Online Killers Read online

  One of the world’s biggest internet companies, Digex, has Microsoft as its largest customer; its second largest customer is the sex industry. The internet industry will not admit to the pervasiveness of pornography on the internet because it profits enormously from pornography in all of its extreme forms.

  As an exhibitor at an adult entertainment trade exhibition said, “The whole internet is being driven by the adult industry. If all this [products at an online prostitution industry trade show] were made illegal tomorrow, the internet would go back to being a bunch of scientists discussing geek stuff in email.”

  It may require a Herculean effort, but an international code of conduct is needed to police the internet, with search engines being required to conform rigorously to the agreed standards. It is far easier to close down an international search engine than to nitpick away at individual sites—a time-consuming, costly and ultimately unrewarding exercise.

  In truth, the authors are very mindful of the flip side of the coin: these undesirable sites would not exist if millions of visitors did not frequent them and graze on their contents. And because it’s a two-way street, these surfers must share responsibility for the sites’ existence.

  The Internet Watch Foundation says that the world wants the web and so now we have to live with all of its consequences, like them or not. The genie is out of the bottle and flying about our heads wherever we are on the planet.

  One of the few safeguards—and a feeble one it is—is that most pornographic sites contain warnings about their content and the decision as to whether or not to enter them is left to the individual.

  The authors’ research for this book confirms that a large number of people have become addicted to various types of internet sites and that corresponding types of crime are rising rapidly as a consequence. It proves too that those who harbor thoughts and fantasies of committing such crimes find encouragement and support by logging on.

  In the course of this investigation into the internet’s grip on the criminal world, and by extension on the lives of all of us, we enter many chilling true-crime nightmares.

  Christopher Berry-Dee, 2006

  Armin Meiwes: Internet Cannibal

  “It was passable, but a little tough; it would have been better braised… and the wine, a Riesling, was not at all correct, too sweet, lacking body, next time, perhaps, a Pomeral.”

  —ARMIN MEIWES ON EATING HIS VICTIM′S PENIS

  “There are several hundred people with cannibalistic tendencies in Germany alone, and many thousands around the world. Cannibalism has always been around, but the internet reinforces the phenomenon. You can be in contact with the whole world and do this anonymously.”

  —RUDOLF EGG, CRIMINOLOGIST

  The internet has highlighted that there are at least one million people who harbor sexualized cannibalistic fantasies. Discussion forums and user groups exist for the exchange of pictures and stories of such fantasies. Users of these services fantasize about eating, or being eaten, by members of their sexually preferred gender. This cannibalistic inclination, known as paraphilia, is one of the most extreme and popular sexual fetishes.

  Today cannibals can shop on the internet for someone to consume. And, to judge from the following case, there is no shortage of websites to titillate people who are eager to be killed and eaten.

  But one thing is sure: over the coming years there will be no shortage of people for flesh-eating killers to feed on. The cannibal cult followers themselves operate under disguised names or completely phony identities in the darkest crevices of cyberspace. People such as Laura, who pleads her bona fides in poor English. “Please don’t tell me I’m sick,” she writes. “It is just a fantasy, but the realism of it turns me on so much.” Or Robert, who cuts very much to the chase: “I already have a young, pretty, slightly plump married woman from Iowa offering herself to be eaten.”

  Most of these people are doubtless fantasists, sexual deviants or plain old fruit bats, but their messages are nonetheless ice-cold chilling, because one of these modern-day would-be cannibals and his willing victim have now stepped out of cyberspace, evolving before our eyes from the virtual into the visceral.

  It may be hard to digest, but it appears we live in a time of cannibals. The question is, how can such savagery exist in a supposedly sophisticated world?

  When Armin Meiwes, a shy, fair-haired man who lived with his mother, went sailing with his army buddies, he would always make pasta. “He didn’t eat much himself,” remembered Heribert Brinkman, who organized the trips. Meiwes, it seemed, had an appetite for something different, but it was not until March 2001 that dinner was finally served to his satisfaction.

  In the tiny central German village of Rotenburg, in the centuries-old farmhouse bequeathed to him by his mother, Meiwes often sat at the kitchen table and dined on steak with pepper sauce, potatoes, sprouts and a glass of red wine. It is not known what the wine was, but eventually the meat would be from a two- rather than a four-legged source.

  While Mrs. Meiwes was alive, Armin was restrained. Her son was the apple of her eye, and she dominated his very core, so that his fantasies remained just that. Her death in 1999 released the sick side of his soul, which then found the nurture it needed on the internet. But Meiwes was apparently no serial killer. Unlike the American Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed 17 men and ate parts of them, or Andrei Chikatilo, who murdered and gorged on as many as 50 men and women in Russia, Meiwes was in search of not so much a victim as a collaborator, a fellow chef who would provide the principal ingredient.

  And into that role stepped 43-year-old Bernd-Jurgen Brandes.

  This computer software designer from Berlin had a predilection that was not to everyone’s taste: he paid male prostitutes to whip him until he bled. Now, on Sunday, March 11, 2001, he relaxed in the large, comfortable chair offered to him by Meiwes and sipped from a tumbler of cognac. A contented half-smile played across his host’s lips, for this was the moment Armin had been waiting for. He had prepared meticulously for what was now, finally, starting to unfold.

  Brandes had written his will and had it notarized. The bulk of his estate, including a sprawling, luxury penthouse apartment, along with a small fortune in computer equipment, had been bequeathed to Rene, his blithely unaware male partner. And he had sold most of his belongings, including an expensive sports car. He wouldn’t be requiring these material trappings where he was going.

  His wish was to be butchered, cooked and eaten.

  Something else Rene could not have suspected was that, when Bernd had informed his bosses at Siemens that he was taking the Friday off “to attend to some personal matters” he would not be coming back.

  With several thousand dollars in cash and his passport tucked inside his jacket, Bernd traveled 185 miles from Berlin to the farmhouse near Kassel where he now sat with his drink. His pulse raced, while the warm cognac slowly dulled his senses. He smiled contentedly, knowing he had been very methodical indeed.

  Armin Meiwes, the gentleman whom he had first met through the internet some months before and who now stood beaming broadly in front of him, had been methodical too. Calling himself “Frankie,” he had patiently posted more than 80 notices on a gay internet chat room with cannibalism as its central theme, waiting calmly for just the right individual to reply. When Bernd, who styled himself “Cator,” finally answered, both men quickly realized that their mutual fantasy would become something much more. After all, it is without question that both parties knew what the other wanted, and this was confirmed in a video recording that captured every sickening moment.

  Meiwes had been fishing—trawling might be a more apt term—and on cannibal fetish websites he had encountered a handful of willing participants who took the bait, swam into the net by visiting his home to admire his newly constructed cage and slaughter room, then allowed him to draw lines on their bodies to illustrate the choicest cuts and even let themselves be suspended upside down by a chain and pulley.

  Meiwes’s culinar
y plans didn’t come to fruition with any of these candidates, but he was a patient fellow. It was not until early 2001 that his message, “Searching for a well-built young man who would like to be eaten by me,” was greeted by, “I am offering myself to be eaten but alive. No slaughter but consumption.”

  Who would reply favorably to an invitation like “Gay male seeks hunks 18-30 to slaughter,” unless that nightmarish sentiment stirred something deep and secret within?

  From the start secure within the confines of the rambling half-timbered house so painstakingly customized by his host, Bernd placed his glass on the table beside him and rose. Smiling, he embraced the tall man standing before him and allowed himself to be led out of the room and along a narrow hallway. Once in Meiwes’s bedroom, he lay down on the bed and, with that same vapid smile on his face, he watched as the 41-year-old man produced something sharp that gleamed in the lamplight.

  Bernd closed his eyes and waited.

  First he felt his fly being unzipped and then his slacks slowly being tugged off. Meiwes was gentle but firm, wary of doing anything that might spoil the coming moment. Bernd snapped at him, “Just do it. Just cut the thing off!” Taking Bernd’s flaccid penis in his hand, Meiwes drew the razor-sharp blade slowly across the member several times until it separated from his guest’s body.

  The pain must have been excruciating and the flow of blood powerful, but this Meiwes partly staunched with a wet towel. Without immediate medical assistance, Bernd would bleed to death, but death is exactly what he wanted.

  Both men were unable to consume the penis raw and, unfortunately, when Meiwes tried to cook it, he burned it black.

  With Bernd bleeding heavily from his mutilated groin and his time running out, the two men agreed to forgo the first course and head directly for the main dish. With a glass of wine in one hand, the guest proffered the “delicacy” to his host. Meiwes gladly accepted and, as Bernd looked on, he savored the heady sensation of realizing this powerful mutual fantasy, then took up his knife and fork.

  In the yellowy light of the dining room, the delighted castrator tucked into this most succulent, although overdone piece of flesh, savoring it as one might a tender venison steak. He had taken the liberty of frying the organ in garlic butter—he had trusted his guest had no objections. Then, after voicing his approval, he gestured for Bernd to join him and both tucked in.

  After dinner, Meiwes waved away his guest’s polite offer to help him clear the table. He invited him instead to sit down and make himself comfortable with another cognac. Before long, the two men repaired again to the bedroom, where, after saying goodbye to the almost unconscious Bernd, the gracious host took one last longing glance at the crudely cauterized, gaping, bloody hole between his new friend’s legs.

  It took many hours for the man to die, during which time Meiwes read a Star Trek novel before setting to work with the sharpest of his bread knives.

  Meiwes had a video camera rolling at the time. He had decided early on in the proceedings that he would allow himself the opportunity to relive this moment time and again. Similarly, Bernd’s willing emasculation, followed by the unforgettable meal, was captured for posterity.

  After Meiwes had finished plunging his knife into his guest’s throat, he picked up his video camera and dragged the bloody corpse into his special room. It was here, after he had suspended the body from a meat hook, that the next phase of the ritual began.

  At peace in his self-constructed abattoir, surrounded by heavy metal hooks and drains, Meiwes opened the body from groin to sternum and gutted it as one would a deer. Throughout the night he labored, hacking and severing until finally, one dismembered corpse later, it was time to separate the choicer fleshy morsels and render them into what he would later describe as “meal-sized packets.”

  With his special food supply placed in his freezer along with the dead man’s skull, he disposed of the cumbersome bones and teeth—and let us not forget the innards—by burying them in the garden.

  Meiwes would consume a piece of his friend almost every day, but he never finished the task, for frozen chunks of Bernd-Jurgen Brandes were discovered in his home on his capture on December 10, 2002. Indeed, the crime only came to light when Meiwes, having chewed through 44 pounds of his victim, began to search for another dish on the internet, and a correspondent invited to become a meal took fright.

  After being tipped off by worried internet chat room users about the existence of disturbing ads placed by Meiwes, undercover police officers posing as respondents quickly determined that the ads were meant literally. When Meiwes was eventually arrested, his reaction was one of confusion. Why was he being taken away? No crime had been committed. He contended it had all been completely consensual, a congenial arrangement for their mutual pleasure—victim and killer, in it together. The cops, however, took a somewhat different perspective, and the protesting Meiwes was promptly marched off to the police station.

  From the very start of his sensational trial, which opened in Kassel on a suitably overcast day, Wednesday, December 3, 2003, Meiwes’s primary objective, with the aid of his lawyers, was to convince the jury that he was not a murderer. This they ultimately achieved. The prosecution struggled laboriously to secure dual convictions pertaining to “sexual murder” and “disturbing the peace of the dead.” But the fact that videotaped evidence showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Brandes had been perfectly happy to have his peace disturbed after his demise did not help their case one bit.

  After taking in the evidence that the victim had been a willing participant in his own killing, the court was shown the videotape. The pair had clearly been in agreement about filming the killing and the subsequent butchering.

  Brandes was seen explaining that, for him, being eaten would be the fulfillment of a dream. As the carnage began, the video revealed two men locked into a very private world.

  One of those viewing the grisly film, which also showed Meiwes talking to the severed head while he disemboweled the body, actually fainted.

  The court heard that the killing had taken place in March 2001. Brandes had been reported missing at this time. The judges heard how, for the defendant, the act of eating another human being was akin to the merging of two souls. It was the nearest feeling Meiwes could experience to being close to another person.

  At the trial, and with considerable understatement, both Meiwes and Brandes were described as “having mental difficulties,” and Meiwes did little to dissuade psychologists from persisting in this notion. He disclosed in detail how he had achieved his closeness with Brandes by eating pieces of him for more than a year and stated that by so doing he had gained the dead man’s ability to speak English.

  On the topic of the unique dinner, the defendant had an important culinary message to impart. After first trying, unsuccessfully, to bite off Brandes’s penis—at his request—he decided that it should be severed with a knife. The freshly removed organ was then sautéed, flambéed and prepared to be served. Meiwes, with a touch of Hannibal Lecter’s panache, delivered his verdict on the dish: “It was passable, but a little tough. It would have been better braised.” He paused before adding, “And the wine, a Riesling, was not at all correct, too sweet, lacking body. Next time, perhaps, a Pomeral.”

  Later, with the slaughtered Brandes in pieces in his freezer, Meiwes positively reveled in dining every day on this special meat. Retrospectively, the self-confessed connoisseur of human flesh commented, “Honestly, I’ve taken a fancy to American-style cuts rather than traditional German or French.”

  A brief background of the defendant was supplied by the usual gamut of family, friends and neighbors, who described the killer as pleasant and mild-mannered, a mostly quiet man who kept himself to himself.

  He had served a dozen years in the German Army as a noncommissioned ordnance officer and was said to have been an amiable and conscientious military man. After leaving the armed forces in 1991, Meiwes retrained as a computer technician and started working for a software
company in the Rhine Valley city of Karlsruhe.

  Evoking vividly the shades of Norman Bates from Hitch-cock’s Psycho, Meiwes had lived with his mother in the farmhouse and remained there for several years after her death. One neighbor had put it succinctly for reporters: “He was a mama’s boy.” The young Meiwes had been totally fixated with his overbearing mother, who had never let him have a girlfriend. Meiwes, who in any case preferred boys, had meekly acquiesced. He himself later recounted how his desire to eat another man had begun during puberty and that his fantasy had become so powerful over the years that he always knew he would one day enact it.

  Had Meiwes been convicted of murder he would most likely have ended up spending the rest of his life in prison. Considering the ghastly acts involved, justice would surely have demanded no less. Instead, after adhering more to Meiwes’s lawyer’s claim that his client had merely assisted in a suicide, a panel of judges decided to convict the cannibal of manslaughter. He was sentenced to eight and a half years in jail.

  The sentence equates to just over two years for every ten pounds of Bernd-Jurgen Brandes that Meiwes cooked and ate.

  Though the court rejected the defense solicitor′s main argument, that Meiwes should be convicted of “killing on request,” a form of illegal euthanasia carrying a shorter sentence of six months to five years, it was agreed that he could not be found guilty of murder.

  Judge Volker Muetze, one of those presiding at the trial, said the deed was “viewed with revulsion in our civilized society,” but, on the basis of the very clear video evidence presented, Meiwes had not committed murder, the hushed courtroom was informed. Instead, he had displayed “a behavior which is condemned in our society, namely the killing and butchering of a human being. Seen legally, this is manslaughter, killing a person without being a murderer.”