If You Can't Eat 'Em, Join 'Em, or, Ed Gein, Eat Your Heart Out

No embed link available, but yesterday I came across on YouTube this film, the subject of which I had NEVER heard about despite the documentary's claims it was a worldwide story in 1981, is guaranteed to make one physically ill.

How this man was EVER allowed to walk free, much less be a goddamned celebrity in Japan, is a mystery. He has literally profited from his murder and cannibalism.

More background of this disgusting story:

On the afternoon of June 13, 1981, a Japanese man named Issei Sagawa walked to the Bois de Boulogne, a park on the outskirts of Paris, carrying two suitcases. The contents of those suitcases were the dismembered body parts of a fellow student, a Dutch woman named Renée Hartevelt, whom Sagawa had shot three days prior and had spent the days since, eating various parts of her body.

The details of Sagawa's brief incarceration and subsequent return to Japan are too vague and complex to state here, but for the sake of this introduction, I can say that on August 12, 1986, Sagawa checked himself out of Matsuzawa Psychiatric Hospital and has been a free man ever since. This is the point in the story in which things get really strange.

In his 24 years of freedom since, Sagawa has experienced a level of notoriety ranging from perverse public intrigue to minor celebrity. He has published novels; inspired songs; been the subject of countless documentaries and magazine articles, and exploitation films in which he re-enacts his crime; drawn manga novels and even directed his own personal pornography "experiment." Effectively, he has made a living off his crime.

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