Alleged Cannibal Ran B&B With Grilling Area, Rocks Germany

Alleged Cannibal Ran Hotel With Grilling Area

Dec. 7, 2013

By SPIEGEL

Police investigate the area around a house near Reichenau, south of Dresden, eastern Germany, Nov. 30, 2013.

Jens Meyer/AP Photo

New information about an alleged case of cannibalism in Germany suggests the suspect was immersed in the online fetish world, and had discussed a similar act with another willing potential victim. He ran a bed and breakfast which advertised its grilling facilities.

In recent days, new details have emerged in a bizarre alleged cannibalism case in Germany. The murder, which recalls a notorious killing perpetrated by Armin Meiwes in 2001, was allegedly committed by a 55-year-old police officer working as a handwriting analyst in the Dresden office of the State Criminal Police. The man has admitted to killing a 59-year-old Polish-born businessman from Hanover, whom he allegedly met on a cannibalism fantasy forum and whose body he allegedly dismembered and buried on a property belonging to him in the Ore Mountains, near the Czech border. The police officer -- thus far only known by his first name and last initial, Detlef G. -- disputes consuming any part of his victim.

Cannibal Cop Allegations Rock Germany

According to an unconfirmed report in German daily Bild, Detlef G. was immersed in the online cannibal fetish community, and the police have yet to discover several parts of the victim, raising the question of whether they had been eaten.

'Long Pigs' and 'Chefs'

According to German daily Welt, the victim, known as Wojciech S., took a bus and a train to Saxony on Nov. 4, in order to meet with the alleged murderer. They met in Dresden, and drove to the police officer's Reichenau home, which doubled as a bed and breakfast. Shortly thereafter, Detlef G. allegedly stabbed his new acquaintance in the neck in the basement of the building, cut his body into small pieces and buried it in the garden of his home. The police officers investigating the case have said that the killing "had been desired by the victim."

The two men are alleged to have met on an online forum which describes itself as the "Number 1 site for exotic meat" and is visited by men with a fetish related to the consumption of human flesh. As of Friday, it had 3,000 users. The cannibal fetish community is a small, but not insignificant subgroup in Germany. Armin Meiwes, who was found guilty of killing and eating parts of 43-year-old Berlin engineer Bernd Jürgen in 2001, claimed after his conviction that there were approximately 800 "cannibals" living in the country.

In the online cannibal fetish world, men who want to be eaten are referred to as "long pigs," a term which comes from 19th-century explorers who encountered cannibals on their voyages. Men who fantasize about eating other men, meanwhile, are referred to as "chefs." The vast majority of forum-users, criminologist Petra Klages told Die Welt, are only interested in safely playing out a fantasy. Somewhat ominously, however, users for the forum are able to check a box marked "I'm interested in more than just role play."

Another Near-Victim

The alleged murderer, it seems, was part of the latter group. Yesterday, Bild published an interview with another man, a 31-year-old sewage mechanic from Baden Württemberg, who had also met with the police officer just a few weeks ago. The man, who went by "Junjie" online, had posted that he "wanted to be grilled alive." He wrote, "whether on the grill or on a spit, I don't care."

He told Bild he chatted online with the accused murderer, and the two made an appointment for him to be eaten because he says he had had a fight with his parents and wanted to disappear without a trace. In October he spent several weeks in the police officer's bed and breakfast, where the latter cooked Asian food and former East-German dishes for them, but finally decided that the 31-year-old was too young to be consumed. The younger man, who now lives with a boyfriend, was not shocked by the murder allegations because, he told Bild, "after all, I went there to be eaten."

Bed and Breakfast 'Ideal for Grilling'

The rustic bed and breakfast, called Pension Gimmlitztal, offered lodging for as little as €13 a night, including breakfast. Its website, which has been taken down, but is still cached online, advertised "a generous outside area, surrounded by woods, which is ideal for an evening of grilling." The suspect ran the business with his husband, who apparently knew nothing of his partner's criminal interests and has since gone into hiding.

Neighbors told Bild that Detlef and his husband would invite them over in the summer for parties in their garden, where the police officer would prepare "potato salad, sausages and steaks on the grill" and acted as the "perfect host." According to Bild, authorities will begin searching the interior of the house in the next few days.

"Nothing Personal: (Cannibals) Want To EAt You" & Replace Zombies

New York Times, Sunday Review (The Opinion Pages), October 27, 2013, Page SR 7:

NEWS ANALYSIS

Nothing Personal: They Want to Eat You

By ERIK PIEPENBURG

Published: October 26, 2013

ZOMBIES may be hogging the pop culture spotlight these days in “World War Z” and “The Walking Dead,” but now that the flesh-eating undead are selling Sprint cellphones in television ads, one has to wonder: have they finally jumped the shark as the monster of the moment?

Enlarge This Image

Kris Mukai

Well, there’s a new wave of evildoers waiting to step in: cannibals.

At the Toronto International Film Festival in September, Eli Roth’s hungry-savages film, “The Green Inferno,” and Manuel Martín Cuenca’s dark love story “Cannibal” played to gore-loving crowds. Other releases this fall include “Butcher Boys,” an urban thriller based on Jonathan Swift’s satirical 18th-century essay “A Modest Proposal”; “The Colony,” about flesh-eating survivors of an apocalyptic attack; “We Are What We Are,”about a father and his cannibal children; the German-language “Cannibal Diner,” with young women on the menu; and “Evil Feed,” a comedy about a restaurant that serves the body parts of losing participants in an underground fighting ring.

On the small screen, NBC’s crime drama “Hannibal,” based on Thomas Harris’s notorious flesh muncher Hannibal Lecter, will return for a second season. And two plays (both closing this weekend) brought cannibalism to the stage: In New York, “feeling” told the story of a woman who talks with Jeffrey Dahmer; in Minneapolis, “Kung Fu Zombies vs. Cannibals” took a comic-book approach to the subject.

So what’s behind this burst of fascination with flesh eating?

For Mr. Roth, the director of “Hostel” and an expert on pushing the boundaries of horror, the fear of cannibals “is not just having your own flesh devoured, but that you would have a taste for another person’s flesh. It’s a primal feeling.”

The tag line for “The Green Inferno,” showing on Nov. 2 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Scary Movies series, is, “The only thing more terrifying than Mother Nature is human nature.”

Gunnar Hansen, who played the weapon-wielding Leatherface in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974), a pioneering foray into cannibalistic terrain, sees it as a sign of the times, just as the cold war gave rise to fever dreams of space invaders and Vietnam ushered in a modern zombie era with “Night of the Living Dead.”

“You can look at the economy and say the past is about to bite us literally and figuratively,” said Mr. Hansen, whose new memoir is called “Chain Saw Confidential.” “We are at the point where a new generation has nothing to look forward to.”

Or perhaps there’s something more visceral at work. Another early favorite of horror cognoscenti — and an inspiration for Mr. Roth’s “Green Inferno” — is Ruggero Deodato’s“Cannibal Holocaust” (1980), about a documentary crew that’s attacked by the flesh-eating tribe they are filming in the Amazon. Its depiction of real-life animal slaughter, which still shocks today, suggests a weird affinity with today’s animal-rights’ movement.

“People rarely think of steak or fried chicken as consuming a dead thing,” said Tim Kelly, who writes about the cannibal genre for Cinematallica.com. “Cannibals force you to confront something you don’t want to understand, which is the truth of what you are consuming.”

Then again, maybe it was just a matter of time before pop culture caught up with real-life reports of cannibalism, like the case of a New York police officer who was convicted in March for a plot to kill and eat women.

And there’s always the possibility of shock fatigue. “Ten years ago nobody would laugh at a movie about eating people,” said Aaron Au, a co-writer of “Evil Feed.” “But the zombie genre desensitized us to be accepting of it.”

On another, even creepier, level, what sets cannibals apart from zombies may simply be their humanity. As Kimani Ray Smith, the director of “Evil Feed,” put it: “A cannibal’s just a smarter zombie. You need more cunning to get away with being a cannibal. But cannibals still have day-to-day problems. They still have to pay the rent.”

Erik Piepenburg is an editor in the culture department of The New York Times.

A version of this news analysis appears in print on October 27, 2013, on page SR7 of the New York edition with the headline: Nothing Personal: They Want to Eat You