True Crime Issei Sagawa Murderer Cannibal Celebrity and Free Man?

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I’m your host Rab Greeson and tonight we continue the October month long Annals Of Darkness. He murdered, ate, and photographed a woman in 1981  then became a celebrity. In this episode of One Up the Annals: Annals of Darkness, host Rab Greeson unravels the chilling true story of Issei Sagawa the Japanese literature student who turned cannibalism into content and fame into absolution.

Inside this episode:

 Sagawa’s lifelong fantasies of flesh

The calculated murder of Renée Hartevelt in Paris

The two day cannibalistic ritual that followed

His shocking release and rise to celebrity status

The disturbing psychology behind his obsession and the media that enabled it

This isn’t a horror movie, it’s documented history.

A man consumed beauty, walked free, and the world applauded.

Where shame becomes legend… and horror learns how to sell itself.

#IsseiSagawa #TrueCrimePodcast #CannibalKiller #DarkHistory #JapaneseTrueCrime #AnnalsOfDarkness #OneUpTheAnnals #TrueCrime #Psychology #Murder #Japan

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Welcome to the Annals of Darkness. Where the light never touches and history is unwritten, it's carved. I'm your host, Brad Breeson, the curator of Cursed Curiosities, the librarian of legends better left unread, and tonight, the man unfit to hold a spoon, but foolish enough to serve you this next course. The disclaimer is only the anal scan. Now before we pass the platter, let's talk about what's on it. This story contains content that is disturbing, even by our standards. Themes of cannibalism, necrophilia, mental illness, and a total failure of the justice system. It is all based on documented factual events, and none of it is played for shop value at the expense of the victims. But be warned, we are not your local PBS history hour, and we do not skip over the parts that get blood on the page. Here on the annals, we peel back the skin of history and we show you the rock beneath. If that makes you uncomfortable, good. It means you're still human. So if you're here for a tale that feels like fiction, but is stained with truth, pour yourself something strong, draw the curtains tight, and whatever you do, don't get hungry. Let's go. And inside him was a hunger that could fill the annals of hell. He stood just four foot nine and barely over ninety pounds, with a voice so soft it sounded like a man apologizing for existing. He moved through the world like background noise, but behind that silence was a fantasy louder than death. A fantasy that started young and never left. Childhood, the cradle of cannibalism. Born in 1949 in Kobe, Japan, to a wealthy, powerful family, Segawa had everything money could buy, but nothing that made him feel real. He called himself ugly, weak, inferior. And what did he fixate on to feel powerful? Not grades, not girls, not guns. Flesh. Specifically the idea of consuming it. He would later admit that his first cannibalistic thought came in elementary school, when he looked at the thigh of a male classmate and wondered, what would it taste like? And let me tell you, when your first crush is a leg of meat in gym class, therapy's not gonna be enough. Growing up twisted. Through adolescence, the fantasies didn't fade, they evolved. He became obsessed with Western women. The blonde, tall, confident ideal that haunted post-war Japanese media. In his mind, these women were superior, goddesslike, untouchable. So naturally he decided the best way to possess one was to eat her. Romantic, right? He didn't want to dominate. He didn't want love. He wanted to absorb beauty, to own it. To erase his own inferiority by devouring someone he thought was perfect. If I eat her, he once said, then she becomes part of me. I become her. Annals of Obsession, Exhibit A. The rich boy with rotten thoughts. His family sent him to the best schools. He studied literature, he could speak Japanese, English, German, French. He wasn't stupid, but he was definitely unhinged. In 1970, he tried to act on his fantasies for the first time. He followed a tall German woman back to her apartment in Tokyo. When she fell asleep, he snuck inside, intending to cut off and steal a piece of her flesh. She woke up, he panicked, she screamed, he ran. He was arrested but only charged with attempted rape. He never told them the truth. And no one bothered to ask why a literature student was breaking into apartments with knives. He got a suspended sentence. Off to Paris where the appetite matures. By the 1980s, Sagawa was in Paris attending the Sorbonne, studying for his PhD in comparative literature. But let's be real, he wasn't there for degrees, he was there to hunt. Paris, the city of light, art, beauty, elegance, to him it was a buffet. He walked the streets like a predator in a three-piece suit, watching women like a smalllier eyeing wine bottles. He wrote in journals, took photos of strangers. He fantasized about consuming beauty like it was communion. And that's where he met his target, Rene. The perfect target. She was everything he wasn't. A 25-year-old Dutch student, fluent in German, English, French, intelligent, radiant, a lover of art and poetry. He felt invisible, and to a man like Sagawa, invisibility is the ultimate humiliation. So he did what any delusional predator would do. He befriended her. He told her he admired her intellect. He said he needed help with German poetry for a school project. She agreed. She not only was beautiful outside, but inside she was kind. She didn't know the man in front of her had a rifle stashed in his closet, and knives already labeled for carving. He planned it for weeks, carefully, meticulously, like a dinner party. The hidden thread, a taste of the unthinkable. Paris, June 11th, 1981. Late afternoon sunlight spills through the thin curtains of a small apartment on Rue Alonga. The kind of golden light that makes the city glow like honey. But inside this room, the air is heavy. The air is still. The air is waiting. Renee sits on the floor cross-legged reading from Le Fleur de Mag Baudelaire's poetry of beauty and decay. Her voice is calm, steady. Behind her, Sagawa watches, his heart pounding, his palms slick, and his hands a small twenty-two caliber rifle. He raises the gun, he hesitates. I thought if I didn't do it now, he would later say, I never would. He pulls the trigger, one sharp crack, and her voice is gone. Renee falls silent, Sagawa freezes. He doesn't scream, he doesn't cry, he just stares. He later reflected, I was surprised how easy it was. She didn't even resist, it is like a dream. The sick dude checks her pulse, nothing. Then as calmly as a man cleaning up after dinner, he locks the door and begins preparing her body. The Ritual of the Flesh. Sagawa drags Renee's body onto a low table. He opens his desk drawer, not for paper or pens, but for a set of knives. He starts at the neck and the skin resists. He tries again smaller cuts. He says he was amazed at the texture. He describes her skin as soft, her fat pale and slippery. At first he claims he wanted to simply explore the body, to see what beauty looked like from the inside. But within minutes, that curiosity turns to compulsion. He leans close, smells her hair, touches her face, and then he bites. He tastes human flesh for the first time. He later says it melted on my tongue like raw tooth. That line, the one between the poetic and the perverse, has been erased. He begins cutting with surgical precision like a scholar dissecting his obsession. He removes a piece of her left buttock, a part of the body he had fantasized about since childhood. He places it on a plate, seasoned it lightly, and fried it on the stovetop. He describes the smell as sweet and savory. He takes a bite and another and another. Then he stops cooking altogether and starts eating her raw, claiming it felt more intimate. He wrote in his journal, I wanted her to become part of me. I wanted to possess her forever. For two days he lived beside her corpse, photographing it, touching it, talking to it. He ate parts of her thigh, breast, and nose, trying to consume every piece he could. He said he wanted to preserve her beauty inside him. He took dozens of Polaroids, some were anatomical studies, others were theatrical, like the grotesque parody of romance. He dressed her body, then undressed it again. He posed her with food, with mirrors, he treated her corpse like art, a twisted self-portrait of his own depravity. When later asked why he photographed everything, he said, because beauty fades. I wanted proof that I captured her. This wasn't just a murder, it was performance art from hell. And for a man studying literature, every photograph was a paragraph in the story he believed he was writing about himself. The Banquet of Delusion. Over the next 48 hours, Sagawa barely slept. He read, wrote, and consumed. He said the smell of decay didn't bother him. He said it made him feel closer to her. He experimented. He sliced muscle from her arms, tasted fat from her stomach, and compared the textures like a food critic describing entrees. Her breasts, he wrote, were too soft. The thighs, perfect, firm, delicious. And in case that wasn't grotesque enough, he told police he tried to eat parts of her face but found them too tough to chew. He described how, as her body cooled, he felt his excitement fade. The fantasy, once vibrant, was becoming routine. But the final act was yet to come. The disposal point. Two days later, the reality of decay set in. Her body began to smell. Sagawa decided to dispose of what remained. He purchased two large suitcases and carefully packed the dismembered remains inside. Layer by layer, like someone storing leftovers. He hailed a cab to the Bois de Boulogne, a wooded park outside Paris where he planned to dump the evidence into a lake. But fate, or karma, has a way of tripping monsters. He was seen. The cab driver noticed the blood leaking from the bags. Two passers saw him struggling to drag them through the park. When police arrived, he stood there quietly, almost amused, and said, I killed her. I wanted to eat her. That's all. They opened the bags, they found what he packed, and just like that, the world's most twisted dinner party was over. The interrogation. Sagawa confessed immediately, no tears, no excuses, no remorse. He gave the police every detail. He told them what parts he ate. He told them how they tasted. He told them he was not sorry because in his mind, he had finally fulfilled his dream. When asked if he regretted it, he said, I wish I had eaten her whole. Even the detectives went pale. One reportedly stepped outside the room to vomit. The hidden thread. This is where the story digs under your skin. Because Sagawa wasn't insane in the chaotic sense. He was methodical. He was lucid. He didn't kill out of rage or jealousy or survival. He killed for aesthetic possession. For the belief that if he consumed beauty, he would no longer feel small. He didn't want to destroy her, he wanted to keep her forever. And that's what makes this story more terrifying than any horror film. It wasn't a crime of passion, it was a crime of admiration. When the French courts evaluated him, they declared him legally insane, a verdict that would ironically set him free. But that's a story for the next act, when obsession becomes celebrity and the monster gets a microphone. He didn't just eat her body, he devoured the world's attention, and the world for a time set him right back. Act 3 Parallels in Reflection: The Monster, the Microphone, and the Mirror. When the police hauled Sagawa out of there, they expected a madman. What they got was a soft-spoken academic with perfect manners. He bowed. He apologized for the inconvenience. And then he calmly told them everything. The trial that never happened. French psychiatrists spent weeks with him. They described him as lucid, articulate, and terrifyingly logical. He understood what he'd done, he just didn't think it was wrong. Their final diagnosis, legally insane. No prison, no trial. Commitment instead to a mental institution outside of Paris. He told the doctors he felt peaceful. He'd achieved his life goal, now he could rest. I've fulfilled my dream, he said. I don't need to hurt anyone else. And for a moment, it looked like justice, or at least containment, had won. But the annals always have another twist. The loophole of privilege. France didn't want to pay for him forever. His father, a wealthy industrialist, lobbied for his return to Japan, promising continued psychiatric care. So in 1984, just three years after the murder, they put him on a plane. When he landed in Tokyo, something incredible happened. Because France had sealed the case files and never held a formal trial, Japan had no legal authority to charge him. The doctors reviewed him, declared him no longer insane, and released him into society. No handcuffs, no supervision, no freaking shame. He stepped out of the asylum gates of free man and into one of the most grotesque second acts in modern history. Celebrity Cannibal. The Japanese press went feral. He was small, soft spoken, disturbingly articulate. The perfect freak show guest. Reporters called him the man who ate beauty. Producers called him Ratings. He published a memoir in the fog. Describing the murder in exquisite stomach-turning detail, and it sold out. He wrote food reviews, movie critiques, even columns on other crimes. He appeared in pornographic films where directors staged him touching models as if parodying his crime. He starred in a documentary where he ate raw meat on camera. He drew sketches of women and signed them for fans. The very act that should have buried him made him a star. I am proof, he told one interviewer, that fantasy and reality can merge. People are fascinated by that. No remorse, just branding. Pop culture eats itself. The story spread beyond Japan. In Europe, the Stranglers Band released La Foley, a song inspired by him. Even The Rolling Stones slipped a reference into Too Much Blood. Horror directors whispered his name like a creative prompt. Manga artists turned him into an archetype. The frail, polite killer driven by aesthetics. He became the template for every cult cannibal trope that followed. And the most disturbing part, he played along. He gave interviews analyzing his own myth, correcting inaccuracies like a historian of horror. The psychology of performance. Sagawa didn't see himself as evil. He saw himself as interesting. Psychologists described him as narcissistic with zero empathy. A man who replaced guilt with curiosity. He said eating Renee was an artistic act. He claimed he wanted to understand the essence of beauty. He framed murder as philosophy. He wasn't haunted by what he'd done, he was bored that it was over. When one interviewer asked if he would ever kill again, he smiled and said, If someone volunteered, so I wouldn't be arrested, perhaps. From infamy to obscurity. By the late 1990s, the novelty wore off. He was no longer the strange new headline, just a footnote of infamy. He lived off small royalties and occasional taboid appearances. Then in 2013, the stroke paralyzed his right side. He lost his ability to walk, to feed himself, to perform. The man who once fetishized flesh now needed others to cut his food. He lived with his brother in a cramped Tokyo apartment surrounded by books about his own life. He told one reporter, I still dream of her, but I wake up and I'm weak. That's my punishment. In 2022, Pneumonia finally claimed it. No cameras. No crowd. Just a frail old man gasping in the dark. The mirror. Sagawa's story is more than a grotesque curiosity, it's a reflection of us. The world rewarded him. Not for remorse, but for shock value. He became a prototype for the influencer age. Someone who did something unthinkable, and then monetized the attention. He turned cannibalism into content. He turned horror into entertainment. That's the real hidden thread of this scroll. In a culture obsessed with spectacle, even evil can find a PR team. He devoured a woman, then devoured Fame, and finally, himself. But the appetite he represented, the hunger for the grotesque, that still lives in us. The monster didn't win, he just learned how to sell tickets. Act 4, the judgment, the feast of forgetting. There are crimes that end when the killer is caught, and then there are crimes that echo long after the blood dries. A world that rewarded the wicked. He murdered, desecrated, and consumed a woman. And was rewarded with a woman. Book deals, cameras, and royalties. He sat on talk shows, sipping tea, politely describing how flesh melts like tuna, and the audience leaned in closer. Every producer who booked him, every viewer who tuned in, was adding a coin to the same scale that let him walk free. We didn't cage the monster, we hired him for an interview. That's the first judgment of the annals. Sometimes the monster isn't just the man on the screen, it's the culture that claps back. The myth he built. Segawa wasn't content to be infamous. He curated his image. He painted himself as a tragic poet. A frail philosopher who had simply loved too deeply. He quoted Baudelaire and Mishima, called cannibalism a metaphor for intimacy, and smirked while doing it. But it wasn't poetry, it was marketing. A cannibal turned content creator. Press kept asking why he did it, as if there were an answer profound enough to excuse it. There wasn't. He did it because he could, because he was bored, because no one stopped him the first time, and because he was just flat out crazy. With a dark soul. And the mirror he left us? Every time we replay his interviews, reprint his photos, or stream his documentaries were feeding the same hunger he lived on. The need to watch, to know, to peep through the keyhole at madness. He devoured one person, the world devoured the story. We're all at that table now. But the animals aren't here to moralize. We're here to remember, to hold up the mirror and force the audience to see what reflected him. He ate beauty to feel whole. We consume horror to feel safe. Both appetites are built from fear. And the final verdict. So what do we do with him? Erase him, ignore him, pretend it never happened? No. We brand his name into the annals, not as a legend, but as a warning. The warning that intellect without empathy becomes pathology. That fame without ethics becomes fuel. That when justice shrugs, the stage lights turn on. Verdict, guilty. Sentence, paternal disgust, no redemption, and a place on the low shelf of history's pantry. Because in the annals of darkness, the punishment is memory, to be remembered forever, not with fear, but with contempt. He said he wanted to consume beauty to make it a part of him. In the end, the only thing he ever truly digested was himself. Sagawa died in 2022, small, paralyzed, and forgot. His fame rotted the same way his conscience did. Slowly, publicly, and without dignity. The flesh he once worshipped is dust now. The only thing left of him is the story and the warning inside. Where shame becomes legend and horror learns how to sell itself. I came for the facts, you stayed for the filth, and now it's in the annals.