LITMIR.BIZ

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had not been responsible for his actions and he was therefore transferred to the high-security wing of Las Mercedes hospital. There, his antics continued. Not only did Godino try to escape, but he also attacked a paralytic, tried to strangle one patient in his bed and put poison in another patient’s tea.

      Meanwhile, the police were trying to find the body of his first victim – the girl he told them that he had buried alive. Godino pointed out exactly where he had killed her, but by that time a two-storey building had been built on top of the site; neither the architect nor any of the builders had found any traces of a body. One detective took it upon himself to investigate all the reports of missing children in the area from March to April 1906, in his free time. He discovered that a three-year-old girl had been reported missing to authorities and had never been found. Her name was Maria Roca Face and she is now officially believed to have been Godino’s first victim.

      While at the insane asylum, Godino found himself adopted by one of the doctors as his pet project. The doctor was busy developing a crackpot theory – later to be resurrected by the Nazis – that certain physical characteristics could be linked to inborn moral depravity. And what better proof of this than Godino? (See Chapter Twenty-one: How to Spot a Natural Born Killer.) He paraded Godino in front of his students and the story goes that, as he recounted the despicable crimes carried out by the horror now standing before them, he pointed at his subject’s big ears. Godino is reported to have said, ‘Please excuse me, Doctor, for interrupting, but would you be so kind as to go fuck yourself.’

      As Godino continued to raise hell at the mad house, many newspapers were expressing outrage at the perceived lenience of his sentence. ‘This disgusting fellow,’ one indignant journalist wrote, ‘whose crimes horrified the public only a short time ago has just been declared not responsible for his horrible acts. The killer will be placed in a mental institution even though the general public is completely opposed to such a light sentence. This beast who heeded his most basic of instincts on innocent creatures. This beast whose brutal confession outlining his horrible deeds shocked the most hardened and seasoned of detectives. This beast whose account caused a terrible all-pervading sense of fear to creep into households throughout the capital. This beast whose accounts of his crimes caused papers to censor the horrible facts of the case so as not to permanently damage the sensibilities of their readers.

      ‘The boy,’ the journalist continued, ‘who apparently lacks the faculties necessary to judge his own acts and take responsibility for them but at the same time is perfectly capable of erasing the traces of his crimes. The boy who carefully made sure that his victims were completely unable to defend themselves. The boy who revelled in acts of the utmost perversity. The boy with subnormal intelligence who somehow managed to avoid capture and repeat his crimes. This little monster I say! Little because of his age perhaps but old in the scope and magnitude of the crimes he committed. He has been forgiven all of this by our legal system!’

      As he was only 16, Godino was too young to face the death penalty but the prosecutor, with the public opinion rising against Godino, obtained a retrial and this time the teenager was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

      He went first to a jail in Buenos Aires but in 1923 he was transferred to one of the toughest jails in Latin America: Ushuaia, otherwise known as the ‘prison at the end of the world’. Located in Argentina’s southernmost tip, it was as good a place as any to banish this national embarrassment.

      In 1927, doctors in the jail performed surgery on Godino’s ears to try to curb his aggressiveness, but – unsurprisingly – this didn’t do any good. After 23 years in jail, Godino applied for parole but was denied on the grounds that he still presented a danger to society. In all, he was punished 13 times for insubordination, spent 30 years of his life in prison without a single visitor or a letter and was refused parole three times. So ashamed of him were his parents that they returned to Italy, along with his brothers and sisters.

      Godino died in his cell at the age of 49, on 15 November 1944. His death certificate states that he died in his cell as a result of internal bleeding brought about by an ulcer, but the circumstances around his death remain unclear. Legend has it that he died soon after he’d received a tremendous kicking at the hands of his fellow prisoners. Unrepentant to the end, he just hadn’t been able to resist throwing the much-loved prison cat into an oven.

       CHAPTER TWO

       ISSEI SAGAWA: HOW TO EAT PEOPLE AND INFLUENCE THEM

      Cannibal Issei Sagawa murdered then ate a young student in Paris in 1981. But instead of being ostracised and hated, fame and stardom beckoned.

      One trait that cannibals share the world over is that they very rarely rush their food. They don’t like to throw away cuts that can be stored and set aside for later either. While many of us might be too precious to eat sweetmeats or offal, a cannibal has no such reservations, knowing that they can be saved for a tasty snack or starter.

      Cannibals are, of course, pioneers in the relatively uncharted area of human cuisine. When faced with a willing audience, they are known to go into details on the subtle change in taste and texture of each body part, while in the kitchen they can prove themselves adept in the ways of pickling and creative and inventive in the use of daring culinary combinations. Eager to provide tried-and-tested recipes (stew being a particular favourite), they wax lyrical on the challenges each limb presents, and many cannibals are even known to put a morsel aside and carry it around for later – just in case they get peckish.

      But if the confession made by the so-called Japanese cannibal Issei Sagawa is to be believed, he was different from his peers in many ways. Sagawa told the authorities that he had been waiting for his chance to eat another human being; and when it finally came, he claimed, he consumed as much of his victim as he could stomach in a 24-hour feeding frenzy – and he ate most of her raw.

      Sagawa was declared insane and not responsible for his actions by the French courts. Instead of being ostracised and hated, however, he soon found himself catapulted into the surreal world of Japanese show business where, for almost five years, he eagerly cashed in on his own notoriety. While the ‘joke’ lasted, Sagawa’s cult status allowed him to take part in porn films and chat shows, write a bestseller and even appear on the front page of a cooking magazine slurping on sushi.

      A bright boy with an exceptionally high IQ, Sagawa was the son of a millionaire and enjoyed a privileged upbringing in his hometown of Tokyo, where he showed a natural talent for languages. But from an early age he was prone to nasty tantrums, and from the age of 12 he suffered violent nocturnal seizures and nightmares.

      His cannibal fantasies began at the age of seven and to begin with revolved around boys, but this changed during his teenage years. The shy, retiring Sagawa found himself lusting hopelessly after tall, blonde Western women, whom he found impossibly daunting and out of reach.

      While studying English literature at Wako University in Tokyo, Sagawa made his first attempt to eat someone, attacking a German woman. Having stalked her and followed her back to her apartment, he tried to knock her unconscious while she was asleep. She fended him off and Sagawa fled, only to be arrested shortly afterwards. In a taste of things to come, Sagawa served just ten days at Kitazawa police station for the attack.

      In 1977, now on prescribed tranquillisers, Sagawa was quietly packed off to the Sorbonne Academy in Paris, ostensibly to further his studies in French literature. In September 1978, aged 28, he bought a .22-calibre rifle.

      By 1981, even with the change of scenery, Sagawa’s luck with the ladies wasn’t improving – he wasn’t helped much by the fact that he was less than 5ft tall. He found it hard to make friends at the university, regarded first as an outcast, then a pest, and was described by fellow students variously as ‘childish’, ‘sensitive’ and ‘embarrassing’. Indeed, Sagawa was more or less friendless save for Dutch student Renée Hartevelt, who took pity on him and agreed to help him with his German. Perhaps unsurprisingly,

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