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The World's Most Bizarre Murders. James Marrison
Читать онлайн.Название The World's Most Bizarre Murders
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781843586982
Автор произведения James Marrison
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Despite Pagnotta’s gut feelings, the fact is that Sagawa is well educated and usually well mannered, traits that earned him the nickname of ‘The Gentleman Cannibal’ in Japan. ‘He spoke French passably and his manners were gracious,’ Pagnotta concedes. ‘He even appeared somewhat modest, the sign of a proper education. No doubt about it, this diminutive man showed good breeding.’
All the same, according to Pagnotta, money was a passion for Sagawa, even though he was still getting a healthy allowance from his millionaire father. If you wanted to interview or take his photo, you invariably had to pay for it. You also had to deal with his many cronies who, Pagnotta says, openly shared Sagawa’s obsessions. One wanted to eat a baby, while others wanted to join Sagawa in another killing.
Sagawa himself was open about his past. ‘As in a thriller movie script,’ Pagnotta observed, ‘I had noted that Sagawa did not hide his obsessions, he even wanted to openly share them. Every year, almost ritually, the cannibal gathered friends and admirers for Hanami, a traditional party under the cherry blossoms of a nearby park.
‘The main dish was barbecued meat. That year, he wanted me to join in. Reality and fiction had fuzzy borders for him. I was sure Sagawa was reliving permanently his crime in his books. I observed his jubilation when asked about his carving of the cadaver. He preciously kept a collection of horror movies running scenes of cannibalism next to a collection of magazines which carried a story about him, and he permanently updated both.’
Sagawa also kept a busy schedule, regularly filing movie reviews for Brutus magazine. So when a movie called Foam of Light was released – based on a true story of how Japanese troops in World War II had resorted to cannibalism to survive – a tabloid paid for Sagawa to attend the premiere where, according to Pagnotta, he was treated like Hollywood royalty.
The release of Silence of the Lambs inevitably resulted in another surge of interest in the poison dwarf. The Asian Wall Street Journal quoted Sagawa as finding Hannibal Lecter ‘unrealistic and comical. He was portrayed as a monster and ate everything. Normally a cannibal is delicate and selects his victims carefully.’
Sagawa also made a big impact by appearing on Fuji TV in a show called Alphabet 2/three, a popular late-night programme for young adults. Pagnotta recalls how Sagawa was addressed as ‘sensei’ (honourable master) and described as ‘a genius and a gentle person’ by the show’s director. For the show, Sagawa was filmed in a Japanese loincloth and also as a priest – a role he clearly relished. ‘Dressed as a Catholic priest and flanked with two blonde twin sisters in red mini skirts, a sick reminder of his victim’s features, he became the first convicted psycho killer to act on TV,’ Pagnotta remembers. ‘His professionalism was impressive. He fitted into the production like a veteran. In his theatrical TV clergyman’s appearance, the lines were: “Believe, believe; only those who believe will be saved!” During the shooting, I could tell… that he was ecstatic.’
Sagawa also dabbled in the weird world of Japanese underground porn. In one film, he appears on the set while a couple is busy having sex and grabs a girl’s breast. Also according to Pagnotta, for porn magazine Takarajima, Sagawa appeared in a black-leather S&M mask; he also dressed up in bondage gear for Sniper magazine, wearing a helmet wrapped with barbed wire. Pagnotta also discovered the most shocking photo of all, which was published in May 1996, where Sagawa appears dressed in a schoolgirl uniform while a half-naked woman urinates on his face.
In his heyday, Sagawa travelled the world over, enjoying all-expenses-paid trips to Germany, Norway, Denmark, Canada, Mexico, Iceland and India. The fact that he had murdered a young woman and eaten her seemed to have been forgotten. He lectured on the nutritive values of human flesh. He featured as a meat expert for a gastronomy column. He planned to open a vegetarian restaurant.
However, Sagawa’s popularity soon faded. The media work, which started to peter out in the late nineties, has now all dried up completely apart from a brief interview with Sixty Minutes and an interview for an HBO documentary. Nowadays, Sagawa (who is diabetic) spends much of his time belly-aching about his lack of cash and his inability to get a job. There are no family payouts any more – both his parents are dead – and for a while he was even forced to claim welfare.
In fact, according to a recent report in the Scotsman on Sunday, Sagawa is now broke and living under an assumed name in a small apartment outside Tokyo. He does still see Western women from time to time, however, and one, according to the same report, even begged him to eat her. On Saturday nights, Sagawa occasionally still haunts Tokyo’s red-light zone, Roppongi, where he chats up the Australian nightclub hostesses and strippers and often gets their numbers. According to a recent report, Sagawa even managed to pick up an Australian girl and go on holiday with her to Canada, until she realised who he was.
He still makes the occasional headline. In 2002, Japanese tabloid Shukan Shincho reported that Sagawa was spotted attending an anti-war rally in Tokyo. ‘People are all beautiful. People shouldn’t kill people,’ his sign said. Apparently angered by the United States’ attack on Afghanistan, the diminutive cannibal told the newspaper that he planned to spend the rest of his days studying what ‘life is’. But nobody seemed to take much notice of him and he shuffled off soon afterwards.
In October 2007, for the magazine Jitsuwa Knuckles, Sagawa told writer-photographer Noboru Hashimoto, ‘When I see a beautiful girl while riding the train, I feel like eating her.’ He also referred to the killing of Renée Hartevelt, telling the journalist, ‘I invited her to join me for some Japanese food. But Japanese restaurants in Paris were expensive, so I said I’d prepare sukiyaki at home. No one else came along, and usually a girl would be on her guard to be alone with a man at his place, but Renée was completely at ease.
‘The sukiyaki got burned and stuck to the pot, and, while she stood at the sink washing it, I got this feeling while looking at her from behind – I don’t know why – that she looked like a whore, and I was overcome with this compulsion to eat her.’
The fact still remains that, for years, Sagawa cashed in on the murder of a young woman, reducing his horrible deed to nothing more than a sick joke, and the media was more than happy to play along. Today, his novelty has worn very thin, though. The joke isn’t very funny any more, even in Japan.
MARCELO COSTA DE ANDRADE: THE VAMPIRE OF RIO
Ex-rent-boy-turned-religious-maniac Marcelo Costa de Andrade made headlines in Brazil in 1992 when he confessed to a nine-month murder spree. Brazil’s most infamous killer said he had raped and slaughtered 14 boys from the slums of Rio so they would ‘go to Heaven’.
Amillion people live in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. The most notorious ghetto is Rocinha, which sprawls down the hillside and overlooks the elegant high-rises of Sao Conrado and some of Brazil’s most spectacular beaches. Perhaps nowhere in the world is the disparity between the haves and have-nots more striking than here, and there is no more potent reminder of that imbalance than the thousands of homeless kids who constantly roam its streets.
Rocinha has an estimated population of 150,000. Armies of children maraud their way through its labyrinthine alleyways, and youngsters die in the shantytown in such numbers that Brazil has been compared to a country at war. Between December 1987 and November 2001, 3,937 children died violent deaths – the majority were victims of an ever-escalating drug war that had been raging in the slums since the cocaine trade took hold there in the early 1980s. Employed as ‘soldiers’ by drug lords to protect and expand their turf, armed teenagers murder each other in pitch battles and innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire almost every day.
Those who don’t run drugs are forced to survive any other way they can. They scavenge for food,