RedHanded - Episode 49 - Dinner with a Cannibal: Armin Meiwes

Episode Date: June 7, 2018

If you want to be killed, is it still a murder? This is the question that sits at the heart of this week's case of cannibalism and consent. Even at the dawn of the internet there were dark corners where you could find anything you wanted - as Armin Meiwes and Bernd Branders knew only all too well. They were a perfect online match, Armin wanted to dine and Bernd wanted to be dinner... Audio mastered by Conrad Hughes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2FUWmA9B9Y   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone.

Just before we get into this week's episode, we wanted to say an enormous thank you to everyone who voted for us in the listeners choice category of the British Podcast Awards. We were absolutely blown away by how many people voted for us in the listeners choice category of the British podcast awards we were absolutely blown away by how many people voted for us so we knew two weeks out that we were top 20 we didn't know if we were still going to be top 20 on the day of the awards and we both thought it was going

to be so embarrassing if we got there and we weren't in the top 20 still but we were and that is down to you so even though 50 000 more votes were cast you guys kept us in the top 20 alongside insane names like fern cotton freddie flintoff ed millivan russell brand what were we doing up there that's insane because i can guarantee you we are the only people in that top 20 who are recording under duvet forts in their bedroom i'm currently sat between two dining room table chairs with the duvet over me. You can bet that Russell Brand isn't making his podcast like this. So thank you. Also, we were one of two podcasts in the top 20 that's hosted by women. And that is really cool. So we weren't nominated in the true crime category. But we figured out that being

top 20 listeners choice and being two or four women up there that makes us the people's princesses and that is much better that is who we are that's it we've decided t-shirt people's princesses i'm diana you can be mega thank you guys so much it just yeah you're fucking amazing thank you so much for keeping us up there with famous people in the bbc and next year let's make it to the top 10. 100%. Now on with the show. I'm Hannah. I'm Saruti.

And this is Red Handed. Cannibalism, consent and covert personalities for you today. And if you haven't already worked out from the title, we're covering the infamous cannibal of Rottenberg. The Meitzke Meister, the master Butcher, Armin Meibus. And fair warning, it's going to get pretty graphic later on, so no eating, you bunch of perverts. No one is 100% themselves 100% of the time.

We all have different faces. There's a job interview you, a public speaking you, a you that has awkward conversations with people you don't really know slash care about at parties that you didn't want to go to in the first place. There are different sides to everyone, public and private. You don't sit on the tube in the same way you sit on your sofa at home. And if you do, I have absolutely no time for you. You are the worst kind of person. But if you have a secret, a shameful habit or fantasy that you know you could never share with anyone. It's a bit more complicated.

Shameful secrets can lead to double lives. And our major players today, Armin Mivas and his victim, Burnt Branders, both led double lives and hid them incredibly well. Their crippling secret was how they were united with each other. Armin Mivas always wanted to eat someone. And Bernd Brandes had always wanted to be eaten. But was it really a match made in heaven? This case rests on consent. Did Bernd really want to be eaten?

Was he a willing victim? And if he was, is it still a murder? If you strip away the gore, taboo and the gut-wrenching reactions the details of this case give people, was the killing of Bernd Brandes anything more than an assisted suicide? Their childhoods were pretty similar. Bernd's mother died when he was very young, and once he came out as gay, his father disowned him completely. Bernd spent a lot of his time feeling worthless. He thought that he would never

be accepted by anyone for who he truly was. And this torment would manifest in the most bizarre of ways. By the time he was 43 in 2001, Bernt was living in Berlin. He was a software designer. He had worked at the same company for the past 15 years, and he got on with the people he worked with. He lived with Rene Janasek, who he told everyone at work was just a friend who liked computers too. What he didn't tell them was that Rene was actually his secret boyfriend. They lived together for a few years, and according to Rene, they were not at all involved with the famously vibrant Berlin gay scene. They watched TV, went to the cinema, met up with friends,

and presumably talked about computer shit a lot. But a sex worker, known only as Jimmy F told a very different story. Jimmy F claimed that Bernd picked him up one night outside a train station in Berlin and he was only interested in being subjected to pain. Jimmy F obliged, but only to a certain point. He flat out refused when Bernd asked him to, get this, cut off his penis with a knife. He refused even though Bernd offered him 1000 Deutschmark, which is about 500 pounds in today's money. Which is fair enough. When you're asking someone to mutilate you and carry the inevitable murder charge that comes with it, that does seem a

little cheap. I definitely wouldn't be cutting anyone's dick off for 500 quid. Absolutely not. I have been thinking about with this case though, like how much money would it take for me to eat another person? Which part? I think I could probably do it if it was like in a meatball. I don't think I could like eat a finger. If it was like hidden, I could probably do it, I think. Really? I couldn't even eat breakfast this morning going over the case notes for this. Absolutely no way.

And also, I did come across this quite recently. Do you know how many calories there are in a human body? Oh, stop. I hadn't even thought of that. In the whole thing, the entire body. Take a guess at how many calories there are in a human body? Oh, stop. I hadn't even thought of that. In the whole thing, the entire body. Take a guess at how many calories are in the entire human body. You'll be shocked. 500,000.

No, it's less than that. Oh, is it? 81,500 calories. Wow. In a whole cooked cadaver. That's cooked. So it'd keep you going then, wouldn't it? Oh, yeah.

It's like perfect. Perfect survival meat, really, when you think of all those plane crashes. Yeah, that's true. But cheap or not, really, when you think of all those plane crashes. Yeah, that's true. But cheap or not, back to Bernt, because he wasn't done. He begged Jimmy to go through with it, offering him everything, his car, his computers, the contents of his flat, basically all of his worldly possessions, in exchange for just severing off his penis and Bernt's inevitable demise. Extreme masochism and the pursuit of pain was the only thing that mattered to burnt. He was willing to give up everything he owned just to make this one thing happen. He could only keep up the pretense of a normal life with Renee for so long. His ultimate

fantasy was for his penis to be cut off and to experience the highest level of pain possible for a human to experience. After that, he wanted to be eaten. He thought that if another person could gain strength and satisfaction from eating his body, he would to be eaten he thought that if another person could gain strength and satisfaction from eating his body he would finally feel like he was worth something all he wanted was to be accepted so extreme isn't it it's like if you feel so rejected in every aspect of your life that the only way you can feel of worth is to be eaten is just so depressing. It really is the ultimate sense of almost like a total sense of uselessness and like you add absolutely nothing. And the only way you could possibly add any meaning or value to this world is for you to suffer huge amounts of pain and then

be consumed by another person because then they're deriving some use from you. That's horrific. We talk a lot about the extremes of human behavior on this show, but this is really, really up there for me. It's pretty grim stuff, and it only gets worse, I'm afraid. Armin Mivas' upbringing had similar overtones, but with the added drama of being brought up in a 36-room mansion in a tiny village called Rusterfeld with his incredibly overbearing mother. Armin's dad had left in 1976 when Armin was only eight, and Armin has a very clear memory of his dad getting into the car one day and just driving off. Little Armin ran after him, begging him to

come back, but his father didn't even look in the rearview mirror. Armin's two older half-brothers left shortly after this incident, leaving Armin and his mother Waltraut alone in this massive 700-year-old house. Waltraut was quite a strange lady. She would dress herself and Armin in medieval clothes, and they would decorate their empty house together endlessly. She also called him girls names that was something she did classic they were tirelessly pursuing her dream of being the lady of the manor we'll put a picture of her on the instagram because she looks exactly how you think she does she looks absolutely terrifying valdroud dreamt of filling her huge house with people and children but it didn't quite work out that way and this

meant that she focused absolutely all of her energy on Armin. It's so classic it's almost like a fairy tale and Rüstervelt at the time only had a population of 25. It's so remote and there's this looming manor house that's falling into disrepair and inhabited by this mad woman and her son who dress up like king arthur it's real nightmare fuel and i feel like every town or village has that one house that every kid is scared of this had to be it in rostafelt surely my this is like the boo radley of rostafelt but dressed up in like medieval lederhosen that's the other thing apparently when he was at primary school and everyone else started wearing you know like little boys wear shorts quite often for school uniform and stuff.

All of the other kids started wearing normal trousers and he refused. And he was like, no, I'm wearing lederhosen. Smooth. Bad move. Smooth. So, yeah, there's no way he's coming out of this house normal. He was hip hop's biggest mogul. The man who redefined fame, fortune and the music industry.

The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sean Diddy Combs. Diddy built an empire and lived a life most people only dream about. Everybody know ain't no party like a Diddy party, so. Yeah, that's what's up. But just as quickly as his empire rose, it came crashing down. Today I'm announcing the unsealing of a three-count indictment, charging Sean Combs with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, interstate transportation for prostitution. I was f***ed up. I hit rock bottom. But I made no excuses. I'm disgusted. I'm so sorry.

Until you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, it's not real. Now it's real. From his meteoric rise to his shocking fall from grace, from law and crime, this is the rise and fall of Diddy. Listen to the rise and fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery Plus. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti.

It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

They say Hollywood is where dreams are made, a seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer

who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. To deal with his intense sense of seclusion and no doubt to escape from his mother, Armin invented a little brother called Frank. Armin read Robinson Crusoe as a child and was fascinated with the section where Crusoe rescues Man Friday from a cannibal tribe threatening to eat him. This started off Armin's fascination with eating other people. Armin had many fantasies where he would eat Frank so he could never leave him. When puberty hit, these Frank eating fantasies developed sexual connotations.

There is no saying why fetishes become fetishes. It could be literally anything, like something you've seen as a child or whatever, like that can develop into a fetish later in life. And I do think it is quite dangerous to associate fetishes with trauma only. So we're not saying that. But it's definitely his secluded upbringing and an interest in cannibalism at a early age that sets it all into motion, I think. Absolutely. With fetishes, it's almost just like it could have been anything that was just you experienced as part of your life during your sexual development can cement itself and fuse with your sexual development to become a fetish. It could be literally anything. He could have been just reading that Robinson Crusoe passage about cannibalism during a particularly sexual time in his development. The two things get fused together and bam, that becomes his fetish.

It's not totally clear how these things happen, but it's definitely most certainly not always related to trauma. But Armin does actually eventually get away from this situation of intense seclusion he joined the west german army in january 1981 when he was 19 and initially he did really well and rose through the ranks in nearby rottenberg he did struggle though with asserting himself and commanding the respect of others sometimes but, it seemed to be a good fit for him. And his frank feasting fetish seemed to subside for a few years. He even started to bring girls home, although none of them were ever good enough for Waltred, of course. I mean, what a surprise. Because I think it's fair to say that the women she would have approved of, I get the sense with her that it's like a very grandiose aristocracy-minded

delusion that she has about herself, the women that she would have wanted for Mivas were going to certainly be far out of his league. She really feels like the kind of person who would refer to people as being well-bred. Yes. Anybody who talks to you about genetics or breeding, run away. That's who she was. Genuinely, the other day I was talking about how I have a very rare blood type i'm ab positive which is the second rarest blood type and a guy i was telling this to genuinely said oh is that like because of pedigree or breeding or whatever i was like what uh no what an outrageous thing to say i don't think he meant anything by it but interesting choice of words i thought you were gonna say he was like is it because you're a brown person and i was like no because both my parents are brown and

neither of them are ab positive i could draw you a diagram to show you how blood group inheritance happens but um no let's not let's just end this conversation so one of these women that my list did bring home petra did stick around for quite a while though i mean honestly how if i meet your mother and she's mad i'm sorry it's not gonna work out for us but she sticks around and her and my this even get engaged but according to my this it fell apart the only evidence of this petra character that i could find she's in a couple of news articles and armin talks about her in interviews i kind of think she wasn't real or she was real and they weren't really engaged she does kind of seem like the classic girlfriend who

lives in Canada that people make up when they're at school and like maybe I am being too harsh but there's an interview with one of the other people who lived in one of the 25 other people who lived in Rosterfeld who was in the army with him and he was like no one ever met these women and he did tell a lot of stories and he told me about his fiancee he had that lived in castle but like no one ever saw her so i don't i don't know but it seems like a bit madey uppie potentially but whether petra was made up or not he was slightly quote unquote normal during this phase of his life but unfortunately it wouldn't last forever. And we see Mivas start to kind of suppress potentially his intrusive cannibalistic thoughts with alcohol, because his insistence on drinking, driving, and getting into accidents

eventually meant that he had to leave the army. Now 32 and stuck at home with his mum again, Armin turned to his computers. He worked at a company in nearby Rottenberg that maintained the computers of banks. And in his spare time, Armin even taught computer literacy classes for old people. That's kind of adorable. Isn't it? I love old people. That's kind of really sweet. He was always on hand as well to fix technological problems that the 25 people of Rosterfeld may have had. He just kind of seems like a little bit of a weird guy, a little bit of a social recluse who lives with his mum and likes computers. Nothing totally crazy yet that you can see in his life. He really couldn't have seemed more harmless. But things start to spiral when Waltraud died of a heart attack in September 1999. Within two weeks of her death,

there was no trace of her in the manor house, and with his mother gone, Armin didn't have to hide or pretend anymore. His dark side, his secret personality, now occupied most of his time. No one in the village suspected a thing when Armin started renovating his house. It had got into a pretty bad state while his mum had been ill, but what they didn't know was that he was building a slaughter room complete with a cage and hooks in the ceiling. He built it on the first floor and it wasn't as if no one came round, but no one ever thought to go upstairs. It's a massive house and he lived on the ground floor. So even though people were coming to visit him, no one ever saw this room. There was never a sense that there was a part of the house that you couldn't go to. No one thought to look. So no one who knew Armin ever suspected a

thing. Both Armin and Brent turned to the internet to find like-minded people in an attempt to feel less alone. The world was changing, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the dawn of the internet meant it was possible to speak to people all over the world. And both of them used this to try and end their isolation. And guess what Armin's username was on online cannibal forums? It was Frankie, just like his imaginary little brother who he fantasized about eating constantly all the way through his childhood. If you're a cannibal or you dream of being eaten, you know that is totally bonkers. You know that is different to everyone else. Cannibalism is taboo and there's a very logical reason for this. In the same way

that incest is taboo. Incest is taboo because it offers us no evolutionary advantages. Incestuous relationships produce problematic genetic abnormalities and therefore it works against our ultimate goal of being a successful species and it's the same thing with cannibalism eating human flesh often leads to diseases especially if you're eating brain so it has been constructed as taboo because it makes us sick i think it also is more than that as well it's almost biologically hardwired into us that those things are wrong, because not only do they, with incest, for example, lead to these genetic abnormalities that you would see, but also if you take cannibalism, if we started to view each other

as cattle, that altruistic behavior that humans have towards each other that has been biologically hardwired into us for millennia would also disappear. If we could just be free to eat each other, why would we protect each other? Why would we form families and tribes and groups? It would completely stop our evolution. So I think there's the social construct of these things being taboo, but there's the biological drive for why they're also inherently taboo within us. I don't know if I agree. Instances of cannibalism throughout history are usually like people you don't like, you eat the enemy. And there are a couple of examples of people eating their relatives when they die so they can keep with them.

So it's not necessarily a universal thing. But I would say they are quite like small and there are few and far between examples of those kind of things happening. And even when we read about them, it's like a shocking thing that's happened. I really feel, yeah, absolutely with incest, with anything that doesn't offer us not only evolutionary advantages, but actually go completely to destroy what the human species is trying to do, which is evolve into groups and tribes and families that have a close-knit bond leading to our further evolution and survival. No, I think these things biologically fly in the face of what we do and we're hardwired to find them repugnant, not just as society has taught us that they're wrong. I don't know, man.

I think it's both those things. As an anthropologist, I think everything is socially constructed. So you think everything is nurture, nothing is nature? Do I think that? I think more often than not, I think it's nurture. Really? No, I disagree. I think, look at not I think it's nurture really no I disagree I think look at things like a dragonfly for example how it knows to lay its eggs it lay its larvae in water so that but near a plant so that it's kids can like climb up and spawn and grow there and then fly off like

the ones that didn't know to do that behavior would have died off the ones that had that behavior hardwired in them to make sure they did that every time, their kids, their kids, their like offspring would also have that same biological behavior hardwired into them and would continue to ensure the survival of their species. It wouldn't have been because a dragonfly young would have seen another one doing it and done it because that's then implying that they have that level of like logical thinking to be able to take that. I think it's biologically hardwired in a lot of the stuff that we do. So while I agree some stuff is certainly nurture, I would go for more heavily nature. That's interesting, though, that we think that oppositely.

Tell us what you think. But cannibalism is a lot more common than we think, not only in sort of remote tribal instances. And I really think that that passage of Robinson Crusoe where the cannibal tribe want to eat Man Friday is responsible for so much, so many problematic images of tribal communities. But cannibalism in war is actually pretty common, but it is covered up for obvious reasons,

except in the case of General Butt Naked, the cannibal warlord of Liberia, and look him up if you never want to sleep again. The only other instance I can think of of cannibalism not being totally unacceptable in our eyes is in extreme situations, like the plane crash in the Andes in 1972, where that Uruguayan rugby team ate each other. So the point is, Armin and Berndt knew that what they wanted more than anything else in the world to eat and be eaten was not normal. But on the internet, there were cannibal chat rooms. And in these cannibal chat rooms, there were other people who wanted the same things. Or at least they said they did.

Armin posted in multiple cannibal forums, his favorite being Cannibal Cafe, advertising for a person he could eat. There would be no thrill for Armin if his victim was unwilling. They had to want it. Consent was a big part of his kink. Armin needed a willing victim or his fantasy would not be fulfilled because for him, it's all about acceptance. He wanted someone to be with him forever and the only way his mind had convinced him he could get that was by eating them. And it's important to say that Armin Rivas

was not insane. He does not have a mental illness. He has a severe sexuality preference. This, like so many other cases we see, is all about sexual satisfaction. Armin meets a few people in these chat rooms, people who wanted to be barbecued like a chicken, people who wanted to be butchered, and people who wanted to be hung from meat hooks. Marvin even met some of these people at hotel rooms and even labeled one person's body with meat cut names so what like they just stood there naked and i could just imagine him like drawing on them like the dashed line that you see on like yeah that's exactly cows about this is the rump steak oh and this is what he did all these people though they just wanted role play to pretend to be cannibals for them this was enough so armin struggled to find someone who would actually go through it. So he placed an advert on one of the cannibal forums detailing that he was

looking for a young man to eat. And initially he had no luck until he increased the age limit to include people over 30. That literally sounds like my OkCupid. Minus the eating them part. This is when Bernd Brandes replied to a message titled, Dinner. Again, could be OK Cupid. It read, I'm offering myself to be eaten by you alive. No slaughtering, but consumption. I'm 36 years old, 175 centimeters, and weigh 73 kilos.

I hope you're really serious about this, because I really want this. Just to be clear, Brent wasn't 36. He was 43. And he wasn't 73 kilos. He was 90. Again, could be OK Cupid cupid yeah for real but at this point in this story this is all pretty irrelevant yeah we're not going to give him a hard time about lying about his weight on a cannibal forum which is more mean that's what

he was exactly armin and burnt started chatting they sort of sized each other up and once they were both sure that the other was serious they agreed agreed to meet. Just one month later, on the 9th of March 2001, Bernd took the day off work, told his partner that he was off on a work trip, and booked a one-way ticket to Kassel, a station two hours drive from Armin's manor house. And remember, this place is super, super remote. It is miles away from anything. Armin picked up Bernd from the station, and they were both nervous and excited. Bernd couldn't keep his hands to himself in the car. They drove for about two hours till they reached

the manor house. As soon as he was inside, Berndt took off all his clothes so Armin could admire his dinner. And those are Berndt's words. They drank some coffee before heading upstairs to the slaughter room. Armin would later reveal that he and Berndt had sex at this point in the evening, but only because Berndt wanted to. Armin wasn't really interested. Then they engaged in what Armin's lawyer, Harold Ermol, would later refer to in court as love games. The climax of these games was for Armin to cut off Berndt's penis. But when it came down to it, Armin just couldn't do it. Berndt told Armin that he was feeble, that he couldn't inflict the kind of pain that he needed. And Bernd decided that he was going back to Berlin. It's really interesting, isn't it?

Because they do seem to have found the perfect match for each other. One wants to be eaten, one wants to eat. But for Bernd, it's all about the physical pain. He wants to feel that immense amount of pain. But with Mivas, he doesn't want to cause pain. He just wants to eat this person. It's not the sexual pleasure of the killing and the physical pain or the torture or anything like that which is why we see this sort of like

road bump they hit which is quite interesting because it's so opposite to a lot of the other killers we talk about so Brent just decides to go back to Berlin he's had enough but he can't just storm out he's a two-hour drive away from the station in the middle of fucking nowhere so he needs armin to drive him and we can only imagine how awkward that car ride would have been can you imagine this guy's just refused to cut your dick off and you called him feeble and then you have to sit in the car in silence for two hours oh my god that is gonna be the worst n2 the worst kind of internet date you could meet but on the way to the station armin convinced burnt that they could try again and that this time he would do it burnt agreed and they stopped on the way back to roosterfeld to buy some cold medicine and painkillers

thinking it would be easier for armin to go through with the genital mutilation if burnt was a bit sleepy i don't think enough cough medicine in the world could make me sleepy enough for someone to cut my genitals off. Night nurse is not strong enough for that. No, no way. But he also he wants to feel the pain though. That's the thing. They're trying to find that balance of him being a bit sleepy. They should have taken antihistamines that would have done it. But I guess also that he is starting from a different starting point to where you or I would be. If someone is going to abduct me to cut my genitals off, it's going to take more than a fucking pack of Benadryl to get me to comply. That's true. But he's into it. This is what he wants.

Once they get back to the manor and go back up to the slaughter room, Armin set up his video camera and recorded four hours of footage so graphic that only 20 minutes of it was shown in court. And it has never been publicly released. Why did they even need to play 20 minutes of this video in court is what I wonder. I think it's all about the consent. Okay yeah fair. So what we are about to take you through and describe is what other people say is on the tape but I'm pretty happy to say that I have not seen it. Members of the jury who did watch it received a lot of therapy after the trial. On the tape, you can clearly see Armin attempting to cut off Bernd's penis, but he can't do it because the knife is too blunt.

You would think that someone who had been dreaming of eating another person since he was a child would have an array of extremely sharp knives on hand, but apparently not. So Armin leaves the slaughter room and comes back with a sharper knife. And it really is third time lucky, because this time he does manage to cut Bernd's penis off. Bernd screamed loudly for 20 to 30 seconds, but then said that it didn't hurt anymore. And according to forensics expert Manfred Ries,

the type of pain Bernd would have experienced after having his dick cut off is the highest level of pain that people can experience. Reese calls it a sense of impending doom. Now, I haven't been able to find another instance of anyone else referring to the highest level of pain in this way, but we really like it, so let's just pretend it's totally legit. I imagine probably what happened is that Burnt went into shock at this point, and that's where he stopped feeling pain. He must have been losing a serious amount of blood. This didn't stop him however from wanting to eat his own penis. Armin tried to eat it as soon as he'd cut it off but failed as I'm sure you can imagine it was way too tough. But Armin wasn't going to give up so easily.

Armin took the severed penis downstairs to the kitchen. He cut it in half and blanched it quickly before pan frying it. But much to Armin's dismay, the penis just shriveled up in the pan and was totally inedible. That's some rough stuff. Both Bernt and Armin were very disappointed. But according to Armin, Bernt told him that if he was still alive in the morning that they would try again to eat his genitals together and that Armin was to not even think of calling the police when ben started to feel cold he asked that armin run him a warm bath presumably so he could bleed out more comfortably armin obliged and leaves ben in the bath for two and a half hours armin passes the time reading a star trek novel as you do while a man whose penis you cut off bleeds to death in your bathroom you just

couldn't make it up, could you? Bernd eventually called Armin into the bathroom. He got out of the bath, but passed out immediately. He tried to get up a few times, but eventually he just lay still. Armin dragged Bernd back to the slaughter room, where he drifted in and out of consciousness. According to Armin, he just left him to it, until he heard Bernd stumbling around at about half past two in the morning. How is he not dead?

How has he made it till two in the morning? I wondered this because I just thought he would be losing so much blood. Yeah. But apparently he's hanging on. Armin went back into the slaughter room and saw Burnt fall to the floor. He hesitated momentarily before kissing Burnt and beginning his butchery of the corpse. He stabbed Burnt in the throat twice with an 18 centimetre butcher's knife. Then he cut Bernt's body in half and washed it with hot

water. Then he butchered the body. This is all on videotape. Armin buried Bernt's skin and innards in his garden and removed 20 kilos of meat from his skeleton. He kept this meat under a false bottom in his chest freezer. He grated Bernt's bones into flour. So he literally ground his bones to make his bread. It couldn't get any more fairy tale and still be real. Armin waits two days before he eats any of Bernt's body. But when he does, he eats it with sprouts, potatoes, a pepper sauce and a glass of red wine. Because if you're going to do it, why not do it properly? Over the next few months, Armin would consume 10 kilos of Bernd's body.

And if he had left it at that, he might have got away with it. Back in Berlin, René, Bernd's boyfriend, raised the alarm after Bernd didn't come home after two days. He alerted the police that because Bernd had erased all of the internet files on his computer, all his conversations with Armin, and bought his train ticket to Kassel in cash, the police had nothing to go on. It was as if he'd just vanished into thin air. His partner Renee couldn't make any sense of it,

because to him, Bernd was straight edge, stable, perhaps even a little boring. He knew nothing of his secret desires. The case was closed after two months because of zero leads. And to be honest, apart from the fact that it's a little bit weird that he disappeared, he is a grown man and not deemed as particularly vulnerable or anything. But Rene, though, knew that something had to be wrong because Berndt hadn't touched his bank account in all of the time that he'd been gone.

And back in Rosterfeld, life continued as normal. But Armin was getting itchy feet. What do you do when you've achieved your greatest fantasy in life? Like we see with so many killers, just thinking about eating people was not going to cut it anymore. He'd had his cooling off period, and now he needed his next kill. So after five months of silence, Frankie reappeared on internet cannibal chat rooms. To try and snare another willing person, Armin described what he'd done to Bernd, to people he chatted to online, in an attempt to prove to them that he was serious, and this would be his downfall. Whilst talking to an Austrian medical student, Armin divulged just a

little bit too much information, and this guy ended up calling the police. So at 8.45am on the 10th of December 2002, police arrived at the Mavis Manor with a search warrant, and placed Armin under arrest on suspicion of the glorification of violence. The police found bags of meat hidden in the secret freezer and took it for testing. They also seized 200 hard disks from Armin's three computers, and they contained images of torture porn, cannibalism, and some holiday snaps thrown in for good measure. They also dug up the remains in the garden and took them to the lab, but they hadn't found Armin's footage of the butchering of burnt and the test results weren't set to come back for 24 hours. So Armin was released and like any

sensible killer, he lawyered up immediately. He called lawyer Harold Ermold and confessed. He told him everything. He told him about the tape, which was the recording of the whole horrific thing that the police hadn't found yet. And when the results came back from the lab as 100% match for human flesh, the remains were identified as burnt and his family were informed. On the 10th of December 2002, Armin went to the castle police precinct and told them everything, even where the tape was. The tape was recovered and the police charged Armin with murder. Because the thing is, cannibalism in Germany, like a lot of other places in Europe, isn't actually illegal. And there is no law against it in the UK either, just in case you're wondering. In German law, the difference between murder and manslaughter is very specific.

Murder is defined in section 211 of the German criminal code as follows. A murder is when a person kills another human being out of murderous lust to satisfy his sexual desires from greed or otherwise base motives by stealth, cruelty or with means dangerous to the public in order to commit or to cover up another crime. So manslaughter is a killing that doesn't have any of these things attached to it. So in order for Armin to be convicted of murder, one of these motives had to be proven. If the prosecution could convince the court that Armin killed Berndt for his own sexual satisfaction, then he would for sure be found guilty of murder. And this seems pretty easy to prove, as the pair had sex on the evening of

the murder, and Armin admitted to police in interrogations that he had watched back the video footage and masturbated to it in the months after the killing. But it didn't quite happen that way, as on the 3rd of December 2003, Armin Mivas' trial began. His defense rested on consent. Armin's attorney claimed that because Berndt was a willing victim, that it wasn't murder at all. Also, we should say before we go any further, that Armin was pronounced to be totally sane by psychiatrists before the trial, even though Armin told psychiatrists that he felt he had absorbed Berndt's masculinity and his skills, including his ability to speak English, when he ate him. And on the 30th of January 2004, Armin was found guilty of manslaughter and

sentenced to eight and a half years in prison, which might seem like a pretty lucky escape, but it wasn't good enough for Armin. He felt manslaughter was too harsh a sentence for what he saw as an assisted suicide, which has its own section of the criminal code and carries a much lighter sentence. So he appealed his conviction and a retrial began on the 12th of January 2006.

And it was just what the police had been waiting for. They seized the chance to present evidence that didn't appear in the first trial. Armin and his lawyer, Harold Harold Ermell argued for assisted suicide, but the prosecution wanted a murder conviction. Their star witness was Manfred Rees, the forensics expert with the sense of impending doom, who testified that he could see in the footage of the killing that when Arman stabbed Brent in the throat, he was still breathing. This seems to not really make sense, and any butchery experts out there, please correct me, but why would he stab Brent in the throat, he was still breathing. This seems to not really make sense. And any butchery experts out there, please correct me.

But why would he stab burnt in the neck if he already thought he was dead? When you butcher an animal, though, even if it's dead, do you still have to slit its throat to drain the blood? That's what I thought. And yes, you do have to do that. But it's not like right across. It's just in the left side. It's a stab.

It's not a slice. So it's not to like drain the blood. It doesn't seem't maybe he was just sick of him fucking stumbling around his house for hours and hours and hours and not dying probably but that means it's a murder and also like i don't even need the sexual motive that's very obvious like he stabbed him in the neck when he was still breathing therefore it's a murder and it's not an assisted suicide because being stabbed in the neck is not how burnt wanted to go this whole thing him saying, I have the power over my own death and being stabbed in the neck isn't what he wanted. So it's not an assisted suicide, it's a murder. And I also think just the fact that he videotaped it at all,

why did he videotape the whole thing? That really implies the sexual motive, which is all that they would need for a murder conviction. Because even if he wasn't getting off on the killing, surely the sexual motive, the killing to consume, isn't that enough of a sexual motive to make it a murder anyway? And to me, the fact that he videotaped it really, really says that this is sexually motivated. And this time round, the court agreed with us. The judge found that because of the cold medicine and pill combo that Berndt had taken, he couldn't be responsible for making his own decisions that night. And on the 9th of May 2006, Armin Mivas was convicted of the murder of Berndt Brandes. So the appeal that Armin had wanted led to his initial eight and a half year sentence being commuted to life imprisonment.

He's currently serving his time in Castle Penitentiary, where he passes the time singing in the prison choir. Some psychiatrists claim that Armin is not a danger to the public at all because he suffers from an extreme sexual preference disorder and is in control of his actions. I'm really not sure how far I agree with that. We've seen it so many times when people have extreme sexual preferences. Eventually, they're going to go after it again. So he is a danger to the public. The thing is, though, I guess why he says that is he would absolutely go after it again

because it's too late now. He knows exactly what gets him off. There's no way, even if he wanted to, that he would be able to stop himself, I don't think. But why I think potentially maybe I agree that he wouldn't be an actual danger to the public is because part of his whole sexual fantasy, which we can't say wouldn't evolve and maybe turn into something different later. Part of his sexual fantasy, and as we said, his kink, was that the person is a totally willing participant. But why he could be a danger to the public, I guess, is because someone like Brent Brandes, as much as he said that he wanted it, how vulnerable and how disturbed do you have to be to want that to happen to you? Armin Mivas, yes,

would have been a danger to the public because he would have profiled and identified somebody who was vulnerable enough, who was willing to consent to him killing and eating them. But I guess he wouldn't have just gone out down a dark alley and grabbed a stranger and done it to them, maybe. But maybe it would have escalated to that. Consent is a big thing for him. Like, that's what gets him off. So maybe he wouldn't have just started snatching people off the streets. But I don't think it would be too much of a leap for him to start doing that and also like we said like the kind of people that he would have been going after yes they would have given in consent for this to happen but what does that say about you it probably just says that you

need lots of help if you're consenting to somebody cutting off your penis and eating you so that person must be incredibly vulnerable and someone like myivas shouldn't be allowed to be a danger to them. Yeah, exactly. I hope you're still with us and that you haven't vomited. Let us know what you think on our Facebook group and you can follow us on the social medias at Red Handed The Pod. If you would like to give us some money to help us run the show, that would be fantastic. And here are some people who have already done that. So thank you very much. George Leak, Jessica Peacock, Cara Helene Strip, who upgraded her pledge with us, Sabrina Gavigan, Alex Carlson, Mark Randall, Amy Gillespie, Quinn Lay, who has also upgraded her pledge with us, Jessie, Claire Dempsey, Lee Sasha Liz Ozie and Natalie B thank you guys thank you very much guys

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I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness. And inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudian Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come.

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