Timesuck with Dan Cummins - Short Suck #35 - Issei Sagawa: The Unrepentant Cannibal

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

Issei Sagawa aka the Kobe Cannibal, made a living for most of his life off of the infamy he attained... for murdering and then eating a young Dutch woman in 1981, when Issei was thirty-two years-old. Why didn't he spend the rest of his life in prison? And why did he want to eat her in the first place? For Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: https://www.badmagicproductions.com

Welcome to another edition of Time Suck Short Sucks. I'm Dan Cummins and today I will be sharing the story of Issei Sagawa, the unrepentant cannibal. I only wanted to bite into her and have a little taste, rather than actually consuming the meat. Of course I still have this sexual appetite of wanting to eat a beautiful woman's body. For example, if a normal man fancied a girl, he'd naturally feel a desire to see her as often as possible, to be close to her, to smell her and kiss her, right? To me, eating is just an extension of that. Obviously, the general public doesn't understand, but the thing is, sure, I want to eat the

girl, but I don't necessarily want to kill her in the process. Once she's dead, she's merely a corpse, a thing. If possible, I'd like to eat her alive. Frankly, I can't fathom why everyone doesn't feel this urge to eat, to consume other people. Don't you ever feel like this? Uh, no. No, sure don't. Literally not ever. If I'm really craving some red meat, I'm perfectly happy with some beef or bison or elk or venison. I'm out on people. Haven't tried it. Still gonna knock it.

What a curse, huh? To carry around the urge to eat the very people you're sexually attracted to. Let's find out what this freak is made of and feel good about ourselves for not being quite this fucked up. Or at least I sure hope none of you are quite as fucked up as this guy. Words and ideas can change the world. I hated her, but I wanted to love my mother. I have a dream. I plead not guilty right now. Your only chance is to leave with us. The speaker of the words I shared to begin this episode with, a man named Issei Sagawa, lived most of his life with the exception of just a couple years as a free man. And many of those years were lived free after he definitely for sure 100% confirmed. Absolutely, without a doubt, killed and ate someone. He admitted to it.

Many, many, many times. In some ways, a large portion of his life would revolve around admitting to this murder over and over and over again and becoming famous in the process. We've actually met Issei Sagawa before, as I'm sure some of you wonderful sacks will recall. Your memory often impresses the hell out of me. In episode 320, the one on Gilberto Valley, New York's cannibal cop. In that episode we debated free speech. Is it okay for someone to say they definitely for sure want to eat and kill someone? Or should that be a crime? When does speculation cross over into actively

planning, in this case a premeditated murder? Where does pure fantasy end and the early stages of planning a terrible crime begin? In this case, doesn't really matter. Issei Sagawa didn't escape jail time because he was entitled to his free speech. He would commit murder, reaching the line between fantasy and reality abruptly, so abruptly, he would later say that he was actually put off, that it left him never wanting to do something like that ever again. Or did it just leave him wanting to never risk getting caught and incarcerated ever again? Because later he will speak differently. He'll admit that he still wanted a woman to eat, to devour, to consume entirely. So which was the

truth? Can someone like this ever be trusted to live in society freely again? Let's now dive further into a story I know I've touched on before, maybe twice actually. The story of arguably the world's most infamous cannibal, a real life Hannibal Lecter. Issei Sagawa was born April 26, 1949 in Kobe Hyogo Prefecture. He immediately had all the advantages of an upper class life, a wealthy life. He came into a lot of money. His dad Akira Sagawa, very, very successful businessman who would actually serve as president as at Kurita Water Industries, a Japanese manufacturer of water treating chemicals.

It's actually an international company with branches here in the US and other places. His granddad was an editor for the Asai Shimbun, one of the five largest newspapers in all of Japan. the Asai Shimbun, one of the five largest newspapers in all of Japan. But money is not everything and for a while it looked like the family fortune might not help Issei. It looked like he might not actually survive infancy. His mom, Tomei Sagawa, had fallen down some stairs when she was pregnant, narrowly avoiding a miscarriage. Instead her son was born prematurely but with health problems. Born small enough that he could fit into the palm of his father's hand. Also immediately developed entoritis, an inflammation of the small intestine. Issei would eventually recover after

several injections of potassium and calcium and saline. Still he was a very sickly child, very small child. Legs quote as skinny as pencils according to him. His fragile health, his introverted nature, his small stature would lead him to develop a very strong interest in literature. He was a book kid. If only that was the only thing he was interested in. Then this episode would end right here. But unfortunately he began to develop some some other interests. Much more unorthodox interests which might have begun with his uncle. His uncle's name was Mitsuo, and for the traditional New Year's festivities he would often disguise himself as a frightening boy-eating giant. Dressed to look like a

monster, he would chase scurrying children around, pretending he wanted to devour them. Little Issei and his elder brother would run away screaming, look to their father Akira to save them from this horrible monster. That is a fun little game, little boys whooping and yelling hysterically laughing as their uncle the giant you know making his hungry giant noises dashes around the house in pursuit of them. Each time the game was played the giant would always emerge the victor first blinding then slaying the gallant knight Akira. The children would then be snatched up and taken away ready to be placed into

the Giants huge cast iron cooking pot. Issei would later recall the giddy mixture of terror and elation he felt as he and his brother were lowered struggling wildly into the stew pot, which seems to have been a couch cushion set up. They pretend it was a stew pot. I don't think they took this game so far. They actually had some massive custom stew pot created, big enough to place two boys inside. Sources are a little unclear though. This was Issei's entry into the world of make-believe the world of fantasy and Cannibalism was a big part of it Another make-believe story the fable of Hansel and Gretel was one of his favorites and he would lay awake in bed four hours

Fervently replaying in his mind the story of the witch and her fattening up the children she captured. He was obsessed with it. He didn't understand why, but he was. So maybe his uncle actually didn't have much to do with his interest in cannibalism. Maybe he was just born with this interest and his uncle just happened to play a game that strongly appealed to Issei because of some kind of faulty wiring in his brain. Just left him with a craving for human meat. Scared that that might be possible. Whatever the true root of Issei's unnatural cravings, soon his interest in cannibalistic stories would turn into a longing to actually eat people. In first grade, when he was no more than six years old, he looked over,

saw a male classmate's thigh, and instead of thinking that it looked tan or pale, or just whatever, something quickly moving on, forgetting about it entirely, Issei thought something else. He thought, hmm, that looks delicious. And he kept thinking that the flesh of those around him looked delicious. Then puberty hit years later and this exciting craving got mixed up with new feelings of sexual attraction. In junior high he became, according to him, obsessed with the actress Grace Kelly who became a huge Hollywood star and sex symbol in her early 20s before marrying the Prince of Monaco when she was 26 and then

abruptly retiring to focus on raising a family and royal duties. He maintained this obsession through high school. It was the beginning of his fascination with Western women and before he knew it, quote, tall, healthy-looking Western women became the trigger for my cannibalistic fantasies. Where did this, I don't know, kink come from? Iset thought of himself as short, ugly, and inferior, and he sought out people who represented the exact opposite of that. Around this time, he was also becoming immersed in viewing the works of Pierre Auguste Renoir,

the French Impressionist. Renoir's paintings typify the creamy flesh tones Issaix longed for in a woman. And he would gaze at these images often, wondering how all that luxurious peach-hued skin would feel under his touch, and of course, more importantly for him, how it would taste. So creepy. Soon, long before he left high school, Issei realized that his cannibalistic fantasies were quote, purely a form of sexual desire.

The more turned on he got, the more he wanted to eat somebody. Sounds like a curse that would befall some character in a horror novel. The more Issei wanted to eat someone, the more hot and bothered he would get, especially after he had already eaten a regular meal. And now his cravings began to influence fantasies that got more and more elaborate. One morbid fantasy involved Issei voyeuristically spying on a well-built Western goddess as she showered. He would then creep up on her and attack, viciously strangling her from behind with his belt. Then once she was dead he'd consume her body and soul. Around this time to his credit, he realized that he should probably talk to

a psychiatrist. And to his parents credit, they were supportive. Issei first contacted a psychiatrist at the age of 15, worried that his brain was sending him down a dark psychosexual path that would end in bloodshed and incarceration. He was right to worry The psychiatrist he spoke with informed him that in order to be of any real assistance Issei would need to actually come into his office and speak with him rather than hide away on the other end of a telephone Far too embarrassed to sit face to face with someone and discuss his private yearnings Isseisei reluctantly closed off this possible avenue of release and help. And what a shame. Right now undergoing counseling via the phone or over the internet is I think probably the norm. Eventually Issei does share his secrets with his brother

who does not take them seriously. Jun Sagawa thought Issei was trying to pull his leg and dismissed him entirely. As an older brother, I can 100% seen doing that to a younger sibling. Yeah, yeah, I wanna eat girls! I like them so much! Shut the fuck up, dork! Smack! Years later, when Issei did begin to eat people, I bet he was like, ooh, oh, shit. To the outside world, Issei still looked like regular old Issei Sagawa. No one else apparently had a clue about what kind of dark shit he was fixating on. After graduating high school, he attended Wako University in Tokyo and completed a master's degree in English literature at Kwansei Gakuin University,

a private Christian college in Nishinomiya, Japan. And it was during these years surrounded by so many young women, some of them young, attractive Western women studying via exchange programs. This is where Issei began to do more than just think about his fantasies. At the age of 24, he followed a tall German woman home one night, waited for her to fall asleep, and then broke into her apartment. His plan was simple and of course horrifying. He wanted to cannibalize her by slicing off a teensy tiny little part of her butt that she wouldn't even notice. You

know, you know how the butt doesn't have any nerves in it just at all, just zero? He's gonna take a little small slice, is gonna be real quiet about it and she wouldn't even feel anything. He would just would just sneak out she just wake up the next morning and be like hey how this divot get there oh man looks like some bug ate some of my ass last night gosh dang no indication if he actually thought that the butt had no nerves in it but he did actually think that he would be able to sneak in slice off some butt but meat from a fucking woman who was sleeping and not even wake her up because he's fucking crazy. Obviously his plan did not go as planned. At some point this woman awoke

as one does when a creep tries to cut off some of your ass while you're sleeping and she was able to thwart Issei's attack by pushing his weak little ass to the ground. She then immediately called the police, kept this dude from running off while she did, hail Lucifina, she's a lioness, and the police came and arrested Issei, charging him with attempted rape. Guess that was easier to comprehend and believe than his true motivations. No, no, no, I wasn't trying to, I wasn't, I didn't want to rape her, I just wanted to cut just like, I don't know, like a square inch of her ass off and then sneak out, you know, leave her just sleeping peacefully and saute it up and you know have a little taste of a little snack.

Please be like yeah I fucking sure sure buddy you rape his piece of shit. But no pun intended Issei's dad would pay a hefty settlement to the woman numbers not disclosed in sources and the charges would be dropped and shame on Issei's dad for doing that. No no you gotta you gotta let baby boy fucking take the hit on this one. You gotta let him spend some time behind bars. Understand this is serious. So now Issei's still a free man. And although he contacted a psychiatrist again and he went in for a visit, he decided abruptly to stop going. Does not want to work on eliminating his darkest desires. No, he wants to indulge them. Now he decides it's time to

make a new life for himself elsewhere, a place where nobody knows him and where there's a lot of hot Western women. In 1977, at the age of 28, intelligent, cultured, still a virgin, still out of his fragile fucking mind, he moved to France to pursue a PhD in literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, which including its earlier incarnation as the University of Paris has been around since the 1100s, making it along with its acclaimed faculty one of the most noteworthy and prestigious universities in the world. And of course it's very different than Japan. Suddenly in the presence of all these Western girls, very fashionable fit Western girls clad in their short skirts and revealing tops.

Issei is a man on fire, just a walk-in boner. He'd been living in the city for almost two years then when a tragedy occurred that would kind of accelerate his fantasies and push them quicker towards reality. In 1979 the beautiful American actress Jean Seberg, a French New Wave Cinema star, died in her car at the young age of 40. She'd intentionally overdosed on barbiturates after being suicidal for months. Issei Sagawa was amazed that her body was found not only in Paris but just a very short distance from where he resided. Seberg, another sex symbol to many, had been one of his earliest infatuations and Issei concluded that it

was fate that she had died so near to him. Thank you Nimrod for keeping me from these kinds of delusions. My god. The papers reported how she had been naked when found, another delicious element to add to his fantasies. He dreamt of what it would have been like to make it to the actress's corpse before the police had found her right after she died. Where he could take her nude body back to his flat and devour her. This tragedy was like a shot of adrenaline for his dark fantasy. Now this strange illusion of weirdo is thinking about eating some poor young woman more than ever. He's also finally experiencing a sexual life. He does lose his virginity in Paris but it does not change his vision. He'll later say that while residing in Paris almost every night he would bring a sex worker home in the hopes of shooting

them as they bent over the bidet, washing themselves. But for some reason, his fingers would always freeze and he couldn't pull the trigger. Yeah, this weirdo has himself a gun now, which is of course good for no one. Issei said he just couldn't go through with it, not because he was morally opposed to killing killing but because he knew that his world, the world he lived in of wealth and privilege would shatter to pieces if he pulled that trigger. No more peri. No more scoping out western college girls. Now he'd be on the run or be in prison. He tried to ease his lustful dangerous urges by indulging in other kinks. He thought about eating shit.

Literally. But it was a bit too much for him, he decided. Instead he talked to a female friend of his, his acquaintance. He was attracted to and had given him some of her piss and some of her spit to drink. Uh huh. She would just hand him little bottles, little bags of spit and piss. What an interesting conversation. That must have been the lead to that.

Hey, question for you before you head off to class. Just a quick question. What do you... What do you do, like, with all your piss in your spit? You know? Like, with your spit, are you just like, swallowing it? You know? Just kind of swallowing it? Or spitting it out on the ground? Or like, with your piss, I'd imagine just probably like the toilet.

Just flushing down the toilet, really keeping it you know for any reason Cuz I would know I just wonder if you're not gonna do anything with it Is I have it can buy from you? I'd love it I'd love just you know if you just like piss in a bottle and give it to me so I could drink it jerk off But then she gets married this goes good for a while I guess but then she gets married and then she gets pregnant and well She's still uh, you know making some money dropping off bottles of her piss for this guy he doesn't like how it smells anymore he says he feels like it smells like motherhood like a baby and that just leaves him limp and now he needs to move on but he doesn't want to find a new lady to make a piss and spit deal with

uh-uh no because that wasn't really what he wanted. He was settling for his piss and, you know, spit. He wanted to eat someone and he returned to fantasizing about that all the time. So much jerking off. So much behavioral conditioning, reinforcing his mind and body to crave murder and cannibalism. To only be satisfied by that. He now knew it was just a matter of time before he killed somebody. And soon he would find his victim. Renée Hartfelt was his friend. Kind of. Acquaintance. Probably a more accurate description.

Classmate. Most of the French women he knew, he would say later, were kind of stuck up and totally out of my league. Renée was also out of Issaie's league. At least he thought she was. She was a very beautiful 25 year old with a heart shaped face, piercing dark eyes, long swoopy brown hair

and the characteristic 80s blowout style, which she sometimes iron flat. She had this huge winning smile. Also very fucking smart, right? She had to be one of Issei's contemporaries at Sorbonne. She was 5'10". He liked tall women. He was very short. He was 4'9", less than 100 pounds by his own assessment, quote, ugly and weak. Didn't think he ever had a chance of getting Renee to actually date him, but maybe she'd become his friend. No, she was kind and warm. Issei actually wouldn't speak

to her until a chance meeting on the metro led to her to recognize him from class. They chit-chatted for a while and then Renée got off at her stop. Now Issei was really smitten. He eagerly anticipated their next literature class together where he intended to move things along. After the lecture, it was suggested by the group that they go out that evening for a meal at a local Greek restaurant.

Issei could barely suppress his joy when Renee agreed to come. There all the students got to know each other, talking about their various nationalities and origins, and Issei, the only Japanese student, volunteered to host a hot pot party at his apartment. When the time came, all but one of his fellow students failed to show. He wasn't well-liked. They were probably like, nah, fuck that weirdo. We were just being polite. We said we'd come over, not a chance in hell. But one person did come and ESA was overjoyed. This was best case scenario.

Because the one guest who came was Renee. Now the two of them would be alone. And before we find out what happens next, time for today's mid-show sponsor break. If you don't hear these ads, you heard this you can sign up for a patreon Become a space lizard for five bucks a month get the entire catalog ad free and more get all the old episode of the secret suck Thanks listen to those sponsors Hope you liked them and now we return to the Parisian apartment of a strange disturbing little man in the summer of 1981 The moment he saw Renee wash her hands in the bathroom, Issei's brain superimposed the image of the sex workers washing themselves at the bidet.

She became a new prime candidate for his cannibalism ritual. Quickly remembering that Renee said she spoke three languages, English, French, and German, Issei said that he was planning on doing some work in German and would happily pay her to tutor him. Being short on finances, something she had also mentioned to Issei, Renee agreed. And from that point on, every time she came to his apartment for lessons, he would manage to distract her at some point to get her to look at something else while he practiced pointing a gun at her head from behind. But still he could not pull the trigger. Then one day one of the employees from Kurita Water Industries, Issei's father's company, came to Paris

and took Issei out to a Japanese restaurant. Issei was feeling under the weather, had a bit of a fever, and as he ate the fish, which tasted off to him, his brain kept cycling back to the fact that Renee was coming over the next day. And if he got food poisoning, well damn it, then he wouldn't be able to kill her. That made things seem to his fucked up brain very urgent. The next day, June 9th, Rene came over,

they hung out, and unfortunately Issei was not sick with food poisoning. And as Rene settled into some cushions on the floor to look at a book, Issei moved quietly to a cupboard, took out the.22 caliber rifle he kept there. Walking up behind her, he pointed the weapon directly at the back of her neck and this time he pulled the trigger. But nothing happened. The gun jammed and Renee hadn't even heard a click. However, instead of feeling like he'd figuratively dodged a bullet, which Renee had almost unknowingly literally just done, Issei felt that he had to kill her now. There was no other way. He was tired of coming so close and still not tasting the flesh that the 32 year old had craved on some level now

for over 25 years. Renée represented the final frontier of his fantasies and he would not be thwarted again. But it wouldn't happen this night. He would instead prepare for another opportunity. A few days later over the phone, Issei told Renée that he needed her help translating a poetry assignment into German. Could she come over? Having no idea what he was really up to, of course, she said yes. And so on the evening of June 11th, 1981, Renée arrived and Issei led her to a desk where he had set out the poetry, just like he had told her.

A desk she had sat at many times before without incident to do some easy work that he always paid her for. And now while she worked, he snuck up behind her. Just like he had done numerous times before, he pointed that.22 caliber rifle at the back of her head, pulled the trigger, and this time it didn't jam. It fired and she died instantly. Later, according to Issei, an autopsy would show

that the gun hadn't been powerful enough to send the bullet directly through her skull, so it just kept spinning around and around in her head. And that is why, as we've learned several times before here, professional hitmen and serial killers often will use.22s instead of weapons of a larger caliber. In addition to making less noise, much less noise, and bigger weapons,.22s, often more lethal when it comes to headshots specifically, thanks to the bullet ping-ponging around, shredding somebody's brains as opposed

to quickly exiting out of their school. As she died, Issei said he fainted. And then, when he woke up, again according to him, he experienced deep regret. Thought about calling an ambulance, realizing that he had lost one of his only friends in France. Lost, is a funny way to put it, letting himself off the hook there with that word choice. It insinuates that she died accidentally or something. That she just happened to die when he was around as opposed to him murdering her in cold blood. After his initial regret, if in fact

he actually experienced any initial regret, Issei got hard as fuck real quick. Realized that all his fantasies were about to come true. And first, he raped the corpse. But then found out that he couldn't satisfactorily bite into her skin because his teeth weren't sharp enough. So he left the apartment, went out and purchased a very sharp butcher's knife. Then he came back and brought his carnage boner back into his apartment, got back to it. Said, the first thing I did was cut into her buttock.

No matter how deep I cut, all I saw was the fat beneath the skin. It looked like corn and it took a while to actually reach red meat. The moment I saw the meat, I tore a chunk off with my fingers and threw it into my mouth. It was truly a historical moment for me." That passage actually made me a bit nauseous first time I read it and also just now. It's actually so thankful. I like my flesh to have, you know, all of the skin on it and a heartbeat and a smile on the owner of the flesh's face and a twinkle on her eye. Before further diving into experimentation, Issei decided he'd have to dismember the body, both to make cutting the meat off easier and to make its eventual disposer faster.

Having the body or heaving the body, excuse me, into the bathtub, Issei used the same knife with which he had excised some of Renée's flesh to begin cutting off both her legs. Next, he hacked away at both arms until he was able to wrench them free of their sockets. Man, this is fucking so gory. Finally, he plunged his knife into Renée's throat, began severing her head. All the while he kept the cold tap running to get rid of the blood. With that done he then began to consume various parts of her body, either cooked or raw. Her breasts, face, buttocks, feet, thighs, and neck. He didn't like the smell of menstrual blood and seeing as she was on her period he avoided her vagina. But he did sever and then swallow her clitoris whole.

According to him that was his favorite part. It was the first time he felt sexual pleasure in eating her as though quote my inner body was on fire. How is this sick fuck ever allowed to walk free again after this? Well of course we'll find out. Other parts of her were not as enjoyable for him. He didn't like the tough meat on the soles of her feet. Didn't like her breasts which were a little more than lumps of fat. Taste and texture wise, apparently her neck meat was his favorite. I'd come to believe that the meat tastes better and more delicate as you move up the body,

especially above the torso. He thought her tongue was delicious as well. He cut it out of her mouth and chewed it up raw. Jesus. Some of the parts he stored in his refrigerator. At various moments during all this horror, he would stop to take photographs of what was left of Renee's body. He also took a couple trips out of the apartment to do stuff like get rid

of her clothing, but he did keep her underwear. Finding the fantasy was over when her body began to decompose and Issei realized that he would have to carry out the most basic and most difficult element of all murder plans Disposing of what was left of the body which was most of it Using two suitcases. He loaded up her remains After that perhaps in an effort to show that nothing untoward overshadowed his life He accompanied some fellow students on a trip to the cinema where his classmates would remember him being jovial Appearing to be very relaxed. All right. What a piece of shit, just no remorse.

He's loving this. After his night out at the movies, he would return to his apartment, cook up some of René's flesh, flavor it with some salt, pepper, and mustard, and set out on his final task of dumping those suitcases. Centuries ago, the Bois de Bouillon belonged to the kings and queens of France. They would attend with their parties, climb on their horses, and go hunting. Bestowed upon Paris by Napoleon III in

1853 at 2,000 acres, it is the largest of the capital city's great parks. And it is also less than five minutes, just over a mile by car from where Issei Sagawa was living in his apartment. Near midnight on June 13th, the middle-aged couple, taking in the warm summer night, were walking hand-in-hand beside the largest of Bois' many lakes. As they strolled, they noticed a city taxi pull into a side road up ahead and out hopped a young, quote, Asian-looking gentleman. The couple later described the man as being very small and delicately built. They observed him struggling to pull two large suitcases from the boot of the taxi.

Having paid the driver, he proceeded to place the apparently heavy cases onto a small trolley, which he then began to drag into the park. The couple walked on. Better things to do than pay attention to some fucking random weirdo, like enjoying their evening. But then the tiny man with the suitcase or two suitcases did something else to further draw their attention. They slowed their pace, watched as he veered sharply off of a paved path onto the grass and then started heading towards

the edge of a lake. Clearly he intended to throw his baggage into the water. Just a just a bit suspicious. This was confirmed when the man, Issei Sagawa, of course turned, glanced around him him spotted this small and unexpected audience. The couple's presence appeared to distract him from his mission and he panicked. Hastily sliding both cases under a nearby bush he turned and then ran off into the darkness of the park. Intrigued by the weak little man's bizarre departure the couple approached the bushes under which he had left the suitcases determined to to find out what it was, that he was about to sink into the lake. Well, they were in for the surprise of their lives. Those poor bastards were traumatized, I'm sure. And of course, they immediately called the police.

Upon the police's arrival, officers were told by the shaken couple what to expect within the suitcases, the hacked up pieces of a young woman. One suitcase carried her torso, crammed into its twin where her limbs and head. Taken to the mortuary, the bloody remains were removed from their tight confines and assembled onto an autopsy table. Immediately it was clear what had killed her. The gunshot wound in the in the head, you know, obviously spelled it all out. They also noticed that many different portions of flesh were missing. Thick slices had been cut from the buttocks and thighs, the tip of the nose had been removed, the clitoris as I mentioned, more. Meanwhile investigators knew they were looking for a short Asian man who had gotten out of a taxi cab. The city's cosmopolitan is Paris. Well, it had more than its fair share of male residents who matched this description.

But there was still the solid taxi lead to pursue. They contacted all the taxi rental firms in Paris to see if any of their drivers could recall picking up a little man with two heavy suitcases he could barely lift. They hoped that would be a memorable detail, and thankfully it was. After just a few days, they would find Issei's driver. A man came forward to tell police that he had been summoned to an apartment building on Rue Erlangier and there was only one Asian man residing in the building and he was fucking tiny and creepy. He ran in one of the studio apartments on the second floor. Before the police made a move to arrest him

they wanted to take some precautions right there a suspect clearly had access to a firearm and was clearly capable not only of murder but also of extensive mutilation and dismemberment. They were on high alert, weapons drawn, lots of officers present as they moved along the upper landing towards his front door. Little did they know Issei Sakawa was calmly waiting for them inside. He knew he was found out. He did not plan on resisting. He was not going to put up a fight. Right? Of course not. He's a sneaky little coward. Not somebody who would ever take on anyone in a fair fight. He was also weirdly excited to do something else he had fantasized about relating to his

cannibalistic desires and that was give a full confession of them. Something he wanted to do with that psychiatrist but couldn't bring himself two years earlier. He wanted to open himself up fully, unburden himself. Under arrest, Issei immediately gave a lengthy confession regarding every aspect of the murder and also to his previous attempts. The French police were shocked. They didn't understand who they had arrested. He was exceptionally polite. He appeared somewhat remorseful. He kept insisting that he didn't necessarily want to kill women. Ideally, he just wanted to munch on

them while they were still alive. But you know, that wasn't really an option. Calmly, Issei explained how, you know, now that he committed his, you know, murder, this murder, his first, he would never need to repeat it on somebody else because now he knew how the fantasy felt and that was all he really wanted. He told him that the demons that had previously driven him were gone and he would now be able to be a law-abiding member of society, right? Can we just move past this everybody? The police were not so sure about all that shit. They'd found a number of packaged pieces of Renee Hartfelt and Issei's refrigerator, whether he was crazy, sick, or a deviant, or some

combination of all three, no matter what he claimed, he clearly needed to be put away for a long, long time. But that would be up to the justice system, not to them. Not unexpectedly, Issei's trial was a mental health issue from the very start. One of the first decisions made by examining magistrate Louis Bruguier was to board a plane for Japan. His aim was to find out what had gone so terribly wrong in Issei's life that he had resorted to murder. And I don't understand exactly why he did that. Who cares? Who fucking cares what happened in his childhood? He shot and ate a woman. Do you really deserve a chance to be rehabilitated after that? Now I'll move on because I know I'm a broken record when it comes to my

view of crime and punishment. Bruguier talked with Issei's family whose doctors and the psychiatrist to whom Issei had confided details of the attempted assault on the German woman but even after talking for hours there was no definitive answer. Why had Issei done this? Why was he driven to consume women and most importantly would he ever stop? Meanwhile Akira Sagawa flew to France and quickly secured a top lawyer to defend his son. Now all the public who've been following this in tabloids and on TV all they could do is wait. Then in 1982 over a year after the murder of Rene Hartfeldt, Judge Bruguier announced that in his opinion anybody prepared to

kill and eat someone could not possibly be mentally sound. Well, it took him over a year to come to that decision. I'm guessing most of you came to that same decision in less than 60 seconds. Yeah, he's fucking crazy. Was that really up for debate? The judge declared that such an act constituted insanity in and of itself. Yeah, but is he criminally insane? But they weren't really looking at that. Bruguier believed that Sagawa had been suffering from an advanced form of dementia and ordered him confined indefinitely to the Henry Collin asylum for the criminally insane. There would be

no trial. Press had a field day over this decision criticizing the magistrate and pretty much anyone involved with the case. If there was one silver lining, it was that Issei had actually hoped to go to prison rather than be put in a hospital. He found the hospital with its quote deranged patients depressing. The media attention would not stop with this decision. Enormous public interest in the mysterious little cannibal led to a visit from a celebrated Japanese writer, Enhiko Yamamoto. After several hours of conversation, Issei agreed to share the memoirs he had written while in the hospital with Yamoto. And then Yamoto went ahead and just edited it, titled it, in the fog, and published it.

In 1983, without consulting Issei, Issei was confounded and felt betrayed. Oh, poor little fella. However, this publishing made Issei Sagawa very famous back in Japan. Yamoto's audience had heard of bizarre and macabre killings, but nobody seemed to describe them quite like Issei. He wrote that the flesh of his victim had, quote, no smell or taste and melted in my mouth like raw tuna. Finally, I was eating a beautiful white woman and thought nothing was so delicious.

It was morbid, it was terrible, but also kind of poetic. It seemed like maybe, just maybe, Issei with his, could go to greater lengths than most in explaining why he did the unspeakable, becoming kind of like a real-life Hannibal Lecter. And then soon, Issei's infamy would receive another boost. Two years after the book, in 1985, the popular French magazine, The Paris Match, obtained the gruesome crying scene photographs of Ren Renee Hartfeld's dismembered corpse,

the one that Issei himself had taken in his apartment. This was widely viewed as a tactless and massively insensitive decision that would actually lead to the arrest of one journalist and to the seizure of a quarter of a million copies of the magazine. Damn! This, in conjunction with further publicity that Issei Sagawa's writings engendered, led to what happened next. The French judicial system had had enough of their headline-grabbing cannibal, and they

just wanted to be rid of him. Maybe there's a bit more to it than that, though, as well. Some sources say that the lawyer hired by Akira Sagawa argued that there was no reason that the French taxpayers should have to lodge and feed Issei Sagawa for the rest of his life. Regardless of exactly what led to it, shortly thereafter Issei Sagawa now found himself being deported back to Japan, a country where he had not been convicted of any murder or of any other crime. He returned home to a media frenzy being labeled a killer, a cannibal, a best-selling author and a celebrity.

He wasn't free immediately, however. Issei was first taken to Matsuzawa Hospital. There he freely submitted to being placed in a private wing of the institution to be examined by doctors. A phalanx of mental health professionals each found him to be sane, stating that sexual perversion alone had led to the murder. In other words, they thought Issei Sagawa was sane but fucking evil. The man they unanimously agreed belonged in prison and should be there for the rest of his life but following an attempt to gain pertinent paperwork from Judge Bruguier back in France which was refused, the Japanese legal system found that it simply could not pursue incarcerating Issei Sagawa having no jurisdiction over crimes that happened in France. So against the wishes of every legal and mental health professional familiar with Issei Sagawa's case in Japan,

he was released back into the wild. As of August 12th, 1986, Issei was a free man and a free man with a cash cow career as a convicted cannibal. Despite the debauchery of his crime, he'd only been incarcerated for five years. And now not only was he free, he was also free to talk about what he had admittedly done in all its gory details. How sad for Rene Hartfeld's family. Issei soon wrote another book, this time about his days in prison interspersed with memories of his childhood. It would never reach the dizzying heights of his first memoir, but it did help further establish him as somebody capable of both writing and murdering. And the media would be more than happy to indulge in his ongoing publicity stunts.

As part of a brazen effort to reinforce popular appeal, photographers were invited to Issei's cramped apartment to take pictures of him as he painted nude female models. One magazine featured an interview with him replete with glossy illustrations showing a relaxed Issei Sagawa Seated at a dining room table gazing at the camera chopsticks in hand about to partake of some unidentified meat Damn Picture appeared on the magazine's gourmet page his interviewer asked whether he enjoyed cooking and Issei replied just that one time Too bad Renee's dad didn't travel to Japan to find and kill that motherfucker. When asked to comment on fellow Japanese cannibal Tutomu Miyazaki, who had killed and eaten

four people before being arrested in July of 1989, Issei capitalized on his own refinement and expressed his distaste and bafflement at the serial killer's evident need to repeat his first killing, reiterating how, because he had been so sickened by the reality of his own crime he would never have considered reoffending. He was clearly such a good upstanding citizen compared to that other evil savage cannibal. Between 1986 and 1997, Issei was frequently invited to be a guest speaker and commenter in various media appearances. In 1992, really good guy Issei appeared in Hisayasu Satou's exploitation film, sort of a low quality high-shock value B movie, Unfaithful Wife Shameful Torture as a sadosexual

voyeur. The movie's drama set in an underground Tokyo club called The Bedroom where the female clientele are drugged into a trance-like state and subjected to different styles of bizarre fetishistic sex by the male clientele, one of whom was portrayed by Issei. According to some sources, he would appear in multiple underground pornographic films around this time as well, which I was not able to locate, despite what I felt like was some thorough investigating. Actually, I did a little bit of investigating. I didn't really want to find him. I was a little worried about what I would find but I couldn't find anything. EC would get

some exposure in 1997, some more exposure publicity, thanks to the Kopi child murders. March 16th, March 27th, 1997 two young victims Ayaka Yamashita, 10 years old, and June Hase, 11 years old, were murdered by a 14-year-old boy referred to as Seto Sakakibara. On February 10th, 1997, two schoolgirls in Kobe had both been attacked by a person with a fucking hammer and both survived. Little over a month later, March 15thth 1997, 10-year-old Ayaka Yamashita was hit on the head with a hammer from behind. On the same day, about 200 yards away, the unknown assailant attacked another girl with a knife

stabbing her in the stomach before abruptly fleeing. 12 days after these attacks, Ayaka Yamashita died of her injuries. The other girl would survive. What was still to come was even more gruesome. On May 27th of 1997, the head of a young boy named Jun Hase, special education pupil, was found in front of the school gate of his elementary school hours before other pupils arrived for class. Hase had been beheaded with a handsaw. His eye sockets had been emptied, and his mouth had been cut open

to the ears. Jesus! Hase's body was later found near a water tank on a hill inside the city, better known as Tank Mountain. A note written in red pen was found stuffed in the head's mouth, identifying the killer as Sakakibara. The note read, This is the beginning of the game. Try to stop me if

you can you stupid police. I desperately want to see people die. It is a thrill for me to commit murder. A bloody judgment is needed for my years of great bitterness. On June 6 a letter was sent to the newspaper, Kobi Shinbun, in which Sakakibara claimed responsibility for the slain and decapitation of Junhase and threatened that more killings would soon follow. The second letter, delivered in a brown envelope post-March-June 3rd, had no return address or name. Enclosed was a three-page, 1400-word letter also written in red ink which included a six-character

name that could be pronounced as Sakakibara Saito. Same characters, ones meaning alcohol, devil, rose, saint, and fight, were used in the first message found in Junhase's mouth. Obviously, all of this caused a huge media frenzy. In the initial panic, the Japanese media misreported the name as Onibara, meaning demon's rose, though the killer insisted that his name was Sakakibara, not Onibara. Infuriated by the mix-up, Sakakibara later wrote to the station, from now on if you misread my name or spoil my mood, I will kill three vegetables a week. If you think I can only kill children, you are greatly mistaken. Investigators

would later find out that his use of the word vegetables came from his parents, who told him that if he was nervous in class or at an athletic meet, that he should just picture the people around him as being nothing more than vegetables. The perpetrator was arrested June 28th 1997 in connection with the Hase murder and later confessed to both murders as well as the assaults of three other girls. After the March 16th attack he would write in his diary, I carried out sacred experiments today to confirm how fragile human beings are. I brought the hammer down when the girl turned to face me. I think I hit her a few times but I was too excited to remember. As a juvenile offender he was prosecuted and

convicted as Boy A. His real name not been officially released to the press because Japanese law prohibits publishing the identification of minors. Issei Sagawa, well accustomed seeing dollar signs and blood spatters, would write a book about these crimes called Shonen-A, and it reportedly sold very well. So he gets his a new round of publicity and never one to stray too far from his own story, Sagawa used renewed interest in him to then try his hand at a comic book version of his time in Paris, a manga still available on eBay for around 80 bucks. Fortunately, the sick fuck's undeserved run of good luck would at least temporarily stall in 2005

when both his parents died and left debt behind that ultimately ended up in the foreclosure of the house where Issei lived. He would then move into public housing where maddeningly he would receive welfare benefits for a time. It's like fucking Teflon, right? Nothing sticks to him. Then in 2009 he would get more publicity again that helped sell copies of another book when Issei was interviewed by Vice in conjunction with publishing his 20th book entitled Extremely Intimate Fantasies of Beautiful Girls which portrayed his feelings towards women without necessarily focusing on cannibalism

through pictures and words according to him. In the interview, which you can still watch online, he would say that he was definitely for sure 100% still a cannibal. The desire to eat people becomes so intense around June when women start wearing less and showing more skin. Just today I saw a girl with a really nice derriere on my way to the train station. When I see things like that I think about wanting to eat someone again before I die. So yes, I do still harbor these desires and I specifically want to eat a Japanese woman this time. I think either sukiyaki or shabu-shabu, lightly boiled thin slices, is the best way to go in order to really savor the natural flavor of the meat.

Can you please call for people who would willingly be eaten by me in your magazine? There's one condition though. They have to be young, beautiful women. Then he said he would have no qualms being put to death, provided that his executioner was also a young, beautiful woman, who he would also, you know, eat a little of her flesh if given the opportunity. This guy's a fucking broken record. He's still hyper fixated on this dark shit. He said I would like to invite any woman who wants to kill me to step forward. Beautiful women only. This would be the ideal way for me to die. Maybe they can shoot me up with morphine so that I don't feel any pain. Although I guess the pain is part of the pleasure. Dying instantly is boring, so I want to savor the process of being killed.

An alternative would be to drown in female saliva. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be covered all over with women's spit? If I could die drowning in it, that would be my ultimate dream come true. I'm a cowardly man who killed another person, yet I can't face killing myself. true. I'm a cowardly man who killed another person, yet I can't face killing myself. So I guess dying at the hands of a woman would be in a way, excuse me, would be my way to redemption. Well, no woman stepped up. Issei was free to continue his self-promotion. He would now write a weekly column for a tabloid publication, edit an anthology of cannibal fantasies, and would even appear in a 2017 movie, a French documentary about his crimes called Cannaba. The only people featured are Sagawa himself, his brother Jun, and a young female caregiver dressed in a

maid's uniform who happily tells Sagawa zombie stories as she prepares him for bed. That's not weird. He needed a caregiver because Sagawa was hospitalized in 2013 from a cerebral infraction, aka a stroke, which permanently damaged his nervous system. So that's some good news. Due to that and severe diabetes, he would be largely unresponsive through most of the filming, becoming animated only when discussing his murder of Renee. And the doc, June, sums his brother up saying, cannibalism is really very much nourished by fetishistic desire. The desire to lick the lips of your lover and things like that are based on primal urges.

Cannibalism is just an extension of that. Both extremes exist within him. Cannibalism is a totally different world for him. Okay. Finally, Issei Sagawa died from complications of pneumonia at the hospital or at a hospital in Tokyo. They just have one. One of the world's biggest cities. At the hospital. You know the hospital in Tokyo? The one hospital they have there? No, he died at a hospital there November 24th, 2022 at the age of 73, never really having

paid for his crimes. Instead he profited greatly. Interestingly, Japanese interest in true crime written by real murderers doesn't seem to have stopped with him. Sakakibara, that kid who committed the Kobe child murders, was released at the age of 21 in 2005. Decade later, June of 2015, now 32 years old, he took a page from Issei's book and released an autobiography through Ulta publishing titled ZECA, in which he claimed to express regret for his crimes, but also

recounted the murders in graphic, graphic detail and the book sold very well. Junhase's family unsurprisingly tried to block the book's release as one of those details revealed was that before he arranged the boy's head on the school gate, Sakakibara locked himself into a bathroom and quote, committed a deed far more heinous than murder with it. The family did not succeed in their attempt to block the book and it quickly reached the top of Japanese bestseller lists. And like Issei, Sakakibara would dabble in strange art, creating a vanity website in which he posted nude photos of a man wearing a weird fucking mask. The website reports to show art created by Sakakibara, including photos and drawings of slugs. Also includes comments by him about his favorite books. Distinctly lacking is an apology or an expression of any remorse to the families of his victims.

In response to these controversies, the tabloid Shukan Post published Sakakibara's real name of Shinichiro Azuma, as well as his location and occupation at the time. Love that. Today Saka-kibara is allegedly 41 years old, living in Tokyo where he's working as a mechanic. Police still have him under surveillance as they should. And as of now, Issei Sagawa's legacy remains one tainted by fantasy and murder by the brutal death of Renee Hartfeld tainted by blood, guts, gore, and exploitation but probably not tainted enough. And that's it for that creepy little edition of Time Suck Short Sucks. I had usually I can record these in one take real close to it but man, fog brain plus a

lot of Japanese words. Oh, the outtakes would probably delight you. A lot of swearing. A lot of swearing. But we got through it and I hope you're entertained. If you enjoyed that story, horrified by it, but entertained, check out the rest of the Bad Magic catalog. Beefier episodes of Time Suck every Monday at noon Pacific time. New episodes of the now long running paranormal podcast, Scared to Death every Tuesday at midnight. With two episodes of nightmare fuel, fictional horror thrown into the mix each month.

Thank you to Sophie Evans for the initial research. Thank you to Logan Keith polishing up the sound of today's episode, probably laughing his ass off and maybe just being like, God damn it, why can't I fucking say this? How many fucking times do I have to try and say Sakakabara? Anyway, please go to badmagicproductions.com for your bad magics needs.

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