Murder of Renée Hartevelt

On 11 June 1981, Issei Sagawa, a 32-year-old Japanese literature student at the Sorbonne in Paris, invited his classmate Renée Hartevelt, a 25-year-old Dutch woman, to his apartment at 10 Rue Erlanger under the pretext of a poetry-translation assignment. According to Sagawa's own account, he had planned in advance to kill and eat her, having selected her because of her health and beauty. While Hartevelt sat reading poetry with her back to him, Sagawa shot her in the neck with a rifle.

After the shooting, Sagawa said he fainted and then, upon regaining consciousness, proceeded to rape her corpse. Unable to bite through her skin, he left the apartment to buy a butcher knife and subsequently mutilated and cannibalized parts of her body, including her breasts, face, buttocks, feet, thighs, and neck, consuming some parts raw and others cooked. He photographed her remains at various stages and stored some body parts in his refrigerator. As the unconsumed remains began to decompose, Sagawa attempted to dispose of them by carrying her dismembered body in suitcases to a lake in the Bois de Boulogne park. He was caught in the act and arrested by French police approximately four days after the killing.

Sagawa's family, described as wealthy, retained a lawyer for his defense. He was held for two years awaiting trial. A French judge, Jean-Louis Bruguière, ultimately found him legally insane and unfit to stand trial, ordering him held indefinitely in a mental institution rather than convicted of a crime. While detained, Sagawa's account of the killing and its aftermath was published in Japan as a book titled "In the Fog." His growing public notoriety reportedly contributed to French authorities' decision to deport him to Japan, where he was committed to Matsuzawa Hospital in Tokyo.

Japanese psychologists who examined Sagawa at Matsuzawa Hospital unanimously found him sane and concluded that sexual perversion was his sole motive. Because the French criminal case had been closed and the underlying court records were not released to Japanese authorities, Sagawa could not be legally detained or retried in Japan. He checked himself out of the hospital on 12 August 1986 and remained free for the rest of his life. This outcome drew widespread criticism as an apparent failure of cross-border justice.

Following his release, Sagawa became a public figure in Japan, appearing as a guest commentator, writing books about his crime, contributing restaurant reviews to a magazine, and appearing in a film. He died of complications from pneumonia in a Tokyo hospital on 24 November 2022, at age 73, having never been convicted of killing Renée Hartevelt.