Issei Sagawa Dead: Why Notorious Cannibal Killer Never Saw Jail

Issei Sagawa, a Japanese man who killed and ate a Dutch student in the 1980s, has died at the age of 73.

Sagawa, who became known as the "Kobe Cannibal," raped, killed and ate Renee Hartevelt in 1981, but he was never jailed for his crimes. He died of pneumonia on November 24 and his funeral was attended only by relatives, according to a Japan Today report.

In 1981, Sagawa was studying in Paris when he invited Hartevelt to his home. When she came over, he shot her in the neck, raped her and consumed parts of her body over the next few days.

Several days later, Sagawa attempted to dispose of the body in the Bois de Boulogne park, where he was arrested, and he confessed to the French police.

French medical experts deemed Sagawa unfit for trial in 1983 and he was held in a psychiatric institution, before he was deported to Japan the following year.

Hartevelt's family continued to push for his prosecution despite him being deported.

However, in Japan, Sagawa was ruled to be sane by the authorities, who said he didn't require hospitalisation, according to a Mail Online report.

Japanese officials were unable to get his case files from the French authorities, as the case had been closed, which then allowed Sagawa to walk free.

Sagawa shot to notoriety and celebrity status in Japan and throughout his life he showed no remorse for his actions.

He went on to write a novel-like memoir titled "In the fog," in which he reminisced about killing Hartevelt, going into significant detail.

Cannibalistic Tendencies

He would also give interviews to local and international media. In an 2009 interview with Vice, Sagawa went into detail about his cannibalistic tendencies and desires.

"After I went to study in Paris, my cannibalistic urges showed no signs of slowing down, he said.

"Almost every night I would bring a prostitute home and then try to shoot them from behind while they washed their vaginas at the bidet.

"I tried hundreds of times, but for some reason my fingers froze up and I couldn't pull the trigger.

"From around that time, it became less about wanting to eat them, but more an obsession with the idea that I simply had to carry out this 'ritual' of killing a girl no matter what."

Sagawa went into graphic detail about his killing of Hartevelt and even suggested that she should have let him eat a small part of her while she was alive to prevent him killing her.

He said: "This must sound rich coming from me, but the moment the girl became a corpse, I realized that I had lost an important friend and even regretted killing her for a moment.

"What I truly wished was to eat her living flesh. Nobody believes me, but my ultimate intention was to eat her, not necessarily to kill her.

To this day, I still think, 'If only she had let me taste her, just a little bit...' If we had spend another evening having dinner and chatting about our families, I never would have been able to kill her."