Table of Contents
This book
is dedicated
to Barnaby
and my family
for their love,
support
and belief
in me.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank many for their help in
creating this book.
For their love and support, I thank Barnaby,
my parents and Howard and Gayle. A special
thanks goes to Clive for his eternal encouragement
and daily cheer.
I am also grateful to Flavia, Rachel, Lynne
and Bartlin for their sound advice.
For her careful attention to the manuscript,
professionalism and positive words, I thank
my editor, Allison McCabe.
I am also grateful for the assistance provided
by Frank Thonicke, HNA; Channel Four
and Stern.
All the names in this book are real. The
events in this book are real, or as close to real
as humanly possible. The story that follows is
based on hours of research, interviews and
first-person accounts of the participants.
Preparations for Dinner
The sun shone down on the half-timbered farmhouse, nestling in the rolling hills of central Germany. It was a Friday in March 2001, just before Easter.
The birds were singing, welcoming in the spring. The picturesque hamlet was otherwise silent, apart from the sound of a tractor trundling through the nearby fields. Occasionally a car drove past the farmhouse and down the lane that led through Wstefeld, a secluded area of Rotenburg an der Fulda in the German state of Hesse. Visitors were few to this country idyll on the edge of nowhere, and the thirty or so inhabitants liked it that way. Families from the six houses in the settlement knew one anothers business, or so they liked to think.
The Brothers Grimm wrote many of their fairy tales in nearby Kassel, populating the thickly forested countryside around the farmhouse with dwarfs, goblins and witches. There is a museum in Kassel celebrating their work. Kassels highlights also include the Museum of Death, with its permanent collection of headstones, hearses and death-depicting sculptures.
Armin Meiwes, whose family had first bought the rambling, thirty-room farmhouse on a rental basis back in 1965, loved the Brothers Grimms fantastical tales. His favorite childhood story had always been Hansel and Gretel, particularly the passage in which the storybook witch fattens up little Hansel in the hope of cooking him and eating him. As a child he used to act out the scene time and again, playing the role of the witch and delighting in the idea of roasting and devouring Hansel.
Armins family spent most of their holidays at this farmhouse, with its stables and large garden, surrounded by meadows. Young Armin would look after his beloved pony, Polly, and take his dog, an Alsation, for walks. He would play with his neighbor, Manfred Stck, whose grandfather eventually sold the house to them. The farm wasnt popular with other local children, who called it the haunted house because of its dark interior and musty smell. When he was sixteen, Armin moved to the sprawling estate full-time and lived there with his mother.
The farmhouse today is an edifice of dust-filled corners and rooms thick with cobwebs. Armins mother had furnished it according to her taste, with floral carpets and antique furniture from the Biedermeier era, a period in mid-nineteenth century Germany known for its solidity and conventionality. And after she died, Armin never changed it. Visitors to the house feel as if they have been transported back a century or two.
Outside, a childs swing set sits forlornly in a tangle of high grass and rots away alongside a heap of tires, broken lawnmowers and six old cars Armin had always intended to restore but had never gotten around to. He lived mainly on the ground floor of the house. Computer screens and hardware littered the room where he spent most of his evenings, surfing the Internet for hours. Most of the other rooms were guest rooms. The beds were always made up in case anyone came to stay. But nobody ever did. Now that his mother was dead, Armin lived alone with his memories, computers and a Persian cat, Cleo, for company.
Today, though, Armin, a forty-year old computer expert, was expecting company.
Bernd Juergen Brandes, a computer engineer, was coming for dinner.
Armin had stocked up on bottles of his favorite South African red Merlot and bought lots of brussels sprouts, porcini and potatoes. He liked olive oil and garlic, so he made sure he had plenty in stock. He licked his lips at the thought of the meal ahead. Succulent, tender flesh like he had never tasted before.
His stomach growled in hungry anticipation.
Armin had never met Bernd, but they already felt close. Indeed, the two seemed like soul mates. They had become acquainted over a gay Internet chat line, and had exchanged a stream of e-mails over the last few months, revealing to each other their innermost sexual thoughts and festering desires. They both harbored violent sexual fantasies. The two spent hours online feeding their need for pornographic images of torture, abuse and sadomasochism. Pain was their pleasure. Leather, rubber and erotic scenes of domination and submission were a big turn-on. But these two werent hoping to indulge in S&M role-plays. What made these new friends so unusual was their mutual obsession with cannibalism and the way their sexual preferences in this area gelled.
One wanted to kill and eat someone, and the other wanted to be killed and eaten.
And they advertised the fact.
In late 2000, in one of his favorite Internet chat rooms catering to cannibals, Armin posted an ad: Seeking well-built man, 18-30 years old, for slaughter. A few months later, Bernd replied: I offer myself to you and will let you dine from my live body. Not butchery, dining!
The pair set up a bizarre contract designed to realize each others lifelong desires. Armin, fascinated by cannibalism since an early age, was to kill, dismember and devour his victim to satisfy his longing for human flesh. Bernd wanted to be castrated, killed and eaten to annihilate any last traces of himself on earth. He had wanted to be slaughtered and eaten since he was a young boy.
The Internet had made it possible for this odd couple to find each other.
Without it, they probably would have kept their fantasies hidden and never would have met.
Armin smiled to himself and felt a tender feeling inside as he thought of Bernds last e-mail to him. Theres absolutely no way back for me, only forwards, through your teeth, Bernd had written.
For Armin, there could be no sweeter love letter.
Armins Childhood
Waltraud Meiwes was almost forty years old when she brought Armin, her third and last son, into the world. It was 1961. The childs face was set in the same cast as his mothers, with identical deep-set eyes, thin lips and a long, sharp nose. Armin wasnt a handsome child, but his open face was pleasant.
He spent his early childhood in Essen-Holsterhausen, in the Ruhr industrial area of Western Germany. He lived there with his mother, his two half-brothers from his mothers first marriage, and his father, a policeman. When he was eight years old, the men disappeared out of his life. First his younger half-brother, Ingbert, went off to live with his biological father in Berlin. Then his father, Dieter, separated from his mother. Armins mother (who was nineteen years older than his father) and Dieter had been at each others throat, and Dieter could no longer take the stress of their daily domestic disputes. Theres nothing left to save in our marriage anymore, he calmly stated to his wife one evening during one of their confrontations. We fight every day. I cant take it anymore.
