Cannibal Superstar (also known as The Cannibal that Walked Free) is a British documentary produced by Visual Voodoo for Channel Five which explores - through direct access - the bizarre psychology and twisted celebrity fame that surrounds Japananese cannibal Issei Sagawa.
The documentary originally aired in the UK on Channel Five on 12 November, 2007. It is an hour long.
Cannibal Superstar aired in South Africa on DStv's Zone Reality channel on Friday 4 July 2008, at 23h00.
Repeat
Saturday 5 July: 03h20
Synopsis
This documentary examines the remarkable case of Issei Sagawa, who walked free from prison despite having killed and eaten a young woman in the early 1980s.
The film interviews Sagawa alongside police officers, journalists and psychiatrists to piece together the shocking story of his crime and his subsequent rise to become a minor celebrity in Japan.
In June 1981, police in Paris were alerted to the discovery of two suitcases containing human remains left by a small Asian man in the Bois de Boulogne park.
A manhunt soon traced the perpetrator of this heinous crime – Japanese exchange student Issei Sagawa. Police were shocked when the young man calmly confessed to killing his Dutch classmate Renee Hartevelt and eating her flesh.
When police raided his apartment they found Sagawa had stockpiled a large quantity of her flesh, both raw and cooked, along with other mementos of his crime including a tape recording of the murder and obscene photographs of everything he had done to the corpse of his victim.
However, despite overwhelming evidence, Sagawa was declared insane and never stood trial. Within 34 months of the murder, he was returned to Japan a free man.
Today, 58-year-old Sagawa lives alone under an assumed name in a council flat outside Tokyo. He recounts his deeds in his own words, explaining how his obsessions with cannibalism began in childhood.
Sagawa says that preoccupations about his frail physique led him to idolise the beauty of western women. "I'm very small and ugly, so I admire the beautiful existence," he says.
This fascination with western women first came to the fore when he attacked a German woman in her apartment in Tokyo. Sagawa was arrested, only for his wealthy father to save him by paying his victim not to press charges.
Despite being labelled "extremely dangerous", Sagawa was allowed to move to France on an exchange programme in 1977. Now surrounded by tempting western women, Sagawa at last found his target when he met Renee Hartevelt.
"Sagawa was deeply in love with Renee, and his love was so mad that he thought the most he could love her was to eat her," says journalist Jean-Pierre Van Geirt.
In 1981, Sagawa invited Hartevelt to his apartment, shot her from behind and cannibalised her.
After his arrest, Sagawa underwent a year of psychiatric evaluation. The original report, unearthed by this documentary, records that he was "over-sensitive, emotionally cold and selfsatisfied when he talked about the murder".
Sagawa was deemed insane and unfit to stand trial.
However, once again, Sagawa's father intervened to help his son. He hired a top lawyer to convince the authorities that Sagawa's confinement was a burden to the French tax payer and that he should be deported to Japan. The motion succeeded – on the sole condition that he never return to France.
Upon his arrival in Japan, Sagawa was a free man – but to avoid public outcry, his father placed his son in a psychiatric facility. Scarcely 18 months later, Sagawa checked himself out and has remained free ever since.
"Honestly, we were shocked to see him released so quickly," says Olivier Coll, the lead detective in his case. "It was a miscarriage of justice," adds Patrick Duvall, author of a book about the cannibal.
Sagawa now claims to feel remorse for his crime – but critics say he has exploited it to become famous. Since the mid-1980s, Sagawa has written 20 books about his deeds and appeared in countless television programmes, newspaper columns, stage shows and even porn videos.
A star of stage, screen and the written word, the killer even advertised a steak restaurant.
Most shocking of all, Sagawa is free to roam unsupervised, despite admitting that he still has cannibalistic urges. "My childhood desire is just the same when I see all the beautiful girls' legs," he says. "I want to eat, so I'm not cured at all."
Over time, his obsession with western women has been replaced by a lust for Japanese females.
In light of these revelations, Sagawa agrees to be filmed attending his first psychiatric exam in ten years, resulting in some highly disturbing findings.