Court issues sentence in cannibal fetish killing
Print Edition
A court sentenced a German former police officer to eight years and six months in jail yesterday for killing a willing victim he met on a website for cannibalism fetishists.
In the macabre case which captured international headlines, presiding Judge Birgit Wiegand said the defendant, Detlev Guenzel, was guilty of “murder motivated by sexual lust and disturbing the peace of the dead.”
The defendant sat impassively with his arms folded as the verdict was read out to the packed courtroom in the eastern city of Dresden.
Guenzel, 57, went on trial in August over the killing in November 2013 of Polish-born Wojciech Stempniewicz, a business consultant, at the defendant’s home, a bed-and-breakfast inn in a mountain town near the Czech border.
The court found that Guenzel had cut the body into small pieces in a slaughter chamber he built in his cellar and buried them in his garden. But there was no evidence that he ate any part of his victim.
State attorneys had sought 10 and a half years in prison for the defendant, a trim, soft-spoken father of three adult children whom neighbours described as friendly, generous and unfailingly polite.
He smiled briefly at his daughter before taking his seat in the courtroom to hear the verdict.
Lawyers representing the family of Stempniewicz, 59, had requested a 15-year sentence, usually the maximum in a murder case.
But prosecutors said they stopped short of this demand because Stempniewicz had long harboured a sexually charged death wish, a line of argument that Wiegand said the court had accepted.
The men came across each other in October 2013 on a website for slaughter and cannibalism fantasies billed as the “#1 site for exotic meat” and boasting more than 3,000 registered members.
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