A secondary school teacher sentenced to life in prison for murdering and dismembering a man he met online did so “to live out his cannibalism fantasies”, a judge has said.
The man, identified only as Stefan R, killed a 43-year-old mechanic on 5 September 2020, before allegedly chopping up his victim’s body and spreading parts of it across different locations in Berlin’s Pankow district.
Police spent weeks looking for the mechanic, whose mother reported him missing, before a dog walker eventually found his femur in a forest in the German capital that November. More bones were reportedly found two weeks later at a park.
The 42-year-old maths and science teacher was sentenced to life in prison this week, after Berlin state court convicted him of murder and disturbing the peace of the dead.
“What you did was inhuman,” presiding judge Matthias Schertz was reported as saying by local media.
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The prosecution told the court that the teacher spoke to people on web forums about cannibalism in the months leading up to the killing, Berliner Zeitung reported.
According to investigators, he and his victim met on a dating site and agreed to meet for sex at the teacher’s apartment. Stefan R is said to have sedated the man with a drug and cut his throat, before severing his genitals in order to eat them, Der Spiegel reported.
After parts of the victim’s body were discovered, police investigations – including analysis of his mobile phone data – led officers to the teacher’s flat, where they found blood, body parts and suspicious tools, according to the paper.
There was no indication the teacher’s victim agreed to be killed, the court heard.
The court found that the defendant – who had disputed the charges – bears “particularly grave” responsibility, meaning that he will not be entitled to the automatic parole after 15 years that is customary in Germany.
The case is not the first in Germany involving alleged cannibalism or fantasies of it.
Stefan R is reported to have identified himself on a dating site as “MasterButcher79”, echoing the nickname given to infamous German cannibal Armin Meiwes, who is serving a life sentence for killing and eating a 43-year-old Berlin engineer he met on the internet in 2001.
In addition to the case of Meiwes, who was prosecuted in 2006, a German police officer was convicted of murder in 2015 for killing a man he met in an internet chat forum devoted to cannibalism. While prosecutors said the victim had fantasised about being eaten, there was no evidence the suspect actually did so.
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Additional reporting by AP
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