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identities in the darkest crevices of cyberspace. People such as Laura, who pleads her bona fides in poor English. ‘Please don’t tell me I’m sick,’ she writes. ‘It is just a fantasy, but the realism of it turns me on so much.’ Or Robert, who cuts very much to the chase: ‘I already have a young, pretty, slightly plump married women from Iowa offering herself to be eaten.’
    Most of these people are doubtless fantasists, sexual deviants or plain old fruit bats, but their messages are nonetheless ice-cold chilling, because one of these modern-day would-be cannibals and his willing victim have now stepped out of cyberspace, evolving before our eyes from the virtual into the visceral.
    It may be hard to digest, but it appears we live in a time of cannibals. The question is, how can such savagery exist in a supposedly sophisticated world?
    When Armin Meiwes, a shy, fair-haired man who lived withhis mother, went sailing with his army buddies, he would always make pasta. ‘He didn’t eat much himself,’ remembered Heribert Brinkman, who organised the trips. Meiwes, it seemed, had an appetite for something different, but it was not until March 2001 that dinner was finally served to his satisfaction.
    In the tiny central German village of Rotenburg, in the centuries-old farmhouse bequeathed to him by his mother, Meiwes often sat at the kitchen table and dined on steak with pepper sauce, potatoes, sprouts and a glass of red wine. It is not known what the wine was – but eventually the meat would be from a two- rather than a four-legged source.
    While Mrs Meiwes was alive, Armin was restrained. Her son was the apple of her eye and she dominated his very core, so that his fantasies remained just that. Her death, in 1999, released the sick side of his soul, which then found the nurture it needed on the internet. But Meiwes was, apparently, no serial killer. Unlike the American Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed 17 men and ate parts of them, or Andrei Chikatilo, who murdered and gorged on as many as 50 men and women in Russia, Meiwes was in search of not so much a victim as a collaborator, but a fellow chef who would provide the principal ingredient.
    And into that role stepped 43-year-old Bernd-Jurgen Brandes.
    This computer software designer from Berlin had a predilection that was not to everyone’s taste: he paid male prostitutes to whip him until he bled. Now, on Sunday, 11 March 2001, he relaxed in the large comfortable chair offered to him by Meiwes, and sipped from a tumbler of cognac. A contented half-smile played across his host’s lips, for this was the moment Armin had been waiting for. He had prepared meticulously for what was now, finally, starting to unfold.
    Brandes had written his will and had it notarised. The bulk of his estate, including a sprawling, luxury penthouse apartment, along with a small fortune in computer equipment, had been bequeathed to Rene, his blithely unaware male partner. And he had sold most of his belongings, including an expensive sports car. He wouldn’t be requiring these material trappings where he was going.
    His wish was to be butchered, cooked and eaten.
    Something else Rene could not have suspected was that, when Bernd had informed his bosses at Siemens that he was taking the Friday off ‘to attend to some personal matters’, he would not be coming back.
    With several thousand dollars in cash and his passport tucked inside his jacket, Bernd travelled 300 kilometres from Berlin to the farmhouse near Kassel where he now sat with his drink. His pulse raced, while the warm cognac slowly dulled his senses. He smiled contentedly, knowing he had been very methodical indeed.
    Armin Meiwes, the gentleman whom he had first met through the internet some months before and who now stood, beaming broadly in front of him, had been methodical too. Calling himself ‘Frankie’, he had patiently posted more than 80 notices on a gay internet chatroom with cannibalism as its central theme, waiting