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would allow himself the opportunity to relive this moment time and again. Similarly, Bernd’s willing emasculation, followed by the unforgettable meal, was captured for posterity.
    After Meiwes had finished plunging his knife into his guest’s throat he picked up his video camera and dragged the bloody corpse into his special room. It was here, after he had suspended the body from a meat hook, that the next phase of the ritual began.
    At peace in his self-constructed abattoir, surrounded by heavy metal hooks and drains, Meiwes opened the body from groin to sternum and gutted it as one would a deer. Throughout the night he laboured, hacking and severing until finally, one dismembered corpse later, it was time to separate the choicer fleshy morsels and render them into what he would later describe as ‘meal-sized packets’.
    With his special food supply placed, along with the dead man’s skull, in his freezer, he disposed of the cumbersome bones and teeth – and let us not forget the innards – by burying them in the garden.
    Meiwes would consume a piece of his friend almost every day, but he never finished the task, for frozen chunks of Bernd-Jurgen Brandes were discovered in his home on his capture on 10 December 2002. Indeed, the crime only came to light when Meiwes, having chewed through 20 kilograms of his victim, began to search for another dish on the internet and a correspondent invited to become a meal took fright.
    After being tipped off by worried internet chatroom users about the existence of disturbing advertisements placed by Meiwes, undercover police officers posing as respondents quickly determined that the ads were meant literally. When Meiwes was eventually arrested, his reaction was one of confusion. Why was he being taken away? No crime had been committed. He contested it had all been completely consensual. A congenial arrangement for their mutual pleasure: victim and killer, in it together. The cops, however, took a somewhat different perspective, and the protesting Meiwes was promptly marched off to the police station.
    From the very start of his sensational trial, which opened in Kassel on a suitably overcast day, Wednesday, 3 December 2003, Meiwes’s primary objective, with the aid of his solicitors, was to convince the jury that he was not a murderer. This they ultimately achieved. The prosecution struggled laboriously to secure dual convictions pertaining to ‘sexual murder’ and ‘disturbing the peace of the dead’. But the fact that videotaped evidence showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Brandes had been perfectly happy to have his peace disturbed after his demise did not help their case one bit.
    After taking in the evidence that the victim had been a willing participant in his own killing, the court was shown the videotape. The pair had clearly been in agreement about filming the killing and the subsequent butchering.
    Brandes was seen explaining that, for him, being eaten would be the fulfilment of a dream. As the carnage began, the video revealed two men locked into a very private world.
    One of those viewing the grisly film, which also showedMeiwes talking to the severed head while he disembowelled the body, actually fainted.
    The court heard that the killing had taken place in March 2001. Brandes had been reported missing at this time. The judges heard how, for the defendant, the act of eating another human being was akin to the merging of two souls. It was the nearest feeling Meiwes could experience to being close to another person.
    At the trial, and with considerable understatement, both Meiwes and Brandes were described as ‘having mental difficulties’, and Meiwes did little to dissuade psychologists from persisting in this notion. For he disclosed in detail how he had achieved his closeness with Brandes by eating pieces of him for more than a year, and stated that by so doing he had gained the dead man’s ability to speak English.
    On the topic of the unique dinner, the