PJ Vogt

That's actually the second story I want to tell you, which I'm going to call The Trial.

I feel like I should say, if kids are listening to this episode, this would be a good part to skip.

This is not stuff I would have wanted in my 13-year-old brain.

But to me, kind of the most interesting murderous cannibal story when it comes to just thinking about the cannibalism rule and why we have it is the story of the German cannibal, Armin Meiwes.

He was a German computer repair technician.

He went on a cannibalism message board called the Cannibal Cafe and said he was looking for a man who wanted to be killed and consumed.

A few people respond to the ad.

He actually meets some of them, who all eventually back out, and he lets them back out.

But then there's one man who says he wants to go through with it, and so Maivez kills him and eats him.

And they film the whole thing, including the part where the guy seems to be agreeing to everything that's going to happen.

So he's caught.

It goes to trial in Germany.

He was found guilty of Germany's version of manslaughter and gets a sentence of about eight years.

According to reports at the time, Germans were shocked by the sentence.

They thought it was way too late.

It also probably didn't help that Maives was saying that he still had fantasies of reoffending once he got out of jail.

And so the prosecutors call for a retrial and they get the court to like really pay attention to the tape.

And interestingly in Germany, the way German law defines murder, one of the things that can make a killing a murder is that the killer was looking for sexual gratification.

And so they push that idea here.

They're like, if you look at the video, clearly this was about sexual gratification.