In a case that shocked the little town of Rotenburg in West Germany, the whole country, and the world during the early 2000s, the apparently-respectable computer repair technician Armin Meiwes was arrested by the police for murder and cannibalism in December of 2002.
A friendly neighbor (you know how these things go) who mowed his neighbor’s lawns, always said hello, and frequently hosted dinner parties for friends and acquaintances, Meiwes also had, by his admission, fantasies about devouring friends since he was around twelve years old.
And so, a year before his arrest, good Armin had done the reasonable thing and placed an ad online, politely “looking for a normally-built 18- to 25-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed.”
Surprisingly enough, he got his wish: Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes, a forty-three-year-old engineer from Berlin, replied to his ad.
So hop in and keep reading, as we review ten facts about what happened after in this, the story of the Rotenburg Cannibal.
10 /10 Troubles In The Past
Armin Meiwes was born on December 1st, 1961, in the same city where he would live his whole life and commit his crimes.
His father abandoned Waltraud Meiwes, his mother when Armin was six years old, and soon his half-brothers from his mother’s other marriages followed suit.
Meiwes was left alone with his mother, a bitter and verbally abusive woman who frequently berated him. In later interviews, he explained how “very lonely” he felt when his family had “fallen apart.”
9 /10 Keep Your Friends Close
By this time, Armin began fantasizing about eating some of his friends at school, so they would “never leave” him.
In a 2005 retrial of his crimes, he remembered how he would play his fantasies as a child by watching documentaries about autopsies and roasting dolls in the family grill, as well as making human limbs out of marzipan and eating them in a sandwich.
As a reaction against his abandonment issues, Meiwes became very reserved and endowed with a court-appointed psychiatrist identified as an “extreme” smugness, though ultimately polite.