They understood the consequences of the choices they were making.
Bern Brandes and Wojciech Stempniewicz never met, and their deaths occurred more than a decade apart. Yet both became linked by the same disturbing wish—one that would ultimately determine their fate.
Both men were fascinated by the idea of being killed and eaten. Through obscure online forums, each deliberately contacted the person who would eventually turn that fantasy into reality.
The horrific events that followed became the basis of two of Germany’s most shocking criminal cases.
One man agreed to have his genitals mutilated as part of a ritual he hoped to share with his future killer. The other travelled to an isolated mountain retreat, where he was hanged and dismembered.
Brandes encountered his killer, Armin Meiwes, in 2001 through the now-defunct website The Cannibal Cafe, which attracted people with a fetish involving cannibalism.
Meiwes, a computer repair technician, had placed an advertisement seeking a “well-built” man who wanted to be killed and eaten. Brandes, a telecommunications engineer from Berlin, responded to the post.
On the morning of March 9, 2001, Brandes travelled to Kassel, Germany, where Meiwes met him at the train station.
Bernd Brandes, from Berlin, willingly met his killer in 2001 after responding to an advertisement on a cannibalism fetish website
Armin Meiwes, pictured, was convicted of killing Brandes in 2001
The exterior of Meiwes’ home
Brandes had asked to be “slaughtered” that day. The two men drove to Meiwes’ house, where they arranged video equipment to record what was about to happen.
He had also requested that his penis be removed and that he and Meiwes attempt to eat it together while Brandes was still alive.
Meiwes had prepared extensively, buying six knives, a hatchet and a meat grinder. He also downloaded and translated a detailed guide explaining how to butcher a human body.
Before the ritual began, Brandes took 20 sleeping pills and drank half a bottle of cough syrup in an effort to dull the pain.
When Meiwes was unable to bite through his penis, he used a knife to remove it instead.
The men then tried to eat the severed tissue together, but Brandes could not swallow it.
Meiwes fried it in a pan with salt, pepper, wine and garlic, but it became too badly burned for either man to eat.
Meiwes subsequently drew a bath for Brandes, who lay bleeding in the tub, drifting in and out of consciousness.
The bathtub where Brandes spent his final moments
Police search Meiwes’ property in 2002
Once Brandes was dead, Meiwes tied him to a table and cut off parts of his body, keeping them in the freezer and gradually eating them over the next few months.
After putting out an advertisement for a second victim, he was finally caught by police when an Austrian student reported him in 2002.
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By the time police arrived at his home to arrest him, there was less than 40lbs of Brandes remaining.
Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter in 2004, but federal judges later quashed that verdict, and he was found guilty of murder at a retrial in 2006.
At his retrial, a psychologist stated that Meiwes could re-offend and still ‘had fantasies about devouring the flesh of young people’.
The case shocked Germany and shone the spotlight on the dark underbelly of cannibalism sites.
Years later, the killing and dismembering of Stempniewicz would bring up memories of the gruesome cannibal-murder case.
Polish businessman Stempniewicz – who went under the name of ‘LongpigHeszla’ on perverted websites devoted to torture and bondage – was killed and partially eaten by police forensic specialist Detlev Guenzel at his lonely home in the mountains near Dresden.
Stempniewicz, 59, nurtured lurid fantasies of being killed and eaten and trawled the internet for an entire year before he found a willing predator.
In one message to a user calling himself ‘Butcher755’ in November 2012, he asked about a contraption in his house designed to winch up his body after he had been killed.
‘Can you describe a little more about the room and your equipment? Did you check the load-bearing capacity of the rods? Will it withstand my weight?’ he asked on a cyberspace forum.
In November 2013, Stempniewicz, who ran a trucking logistics business in Hanover, met up with Guenzel on the internet – his killer, who went by the name of ‘Caligula.’
Detlev Guenzel pictured standing next to a skeleton and holding an axe wearing nothing but socks and sandals
Police are pictured at Guenzel’s property as they searched for his victim’s remains
Pictured: The property where Stempniewicz was butchered
Guenzel is pictured in court in Dresden in 2014
Guenzel collected Stempniewicz from Dresden’s bus station on November 4 that year and drove him to the B&B he ran in the Erzgebirge Mountains.
Once inside, he took him to the cellar, where he said he strangled Stempniewicz before cutting him into small pieces while listening to pop music.
A video played in court showed Guenzel in his underwear slicing the naked body of his willing victim into pieces with a knife and saw while it hung from a hook.
The fiancée of Stempniewicz, a Russian woman identified only as Svetlana, called police when he did not return home again.
‘Caligula’ was traced via the computer messages and telephone calls he had with his victim, and he was arrested at the police station where he worked as a handwriting specialist early in 2014.
When cops arrived at the property, they found Stempniewicz’s remains hidden among flowerbeds in the garden.
Stempniewicz’s penis and one testicle were never found.
Police also found a disturbing picture of Detlev, which shows him standing next to a skeleton and holding an axe, wearing nothing but socks and sandals.
Guenzel admitted slicing the corpse up but claimed Stempniewicz hanged himself. He was found guilty of murder in April 2015.
