Not all of them wanted to die. Some of them were hoaxers. Most of them just wanted to play out a sexual fantasy. Four men were so interested, they travelled to Meiwes's country home in Rotenburg, a small town in central Germany, to meet him.
When Meiwes discovered the men, including one from London, wanted to role-play and nothing more, he turned them away, bored. Bernd-Juergen Brandes was different. He wanted to be eaten and to even eat parts of himself.
Not butchery, dining!! He told Meiwes he was a ''devoted pig for slaughter''. Needless to say, this is not the kind of cannibalism we associate with distant lost tribes or the desperate, last-resort cannibalism of stranded plane-crash victims. Cannibalistic fetishes are uncommon, according to Dr Keith Ashcroft, an Edinburgh-based forensic psychologist.
It is, therefore, extremely rare for someone to be as determined as Brandes was for such a fantasy to become reality. So far, observers of Meiwes's trial in Germany have given a variety of reasons why, on March 9, , Brandes, a well-paid year-old microchip engineer from Berlin, took the day off work and bought a one-way ticket to visit Meiwes, to be slaughtered and eaten. According to some psychiatrists, he was irrevocably damaged by the death of his mother in a car crash, for which he blamed himself.
Such a gruesome death would be satisfactory punishment. Others concentrate on the apparent sexual nature of the murder. In Meiwes's specially prepared slaughter room, he recalled in court, Brandes asked Meiwis to cut off his penis. Meiwes later cooked it and the pair ate it together. Some men choose to have their genitalia removed as part of a fetish, an extreme sado-masochistic fantasy that involves the cooking and consumption of testicles.
