The case attracted considerable media attention. On 30 January 2004, Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years and six months in prison. Meiwes was diagnosed with a schizoid personality but deemed fit to stand trial. Investigators searched his home and found body parts and the videotape of the killing. Meiwes was arrested in December 2002, when a college student alerted authorities to new advertisements for victims online.
#ARMIN MEIWES VIDEO SUMMARY TRIAL#
Arrest, trial and manslaughter conviction
According to prosecutors, Meiwes committed the act for sexual pleasure. Meiwes dismembered and ate the corpse over the next ten months, storing body parts in his freezer under pizza boxes and consuming up to 20 kilograms (44 lb) of the flesh. Four screenshots can be found online, but the credibility of the screenshots have never been proven. The incident was recorded on a four-hour videotape, which has never been released to the public due to its gruesome contents. After long hesitation and prayer, Meiwes killed Brandes by stabbing him in the throat, after which he hung the body on a meat hook. Brandes continued to drift in and out of consciousness before finally collapsing again. Meiwes then ran Brandes a bath, before going to read a Star Trek book, while checking on Brandes every fifteen minutes, during which time Brandes lay bleeding in the bath. According to court officials who saw the video (which has not been made public), Brandes may already have been too weakened from blood loss to eat any of his penis. He then chopped the penis up into chunks and fed it to his dog. Meiwes then fried the penis in a pan with salt, pepper, wine, and garlic he then fried it with some of Brandes' fat, but by then it was too burnt to be consumed. Brandes apparently tried to eat some of his own penis raw but could not, because it was too tough and, as he put it, "chewy". This did not work, and ultimately, Meiwes used a knife to remove it. Brandes initially insisted that Meiwes attempted to bite his penis off. Before doing so, Brandes swallowed twenty sleeping pills, and a bottle of cough syrup, likely causing an effect of slowed breathing and extreme tiredness. The two made a videotape when they met on 9 March 2001 in Meiwes's home, in the small town of Wüstefeld, west of Rotenburg an der Fulda, showing Meiwes amputating Brandes's penis (with his agreement) and the two men attempting to eat it together. Many other people responded to the advertisement but backed out Meiwes did not attempt to force them to do anything against their will. Meiwes's advertisement stated that he was "looking for a normally-built 18- to 25-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed." Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes, a 43-year-old engineer from Berlin, answered the advertisement in March 2001. Looking for a willing volunteer, Meiwes posted an advertisement on the then-active website The Cannibal Cafe (a defunct forum for people with a cannibalism fetish). He had also described himself feeling "very lonesome" after "the family had fallen apart".
During sessions with police experts, Meiwes had explained that his desire for cannibalism, related to the fairytale Hansel and Gretel, had developed during his adolescent years. His father abandoned Armin when he was eight, leaving him to be raised by his mother. He had two older half-brothers from his father's previous relationship with another woman.