On June 11, 1981, 25-year-old Renee Hartevelt accepted a dinner invitation from one of her classmates, a 32-year-old Sorbonne doctoral candidate named Issei Sagawa. As Sagawa would later tell police, Hartelevelt came to his Paris apartment believing that she would help him translate some poetry. Instead, what followed would be one of the most grotesque crimes in French forensic history, not to mention providing Sagawa with a bizarre sort of media stardom that continues to enthral many crime-watchers even today.
Though Issei Sagawa had an apparently charmed life as the son of wealthy parents as he grew up in Japan's Kobe Prefecture, nobody suspected his long-time fascination with cannibalism, something that 
Having stalked a German woman to her home, he broke in with the intention of slicing off some of her body parts. Instead, she managed to awake in time and push him to the ground. When police caught up with him, he was charged with attempted rape and, due to his lack of prior offenses, was treated leniently. This was despite one psychiatric assessor who declared Sagawa to be "extremely dangerous", something that wouldn't come out until after his later arrest...
By 1977, however, Sagawa had moved to Paris with the intention of studying for his doctorate at the prestigious Sorbonne. By all accounts, he was extremely lonely at his new school with no real social life and few, if any friends. All of this changed when he met the young and beautiful Renee Hartevelt. For Sagawa, it was "love at first sight" and he admitted afterward that he couldn't keep his eyes off her. This included following her around the city and arranging for meetings where they would discuss literature. He also wrote her frequent love letters as well as inviting her to concerts and operas. But it was dancing with Renee that he most enjoyed as he continually fantasized about her body. If Renee was intimidated by Sagawa's obsession with her, she didn't say anything to him or any of her friends. Given that he was only 1.448 m (4 ft 9 in) tall and very slender, he probably didn't seem all that threatening.
All of which led to the invitation to his apartment on June 11 where, after admitting that the poetry assignment was just a pretest, finally confessed his love to her. Not only did Renee laugh at his declaration, but she also refused to have sex with him. It was at this point that Sagawa took out a loaded gun and shot her in the back of the neck. Since he lived alone, nobody would realize what had happened until much later.
Though there were no witnesses, we still have Issei Sagawa's graphic descriptions of what happened next. After stripping the corpse, he tried biting into her flesh and, when he realized his jaws weren't strong enough, took a knife out of his kitchen to dismember the body. In the confession he provided his doctors, he reveled at the sensation of "finally eating a beautiful white woman and thinking nothing was so delicious." When he had eaten all he could, he then cut strips of flesh and wrapped them in plastic before storing them in his refrigerator for later enjoyment.
Which still left the question of what was to be done with the rest of the body. After placing the remains in two cardboard suitcases he bought, he searched for different possible hiding spots around the city. It was only when a couple spotted him trying to toss the suitcases into a nearby pond that things began to unravel. Panicking at being spotted, Sagawa dumped the suitcases under some nearby trees and fled. Curious about his behaviour, the couple investigated the suitcases only to discover a human arm protruding from one of them. After they notified the police, a full investigation was launched.
Once the police managed to identify Renee Hartevelt's body, finding Sagawa wasn't particularly difficult. Just hours after news of the discovery came out, a taxi driver told police about a suspicious "Asian man" who had hailed his taxi and tried to transport two suitcases on a luggage trolley. Based on the driver's description, police soon went to Sagawa's apartment where he freely confessed to his crime. Charged with murder, he was then sent to Le Sante prison to await arraignment and to be examined by psychiatrists. Throughout his time in Le Sante, he showed no real remorse for his actions and even told staff that "I know now what to do when killing a girl, how not to be arrested."
When word about Sagawa's crime reached his parents in Japan, they refused to believe that their son could be capable of such a crime despite arranging for a lawyer for him. They were also unable to deal with the media storm that followed as news of the "Japanese cannibal" spread quickly, both in Japan and around the world. Not only did the Sagawa family become instant pariahs but they were also besieged by requests for media interviews, despite their pleas to be left alone.
As for Issei Sagawa, all criminal charges were dropped in 1983 when examining judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere ruled that he had been "in a state of dementia" when committing the murder. This led to Sagawa's transfer to the Paul Guiraud asylum in a Paris suburb and, after one year, his being deported to Japan after Judge Bruguiere and the hospital doctors decided that he was completely untreatable. What this basically involved was having Sagawa travel on a regular flight to Tokyo with only a psychiatrist and a police officer to accompany him.
It was when he arrived in Japan that things became even more bizarre...
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