His victim? Brandes, the seemingly ordinary man with a shocking secret desire.
After meeting through an advertisement posted online in March 2001, the two men’s fates became entwined in a tale of consensual cannibalism, dark fantasies, and questions that still haunt psychologists, criminologists, and society at large.
The internet of the early 2000s was a burgeoning frontier, teeming with forums and chatrooms that allowed people to explore the depths of human curiosity and taboo.
Among these was a dark corner known as ‘The Cannibal Cafe,’ a platform where users discussed fantasies too grotesque to speak of in the daylight.
It was here, in 2001, that Meiwes, a mild-mannered computer repair technician, posted his disturbing advertisement: he was looking for someone willing to be killed and eaten.
To most, such a post would be dismissed as the ramblings of a deranged mind. But for Brandes, a successful and charismatic engineer from Berlin, it was a siren song.
Brandes harbored a chilling secret: he longed to be consumed.
Their online conversations, preserved in disturbing detail, paint a picture of mutual obsession, and together, they planned an encounter that would blur the lines of legality, morality, and sanity.
To family and friends, Brandes was an average 42-year-old engineer.
But little did they know he was trawling internet chatrooms under the username Cator99, where beneath a chilling advertisement he met his killer, known online as Antrophagus – a name inspired by a 1980s horror film about a group of friends and a hitchhiker who become stranded on an island where they are stalked by a disfigured cannibalistic murderer.
Here, Brandes would delve into his deepest fantasies and eventually plot and execute his grisly desires with chilling precision.
