“He is convicted of killing and eating his girlfriend, but he is today living as a free man in a Swedish town in spite of the fact that there are chances that he will kill — and eat — again. The then 30-year-old man killed his 28-year-old girlfriend in November 1979 by drowning her in the bathtub. According to the Swedish paper, he divided her into pieces and ate large parts of her while drinking wine. The police in Malm� found several kilos of human flesh in the man’s refrigerator, while the rest of the woman, the man had eaten, flushed down the toilet or thrown into the sea. The man had allegedly worked several days with dividing her body. He allegedly scalped his victim ‘in order to see what it looked like…’ In spite of [psychiatric] evaluations, the 54-year-old is allowed to live as a free man in the Swedish society and report to the clinic once a week.” — Nettavisen (Norway)

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

You may have noticed a month or so ago that the notorious German cannibal ended up receiving a very mild prison sentence, primarily since he had videotape showing his victim begging to be eaten. It changed his crime from homicide to something like euthanasia, which carries a much lesser penalty.

When you read about this or about other convicted cannibals, you can’t help but wonder: What do these reformed cannibals do when they’re released back into society? Are they really reformed? If not — and how can you ever be sure? — then isn’t it like putting a fox in the hen house to put a cannibal back in the company of men?

This Swedish cannibal is now an outpatient at a clinic. He has to report once a week, but otherwise he’s pursuing a normal life. He has adopted a “tidy appearance” and begun the study of foreign languages “on a higher academic level.” However, emotionally he is still marked by a lack of empathy and an inability “to comprehend how other people think” (meaning he finds it difficult to understand why people don’t want to throw themselves onto his molars). Presumably the cannibal’s doctors must have wanted him to study languages as a way of helping him empathize with his fellow man.

It all sounds so — well — Scandinavian: higher education as an antidote to animal impulses, linguistics as the cure to severe psychopathology, the study of tongues as a replacement for the eating of them. Wouldn’t a good old-fashioned American type punishment be better? Gather up all the world’s “reformed” cannibals, fly them to an isolated tropical island, give each one a straw hat, a Bowie knife, and a portable camera — a CannibalCam™ — and turn ‘em loose. May the fittest cannibal win, may the others get what they deserve — poetic justice — and may the home viewer get the latest extreme in reality tv. Or perhaps at that juncture it becomes surreality tv…

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