Germany: Cannibal victim’s ‘longpig’ net pleas

a MAN killed and eaten by a self-styled cannibal searched the internet for a year to find someone willing to make his fantasy come true, police have said.

Armin Miewes: Cannibal killer now serving life in German jail. Picture: AP

Polish-born businessman Wojciech Stempniewicz went under the name of “Longpig­Heszla” on websites devoted to torture, bondage and eating human flesh, German police said. The term “longpig” was used by Papua New Guinea tribes to describe human meat.

In one message to a user calling himself “Butcher755” in November last year he was asking about a contraption in his house designed to winch-up his body after he had been killed.

“Can you describe a little more the room and your equipment? Did you check the load-bearing capacity of the rods? Will it withstand my weight?” he asked on the Zambian Meat website – the same forum where German cannibal Armin Meiwes found his willing prey back in 2001.

There was more internet traffic between them but it is not known whether they ever met. Then just weeks ago Stempniewicz, who ran a lorry logistics business in Hanover, met up with Detlev Guenzel on the internet – his killer who went by the name of “Caligula”.

Guenzel, 55, collected Stempniewicz, 59, from Dresden bus station on 4 November and drove him to a B&B he ran with a gay man in the Erzgebirge mountains. Once inside, he took him to the cellar, slashed his throat, and collected his blood in an old paint pot.

He then spent the next five hours dismembering his corpse. Stempniewicz’s fiancée, a Russian woman identified only as Svetlana, called police when her lover did not return home again.

“Caligula” was traced via the computer messages and phone calls he had with his victim and he was arrested at the police headquarters, where he worked as a handwriting expert, on Wednesday last week.

Guenzel has admitted murder but claims he did not consume his victim’s flesh. Detectives do not believe him and are digging up the garden of his home near Dresden in a bid to find more missing body parts.

A special crime squad called “Pension” – after the B&B Guenzel and his partner ran – is also sifting through his computer to find out if he may be responsible for more cannibal killings.

The case mirrors that of Meiwes, who is serving life in prison for killing, dismembering and eating computer technician Bernd Brandes at his remote farmhouse near Kassel.

Meiwes packaged the flesh of his 16-stone victim into neat parcels which he froze and ate over a ten-month period.

When caught, Meiwes had less that a quarter of his grisly hoard left.