Issei Sagawa has to be one of the creepiest human beings I’ve ever seen. On the afternoon of June 12, 1981, 32-year old Sagawa leapt to fame for a cannibal murder the Japanese call Pari jinniku jiken (The Paris Human Flesh Incident). He had shot, killed, and ate bits of a female exchange student in his class the previous day, and was spotted by witnesses in the woods in Bois de Boulogne, France, trying to dump the corpse. He was arrested, but was exempted from prosecution as French psychologists found him to be legally insane at the time of the crime. He was sent home to Japan, and after a year in a mental hospital, he was set free.

Here’s an excerpt from his interview when asked about the first time he felt cannibalistic urges:

I was physically weak from the moment I was born. My legs were so skinny they looked like pencils. It was in the first grade of elementary school when I saw the quivering meat on a male classmate’s thighs and I suddenly thought, “Mmm, that looks delicious.” But I’m not homosexual, so from around the time I entered junior high school I became obsessed with the Western actress Grace Kelly—an obsession that lasted right through high school. That was the beginning of my infatuation with Occidental people. Before I knew it, tall, healthy-looking Western women became the trigger for my cannibalistic fantasies. I guess my infatuation with such women stemmed from the fact that I was short, ugly, and had an inferiority complex and therefore sought people who were the exact opposite of myself. Eventually, I began feeling a strong desire to bite into them—not to kill them or eat them per se, but merely to gnaw on their flesh. It was purely a form of sexual desire. It wasn’t like I felt like eating someone every time I was hungry. But you know how you tend to feel a stronger sexual desire when you’ve eaten a full meal? That’s when I would start feeling the urge to eat a girl. It’s absurd, right? In essence, it’s different from the type of hunger that people experience for food. This cannibalistic urge, where I’m going, “I want to eat human meat,” is a sort of sexual appetite, so if I don’t make sure that I ejaculate frequently enough, the desire only gets stronger and stronger.

Head to Vice Magazine for a full account of the urges behind and enactment of his cannabalistic desires.