Then, in 1982, almost two years after the murder of Renee Hartevelt, Judge Bruguieres announced that in his opinion, anybody prepared to kill and eat someone could not possibly be mentally sound. In fact, he declared that such an act constituted insanity. Bruguieres believed that Sagawa had been suffering from advanced “dementia” and ordered him confined indefinitely to the Henri Colin Asylum for the criminally insane. There would be no trial.
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In 1985, the popular French magazine, the Paris Match, obtained the gruesome crime-scene photographs of Renee Hartevelt’s dismembered corpse. Shockingly, there were no qualms at publishing them, a tactless and massively insensitive decision that would lead to the arrest of one journalist and the seizure of a quarter of a million copies of the magazine. This, in conjunction with further publicity that Issei Sagawa’s writings engendered, led to the next twist in the case. The French establishment had had enough of their headline-grabbing cannibal and wanted him out.
Shortly thereafter, Issei Sagawa found himself deported back to Japan - amazingly as a free man, his return marked by a veritable media-frenzy. Not only was Sagawa a killer and cannibal, he was now a best-selling author. Celebrity, beckoning for some time, was now ready to be adopted by Sagawa.
So as not to cause outrage by simply turning him loose at the airport, Sagawa was first taken to Matsuzawa hospital. There, voluntarily, he submitted to being placed in a private wing of the institution and examined by doctors. No one made him feel welcome. A phalanx of mental health professionals each found him to be sane, stating that sexual perversion alone had led to the murder - in other words, they thought Issei Sagawa was evil. The man, they unanimously agreed, belonged in prison.
Following an attempt to gain pertinent paper work from Judge Bruguieres, which was refused, the Japanese legal system could not pursue Sagawa. He walked free on 12 August 1986, having been contained for just five years.