Detlev Guenzel waiting for the opening of his trial in 2014. Photo / File
Detlev Guenzel waiting for the opening of his trial in 2014. Photo / File
Naked and holding an axe, a German cannibal killer stands in his sandals and socks in the basement where he murdered and chopped up a willing victim he had met online.
Police say Detlev Guenzel killed and then partially ate Polish-born businessman Wojciech Stempniewicz in his cellar in the mountains near Dresden in eastern Germany.
A picture of Detlev, a police forensic specialist, shows him standing next to a skeleton and holding an axe wearing nothing but socks and sandals.
Detectives say he spent five hours cutting up his victim's body in the cellar of the house which was a cheap holiday pension for hikers.
The victim's penis and one testicle were never found, but the rest of the dismembered corpse was discovered in flowerbeds in the garden.
In what has become one of the most gruesome cannibal-murder cases of recent times in Germany ended today with the convicted killer's sentence increased by a month.
Guenzel had claimed at his 2015 trial that Stempniewicz killed himself and therefore he could not be found guilty of his murder.
But he was and received an eight and-a-half year sentence - a term that was overturned by the country's supreme court, the Federal Court of Justice, earlier this year.
Now a fresh trial has ended in Dresden with Guenzel having his imprisonment term extended by a month. The prosecution had sought a life sentence.
Guenzel earned the right to a new hearing after justices ruled that the suicide defence was not 'adequately probed' during the first trial. He was found guilty of murder and disturbing the peace of the dead.
Judges ruled that the fact that local conservative CDU politician Stempniewicz wanted to die meant he deserved some leniency.
During the new hearings he told the court: "I am really sorry, I am partially responsible, but I am not a murderer."
The original case, centring as it did on lurid appetites for human flesh, captivated the country.
A picture of Detlev, a police forensic specialist, shows him standing next to a skeleton and holding an axe wearing nothing but socks and sandals.
Stempniewicz - who went under the name of 'LongpigHeszla' on sick websites devoted to torture and bondage - was killed and, believe detectives, partially eaten by police forensic specialist Guenzel at his lonely home in mountains near Dresden.
Stempniewicz nurtured lurid fantasies of being killed and eaten and trawled the internet for an entire year before he found a willing predator.
In one message to a user calling himself 'Butcher755' in November 2012 he asked 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 cyberspace forum where German cannibal Armin Meiwes found his willing prey back in 2001.
In November 2013 Stempniewicz, who ran a trucking logistics business in Hanover, met up with Guenzel on the internet - his killer who went by the name of 'Caligula.'
Guenzel collected Stempniewicz, 59, from Dresden's bus station on November 4 that year and drove him to the cheap B&B he ran with a gay man in the Erzgebirge Mountains.
Once inside, he took him to the cellar and - according to testimony at the first trial - slashed his throat, collecting his blood in an old paint pot.
The fiancee of Stempniewicz, 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 telephone calls he had with his victim and he was arrested at the police HQ where he worked as a handwriting specialist early in 2014.
Guenzel admitted slicing the corpse up but claims Stempniewicz hanged himself and that he did not consume the flesh of his victim. He was found guilty of murder in April 2015.
The case mirrored that of Meiwes, a man who first shone the spotlight on the underbelly of perverted sex in Germany, when he spoke at his trial of killing, dismembering and eating computer technician Bernd Brandes at his remote farmhouse home near Kassel.
Meiwes, now serving life imprisonment, packaged the flesh of his 16 stone victim into neat parcels which he froze and ate portions of over a ten month period. When police finally arrived to arrest him there was less than 40lbs of Brandes remaining.
Court observers said the difficulty for Gunezel's legal team was in proving suicide when the corpse no longer exists and there were no witnesses as to what happened in the pension.
