The boy who became a cannibal

The many rooms in the half-timbered mansion that was Armin Meiwes's family home have their own names, devised by his late mother. There is a room called Morning Dew. Another is called Sunlight. All the names are evocative of the delightful countryside that surrounds the old house. Almost all. The engraved brass plaque on Armin's room, at the end of a dark hallway, reads starkly: Child's Room.

The court in Kassel, Germany, where Meiwes is standing trial for killing, butchering and eating another man, has been transfixed by a story of cannibalism and homicidal ritual.

The details of the dissection and consumption of 43-year-old computer expert Bernd-Juergen Brandes would be barely believable, were it not for the fact that Meiwes, 42, made a video recording of the whole thing. What, it might be asked, does it take to create such a monster?

The trial resumes today after a holiday adjournment to consider precisely this question. Expert witnesses, including psychiatrists, will attempt to find an answer in the workings of Meiwes's mind.

But for those who knew this apparently normal man - friends and neighbours - the best clues may be found among the 43 rooms of the creaking old manor house where Meiwes carried out his crime. For here, amid broken toys, souvenirs and dusty photographs, is the history of Meiwes's relationship with his mother, Waltraud, a history that cannot be separated from the chain of events that led to the eating of Herr Brandes.

His mother's room is a mess; he has piled her clothes high upon the bed, her dressing table is scattered with her things - mirror, brushes. He has boarded up the window with plywood. No daylight enters.

Nearby, on a bed in one of the many guest rooms, under a pink coverlet, he has placed a doll's head between two pillows. This head used to stand on his mother's dressing table; she placed her wig upon it each night before going to bed. When the police pulled back the cover, they found Meiwes had drawn a beard on the doll's head chin.

In another room, she preserved his favourite toys: a train set, a model of a German castle - but on the table where they stand he has placed the bleached skull of a cow.

"He was a mother's boy," neighbour Joerg Monkermoeller said. "She was his idol. He was always trying to win her approval - he spent most of his time looking after her."

Yet there appears to have been a sick hatred amid all this devotion. But why? Armin Meiwes was born into an affluent family whose emotional and financial decline is mirrored in the flaking, crumbling manor house that stands in overgrown grounds in the pretty village of Rotenburg in central Germany.

At the age of eight, all the men in Armin's life disappeared: one brother, Wolfgang, became a priest in Berlin, another, Ingolbert, moved away permanently and his father left his mother. She was 40 when Armin was born. His mother married three times, but her third husband, like his predecessors, it seemed, could not cope with her overbearing and domineering personality. He left her, but the young Armin had no choice.

In the early 1970s, when his schoolfriends were wearing jeans, she insisted that he carry on wearing traditional lederhosen shorts. When he was a young man, one of the rare guests at the old house witnessed her ordering him to bed because the clock had struck 10.

Meiwes was to recall later that he began creating his cannibal fantasies during his adolescence, when he and his mother lived alone together in the huge manor. He collected material on the crimes of Fritz Haarmann, the Vampire of Hanover, who killed at least 26 young men in the 1920s. Haarmann butchered his victims and drank their blood. He was beheaded at a public execution in 1925.

Then Meiwes bought a Barbie doll and dismembered it, keeping the parts in a locked safe so his mother would not find them. She knew nothing of his fantasies and his own increasing doubts about his sexuality. When he took a girl on a date, she accompanied them, sitting in the back seat of the car.

He had a fiancé Petra Zinnhauser, but after nine months they parted because, as he recalled later, both she and her mother were "too strong-willed". Whenever they met, he said, it was like "going from a shower to a storm".

According to villagers in Rotenburg, the relationship between mother and son was more complex than it might have seemed at first sight. While he appeared to be the devoted son and she the possessive mother, there were bizarre tensions below the surface.

At times, she raged against him, called him names and pronounced him "worthless". Her experiences of men had left her bitter, her neighbours said, and she took it out on the only person possible, her last remaining son.

"He was like the outsider - the family runt," said Kerstin Spang, who lives near the old mansion. "He was a lonely, introverted boy." But he always forgave his mother her outbursts. And, although he joined the army, his work allowed him to continue living at home. On a rare excursion from Rotenburg, she accompanied him and they shared a double room. One of his neighbours asked him once why he never married. He replied: "Perhaps I will, one day. But only when mother is dead."

On 2 September, 1999, Waltraud Meiwes did die. She had suffered from cancer for some time and Meiwes had cared for her. She was 77, he was 37. From that moment, alone in the echoing old house, he began to turn his shocking fantasies into reality.

At one point, he fashioned pieces of pork into the shape of a penis and ate it. There was, he admitted, an overwhelming desire to eat a person, to consume someone utterly. It was linked inextricably to increasingly strong homosexual tendencies.

He pursued gay relationships among his army buddies, but also frequented bars used by prostitutes. While his mother was alive, he appeared unwilling to relinquish his last hold on heterosexuality, but after her death his thoughts turned exclusively to gay sex, murder, dismemberment and cannibalism.

"Meiwes was Oedipal in his love for his mother," the Berlin psychiatrist Kristiane Lang said. "He wanted her love above all and after that the love of his brothers. By denying normal relationships and feelings he was forever slipping closer to an abyss from which it would be impossible to pull back."

The internet became the instrument by which Meiwes was finally toppled into the darkness. He had developed a fascination for computers as a young man and once planned to make his fortune by setting up a computer school in the manor house. He could never raise the money to see the scheme through, however, and one room of the house still contains the broken and jumbled remains of a half-dozen machines.

His own computer was used to surf internet sites set up and frequented by fetishists and sadists. In 2000, almost exactly a year after his mother's death, he posted a message on a chat room message board visited by those interested in cannibalism. Using his internet pseudonym Franky (as a child he had fantasised about having a younger brother called Frank), he wrote: "Seeking well-built man, 18-30 years old for slaughter."

The message was seen by Bernd-Juergen Brandes, a highly-paid computer engineer from Berlin. He was 42 at the time, but took seven years off his age to make himself more attractive for Meiwes's purpose.

The emails between the two men, now evidence in the court case, read like the billets-doux of a courting couple. But where such messages usually contain endearments and expressions of longing for kisses and caresses, the exchange between them revels in sadism and torture. Meiwes sent Brandes pictures of his teeth, promising to use them to bite his tongue out.

Meiwes's own website is closed now, but others devoted to cannibalism and necrophilia thrive. He himself estimated that at least 800 individuals in Germany had, like him, killed and eaten people.

A glance at the internet suggests he may be right. The message boards are filled with earnest appeals for people to offer themselves as cannibal fare. One, posted a few weeks ago and still current, reads: "If anyone knows where I can obtain a toe from a female 18-35 years old, please email me." An email address is appended.

This was the culture behind the coming together of Meiwes and Brandes. When Brandes arrived in Rotenburg on 9 March 2001, he was impatient to be killed, Meiwes has claimed. His testimony details their meeting and he showed police the room where it took place.

It is a chamber beyond the imagination of even the most creative horror writer. In one corner stands a wooden cage into which Meiwes placed young men whom, he said, were sexual playthings, but not victims of his cannibalism.

There is an iron bedstead with a blue, floral pattern mattress on which lie ropes and a leather harness. This was where Brandes lay, dosed with two bottles of Night Nurse and alcohol, when Meiwes cut off his penis. Meiwes flambéed it with seasoning, and they ate it together. Then Brandes was killed with a knife thrust to the throat. His body was butchered, parcelled and frozen to make meals that lasted for months to come.

If, as Meiwes claims, Brandes was a willing participant in this, the question has to be asked - why? It may be futile to try to apply generally accepted logic and sentiments to this case, but Brandes also had an unhappy childhood.

In 1963, on a family holiday, his mother was killed when her car hit a tree. His father, a respected doctor, refused to accept that it was an accident. He told the young Bernd-Juergen his mother killed herself. The boy was five at the time.

He was brought up by childminders - and, later, a stepmother - and seemed a normal child. He excelled at school, became a valued expert at the Siemens group and he found a girlfriend, named only as Ariane B. But he told his friends he was bisexual, and he found himself drawn to the cannibal websites.

"There is a deficit of self-respect and understanding of true love among such people," the eminent psychiatrist professor Andreas Marneros of the Halle-Wittenberg University said. "There is almost always a sexual element."

As the evidence continues to unfold in Kassel, there is, inevitably, a mixture of shock, wonder and revulsion. But surely the most chilling of all elements in this case is that, whatever Armin Meiwes and Bernd-Jurgen Brandes did behind locked doors, to the outside world they acted and appeared just like the rest of us.