After Meiwes and the victim jointly attempted to eat the victim's severed penis, Meiwes murdered his victim and proceeded to eat a large amount of his flesh. In January , Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years and six months in prison.
In a retrial in May , he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Because of his acts, Meiwes is also known as the Rotenburg Cannibal or Der Metzgermeister The Master Butcher , from the signature he used in his e-mails. The house where the murder took place was destroyed in a suspected arson attack that occurred in the early morning of 17 April Armin Meiwes was born in Essen [ 2 ] as the third child of Waltraud Meiwes — and her then-boyfriend Gustav born ; the pair married the year following the birth.
Waltraud was a housewife and Gustav worked as a police officer. Psychologists described Waltraud Meiwes as commandeering and controlling over her son's life. She held misandrist views due to her failed romantic relationships and sought to make her youngest son fully dependent on her. Former girlfriends and colleagues of Meiwes recalled that she would always accompany him to dates and work trips, with Meiwes stating that he was raised to believe this was normal. Since Meiwes' childhood, she guilt tripped her son into performing most household chores and would humiliate him in front of friends by telling them embarassing secrets about Meiwes while calling him by the pet name "Minchen".
Essen police recorded that Waltraud Meiwes had filed a false murder accusation against a female acquaintance of her then-husband in During the encounter with officers and the accused woman, Waltraud pretended to faint to avoid having to explain herself.
A number of journals written by Waltraud contained comprehensive 19th-century genealogies and an autobiography , which notably skipped any mention of her marriages or upbringing of her children. Both of her ex-husbands cited mental cruelty as the reason for their divorce; the father of her second child died by suicide in a gas explosion.
