'Cannibal Policeman' Given Eight-Year Jail Sentence

A German former policeman who murdered a man he met on a cannibalism fetish website has been sentenced to eight years and six months in jail.

Detlev Guenzel, 57, killed his willing victim before cutting the body into small pieces and burying them in the garden of his bed and breakfast guest house.

There was no evidence that he ate any part of Polish-born business consultant Wojciech Stempniewicz.

The crime took place at the defendant's home, a B&B inn in the mountain town of Hartmannsdorf-Reichenau near the Czech border, in November 2013.

he men had come across each other a month earlier on a website for slaughter and cannibalism fantasies which billed itself as the "#1 site for exotic meat" and boasted more than 3,000 members.

Former police forensic handwriting expert Guenzel, 57, went on trial in August last year.

Dresden chief prosecutor Andreas Feron told the trial: "He killed and dismembered him to get sexual stimulation."

Guenzel retracted a confession originally made to police in which he admitted killing Mr Stempniewicz by cutting his throat.

An autopsy determined that the cause of death was asphyxiation and it was alleged Guenzel took a knife, then an electrical saw, to Mr Stempniewicz's body.

The defence team argued that the victim, who had long expressed a death wish, hanged himself in Guenzel's custom-designed "S&M studio" in his cellar.

The men's email exchanges had the title "Schlachtfest", the German word for a country feast after the slaughter of a pig.

Defence lawyer Endrik Wilhelm told the trial in August: "In our eyes, and in the eyes of our client, it is about a suicide."

The defendant, who has children from the first of his two marriages, the second of which was to a man, sat impassively with arms folded as the verdict was read out.

Presiding judge at the sentencing at the regional court in the eastern city of Dresden Birgit Wiegand said: "He was found guilty of murder and disturbing the peace of the dead."

State prosecutors had wanted a jail sentence of 10-and-a-half years.

Lawyers representing the family of Mr Stempniewicz, 59, had requested a 15-year sentence, which is typically the maximum in a German murder case.

But prosecutors said they stopped short of this demand because he said he wanted to die.