FBI agent describes online cannibal discussions at trial

Police officer is charged with conspiring to kidnap women

By Larry Neumeister and Tom Hays
Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Cheerful written exchanges between a police officer and women from his past appeared in a sinister new light when an FBI agent described at the officer’s criminal trial how he talked on the Internet about killing and eating the women.

“I’m dying to taste some girl meat,” Agent Corey Walsh testified Tuesday that New York Police Officer Gilberto Valle told one of the online friends he met who shared an appetite for human flesh.
The testimony came on the second day of testimony in federal court in Manhattan for the 28-year-old Queens resident charged with conspiring to kidnap women and illegally accessing a
government database to research potential victims. If convicted, he could face life in prison.

It came a day after his 27-year-old wife told jurors she fled their home in September with their 1-year-old daughter after discovering that Valle spent hours a night on extreme sexually violent web sites and one that catered to those interested in cannibalism and asphyxiation. In Reno, Nev., she turned over a computer to the FBI that contained hundreds of Valle’s emails and instant messages with what the government has described as co-conspirators.

To prove the plots involved real women and to counter defense claims that it was all fantasy, the government summoned several women to testify about their dealings with Valle before prosecutors say he wrote about them as potential targets and, in two cases, potential meals.

The women included a former high school classmate, two former college classmates and an 18-year-old woman who attended Valle’s high school alma mater and said she had no contact with him before he described her to one of his Internet friends as “the most desirable piece of meat I’ve ever met” and small enough to fit in his oven.

Kimberly Sauer, of Germantown, Md., went to the University of Maryland with Valle and had nothing bad to say about her former classmate. On cross-examination, Sauer told defense attorney Julia Gatto that she never felt threatened by Valle.

Sauer learned of the case only after she received from Valle’s wife last year in the middle of the night a disturbing Facebook message that sounded so crazy that she texted him to warn that the account must have been hacked. Either that “or you’re trying to sell me into white slavery,” she recalled joking in the text.

But Walsh said Valle’s computer had a file titled “Abducting and Cooking Kimberly: A Blueprint,” which included a photo of Sauer.

Sauer came up frequently as a subject in online chats between Valle and a man who used Moody Blues as a screen name and MeatMarketMan as part of his email address, the agent testified. Walsh said Moody Blues told Valle he had fantasized about cannibalism since he was 6 years old but did not fulfill the desire until 35 years later.

Walsh also described communications between Valle and his co-defendant, Michael Vanhise, of Trenton, N.J. He said the two negotiated the price to be paid for a Manhattan teacher to be taken to New Jersey in a suitcase for Vanhise to rape and kill.