Detlev Guenzel (C) sits next to his lawyer Endrik Wilhelm (L) as he waits for the opening of his trial on August 22, 2014 at the court in Dresden, eastern Germany/AFP
Detlev Guenzel, 57, stands accused of murder driven by sexual lust and disturbing the peace of the dead although there is no evidence that he ate any part of his victim.
A regional court in the eastern city of Dresden was to rule in the macabre case which captured international headlines when it broke in 2013.
State attorneys have sought 10 and a half years in prison for the defendant, a trim, soft-spoken father of three adult children who neighbours described as friendly, generous and unfailingly polite.
Lawyers representing the family of the deceased, 59-year-old Polish-born Wojciech Stempniewicz, have requested a 15-year sentence, usually the maximum in a murder case.
Prosecutors said they stopped short of this demand because Stempniewicz said he wanted to die.
Guenzel went on trial in August for allegedly killing Stempniewicz, a business consultant, at the defendant’s home, a bed-and-breakfast inn in the mountain town of Hartmannsdorf-Reichenau near the Czech border, in November 2013.
He then allegedly cut his body into small pieces and buried them in his garden.
In the process, he made a grisly home video of the events that prosecutors say he intended to use as pornography.
The men came across each other in October 2013 on a website for slaughter and cannibalism fantasies billed as the “#1 site for exotic meat” and boasting more than 3,000 registered members.
A click on a box allows participants to say if they would like to go beyond the realm of the imagination.
– Cause of death? –
Guenzel, a three-decade veteran of the police force, retracted a confession he made to detectives soon after Stempniewicz’s death in which he said he killed him by cutting his throat.
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