A self-confessed cannibal has shared how his initial appetite for human flesh started while working at a morgue.
Nico Claux, a convicted killer dubbed 'the Vampire of Paris,' cultivated a fixation with death from childhood following his grandfather's untimely passing when he was 10 years old.
Claux admitted he started fantasising about consuming human flesh at the age of 12 after reading about notorious cannibal Issei Sagawa, who murdered and ate parts of a Dutch woman in Paris in 1981.
Morgue Work and First Taste
This preoccupation drove him to pursue work in a morgue where he sampled human flesh for the first time, launching him on a sinister journey involving murder, cannibalism, blood-drinking, and black magic.
During an interview on the Anything Goes with James English podcast, he confessed to being attracted to morgue work by the availability of corpses, which is where he started to fulfil his desire for human meat.
He stated: "I started having fantasies about biting, tearing flesh apart with my teeth, psychopathic fantasies. It was a fetish."
"My first job was as a morgue worker. I worked in a morgue in Paris. In France at the time there was no formal education to become a morgue worker. You were a hospital orderly and they would say 'are you interested in that job' and you would get it."
"When I first started to work in the morgue, I saw how easy it was when I was left alone for the autopsies to get strips of flesh from the bodies and eat them."
"First it was raw, and then I'd cut little strips, brought them home and cooked them several ways."
Murder and Conviction
Yet the meagre portions he managed to pilfer from the morgue proved insufficient to satisfy the cannibal's dark desires.
He went on to murder Thierry Bissonnier in Paris, a man he had encountered online, with the sole intention of consuming parts of his body. However, he was disturbed before he could carry out his gruesome plan in full.
Claux was caught after attempting to forge one of his victims' bank cheques to buy a VCR and was subsequently handed a 12-year prison sentence. He was freed after serving just seven years and four months.
What Human Flesh Tastes Like
The cannibal killer reveals that people are always curious about the taste of human flesh, and while he compares it to a particular animal's meat, he maintains that flavour was never the point.
Claux stated: "People always ask me about the taste. And it wasn't about the taste. I can say that it tastes like horse meat because at the time I was eating horse tartare."
"But for me it was more about the rush, the sensation. Something like I had never experienced before. It was keeping me constantly on a high, aroused."
Speaking about the killing, he added: "The goal was not just murder for the sake of murder. It was to get the meat. Because I had already been eating small strips of meat in the morgue and I had developed this craving."
"I wanted to kill to harvest the meat to get the meat home."
