From neighbors' accounts, Armin Meiwes was the type of person you could easily talk to across the garden fence or who would pop by for a coffee.
A gentleman, "always ready to help, always proper and friendly," they said of the quiet, unassuming computer technician.
So it came as a shock to learn that the man living down the road at one end of town was secretly living out a taste for cannibalism.
And when police searched his house in Rotenburg, a small town near Kassel in central Germany, they found packets of human flesh in a deep-freeze, bones and a skull in the garden and a collection of home videos showing in gruesome detail the killing and partial consumption of an apparently willing victim.
"He was nice, kind, always polite and obliging," one neighbor said.
Meiwes, 42, will stand trial from today in Kassel, charged with murder. Prosecutors say that despite the dead man's apparent "death wish," the accused is guilty of killing him to satisfy an extreme lust.
Just quite what drove the mustachioed, dark-haired former soldier, who admits killing and eating his accomplice, is unclear.
Blood fantasies often start in childhood, said Professor Andreas Marneros, head of psychiatry and psychotherapy at the University of Halle-Wittenberg in eastern Germany.
In rare cases, usually due to a personality disorder, they develop over the years until the urge to consume human flesh becomes uncontrollable.
"In the cases of all four cannibals I have examined, the fantasies started when they were very young," he said.
Once they had crossed the threshold from fantasy to reality, "the danger of a repetition is extremely high with the aggressive form of this massive sexual disorder."
He said the cannibals he studied were "possessed" by their lust.
Marneros and criminal psychologist Rudolf Egg pointed to a primeval belief -- noted nearly a century ago by Sigmund Freud -- that by eating human flesh, the cannibal believes he is ingesting his victim's power and soul.
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