It's been nearly 24-hours since our last Cannibal Cop trial update, so here's your daily roundup: FBI Agent Anthony Foto told jurors yesterday that Valle obsession with cannibalism began while he was in college, and that he'd been visiting a fetish website since 2010; Valle also offered to help the FBI with their investigation into the website. Valle's sergeant, Edwige Anatsui, shed light on Valle's worklife, and a computer expert revealed a few of the grisly photos he found on Valle's harddrive.
Foto testified that he questioned Valle for three hours on Oct. 24, pulling information out of him by telling Valle he'd been on his tail for the past year, though investigation had really only been underway for a month (Foto also said he was able to arrest Valle at his home by pretending his car had been hit on the street). During the interrogation, Valle told Foto "he believed that he was there for conspiracy to murder, commit murder or attempted murder," and said he could help the FBI navigate the fetish website he frequented, darkfetishnet.com. "He said that he would be willing to help the F.B.I. in distinguishing between which users were real and which users were fantasy, and it was hard to make that distinction," Foto told jurors.
Meanwhile, Anatsui, Valle's boss, told jurors Valle called out sick for a week over the summer. "He lost weight," she said. "He looked like he had lost 10 pounds." And Stephen Flatley, an FBI computer expert, said investigations into Valle's online life revealed he'd visited darkfetishnet.com over 1000 times, in addition to thousands more searches and hits related to violence against women. He also said he found photos of dead, mutilated and disemboweled women, as well as other grisly, violent images on Valle's harddrive; the judge says he will rule on Monday as to whether or not he will let jurors see the photos.
