Like a Lockhorns cartoon gone horribly wrong, the trial of alleged "Cannibal Cop" Gilberto Valle began yesterday with testimony from his wife, who was the one who alerted authorities to her husband's alleged appetites. As you may recall, Kathleen Mangan-Valle discovered her husband's alleged plot to kidnap, kill and eat women—including herself—one day last year when she was snooping around on the ex-cop's computer. Yesterday, Mangan-Valle kicked off the trial by telling the jury what she learned: "I was going to be tied up by my feet and my throat slit, and they would have fun watching the blood gush out of me."
Mangan-Valle first became suspicious when her husband lost interest in her sexually after her pregnancy and started staying up late into the night on the Internet. On his computer, she found the website Darkfetish.net. “I just remember it was porn, and it was disturbing,” she told the jury. “I know S&M is popular, with ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’ but this seemed different. The girl on the front page was dead."
Valle and a nice plump baby girl.
After she confronted her husband, whom she met on OKCupid, she testified that things got worse. She started running, thinking that if she lost weight her husband would be more interested in her sexually. Instead, he “seemed very interested in my running route” and allegedly asked "if there were street lights or many people around. He encouraged me to run at night." That's when she installed “keylogger” software on to get a closer look at his double life on the Internet.
The Times reports that Valle, 28, and his wife both wept during the first day of testimony as Mangan-Valle recalled reading chat messages between Valle and other cannibalism enthusiasts. When someone in the chatroom told Valle that if his wife cried during the murder, “don’t listen to her, don’t give her mercy,” she testified, “Gil just said, ‘It’s O.K., we will just gag her.’ " After making this horrifying discovery, Mangan-Valle immediately fled the home with the laptop and their daughter, flying to Nevada to stay with her parents. She also informed the FBI.
But despite the trove of evidence in which Valle allegedly discusses numerous cannibalistic plots, legal experts say the case isn't an easy one for prosecutors. As the Times it, "When does a fantasized crime become an actual crime?" Federal prosecutor Randall W. Jackson told the jury yesterday that Valle had been "engaging in detailed strategic discussions about real women that he has identified... [In one conversation] Mr. Valle discusses a specific real woman, a specific real woman that he knew, and discussing the logistics of fitting her into an oven."
Valle's defense lawyer Julia Gatto, however, told the jury in her opening remarks that while her client's alleged online fantasies were horrifying, they were merely "the stuff that horror movies are made of. They share something else in common with horror movies. It’s pure fiction. It’s pretend. It’s scary make-believe." She argues that the case will test "bedrock principles: the freedom to think, the freedom to say, the freedom to write even the darkest thoughts from our human imagination."
