Free The Sacrificial Man by Ruth Dugdall Page B

should be able to act in any way they see fit and there is no evidence that Brundes was not of sound mind when he opted to be killed and eaten. Indeed, he had even joked with Meiwes that ‘smoked meat lasts longer,’ after hearing they were both smokers. The case continues.
Replacing the paper on the chair at my side, I examined my feelings, took the pulse of my reaction. It was racing, but I found no shock there. Instead my excitement was the sweet taste of recognition, of a thought reflected back in an unexpected setting. Killing on request. The idea, then, had already occurred to me. This newspaper article didn’t plant the seed. If the idea hadn’t already existed I’d have glanced at the article, dismissed it as a sick perversion. But instead it tapped into something inside me, something already alive, a root planted deep began to reach up. The idea began to grow.
     
So it was possible then, to find someone like Bend-Juergen Brundes. To find a man, a lover, with the same desire. But how would such an advert be worded? Could I computer screen, a flare in the sky, a signal across distant waters? A man might answer, it could be the man standing next to me in the supermarket queue. It could be a man from across the oceans. The web could span these distances, make it possible to send a thread, find a fixing point. To weave a home, for a mate to rest in before extinction. The idea excited me. The German case showed me what was possible.
But the time wasn’t right. It was years, a whole six years later, that I started to stalk the web, reading messages, waiting. Lee had gone, posted to Germany, and I was bored. Looking for something. I didn’t know what I sought until I saw the ad:
Man seeks beautiful woman for the journey of a lifetime: I will lift mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help. Will you help me to die?
     
Smith placed the advert in January last year, and I replied. He first came to me in the February. He never even told me his real name. He wanted to protect me. That was our agreement. I confess to being with him when he died. I watched him take the overdose, I watched him cut his own skin. Smith wanted to die. It was his free choice. His death was suicide. I was just helping him; he didn’t want to be on his own when the end came. Who wants to die alone?
     
Cate Austin doesn’t see this. She can’t. She’s part of a system that believes in retribution and justice, whatever that means. And she speaks of prison.
Today a psychiatrist is coming. He will also have a hand in deciding my fate. I’ve made a decision. I’ll be the author of my own destiny. I will not submit to the judgment of others; the time has come to act.
I’d not thought about prison before Cate Austin said it. The word is too romantic, a beautiful lie. ‘Prise’, a word for open. Said quickly prison could be present – birthdays and Christmas.
How can such a word mean something so ugly, so absolute, as incarceration? I shall say jail. The word is more honest, in it you can hear the clink of keys in locks. I like to be honest with words: jail terrifies me. There. It’s said.
Smith has been dead for seven months and never, in all that time, did I think jail was my fate.
You don’t believe me. Of course, I knew it was a possibility. Others, my solicitor, my barrister, pointed out it was there like rotten meat at the back of the fridge. How could it be forgotten? And it had happened to Meiwes in the end; the prosecution challenged the initial sentence and he was sentenced for murder. He was stupid though, searching for another victim and thereby inviting prosecution. A serial cannibal, he was a risk to society and his sentence bears no significance to my case.
Why should incarceration concern me as a serious option, when I’ve done nothing wrong? Nothing! Life, the air we breathe, is random. A happenchance that molecules and genes and chromosomes came together at random and we exist. That flesh and bone grow, that we’re