‘Cannibal cop’ wanted to kill me, says wife

The estranged wife of a New York City policeman told a court she found emails and other evidence on her husband’s computer showing he had discussed killing her and torturing and eating other women.

“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 because I was young,” Kathleen Mangan-Valle told a Manhattan jury one chat revealed.

Mangan-Valle, 27, said she also read about plans to put one friend in a suitcase, wheel her out of her building, and murder her. Two other women were “going to be raped in front of each other to heighten their fears”, while another was going to be roasted alive over an open fire, she said.

“The suffering was for his enjoyment and he wanted to make it last as long as possible,” she told the court.

Mangan-Valle broke down in tears several times, but the emotional peak of the day came when a defence lawyer showed her pictures of Gilberto Valle in uniform feeding their newborn daughter, prompting the estranged couple to openly weep as the judge sent the jury for an afternoon break.

The drama came on the first day of evidence at the closely-watched trial of Valle, 28, dubbed the “Cannibal Cop” by tabloids.

Valle is accused of conspiring to kidnap a woman and unauthorised use of a law enforcement database that prosecutors say he used to help build a list of potential targets. A conviction on the kidnapping count carries a possible life sentence.

He claims his online discussions of cannibalism were harmless fantasies, but, in opening statements, a prosecutor said “very real women” were put in jeopardy.

“Make no mistake,” said assistant US attorney Randall Jackson. “Gilbert Valle was very serious.”

Julia Gatto, defending, said Valle “never intended to kidnap anyone”. She added: “You can’t convict people for their thoughts, even if they’re sick.”

Valle, a New York Police Department patrolman, appeared to be leading a normal life before “things got bad”, his wife said. “Weird stuff started happening.”

Mangan-Valle said her husband began asking questions about where she liked to jog, what the lighting was like and whether other people were around. Using spyware on his computer, she uncovered gruesome photos and the names, heights, and weights of women.

She also found he had visited a fetish website featuring images of dead women.

“I was scared... I’d never seen that before,” she said.

After Mangan-Valle reported Valle’s behaviour to the FBI last year, agents uncovered “a heinous plot to kidnap, rape, murder and cannibalise a number of very real women”, Jackson said.

Valle had attempted to contact potential victims, including a New York teacher, to learn more about their jobs and residences, Jackson said. Valle’s internet research also included the best rope to tie someone up with, recipes, human flesh, white slavery, and chemicals to can knock someone out, Jackson said.

Gatto said there was “no proof of a crime here. The charges are pure fiction.”

Valle, she said, was aroused by “unusual things” including the thought of a woman boiled down on a platter with an apple in her mouth, Gatto said. He found a home at a fetish website where 38,000 registered members discuss “suffocating women, cooking and eating them”, she said.

The defence denies that Mangan-Valle was a potential victim. Valle had made clear his wife “was unavailable for any kidnapping fantasy”, the defence said in court papers.

Valle is expected to take the stand to make the case that it was all role-play. The defence also plans to call experts in fetish sub-culture and to show jurors the videoed evidence of the fetish website’s co-founder, Sergey Merenkov.

Merenkov called the site “a clone of Facebook, but it is oriented to people with fetishes that are not considered standard”. Asked about the most popular fetishes, he responded, “All sorts of asphyxiation” and “peril cannibalism”.