A New York City police officer and a butcher in India chatted online about the officer’s plans to torture and cook his soon-to-be wife and a former college roommate, an FBI agent testified Wednesday.
“I have longed to butcher and cook female meat,” Officer Gilberto Valle, 28, told the man identified as Aly Khan early last year, according to the testimony of Agent Corey Walsh. Khan offered to provide a place in Pakistan to kill the woman once she was brought to India, Walsh said.
The exchange was among numerous Internet chats offered by prosecutors to support charges that Valle conspired with others on the Internet to kidnap, rape, kill and eat women that he knew. Also charged with illegally accessing a government database to research potential victims, Valle could face life in prison if convicted.
No women were injured, and defense lawyers have argued he was merely fantasizing on the Internet with no intent to harm.
For two days, Walsh has testified about chats Valle participated in last year with a New Jersey co-defendant and two co-conspirators: a man in Great Britain and Khan, both of whom posed on the Internet as veterans of cannibalism who could teach Valle the skills he would need.
In several emails read by Walsh, Valle seemed eager to make the woman he would marry a few months later an offering of sorts to Khan, though he added: “She is a sweet girl. I like her a lot. But I will move on.”
Valle wrote that he could talk her into going on a trip to India before they took her to Pakistan, where they could gag her and take her to a basement, where they could hang her from her feet and take turns sexually assaulting her before slitting her throat and cooking her.
“I just love the thought of stringing her upside down,” Valle wrote in an email displayed to the jury. He also said he would like “to see her suffer” and “slowly roast her until she dies.”
In a later email, Khan taunted Valle for failing to deliver a woman.
“Are you really into it?” he asked.
“Yes,” Valle answered.
“Are you sure?” Khan asked.
“Definitely,” Valle said.
Khan, apparently pleased with the response, said: “Get your mind ready. I will guide the rest.”
As the instant messages progressed over a series of weeks, Valle began discussing plans to attack a 27-year-old Columbus, Ohio, woman he knew in college.
“I want her to experience being cooked alive,” he said in one exchange. “She’ll be trussed up like a turkey. … She’ll be terrified, screaming and crying.”
He wrote that her death would “definitely make the news” and there will be “plenty of suspects” because she is a prosecutor.
The woman, Andria Noble, testified Monday that she never knew Valle to be violent when they were at the University of Maryland together.
If jurors are offended or horrified by the gruesome testimony, they haven’t shown it. Three of them even yawned during the reading of the Internet exchanges.
The six men and six women sitting on the jury mostly sat stone-faced and silent on Tuesday and Wednesday as they listened to the agent’s monotone recitation of seemingly grimace-worthy evidence — remarks by Valle like, “I’m dying to taste some girl meat” and discussions about using one potential victim’s severed head as a centerpiece for a feast of body parts.
Before testimony resumed Wednesday, the judge granted a request by prosecutors to present testimony that the alleged kidnapping conspiracy goes back to 2011, but ruled that some of the evidence from then was inadmissible.
U.S. District Judge Paul G. Gardephe said prosecutors could use the evidence to show Valle “did not wake up in January 2012 with a sudden desire to kidnap these women.”
Valle’s 27-year-old wife, Kathleen Mangan-Valle, has testified that she fled their Queens home in September with their infant daughter after discovering that Valle spent hours at night on extreme sexually violent websites, including one that catered to those interested in cannibalism and asphyxiation. In Reno, Nev., she turned over a computer to the FBI that contained hundreds of Valle’s emails and instant messages with what the government has described as co-conspirators.