The defense team for a New York City police officer charged with conspiring to kidnap, kill and eat women is making its case to a Manhattan jury after the government finished presenting evidence by showing what it found on the officer’s computer — images including a video of a chained woman screaming as the flame of a torch lashes her body.
Defense attorneys presented evidence Tuesday beginning with the videotaped testimony of a Russian man who runs a fetish Web site where the government says Officer Gilberto Valle, 28, met co-conspirators interested in capturing, raping, killing, cooking and eating women.
The defendant will not testify.
Sergey Merenkov, 34, said in testimony videotaped Feb. 19 that he started the Web site with partners in 2010 to create a Facebook-like environment for people with kinky fantasies to communicate. He said the majority of the 4,500 active users, 25 percent of which he estimates to be women, are in the United States or Europe.
According to a transcript already in court records, the Moscow who says his primary job is to distribute Spanish ice cream will testify people commonly engage in role play on the Web site, such as when a woman poses as a witch and a mob of 10 or more angry villagers prepare to hang her.
“The girl could write, ‘I’m shivering from fright. They’re pulling me to the noose. I can feel the rope already on my neck,'” he testified.
Merenkov’s testimony is aimed at supporting defense arguments that Valle was role playing when he spoke in dramatic details with others on the Internet about killing and cooking at least six women he knew, including his wife.
Valle was arrested in October after his wife discovered the chats on his computer and fled their Queens home, turning a computer over to the FBI in Reno, Nev.
In a final flourish Monday, prosecutors revealed the contents of two computers Valle used, including disturbing images from Web sites devoted to torturing and eating women.
FBI computer forensics examiner Stephen Flatly testified Valle frequently visited several Web sites showing women in various stages of forced duress, including one that offered images of women who did not survive.
“Some are dead. … A couple of them appeared to have been strangled,” he said.
As Flatly described the images displayed on video monitors in federal court in Manhattan, some jurors put hands to their mouths. One shook her head. Another wiped his brow.
One cannibalism Web site allegedly visited by Valle promised customers they would “only receive the highest quality human beef.” The jury also heard how the officer allegedly looked up “how to tie up a girl,” ”human meat recipes,” ”how to chloroform a girl,” ”I want to sell a girl slave,” ”how to cook a girl,” ”death fetish” and “huge cooking tray” among other topics.
The FBI analysis of Valle’s laptop yielded an apparently staged video of a naked, screaming woman hanging over an open flame that came close to her skin. There also were several photos of women with bright red apples stuffed in their mouths.
Two images of naked women roasting on a giant spit were discovered in a computer file of several dozen photographs Valle kept on a former college friend whom prosecutors have identified as a target of the alleged plot. The face of one woman prosecutors say he targeted was cut out and pasted onto a cartoon of a woman being boiled in a pot.
His browsing history also revealed an article titled “Cannibalism can be addictive, expert says.”