The Thought Crime

Gilberto Valle was a New York City police officer in his late twenties, married, with an infant daughter, living in Forest Hills, Queens. He worked out of the 26th Precinct in Manhattan and had a clean record. After his shifts he logged on to a fetish forum called Dark Fetish Network.

In September 2012 his wife, Kathleen Mangan, came across pictures of dead women on their shared laptop and installed monitoring software on it. Across dozens of conversations he had described kidnapping, killing, and eating specific women he knew, including her and a college friend, Kimberly Sauer, and he had attached their real photographs. She left for her parents’ home in Nevada and took the laptop to the FBI. Valle was arrested in October 2012, charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping and with one search of a restricted police database he had no police reason to run.

The tabloids had already named him the Cannibal Cop when a jury convicted him on both counts in March 2013. In June 2014, Judge Paul Gardephe set aside the kidnapping verdict, finding nothing that separated the supposedly real plots from the ones prosecutors agreed were fantasy. He walked out in July 2014 after 21 months in custody and was sentenced to time served that November. On December 3, 2015, the Second Circuit upheld that ruling and reversed the database conviction as well.