The New York City cop on trial for plotting to kidnap, cook and eat women shed tears on Tuesday as his attorneys rested their case after one day, according to Reuters.
New York City Police's Gilbert Valle has featured dozens of Internet chats and emails in which Valle talked with others about murdering and eating women. The women even included his estranged wife, Kathleen Mangan-Valle.
The defense rested without calling Valle to the witness stand or noted forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, who interviewed the cannibalistic serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Defense attorneys also showed jurors a video tour of DarkFetishNet.com, a website where prosecutors say Valle's kidnap plots were first hatched. Jurors saw graphic pictures of mutilation, hanging corpses and profile pages for members with names like Vicious Vixen.
Jurors received a brief dose of comic relief from a videotaped deposition of the creator of DarkFetishNet.com, who repeatedly compared his violent, sexual, fantasy role-play website to Facebook.
"It's a social media network very similar to Facebook," Sergay Merenkov, 34, said in describing how the site works. "It does everything that Facebook does," he said during the deposition, which was taken recently in Moscow.
Prosecutors have accused Valle of conspiring to kidnap, cook and eat women, saying many of his plots were hatched on DarkFetishNet.
After months of online role play last year, Valle began to act on his fantasies when he met one of his online "targets" for brunch and improperly accessed a law enforcement database to get personal information on another, Assistant U.S. Attorney Randall Jackson alleged.
Valle's secret online life began to unravel last year after Mangan-Valle said he began acting oddly and spent much of his time on the couple's computer. She discovered dozens of files her husband kept on their computer about women, including herself, that he wanted to kidnap, torture and murder, she testified.
She contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Valle was arrested in October.
© 2023 Lawyer Herald All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Get the Most Popular Lawyerherald Stories in a Weekly Newsletter
Join the Discussion
