Officer Is Found Guilty in Cannibal Case
By BENJAMIN WEISER

A New York police officer was convicted on Tuesday in a bizarre plot to
kidnap, torture, kill and eat women.

The officer, Gilberto Valle, 28, could be sentenced to life in prison
for one count of kidnapping conspiracy.

The verdict came on the 12th day of his trial in United States District
Court in Manhattan.

The officer was also convicted of illegally gaining access to a law
enforcement database that prosecutors said he had used to conduct
research on potential victims. He faces up to five years in prison on
that count, prosecutors said.

The trial had drawn widespread attention in part because it involved a
police officer’s bizarre and disturbing behavior, but also because it
highlighted some of the darkest corners of the Internet, where
fetishists hide behind Web identities like Girlmeat Hunter, which
Officer Valle used, and engage in role-playing fantasy about cannibalism
and sexual torture.

Officer Valle, who worked in the 26th Precinct in Upper Manhattan, had
planned his crimes with three co-conspirators through one such Web site,
prosecutors said. They said he also took steps beyond the computer, like
conducting surveillance of potential victims and researching them in a
law enforcement database.

“The evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Officer Valle’s
plans were real, that he was serious, that he was not just entertaining
himself,” a prosecutor, Hadassa Waxman, told the jury on Thursday.

“He would have carried out a plan if he thought he could get away with
it,” she added.

Officer Valle’s lawyers told the jury that their client had merely been
involved in role-play and never intended to harm anyone.

“It was all fantasy — sick, twisted, ugly fantasies, traded on the
computer,” Julia L. Gatto, a federal public defender, said in her
summation on Thursday. “That’s what this prosecution rests on, the
ugliness of Gil’s thoughts.”

“We don’t convict human beings because of ugly thoughts,” she added.

But Ms. Waxman, the prosecutor, told jurors that Officer Valle had “left
the world of fantasy.”

“He entered the world of reality,” she said, “and, thankfully, he was
stopped before he could act.”