The Edmondson Blog

French high security prisoner, Nicolas Cocaign, explained that a sexual urge drove him to kill his cellmate and “curiosity” about the taste of human flesh led him to cook and eat a lung he ripped out of the corpse. He said he flew into an “uncontrollable” rage after his victim gave him a “dirty look” after he ordered him to wash his hands after using the toilet in the tiny cell they shared with a third inmate in Rouen.

He said that after pummelling his victim, he took a pair of scissors and plunged it into his back, neck and chest a dozen times before holding a plastic bag over his head “for five minutes” to make sure he was dead. Then he decided to eat Thierry Baudry’s heart for his evening meal. “I take a razor blade and I open his chest. I plunge my hand in and I take out what I think is the heart but which in fact is a piece of lung, which I put into a Tupperware container,” he told a transfixed courtroom. “I did it out of curiosity to see what it was like to eat human flesh,” said Cocaign.

“What is terrible is that it [the lung] was good,” Cocaign explained, “It has the taste of venison. It is tender. What I did I liked doing. No one was listening to me, I took action, and then they took me seriously.”

Baudry's mutilated body was found by a guard. A postmortem revealed that two chest muscles and part of his left lung were absent.