Story highlights
Gilberto Valle faces life in prison for the kidnapping conspiracy
No one was ever kidnapped or eaten
Valle's lawyers argued his e-mails and online postings were just "fantasy role-play"
Prosecutors claimed Valle's plans were "deadly serious"
New York police officer Gilberto Valle conspired to kidnap women, who prosecutors argued he planned to rape, torture, cook and eat, a federal jury decided Tuesday.
Valle’s lawyers argued the former police officer’s e-mails and online postings were just “fantasy role-play” and” dark improv theater,” but prosecutors said he was “deadly serious.”
Valle, 28, faces life in prison for the kidnap conspiracy conviction. He was also found guilty of illegally accessing a federal law enforcement database.
The database, which Valle was trained to use and had access to as a cop, helped him research potential victims, prosecutors said.
No one was ever kidnapped or eaten, but the jury did see what prosecutors said were detailed plans to carry out Valle’s plot.
Graphic photos, how-to-kidnap searches found on cop’s computer
A document found on his wife’s laptop was titled “Abducting and Cooking Kimberly – A Blueprint.” It included a photograph of Kimberly Sauer and personal information, including her bra size and shoe size. Sauer’s testimony revealed that some of the information – a different last name, birthplace, birth date and college education – was inaccurate.
The same document listed “materials needed,” which included a gag, rope, chloroform and a tarp for the trunk. The FBI never found any of these items in Valle’s possession.
References to the blueprint were found in chats the FBI deemed “fantasy role-play,” along with references to waterboarding and chloroform, terms frequently used in the online conversations.
Valle, a six year NYPD veteran, planned to kidnap three women during the week of February 20, 2012, prosecutors said, pointing to some of the e-mails and chats.
He communicated online with three co-conspirators, including a man identified as “Moody Blues” or “Chris Collins” or “meatmarketman,” who Valle met on the Dark Fetish Network, prosecutors said. “Meatmarketman,” who lives in the United Kingdom, bragged in one conversation about one of his past victims, sending Valle a picture, and saying he “tried her alive first, actually it wasn’t very good, very bloody.”
Court records show that Valle got the addresses of his alleged targets by sending them a police charity card that he claimed would “get (them) out of a minor traffic violation” if they are pulled over by police. The police charity card was a ruse, prosecutor Randall Jackson argued.
Defense attorney Julia Gatto argued Valle’s conduct was “pure fiction” and “make believe.”
Gatto tried to show that Valle provided false information about the alleged targets’ locations to some people he chatted with online. In one instance, Valle said the woman was at a college four hours away, even though she attended school in New York. In other instances, he said he was watching an alleged target, when she really lived in Ohio. Records indicate Valle never went to Ohio.
Gatto told the jury that it was a part of “crude, stupid, infantile, masturbatory storytelling.”
“I have a world in my mind,” Valle wrote in an e-mail to one fantasy role-play partner. “In that world I’m kidnapping women and selling them to people interested in buying them,” she read aloud from Valle’s e-mail conversation.
In one online chat, Valle said he was working on a story that featured “a restaurant that sells women in all varieties, sometimes grilled or roasted as whole, sometimes in steaks or pieces, sometimes a la carte, or in a buffet.”
“His porn consists of dead bodies,” Assistant U.S Attorney Randall Jackson told jurors. “That is not normal.”
Valle will be sentenced June 19 by U.S. District Court Judge Paul Gardephe.
CNN’s Mark Norman contributed to this report.