An NYPD officer was arrested last night after FBI officials said they uncovered his gruesome plot to kidnap a woman and cook her in his kitchen’s oven before eating her flesh.
Gilberto Valle III, 28, is also accused of planning to abduct and cook 100 other women, which he discussed in grisly detail during online chats. He is charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said today that the allegations “shock the conscience.”
“This case is all the more disturbing when you consider Valle’s position as a New York City Police officer and his sworn duty to serve and protect,” Bharara said.
The FBI accuses Valle of a sinister plot to kidnap, rape, torture, kill, cook and cannibalize a number of women.
Investigators also say he also negotiated a price with a co-conspirator to kidnap a woman, insisting on no less than $5,000, according to the FBI, to deliver a woman bound, gagged and alive.
28-year-old Janel Quarless graduated with Valle from the University of Maryland in 2006. The two were in the same resident advising class. Quarless told Metro she remembered Valle sometimes makingmisogynistic jokes and “playing up the stereotype about the angry New Yorker.”
“I’m floored, but somewhat unsurprised,” Quarless said. “He just came off kind of hostile, but in a joking way. In retrospect, I can see how it was a mask for deeper issues.”
Quarless said she had an eerie sense it was Valle when she first heard the news about the arrest of an NYPD who graduated from UMD.
“I started shaking, more so because, at one point, I was acquainted with a future psychopath,” she said. “I can’t say that I’m shocked.”
Valle allegedly created files on about 100 women, each including at least one photograph, and others detailing personal information such as addresses and physical descriptions.
Valle also is accused of illegally using the federal National Crime Information Center to find potential victims, and he also watched them at their homes and workplaces, prosecutors say.
Police revealed details they say are from his computer, such as a document entitled, “Abducting and Cooking [Victim-1]: a Blueprint,” featuring the woman’s name, birthday, height, weight and bra size.
According to the criminal complaint, Valle, a cop with the 26th Precinct in Harlem from Forest Hills, had online conversations with a co-conspirator about his grisly plan to put his girlfriend’s body into his oven:
- “[My oven] is big enough to fit one of these girls if I folded their legs … The abduction will have to be flawless&I know all of them … [Victim 1], I can just show up at her home unannounced, it will not alert her, and I can knock her out, wait until dark and kidnap her right out of her home.”
- “I was thinking of tying her body onto some kind of apparatus … cook her over a low heat, keep her alive as long as possible.”
- “I love that she is asleep right now not having the slightest clue of what we have planned. Her days are numbered. I’m glad you’re on board. She does look tasty doesn’t she?”
According to the criminal complaint, Valle’s co-conspirator also asked him about his favorite cuts of meat:
- “It’s really hard to dislocate (lock) a jaw. Also, how would we put her over the fire, spitting kills the girl. Have to put her into a kind of cage. What is your favorite cut of meat?
- “You do know if we don’ waste any of her there is nearly 75 lbs. of food there.”
“The allegations in the complaint really need no description from us. They speak for themselves,” Mary E. Galligan, FBI acting assistant director, said in a statement. “It would be an understatement merely to say Valle’s own words and actions were shocking.”
Valle will appear in federal court in Lower Manhattan this afternoon, according to a spokeswoman at the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney’s Office.
