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Friday, February 05, 2010 - 6:24 PM
An argument over a porn tape, a scuffle, a possibly
unintentional murder, all topped off with a multi-course two-day meal.
That's how Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire became Vienna's teenage cannibal killer.
His case doesn't fit the typical profile of cannibalism. Ackermann's
motives were neither ritualistic, particularly bloodthirsty, nor,
despite the pleasure the crime provided him, apparently sexual in
nature. His motive evidently was among the most dangerous of all:
twisted, misdirected morbid curiosity. The handsome, blond young man
seems to have killed Josef Schweiger impulsively or even accidentally,
then seized on the opportunity to explore his frightening fascination
with the hidden secrets of the human body.By August
of 2007, Ackermann, then 19, had left his native Cologne, Germany, for
Vienna, Austria, where he was staying in short-term housing for the
mentally ill and homeless run by a private charity. He shared a room
with Josef Schweiger, 49, who had been in the facility since that June.
Weekly social workers don't seem to have been alarmed by Ackermann's
behavior or concerned about the pair's feuds. But neighbors on the
family-filled tenement block who argued with the increasingly disturbed
Ackermann, saw him crawling naked through the yard howling at the moon,
or dumping what appeared to be blood from his window, realized the teen
was dangerous.
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