He has two adult children from a previous marriage and said he had adopted his partner's daughter, who now lives in Ireland. "I was the baby of the family and was spoiled by everyone." Guenzel had been married to his male partner in a civil union for 10 years at the time of the killing but said they divorced earlier this year. "I grew up in a beautiful house with my parents and had a very sheltered childhood," said Guenzel, a three-decade veteran of the police force who was raised in communist East Germany. He told presiding judge Birgit Wiegand that he would not address the facts of the case for now but he recounted his life story. 'A very sheltered childhood' - Guenzel, a trim man with closely cropped grey hair, entered the courtroom wearing a white hoodie jacket and neat grey trousers and smirked slightly as media photographers took his picture. His defence team argued that Stempniewicz, who had long expressed a death wish, hanged himself in Guenzel's custom-designed "S&M studio" in his cellar before Guenzel took a knife, then an electrical saw, to his body. Guenzel has retracted a confession he made to police in which he said he killed 59-year-old Polish-born Wojciech Stempniewicz by cutting his throat, and an autopsy found the cause of death was asphyxiation. Investigators say, however, there is no evidence that the suspect ate any part of the dead man. A click on a box allows participants to say if they would like to go beyond the realm of the imagination. The men came across each other in October 2013 on a website for slaughter and cannibalism fantasies billed as "the #1 site for exotic meat" and boasting more than 3,000 registered members. Guenzel could face 15 years in prison if convicted of murder and "disturbing the peace of the dead". "He killed and dismembered him to get sexual stimulation and then later to get sexual stimulation by watching the video he made," chief prosecutor Andreas Feron told the regional court in the eastern city of Dresden.
In a macabre case that has captured global attention, prosecutors say the 56-year-old defendant, Detlev Guenzel, killed the man at his home last November, then cut his body into small pieces and buried them in his garden.
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A German police officer went on trial Friday accused of murdering a willing victim he met on a website for cannibalism fetishists so he could make a grisly pornographic home video.