Andrea Peyser
Some husbands run around with random women, drink to excess, gamble away the kid’s college savings, or manhandle their wives to a bloody pulp.
Police Officer Gilberto Valle was home most every night planning elaborate meals.
Unfortunately, Valle’s notion of ways to better serve his trusting spouse featured an unconventional main ingredient.
His wife.
“He hung me up by my feet!’’ Kathleen Mangan-Valle sobbed in the ordinarily staid and PG-rated Manhattan federal court yesterday.
She was describing the day in September when she discovered, to her utter horror, that the love of her life, the man of her dreams, the father of her infant daughter — a guy she, ironically, met on the Internet — harbored a secret as burning as a 350-degree oven.
She pored over her hub’s hush-hush cache of Internet fantasies. And in that dark and depraved hole, Kathleen was the star of a cannibal’s reality-TV series.
She found her husband, who had lately been unaffectionate and distant, cared for Kathleen, all right. He liked her roasted and basted on a spit.
Valle, 28, is among the few, the twisted, the deviant who are turned on by the idea of devouring female flesh — and he allegedly conspired to cook it to a golden brown. Then eat it.
He is charged with conspiring with a man who lived in his grandparents’ basement, Michael Van Hise, to kidnap, rape, murder and slow-cook a banquet of unsuspecting womanhood. The unlucky human sacrifice would be served on a platter with an apple in her teeth.
The courtroom was flooded, to standing-room only, with spectators, lawyers and unhealthy-looking types who took careful notes throughout the proceedings, which I don’t care to see.
Valle, looking like a kid with a buzz cut in a dark suit, sobbed as he sat at the defendant’s table. He lost his wife. His kid. His password-protected access to darkfetishnet.com.
He repeatedly wiped his eyes as his wife told of his depravity. He may never surf for porn again.
But, his lawyer insists, it was all a kind of sick joke — a fantasy that makes “Fifty Shades of Grey’’ look like dirty hopscotch. Valle, said lawyer Julia Gatto, never intended to actually go through with it. He would never pan roast a living soul.
But tell that to Valle’s poor, suffering wife, who left him last fall when she discovered what he was up to at all hours of the early morning, scouring the Internet for recipes while normal carnivores are counting sheep.
On her own laptop, she found the names of more than 100 women, all real people, not fantasies. He included their height, weight and distinguishing characteristics. And then, Valle described what he wanted to do with them.
Valle, she said, chatted online about fricasseeing a human.
Consider this trial a cautionary tale. You don’t know the handsome stranger who looked so promising on the Internet. Check references.
andrea.peyser@nypost.com
