'Cannibal cop' to be freed, conviction overturned

A judge ordered New York’s notorious “cannibal cop” freed on $100,000 bail Tuesday, a day after tossing out his kidnapping conspiracy conviction.

A jury had convicted Gilberto Valle last year on charges of plotting to kidnap, kill and eat his estranged wife and other women. But Manhattan Federal Judge Paul Gardephe on Monday overturned the conviction on the most serious charge, citing a lack of evidence.

Gardephe let stand Valle’s conviction on illegally using a police database. The maximum sentence for that crime is a year in prison; the conspiracy charge could have meant life in prison.

Valle, 30, has been jailed for more than 18 months. The six-year New York Police Department veteran was fired from the department after his conviction.

Prosecutors had argued Valle looked up potential targets on a restricted law enforcement database. Gardephe was unconvinced.

“It is more likely than not the case that all of Valle’s Internet communications about the kidnapping are fantasy role-play,” Gardephe wrote in a 120-page opinion.

The “decision validates what we have said since the beginning: there was no crime,” defense lawyer Julia Gatto said. “Gil Valle is innocent of any conspiracy. Gil is guilty of nothing more than having unconventional thoughts.”

His estranged wife, Kathleen Mangan-Valle, testified at Valle’s trial in February 2013 that the couple were newlyweds with a young child when she found online chats and other evidence on his computer showing he had discussed killing her and abducting, torturing and eating other women.

“I was going to be tied up by my feet and my throat slit, and they would have fun watching the blood gush out of me because I was young,” Kathleen Mangan-Valle, who was 27 at the time, told a Manhattan jury.

Mangan-Valle also read about plans to put one friend in a suitcase, wheel her out of her building and murder her. Two other women were “going to be raped in front of each other to heighten their fears,” while another was going to be roasted alive over an open fire, she said.

“The suffering was for his enjoyment, and he wanted to make it last as long as possible,” she told the jury.

Gatto had argued that Valle always had been aroused by “unusual things,” including the thought of a woman boiled down on a platter with an apple in her mouth. He found a home at a fetish website with 38,000 registered members, where regulars discuss “suffocating women, cooking and eating them,” she said. But it was all fantasy, his lawyer said.

Contributing: Associated Press

'Cannibal cop' to be freed, conviction overturned