Gilberto Valle
Gilberto Valle
An agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation testified on Wednesday that emails prosecutors alleged showed a New York City police officer planned to kidnap, kill and eat women mirrored scores of other online communications that he and other FBI officials deemed the stuff of fantasy.

Officer Gilberto Valle, 28 years old, who has been suspended from the police force, has pleaded not guilty to a count of conspiracy to kidnap in the case in Manhattan federal court. None of the alleged plots were carried out, and Mr. Valle's attorneys have said he was a fetishist who was merely fantasizing in cyberspace.

Under questioning by Mr. Valle's attorney Robert Baum, FBI agent Corey Walsh also said many of the names and photographs of women whom authorities have said were the subjects of the kidnapping conspiracy were also mentioned in emails the FBI determined were fantasy.

Mr. Walsh spent parts of Wednesday and the previous day reading graphic chats and emails he said Mr. Valle had engaged in last year with three others. Those are Mike Van Hise, a 22-year-old New Jersey man who also has pleaded not guilty in the conspiracy; and two co-conspirators the FBI said it hasn't been able to identify except by their email names - Moody Blues and Aly Khan.

In one of those communications read by Agent Walsh, Mr. Valle offered to deliver his wife to India so Aly Khan could kill and cook her.

"Would the feet be edible," Mr. Valle asked, according to Mr. Walsh.

"Yes, feet soup will be good and nutritious even," Aly Khan wrote back, the agent said.

Mr. Walsh told prosecutor Hadassa Waxman that out of the "thousands" of chats and emails the agency had recovered from Mr. Valle's computers, they focused on about 40 that involved the three alleged co-conspirators because he said the messages appeared to "contain elements of real crimes."

The other chats and emails, Mr. Walsh told the prosecutor, "didn't seem realistic" and "were clearly role playing and used the term 'fantasy.'"

The agent testified that the FBI's investigation concluded that thousands of chats and emails Mr. Valle had with approximately 21 others were deemed not to be real.

As with the communications seen by the FBI and prosecutors as signifying an intent to kidnap, Mr. Baum asked whether the "fantasy role playing" messages also "involved rape, torture and cooking women." The agent said they did.

Mr. Walsh testified the FBI conducted no surveillance on Mr. Valle in the month between the start of the investigation and his arrest in October.

Nor did the FBI seize and test for DNA Mr. Valle's car, which he wrote in his emails and chats had been used in the past to abduct women, he said.

Mr. Baum also asked Mr. Walsh if Mr. Valle's oven, which he allegedly told a co-conspirator was large enough to cook a woman, was in fact large enough. "That's debatable," said the agent, who added it depended "on the size of the woman, sir."

And while Mr. Valle's emails and chats talk about delivering a woman to be eaten as far away as India, the officer didn't leave the U.S. during the time of the alleged plot.

In a Feb. 7, 2012, message that Mr. Baum showed the agent, an emailer asked the officer if he could "really sell a slave like that." After answering yes, Mr. Valle wrote, "I mean not for real, no I'm just talking fantasy...I just like to get a little dirty with the ideas."