cold case – Killer Case Files

Cold Does Not Mean Dead: The Nagoya Housewife Murder and the Twenty-Six-Year Silence

August 24, 2026 by author

The Shōnai River flowing through Nishi Ward, Nagoya — the residential neighborhood where Namiko Takaba was murdered in her own apartment on November 13, 1999.

On November 13, 1999, a thirty-two-year-old housewife named Namiko Takaba was murdered in her own apartment in Nagoya while her two-year-old son sat in the same room. Her husband spent twenty-six years and one hundred and fifty thousand dollars refusing to let her case be forgotten. On Halloween 2025, the woman who killed her walked into a Nagoya police station and turned herself in. A companion piece to the Setagaya murders.

The House He Would Not Leave: The Miyazawa Family Murders

August 24, 2026 by author

Aerial view of Soshigaya, Setagaya Ward, Tokyo, in 1992 — the residential district adjacent to Kamisoshigaya, where the Miyazawa family were killed on the night of December 30, 2000.

On the night of December 30, 2000, a man climbed through the second-floor bathroom window of a house in Setagaya, Tokyo, killed the four members of the Miyazawa family, and then stayed in the house until dawn. Twenty-five years later, despite one of the largest evidence pools in Japanese criminal history, he has never been found.