The Man They Let Out: The Ashikaga Wrongful Conviction and the North Kanto Serial Kidnappings
Content note: this piece describes the disappearance and murder of several young children between 1979 and 1996, and — at its center — the wrongful imprisonment of an…
“Mom, Good Morning!!”: The Murder of Yukari Ogino
A twenty-one-year-old student texted her mother good morning, and two days later the police called. The man who killed her was convicted, sentenced to death, and then given…
The Money Was Still in the Safe: The Hachiōji Supermarket Murders
Three people were shot dead in the office of a Tokyo supermarket on a Sunday night in 1995, and the money in the safe was never taken. Thirty-one…
The Man in the Ocher Raincoat: The Murder of Junko Kobayashi
Content note: this piece describes the murder of a 21-year-old university student in her own home, two days before she was due to leave the country, and the…
Cold Does Not Mean Dead: The Nagoya Housewife Murder and the Twenty-Six-Year Silence
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…
The House He Would Not Leave: The Miyazawa Family Murders
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…
Takahiro Shiraishi: The Tokyo Twitter Killer
Takahiro Shiraishi, a 30-year-old Japanese man, was sentenced to death in December 2020 for the murders of nine people. The victims were all young women, mostly in their…