May 24, 2023 • 68 mins
In December of 2000, an unknown assailant brutally murdered the Miyazawa family as they slept in their home, preparing to celebrate the new year. This horrific crime only seems to grow more mysterious -- the killer stayed in the home after the murders, eating food, leaving evidence, and using the computer. Police have the killer's personal possessions. They have his DNA. And, more than two decades later, they have yet to find this murderer.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Nol.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul, Mission controlled decand most importantly, you are you.
You are here and that makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know. Please listen closely, fellow conspiracy realists.
Today's episode concerns an absolutely horrific brutal crime. It remains
(00:48):
unsolved in the modern day. There's almost nothing in the
way of solid leads in a baffling case that is
stretched for decades now. This episode will contain at times
affect depictions descriptions of violence against children as well as adults.
As such, it may not be suitable for all listeners,
But we talked off air, we believe this story is
(01:10):
important and we hope exploring it on air tonight may
just possibly in some small way, help spread the word
and lead to a breakthrough. This is the story of
what's called the Setagaya family murders and the so called
faceless man. Here are the facts. Setagaya or Setagaya City
(01:32):
as it's referred to often in English.
Speaker 4 (01:34):
It's huge.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
You guys know, Paul and I have spent some time
in Japan. I never made it out there. I haven't
been there yet. But it's called a special ward of Tokyo,
kind of like how you know you have burrows of
New York.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Right.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
We've talked in the past about how big Tokyo is.
It really hit me when we were learning about Setagaya City.
So if you look at a map, it's in the
southwest of Tokyo and it's along the Tama River, so
it's right at the border of the larger Tokyo Metropolis
and Kanagawa Prefecture. We are not native Japanese speakers, I
(02:12):
mean spoiler alert, so please bear with us if we
get some pronunciations wrong.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
Here.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
We do have the fact straight. Special wards are pretty big,
and this is like the biggest one, the first or
second biggest one in the US. This place would not
just be a city in its own right. The population
as of twenty twenty is just a little bit under
one million people. That means it has a population larger
(02:39):
than several US states.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
Right at first, I was thinking, like, is this sort
of akin to a village, But no, this is not
at all. This is much more like a mini country,
almost like within a country. That's interesting.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
And this our story takes place in relatively well to do,
not super opulent, but well to do neighborhood in Sedegaya.
It is a place called Kamisoshigaya. It's think of it
like a western suburb of Tokyo. It's a family place,
a lot of family homes, and.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
You know, following suit with that, it not a lot
necessarily goes on in terms of criminal activity. It's very residential.
It's something you might describe as being a little bit
of a sleepy, kind of peaceful bedroom community. But on
December thirtieth and thirty first of the year two thousand,
that tranquil, peaceful feeling was completely uppended, shattered. At the
(03:39):
very end of the year, during that same period, the
Miyazawa family was murdered during a home invasion.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Hey, yeah, and let's talk about who that family is.
Miko's forty four years old. This is that the father
of the family. Yasuko is the mother. She's forty one
years old. And they are. There were two children, and
eight year old named Nina and a six year old
named ray r Ei. Yeah. I think that therein lies
(04:15):
why this is such a tragic story and why we
all kind of are in this place with our energy today,
because it's a family that was slaughtered in their home
at a time of celebration. The rest of the town,
the rest of the city, all of the whole area,
everybody is preparing to celebrate, and everyone is celebrating basically
(04:39):
at a time when this family is brutally murdered.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Yeah, law enforcement as well is down to skeleton crews.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
You know.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
It's it's the border of one year to the next.
It's the time when people, even in a notoriously overworked
country like Japan or a notoriously overworked what country like
the U, even those even those cultures, try to take
some time off and be with their loved ones. Yasuko,
if you want to learn a little more about the family,
(05:10):
she had worked in cosmetics until she got married and
then she started essentially a cram school. Knowing that you know,
Japan has a very rigorous, quite competitive education system. Suicides
actually quadruple in Japan when some of those exam results
(05:30):
get released, so you need those cram schools. She you
could call it a tutor, but we just want everybody
to know it's a lot more intense than the word
implies in English.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Well yeah, I mean i'd heard that term for the
first time actually in an anime not terribly long ago,
and it wasn't one that I was familiar with. Is
that like specifically kind of a Japanese thing? I mean
usually here they would maybe be referred to as like
taking you know, SAT tutoring or like kind of like
you know, studying in advance for US Pacific test. Can
(06:01):
you talk a little bit about more about that kind
of cultural phenomenon of what a cram school is.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
Sure, yeah, it's a technically it would be like an
extracurricular but because it doesn't occur in you know, the
actual school system, but it's considered a mandate, it's considered
a necessity. There are things like this in Korea as well.
What happens is you are a lot of your future
(06:27):
success is going to be determined by your performance on
these tests. So cram schools, a class in cram school
can last for four to five hours after your actual
school is over.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
So some kids.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Don't get home to even start on their homework until
like nine or ten at night. It's pretty brutal.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
And my understanding is that she taught those classes in English.
Is that correct? That's at least what I had read
on Reddit, which again I don't know if I can
verify that.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
I believe. I believe that is correct.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Matt.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
She again, like this would typically they're going to be
focusing on specific tests, So she probably had some specializations,
and if one of them was language, then it absolutely
makes sense because the best way to learn a language
is to hold discourse in that tongue.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Yeah, and only bring that up to open that door
for later in this episode about potentially a student of hers.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
I think that's wise. Yeah. And the children were, let's
see Nina, that's Inia was in second grade and Ray,
being just six, was a kindergartener. Their bodies were found
at ten forty am on December thirty first, the very
last day of two thousand. Yasuko's mother, who lived in
(07:44):
a house directly next door, came by. She was concerned
because she had tried to call her daughter earlier and
had not been able to reach her on the phone,
and so this is if you look at the houses
and you can see pictures of them, they are they're
pretty much what you would call semi detached houses in
(08:06):
Britain or in the UK, excuse me. And they were
once part of a residential community that had hundreds and
hundreds of homes. But there was this move to create
a park that plays a role in the story. And
as people were getting bought out of the neighborhood, there
were fewer and fewer houses, and they were getting paid
(08:27):
a lot of money what would be called compensation money
to relocate. So this family, the Miyazawa family, Mikio Miazahwa,
his wife and kids. They lived next to his in
laws basically, and they're two of only four houses left
in the neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Yeah, and we should just say, right behind both of
these houses is that park you're speaking about, Ben, And
we're saying how nothing really happens in this town. There's
no brutal crime like this. There are little annoyances like
there are in every other place. And one of those
annoyances was part of that park, right in.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
The skate park skaters. Yeah, and so yeah, this is
the kind of suburb where the big news would be
that someone complained about the skate park right, or someone
was seeing punk and druplic and so on. So this
in this sleepy time what it's horrific because the grandmother
(09:29):
is the one who discovers the scene of the crime
at ten forty am. She goes just next door. The father,
the wife, and the eldest child, the daughter, have been
repeatedly stabbed in incredibly brutal ways, and the youngest family member,
the boy, whose room was on the second floor, have
(09:50):
been strangled, probably first, probably before the rest of the
family was murdered. Tokyo police arrived, they start investigating. It's
an mistigation that continues even today in twenty twenty three.
It's one of the biggest murder investigations in all of
Japanese history. It didn't take them long to determine a
(10:10):
rough timeline. They said the murders occurred probably somewhere around
eleven thirty pm to just after midnight, like twelveh five,
and it looked like a home invasion, as we're going
to see. The police were incredibly thorough credit where it's due.
They have a real solid sense of a timeline. They
have an absurd amount of physical evidence up to and
(10:34):
including DNA. What they do not have, however, is the killer.
And more than twenty years after the murders, this criminal
remains on the loose and possibly could be listening to
this show. Here's where it gets crazy. Let's walk through
this timeline, because again, the police have been they seem
one hundred percent convinced that they know the timeline up
(10:58):
to and including the order of the murders.
Speaker 4 (11:00):
That's right, they believe, or at least the narrative that
the police constructed was that the killer entered through an
open window on the second floor bathroom the back of
the house. The rear of the house is directly next
to a park called Soshigaya Park, and the killer was
believed to have reached the window by climbing up a
(11:21):
tree and then you know, removing the screen from the window.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Strangely, the light in that room was supposedly on, which
is an odd choice for you know, someone entering a home,
you think that window, yeah, yeah, you'd go to a
darkened room or something.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
But they also noted that if this were a robbery,
there's a lot of speculation we'll see because there is.
Weirdly enough, there's a dearth of evidence to support, like
for any kind of motive. We have a lot of
evidence for what happened, but not a lot of evidence
for why it happened, So it could be random, could
(12:01):
be targeted. You know, often in a home invasion, people
have a misconception and they say robbers want to look
for the most wealthy homes. It's not entirely true. Successful
robbers want to look for accessible homes, And with that
in mind, it is weird to go into a lighted window. Specifically,
(12:26):
I've got a picture of the of the house here,
and if you look at it part it's kind of
hard to tell which window this would have been, but
some of the windows are have bars on them, but
you can see there are a lot of trees close
by the park. Really does a butt right to the
(12:48):
rear of the house, I don't know. It makes you
wonder how much they knew about the house in advance.
Right Because the killer went directly to the youngest child's room,
entering the bathroom, and the kid's room was next to
the second floor bathroom, the killer used their bare hands
(13:09):
to strangle the child. Possibly this was to minimize noise.
The father, Mikio down in the living room slash study area.
He clocks something is wrong. He runs up the first
floor stairs. This house has three stories. The mother and
the daughter are already asleep on the third story. The
(13:30):
father catches the murderer. The struggle ensues. We know that
the father injured the killer, and then the killer took
the father's life. He was armed with a knife specific
type of knife, sashimi boto knife, which is used conventionally
(13:50):
to make sashimi.
Speaker 4 (13:51):
A long, very sharp, thin blade, you know, that comes
to a very sharp point.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
And it appears that the killing blow was the most
damaging blow was to the father's head. The knife was
stabbed in with such force that a piece of the
blade actually broke off.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
Yeah, and that was in the police report. Of course.
The killer then went on to attack Yasuko and Nina
with the remaining part of the blade. And also then
I believe obtained an additional knife from the house. This
sashimi blade was when he had brought with him, correct
or was that so okay? So then the second knife
(14:37):
was when he found in the home a different topic
blade called a sountoku knife.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
And part of that is so strange to me, just
when you if you look at the diagram of where
the victims were found, right, Ray was in it was
in his bed, That's where he was found. The father
was found at the bottom of the staircase, kind of
near the door air and then the mother and child
were found up at the top of the staircase, kind
(15:06):
of to the side of it. I guess, around a
bit of a corner and.
Speaker 4 (15:12):
Over the daughter.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Yeah, the mother attempting to protect the daughter. Just imagining
where it all took place. Right, If you're a crime
scene investigator and you're trying to come up with all
those facts that we just stated, just that's a tough
thing to do. But it's also, in my mind, really
hard to completely get a picture of what exactly happened.
(15:36):
And you know where the killer came in. But in
this case, we're going to keep saying it. There's so
much evidence that's left at this scene that you really
could kind of piece it together.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
I want to get to that part. Yeah, we're talking.
The extraordinary thing here is that the killer does not
leave the scene of the crime. The killer stays for
at least two hours, possibly up to ten, the entire
time they are we're certain its mail the entire time,
this murderer is leaving tons of evidence, using the family
(16:13):
computer or hopping online around one in the morning, eating
and drinking stuff from the fridge. He disconnected the landline,
and that landline disconnection is you know, what actually led
to the discovery of the body so recently after the incident.
If we think in terms of, you know, the other
variables of family murdered like this during a massive holiday
(16:37):
could have gone unreported for much longer. So he drank
a bunch of barley tea, we know, he ate melon
that was around. He ate four little ice cream containers.
He used the restroom and he didn't flush, so they
had his feces as well. And then he also used
(16:58):
first aid kits. They found, howel with blood on them
some of his uh. He napped on the sofa in
the living room on the sec They think, yeah, yeah, they.
Speaker 4 (17:09):
Think to me, this is the kind of thing you
picture in like, you know, a silent Silence of the
Lambs type film, you know, where it's like a killer
who is just so callous and or unconcerned with being
caught that they just linger around, you know, and then
hang out and like sort of live in this you
know what I'm thinking of. It was not Silence of
(17:30):
the Lambs. It was actually the it's called it was
the original Hannibal Elector film by Ryan De Palma called Manhunter,
And there is a killer who kind of does this,
who like goes into homes as home invasions, kills the family,
and then sort of hangs around and just sort of
like occupies the life of that family. And that's just
utterly chilling to think about. You also have to wonder
(17:53):
if there's some deep seated psychological issues at work here
they would call someone to be so unconcerned with being caught,
I'd really quickly affair. Paul corrected me. Actually, Manhunter was
directed by Michael Mann, not Brian De Palma. But I
do kind of I don't know, maybe I've switched those
guys up in my head. Sometimes they have similar stylistic choices,
(18:15):
but really cool film.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Well let's get let's stay over one second, just because
I do think you're on something there, Nol. It does
feel like either this person was extremely comfortable with death
and murder and murdering people to the point where they
would just stick around like this, or I think you're right,
something is really off, there's a some kind of state,
(18:37):
mental state that this person is in where they're not
even registering really mistakes or what's happening.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Unless you have repeatedly been in situations where you take
people's lives. We have to naturally assume that a perpetrator
of crimes like this will experience shock, a profound amount
of shock, possibly disassociation.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
You know.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
Mental state definitely comes into play here. I agree with
you guys.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
They might be losing a lot of blood quite.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
Possibly, Yeah, but they wouldn't have lost enough blood to
impede their escape because, as we'll see, they got away.
The murderer did some things that also would ordinarily point
toward motive. But we'll see why. This is difficult to
say anything conclusively. The house had been ransacked, like you
(19:35):
know how it is. If you've lived in a family house,
you probably have a drawer somewhere with valuable paperwork, right
or certificates, bills, utilities, etc. All the jazz, all that stuff. Well,
the drawers containing that stuff they were torn open. There
were papers scattered everywhere. Some papers have been dumped in
(19:56):
the bath, some in the commode. And some money was taken,
specifically money from the cram school where people were paying cash,
but not all of it. The killer actually left a
lot of money, and they also left a ton of
items that they had brought to the house. The broken
knife was found on the scene. Uh, there was this
(20:18):
stuff was on the sofa, a scarf, a hip bag
kind of like think like a fanny pack or sometimes
they call them a bum pack. Uh, a sweater, a jacket, hat, gloves, shoes,
two handkerchiefs, one of which was probably used to wield
the knife, and one that may have been used kind
of like a mask.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Ye. Again, one has been ironed, right, mm hmm, it's
really weird. Uh.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
The also the handkerchiefs had Drakard noir on them.
Speaker 4 (20:49):
It's just weird that now.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Colge Yeah, the colone, yeah, which has a very specific scent,
right it does.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
And you'd have to imagine if that there could be
DNA involved in that as well, well, maybe sweat or
whatever it might be. I mean, good lord. You know
you point out in your research that it's like the
killer went out of his way or went out of
their way to leave evidence. And I think the previous
conversation that we have maybe in the case another element
there might be that it wasn't that they were going
(21:16):
out of their way to leave evidence, but just that
there was a lack of awareness, you know, a lack
of care because of any number of reasons. We'll discuss
further and get into.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Or and this is just conjecture on my part. Guys,
the killer was awoken suddenly after sleeping on that sofa
or falling asleep by the grandmother and had to just
GTFO and just left everything there on the sofa. That's
just I think a possibility.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
It is a possibility. There are also shoeprints. We know
the killer was wearing size eleven white running shoes. These
were type of shoes that were manufactured in South Korea.
No shoes of this type and this size were sold
in Japan. Because what the police did after this was
to track down the provenance of any of these items.
(22:07):
They found that some of the clothing, not the shoes,
but some of the other clothing, and that broken sashimi
knife had both been purchased in Kanagawa Prefecture. They analyzed
the poop, they saw that the murderer in the twenty
four hours leading up to the crimes had eaten string
beans and sesame seeds. They know a lot about this criminal.
(22:30):
There's also you'll see a report that the computer went
online twice, once at one eighteen am in the wee hours,
and another a second time at ten am. But police
now believe that that ten am hop online with the
computer was because the grandmother had perhaps accidentally moved the
(22:52):
mouse when she discovered the crime scene. They did some
good police work here, and of course people are people
are baffled. People on closure. There's no shortage of independent
investigators who will allege that there was incompetence or even
corruption on the part of the Japanese police. But we
(23:16):
see that they they did digging that led to some
pretty important breakthroughs, like they found the provenance where the
knife and the clothing was manufactured. It turns out that
the sweater left there is pretty rare. Only one hundred
and thirty versions of this sweater were made and sold,
(23:37):
and police were able to track down twelve different people
who purchased those sweaters. Imagine those conversations. You bought a
sweater and the police are at your door, you know
what I mean. That's a very strange way. That's a
very strange day to have none of those people, in
the opinion of the authorities, could have committed those murders.
(24:00):
And there's one more piece of evidence that.
Speaker 4 (24:07):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
We'll see what everybody thinks. But this really surprised me.
This is not what I was expecting. We'll fill you
in after a word from our sponsors.
Speaker 4 (24:23):
We've returned.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
Let's talk about the hip bag, the bum bag, the
Fandi pack.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Uh. Yeah, so we've already seen with other pieces of
evidence that were recovered that signs are pointing to this
person probably not living full time in Japan, or maybe
not being from Japan and being here as a foreigner
in one way or another. And that's the same thing
you find with the bag, because inside there is sand
(24:52):
that is not from Japan.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Yeah, and this is impressive. You can trace sand. You
can trace sand. I mean somewhere out there there's a database,
likely multiple databases, of different types of sand. This sand,
as you said, Matt, does not come from Japan, any
part of Japan. It is all the way across the Pacific.
(25:17):
This sand originates from the Nevada Desert, most likely from
an area around Edwards Air Force Base.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
WHOA, right, it's now strange. Well, let's talk about that,
because you know someone who is military or ex military
at least trained with a knife in that way, that
would make sense for the severity of you know, this
crime and the cool potential cool displayed after such a
(25:46):
horrendous set of acts. So I don't know, that's interesting, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
And I looked around to to see what of US
military bases are located in Tokyo, and there are seven
US military facilities of some.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Sort anything near Kanagawa.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Not necessarily supernir, but there is obviously US military presence
in Japan. Police have the DNA, they have the fingerprints,
they have bloody fingerprints, and they of course they ran
this through their files. Whomever this person is, their info
is not available in any of those databases, so we
(26:36):
know this person, whomever they may be, never got booked
for a previous crime in Japan.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
Yeah, that's just really troubling that they're not in any databases,
or at least that the Japanese police who are investigating
the crime have access to right any of those databases.
Then I'm sure there's cross reverencing that was done, but
I wonder how wide that DNA has been distributed over
the years to look at other databases. It also makes
(27:06):
me wonder about the friends of genealogy. Maybe there's something
there with this case. But let's talk about what we
know about the killer.
Speaker 3 (27:14):
Yeah, let's also note on the database thing that one
of the big questions I have at least two is
just on the just on the providence of that sand
is it. Is it enough for Japan to convince the
US to run this stuff through military database?
Speaker 2 (27:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (27:33):
Why not?
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Yes, yes, I'm saying yes, I'm saying yes as well,
let's go.
Speaker 4 (27:39):
But we didn't.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
We didn't find at least so far, we haven't. We
haven't found any evidence of that or whatever happened, They
didn't set up, it didn't set off a match. And
like you were saying, Matt, based on this, the Tokyo
police have made some rough estimates about the person, some
of which are controver vial.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
The first is the height. So the height of the
person is around one hundred and seventy centimeters, which is
five feet five point seven inches, so about five foot
six so a fairly short mail. We also know that
this person was very thin. They found because of their
(28:24):
clothes that were left behind. They found that his waist
was rather small.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Yeah, yeah, And they also believe that he would have
been born sometime between nineteen sixty five to nineteen eighty five,
conjecturing that he was a younger person fifteen to thirty
five years old at the time of the crime. This
is based on their estimates regarding the level of physical
fitness required to get into the house and commit the murders,
(28:50):
and the idea of him having a slim build is
also based.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
On that, yeah, climbing a tree to get into second
story window.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
In a relatively small window at that so he was
also Unfortunately, this is part of the research that has
to be done that they looked at the bodies. Medical
examiners and detectives came in and they concluded that the
killer was most likely right handed due to the nature
of the wounds. As we said here, there's a lot
(29:19):
of blood, and you can learn quite a bit from
human blood. The killer had Type A blood, so that
means they could not have been a member of the
Miyazawa family. That's one of the things they had to check,
you know. Unfortunately, the killer is male, and there was
some in depth discussion of the killer's genealogical or genetic background.
(29:41):
Whether they were of mixed race, because originally you'll see
reports where they say the maternal DNA indicates some European lineage,
and the first way it was phrased was the mother
is of European descent, possibly from a South European country
near the Mediterranean or Adriatic Sea. Paternal DNA shows a
(30:05):
father of East Asian descent. However, we have to remember
two thousand was two decades ago. DNA testing, as you
guys know from various shows VP'D has come a long
way since then, and it wasn't like testing at this time.
(30:25):
One of the primary objections I've seen to it is
that they're saying, well, maternal DNA could just be an
ancestor on the mother's side, you know what I mean,
Like if there's a small amount of European DNA, then
I don't know. And it's shady. The way the public
got that news about the DNA. It wasn't from the police. Originally,
(30:46):
it was from someone who worked at a university that
was also testing it, and they leaked it to the press.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Well, yeah, and now that we're twenty three years on
and we've got things like twenty three and me and
all of these companies, like, why not test that DNA
all over the place because they've still got samples. I mean,
put that thing in every database, see what you find.
Speaker 4 (31:08):
You might get a ping from a known relative who
might be able to help point out and the whereabouts
or have information. You know, you go interrogate this relative
and they're be like, oh, yeah, yeah, cousin Steve or
whatever was always kind of weird, you know.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Which, Yeah, was that Edward's Air Force base?
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Mm hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
And there there's another thing. There's a specific piece of
the DNA that is more common in people from China
or Korea. This goes back to what you were setting
up earlier, Matt, the idea that this person may not
this criminal may not have been a Japanese national, or
(31:48):
may not be based in Japan or from there. And
this analysis led the police to contact Interpol because they
currently one of the prevailing opinions is that this killer
might not be a Japanese national, might not even be
present in Japan anymore. Because remember Japan as a big
(32:11):
destination for tourism for kids on gap year, for international business,
a lot of people visit Japan or stay for a
number of months or stay for a number of years.
And as we said right now, this is one of
the largest murder investigations in the entire history of Japan.
We're talking the number keeps changing as time goes on.
(32:33):
Two hundred and sixty thousand individual investigators with eyes on
this case over the years, thousands and thousands of pieces
of evidence, more than like twelve thousand individual pieces, thousands
and thousands of tips that so far haven't really gone
anywhere nothing. That's why over the years the press started
(32:54):
calling this criminal the faceless man. They also used another
phrase for this that some of us may have heard,
which I don't love, called the Goldilocks murders. Gets heard
it called that it's gross, but I get it. Yeah, yeah,
it feels somehow disrespectful.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Yeah. I want to mention something that was brought up
in some of the reporting, and it's something I didn't
think about, and I honestly can't see really the relevance here,
but I would just want to get your guys opinion.
Some of the reportings stated that the initial team of
investigators that went to this scene were essentially a reserve
(33:36):
unit or something because of basically everybody's on holiday, so
this is like the team that the B team or
C team that comes in to do crime ZNE investigation,
and all of the parts, basically all the information we're
working on was based on this team's findings. I don't
see how that could really have an effect on, you know,
(33:58):
the stuff we're analyzing right now and the things we're discussing.
But just want to put that out there to you guys.
Do you think there's a possibility that either stuff was
tainted or seen wrong or.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
I just don't. I mean, yes, of course there's a possibility,
for sure. I just so many opportunities, various opportunities to
get clean DNA, to get clean samples. I mean, he
left poop in the toilet, you know. I mean, I
just don't understand. It's like it's like a slam dunk.
It just seems I mean, you know, I think this
(34:30):
is what it seems like.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
If the investigation had not continued for so long, with
so many people re examining different pieces of it, then
I could see a stronger possibility that maybe a reserve
unit did the did the wrong thing. But we have
to remember too, a reserve unit is not necessarily like
the JV version. Yeah, the squad. They're they're the skeleton crew.
(34:54):
They're the folks who drew the short straw, and we'll
just have to celebrate New Year's next time.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Exact I mean, well, and everything, you know, even in
the year two thousand, everything is digitized, right, So even
the stuff that we're examining right now, it's the it's
the same. It's not the exact same, right, crime scene
photos and all of those pieces of evidence that were collected,
but it's very similar. It's digitized media that everybody else
is looking at of what the place looks like and
(35:21):
what was there?
Speaker 4 (35:21):
Wait, sorry, was this was this ninety nine rolling into
two thousand or two thousand, early into two thousand.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Two thousand into two thousand and one, two thousand and one.
Speaker 4 (35:29):
Okay, so it wasn't amidst the whole y two K chaos.
I mean, not that that matters. I'm just saying, you know,
the why two K killer I could just see that.
Oh yeah, I can see that as well.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
I mean, people can be kind of soulless when they
start putting those names on things.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
But even arguing that somebody lost there.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Because of the name, to mention things like Goldilocks and faceless.
But I just see, you know, that kind of stuff
can't be exploitative.
Speaker 4 (35:54):
I just meant specifically, if it were during that time,
the argument could be made that people were really like
going bananas, you know, because of paranoia about all the
things you're describing. I mean like digital you know, computers
resetting and all of that stuff. But there's all kinds
of doomsday preppers and stuff. I mean, I know that's
not that would happen, but that's just what occurred to me.
It's a good observation too.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
I mean that's because again, nothing occurs in a vacuum.
And that's why there are no shortage of theories attempting
to explain this crime. And to be very clear with everybody,
none of the theories that we're about to discuss have
been proven, and we'll dive into those theories after a
word from our sponsor. Theories, Okay, the killer's motive, motives,
(36:45):
whatever they may be, remain elusive today. Again, none of
these theories have been conclusively proven. That's why there's still theories.
There are some people who are convinced they figured it out,
which we can talk about. But right now, I think
the biggest thing on The biggest one that you'll hear,
especially in the early days, was suspicion of a robbery.
Speaker 4 (37:07):
Right.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Yeah, Given the fact that this is a pretty wealthy
area we talked about at the beginning there, and the
fact that the house that we're talking about here, the
one that got entered into, was fairly isolated out by
that park, it would make sense that it would be
targeted in at least a moment of opportunity.
Speaker 4 (37:30):
Right.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Maybe you're at the park and you see these kind
of loan houses right here, and you think, oh, I'm
going to go in there and take everything that I
can that's not locked down.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
Yeah, I mean, maybe we know that. One of the
theories argues they draw on all kinds of stuff. They
say that there was a person aware of the compensation
being paid to relocate right from the park, and that
they have believed that that money existed in cash in
(38:05):
the house. Maybe that was part of it, which is,
you know, an attempt to explain the paperwork being shuffled
around the fact that some money was taken, but again
other money was left on the scene, and the Miyazawas
had sold their home, but they just hadn't moved yet.
Speaker 4 (38:24):
This.
Speaker 3 (38:25):
Somehow, this let some people to speculate there could have
been a hired killer and it could have been a hit.
The biggest proponent of this is an investigative journalist named
Fuyima Ichi Hashi, who claims to have solved the case.
Speaker 4 (38:41):
I don't understand the whole idea of how I mean,
this is the hit. This is the least successful hit
man I could ever imagine hiring, you know, I mean again,
it's insane, and this person hasn't been caught yet. But
you know, if you're a hired killer, you're gonna come.
You're gonna pop in, pop out, do your business, and
leave no trace.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
Yeah, ideally unless you have been unless you have been
paid to do specific things like to kill someone in
a specific way, or to remove or lead or remove
or deposit specific items. I tend to agree with you
because it is very clear that at least two of
the victims, the mother and daughter were brutalized, were stabbed
(39:24):
and attacked after they had died, far after they had died,
So this could be indicative of an emotional motivation for
the crimes. If someone's doing a job, then they're probably
not going to stick around.
Speaker 4 (39:35):
Remember that other family murder case that we did relatively recently,
where the bodies were posed sort of like a creepy sculpture, like,
and we talked a lot about the motivations there, you know,
as to whether this was done to like send a message,
you know, maybe you're even like paying extra to get
someone to do some of these things to really like,
(39:57):
you know, make it appear as as though something different happened,
or as though there was some sort of cultic reasoning
behind what was, you know, ultimately just a murder. I'm
not saying they're they're that similar, but it's something to
think about. We did talk about a similar angle on
that story, and the name of the family is eluding
me on that.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
One, the Sherman double murders that's right there in Canada. Yeah,
I was thinking the same thing with that murder in Toronto.
It's actually specifically what I was thinking because we had
talked in that episode about how it could be possible
that someone with an emotional motive paid a professional operator
to you know, to do that posing you're talking about,
(40:38):
which is not out of the realm of possibility.
Speaker 4 (40:41):
I agree.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Well, let's let's talk about this. This emotional reaction here.
So let's say it was a murder for higher situation
the person was supposed to go in or maybe it
wasn't murder for hire. Maybe it was get that money.
That's what the job was initially, and you know the
money is supposed to lead that was inside that house
(41:04):
that was given to them to move right, it's for
selling their house. Whoever sent the murder for higher believe
that was in there and they just wanted that money
and maybe that money wasn't at the house and this person,
you know, it made this person extremely angry that now
they have you know, been seen by an entire family
(41:25):
of people. And then it turns into the situation it
turned into that's a possibility, But that seems that seems
pretty far fetched to me, at least to my.
Speaker 4 (41:36):
Lot of it.
Speaker 3 (41:37):
THENDS to get there is the issue, right, like we
we would have to have a lot of things work
out just so.
Speaker 4 (41:43):
And the individual just you know, to be annoyed to
that degree would specifically refer to like, oh, now I've
been put in this position where I'm at risk. So
to continuously exhibit behavior that just puts them further and
further at risk just doesn't really line up.
Speaker 3 (41:59):
I want to talk little bit about Ichi Hashi just
so everyone knows where this investigator is coming from. Chihachi
has bona fides and has extensively researched other cases in
an incredible way. Their conclusion here remains controversial, and this
is one of the people who believes they solve the case.
Speaker 4 (42:18):
They say in.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
Their book on this that they got in contact with
a South Korean national who is only called K, like
the letter K in the book, and that this person
K pointed ichi Hashi to the direction of the actual killer,
a South Korean hitman who is given the pseudonym R
(42:42):
like the letter R in this book. And ichi Hashi
says that they spoke to or they excuse me, they
say they made contact with R, who is a former
member of the South Korean military. Further, ichi Hashi says
they take the man's fingerprints and these are a match
(43:04):
with those collected at the crime seen by the police.
That's one author saying this not a member of Japanese
law enforcement.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
If that's true, then the author needs to like, what
the heck? If that's true, why has there been no
arrest made?
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Exactly there would if that was true there would have.
Speaker 4 (43:25):
To be we talked about the Buddhist statue.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Not yet, we haven't gone to the Buddhist y.
Speaker 4 (43:30):
I'm sorry. This is just interesting and sinister, right, I mean,
unless I'm misreading it, the idea that perhaps the killer
may have even returned to the scene of the crime.
Speaker 3 (43:40):
Maybe, Yeah, that's an interesting way. I mean, there's also
I think this is something we're building toward a little
bit earlier. There's the concept of possible revenge. Maybe someone
felt emotionally scorn, maybe they resented the husband, maybe they
resented the mother, something like that. We just we don't know.
It's well, let's lock get into that. Yeah, the cram school.
(44:03):
Let's get into the Cram school.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
Right, because there there's possible there's a possibility here that
a five to six, very thin person who was potentially,
you know, pretty young, was the person who did this,
and that could be a student, right possibly.
Speaker 4 (44:22):
It doesn't that stuff seem like something a kid would
do eating ice cream, you know, drinking like you know,
not flushing the toilet, not flushing the toilet, just eating
the junk food, you know. Just yeah, man, okay, go on, Well.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
To me, like that's that's where most of this points
just in my mind that it's a student that was
either angry because he was unable to perform on whatever
test he was cramming for, right, or he developed emotional
feelings for his teacher or you know, his tutor, which
is something an adolescent person going through puberty might do.
Speaker 4 (44:58):
But what about the sand from from the United States,
and and and uh, you know the whole they were
likely not a Japanese citizen.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
Maybe they were studying and you're right.
Speaker 4 (45:08):
That's exactly right, you're studying abroad, And then you would
be you would have because it's a private school. This
isn't a government but you pay to go to the
school out.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
The Cram schools, yeah, are private, private outfits. But then, uh,
to play point counterpoint with this, uh, it seems absolutely
unreasonable that the authorities would not have interviewed families associated
with the Cram school.
Speaker 4 (45:34):
Oh yeah, well it's true, there wouldn't have been so.
Speaker 3 (45:36):
Well as Mikio co workers. I mean, I think it's
I think it's a very valid argument. I was thinking
the same too. We just didn't if they talked to
the families and possible students at the Cram School to
get information which they absolutely did.
Speaker 4 (45:54):
Then they would have clocked.
Speaker 3 (45:56):
Something, right, I mean maybe the thing we don't know
is they test everybody's fingerprints, right.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
Well, yeah, or DNA or you know, any of that,
And I doubt they did. I doubt they went around
asking for DNA tests from any of those people.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
They may have later in later decades, right as DNA
becomes uh, DNA technology becomes more affordable and more sophisticated.
And I see the idea, like we can we can
interpret that behavior after the murders as the behavior of
an adolescent. But again, like so many other people, we're
(46:34):
we're attempting to build out possibilities based on very limited information.
Speaker 4 (46:39):
Really, and again, it could also have been the behavior
of an adult exhibiting some psychosis. You know, there's some
some fugue states some you know, uh yeah, one hundred percent. Wow. Now,
But when you said that, though, Matt, I was immediately like, yes,
but then you're rippen. Of course, they would have meticulously
(47:01):
gone through This isn't a massive population. I mean, you know,
of students going to the school, they could have they
could have run through those possibilities relatively quickly.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
They also ran through the skateboarders nearby. We shall mention
this before you get to the buddhiat statue. So there's
a skate park in the area and kids having fun,
you know, trying to do kickflips and Olly's and all that,
and Mikio the father, had complained about the noise from
(47:34):
the skate park, which is, you know, something a dad
in a suburb will do. But this led some people
to say, hey, because he complained about the skate park,
did he trigger or anger. Some of the local skateboarders
and police actually went and investigated whether that was the case,
(47:57):
and they, I don't want to say, shook down. They
questioned the local skateboarders and again they came up with buppkis.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
Well, let's talk about this too. Didn't we discuss this
in a previous episode, The culture around police investigations in
Japan and how it is very different.
Speaker 4 (48:14):
Ah, I would say that for the let's do it now. Yeah, sorry,
I know, An, you're right, No, you're right.
Speaker 3 (48:19):
You're right, because one of the concerns is like, that's
why we're saying they're doing for what we can tell
good police work at the top. Japan has an incredibly
high conviction rate. Essentially, if they like you for a crime,
you are going to be found guilty. And their conviction
(48:40):
rate has raised a lot of questions over the years,
a lot of very valid questions about how much emphasis
is put on determining the true guilt or innocence versus
how much is put on successfully closing cases.
Speaker 4 (48:53):
But then to that end is maybe the preponderance there
ponerance is a lack of the glutt of evidence maybe
a bad thing because they can't just pin it on
anybody because they have so much damn evidence, so it
has to really fit. So the fact that they can't
that you'd think, in other words, if maybe they were
less evidence, they would have found some fall guy to
(49:15):
pin it on. But in this case, because there's so
much evidence that they can't find the real guy, they
can't pin it on anybody.
Speaker 3 (49:21):
Yeah, there's also there are also some behaviors or procedures
of Japanese law enforcement that other countries would find either
unethical or incorrect. And so for anybody listening in law
enforcement outside of Japan, tell us what you think about this.
Speaker 4 (49:43):
This is from Freakonomics.
Speaker 3 (49:45):
Highly recommend Freakonomics just if you want to learn interesting
things about the world. Japan has this very high conviction rate.
Japan famously has a low crime rate too.
Speaker 4 (49:57):
Right.
Speaker 3 (49:59):
Apparently, if Japanese authorities, for instance, discover a body in
a public space, and let's say it as stab wounds,
it's clearly a violent death, they'll set standards like a
ticking clock for how much time they have to find
a suspect. If they don't find a suspect by that time,
it's not an unsolved murder. It's reclassified as a abandoned body.
(50:23):
So the case of manslaughter or murder is no longer
officially on the books. They got cooked, right, So what
do you think if you're a law enforcement professional in
some other country? Does this happen? Should this happen? Is
this the right way to approach things? This also reminds
me of our older episode of The Monster with twenty
one faces. You guys remember that one?
Speaker 4 (50:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (50:43):
Yeah? And what does it say that this is a
twenty three year old case and there's still not a
single suspect.
Speaker 3 (50:51):
Right exactly, And because of public pressure, of course, and
because of the just horrific nature of the crime, they
cannot do a reclassification trick on this one. You simply
cannot try to frame this as anything other than a
multiple murder.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
Well, and that's another thing. Imagine that you live in
the area, and on the front page of your paper
the day you wake up, you know, on January first,
or you know, I think it was, you would have
been really on the thirty first or the first when
when you read about this thing, it's like the first
day of a new year. This is the major case
(51:33):
that's on the front page. You would remember that right
going forward. And that's why I think there's so much
that's been written about this case.
Speaker 3 (51:42):
Yeah, I agree with that. And now we know that
the case definitely stayed right in the mind of Japan,
in the in the mind of the community, and I
think now we can let's get to that that statue.
So a few months after the murders, right in December
thirtieth thirty first of two thousand, in April of two
(52:04):
thousand and one, someone went to the neighborhood, went near
the house, and they left this two foot tall Buddhist
statue there.
Speaker 4 (52:15):
And you can pull up a picture of this. It's not.
Speaker 3 (52:21):
It's not a statue that I was familiar with beforehand,
but it was definitely. It seems to have been left
there in reference to the murders.
Speaker 2 (52:30):
Okay, in reference to the murders, like in honor of
the victims.
Speaker 3 (52:34):
Or unclear, And they still don't know who gave the no.
I think is probably why it sticks out in your
mind too. They still don't know who put the statue there, Like,
is it like a commemoration where you would see at
a roadside accident.
Speaker 4 (52:47):
Yeah, I mean, you know, it is the protector of
lost or dead children, but it also I don't know,
maybe that's just my or our brain's kind of filtering
it through pop culture. The idea of a you know,
murderer returning to the scene and leaving some token, you know,
that's where my brain goes. But that's probably the least
likely option. This person is probably long long gone. I
(53:11):
just can't you know, again, the police really treated this
with a lot of attention to detail and fastidiousness, and
I just can't imagine if this person wasn't utterly in
the wind, that they wouldn't have, you know, gotten a
whiff of of this person's whereabouts.
Speaker 3 (53:28):
Yeah, this is a Jizo bodhisatfa, which is, as we mentioned,
considered to be a guardian of dead children. Police, you know,
still desperate for leads. Police printed thousands, thousands of posters
with a photo of this statue, and you can pull
up you can pull up one of the posters. Now
it's in Japanese, but you can see it online. And
(53:50):
they were hoping members of the public could come forward
with information, right because again, any unanswered question might be
the thing that breaks the case. This set. It's difficult
to say just how much this rocked the country of Japan.
It triggered changes in the law. For a long time,
(54:12):
Japan had a statute of limitations, and as time went on,
relative survivors, the grandmother who found the bodies and remains alive,
they were horrified by the idea that due to the
statute of limitations, this murderer might be found after that
statute had expired and then they couldn't be prosecuted. This case,
(54:36):
in fact, is the primary reason Japan removed that statue
of limitations in twenty ten, which I think is a
positive change. They didn't remove it for everything. They removed
it in cases where conviction might lead to the death penalty,
and of course Japan still ast the death penalty and
they do it in a very strange way. We talked
about this before on air. I think, like how they
(54:58):
execute you. They don't tell you what day it is, Yep, surprise,
they just show up. Could be several months, could be
several years, one day it's the day.
Speaker 2 (55:10):
It's an interesting psychological technique.
Speaker 4 (55:15):
You're a mind freak.
Speaker 3 (55:18):
And while we're on the subject, you can read a
bunch of flyers that have come out over time. Detectives
have put them in, Retired detectives have put them in.
Supporters of the family action groups have printed pamphlets. People
hold demonstrations at the train station near the neighborhood or
near the house, and police are still handing out flyers
(55:41):
each year around December, around the anniversary of the crimes.
In twenty nineteen, police made plans to tear down the house.
You know, Japan and general treats older houses differently from
what we might expect in the West, but families and
supporters appealed the decision and so the house still stands today.
(56:05):
You can see a video tour from when one of
the survivors opened the house to the press and it's
just heartbreaking, man. I don't say it lightly. It's people
who are living just a wonderful dream of a life
just cut short in such a horrible, horrible way. And
(56:27):
this is the same thing that has haunted investigators like
we were talking off here. Takashi Sushida, who headed the
initial investigation, still visits the site regularly, still goes over
the clues obsessively hoping to get a break in the case,
and has become a very close friend of the grandmother.
Speaker 4 (56:47):
Yeah again, I think, well, maybe we could be visit
just for a few seconds, this idea of the super
high conviction rate. I don't think we're necessarily making any
accusations there, but is the conjecture that, perhaps, especially in
a part of the country that maybe is a little
(57:07):
bit more iron fisted in terms of the way they govern,
that maybe some of these cases are being pinned on
fall individuals. Is that, oh, absolutely okay? Just to make
you putting them all on the tables, making.
Speaker 3 (57:19):
Sure interrogations are not recorded, stress positions are used, they
will lock you up four days.
Speaker 4 (57:27):
Apparently.
Speaker 3 (57:27):
The kind of thing is if they're actually arresting you
and detaining you, and they like you for the crime,
they'll just do their best to get.
Speaker 4 (57:35):
You to say you did it unless they find someone
they like better.
Speaker 3 (57:39):
Yeah, unless they find unless there's a new bell of
the criminal ball.
Speaker 4 (57:42):
Yes, so it is unusual in this case, they wouldn't
have even had a true person of interest. And I
think maybe I was right, or we're all leading the
same direction that the absolute overwhelming amount of evidence could
have been a hindrance to them being able to do that.
Speaker 3 (57:58):
That may be the case. We are not We're not
able to make the call on that. There was something
really interesting, Sushida said. A few years back, you're or
two back, he said the same thing we're saying earlier.
Speaker 4 (58:15):
DNA has come a long way.
Speaker 3 (58:18):
And he said, why haven't we used DNA to attempt
to make a facial composite, right, which is technology that
now exists. It's very imperfect, but it's something he's saying,
let's give a face to this faceless man as we record.
That hasn't happened. I don't know how much how much
health help it would be, because we've talked about it
(58:40):
in the past. Those creating a face from DNA evidence.
Speaker 4 (58:45):
Is I don't know.
Speaker 3 (58:48):
It doesn't account for anything that might happen as a
result of environment.
Speaker 4 (58:52):
You know, or lifestyle.
Speaker 3 (58:54):
It's it's still is something and I think at this
point you got to do something right.
Speaker 2 (58:59):
Yeah, I think for genealogy is the way to go,
Like just send out that DNA for sampling testing, added
to the database, see where where those connections are, and
I think you you'll get as close as you'll ever
get to solving this thing. Let's talk quickly, guys. We
didn't even mention on the night of the murders, and
(59:19):
like a couple of days before the murders, and even
like the morning after, there were eyewitness accounts of somebody
wearing this strange I call it a fisherman's hat. I
don't know what hat it's like, yeah, but it's you know,
the material isn't very stiff. It's like a I don't
(59:39):
know how to describe it.
Speaker 4 (59:43):
The top sometimes you can tuck things. I agree.
Speaker 2 (59:48):
My grandfather wore one all the time, so I always
always think of it like that. And then the jacket.
There were I went this accounts of somebody matching that
description all over the place, all over town, at a
train station, at what else, getting into a cab. There
was a cab, a taxi cab that left that early
early that morning. Three men got in, so it was
(01:00:11):
a shared ride in a taxi cab and one of
the three men was bleeding all over the taxi. They
left a bunch of blood behind. Is it possible that
that's a person that got into that cab. I think
it might be possible. There was one eyewitness account that
said around eleven thirty pm on the night of the murders,
(01:00:31):
somebody was hurriedly, like rushing in the direction of the house,
not directly towards the house, right, because houses kind of isolated.
Maybe that's not what they actually saw or where this
person was headed. But they matched that same description with
the hat in the jacket.
Speaker 3 (01:00:47):
If the eyewitnesses are reliable, right from twenty three years ago, right, Yeah,
But I mean it's a good point. It also calls
to mind again the Sherman murders, where we had to
talk about eyewitness accounts of the guy walking some unknown
individual and then yeah, so the police were I mean
they did amazing things. Being able to trace down the
(01:01:09):
clothing is impressive. In the sand, yeah, and the sand
there's some secrets there. There's like a sand repository. Now
we know there's not one, but multiple people who just know,
like a cartoonishly disturbing amount about sand. I don't think
(01:01:32):
it was until quite recently that we learned there are
different grades of sand, and there's good sand and then
there's the bad sand, and you can only build with
certain types of sand.
Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Guys, what do you think about a traveling a student
who was traveling maybe with their father or mother who
was in the military and was studying going to the
Cram school, Like maybe you came from the United States
from that exact area near Edward's Air Force Base, and
was a student and was angry for one reason or
(01:02:01):
another and did this.
Speaker 4 (01:02:04):
And not just I mean, yes, that's where that's I
think where it's easy to have your mind go in
that direction. But I think this is this is a
severely disturbed and demented individual that could have been set
off by any number of perceived slights, perhaps you know,
or being feeling as though they were on some sort
(01:02:25):
of outsider The idea of revenge, I mean, revenge is complicated.
You know, It's like, is it enough just to kill somebody?
Do you want it to do? You want to make
them suffer? All of that stuff. But this, to me,
and the behavior indicates just an incredibly deranged individual, and
that it would have been, you know, the kind of
thing that maybe even they just did for fun. One.
Speaker 3 (01:02:47):
It does not seem to be a professional operation, right,
just based on some of the just the lack of
operational hygiene. Right, It's a very cold thing to call it,
but you get the gist to I think, because of
the lack of really compelling evidence, it's easy for us
to put kind of tropes on this thing, the trope
(01:03:11):
of the like the scorned disassociated kid or the you know,
almost like a Columbine kind of thing that's very familiar
to us here in the US because mass shootings continue
and it's a very familiar concept, and it's quite possible.
The damning thing is, we just don't have enough detail there.
(01:03:35):
If it's someone traveling from abroad, which I also do
feel is there's a strong likelihood of that, then if
they are associated with the military, just again, why is
that DNA not sent out, as you said, Matt, everywhere,
especially to US military. I mean, is there something they
want to stay away from because of the crimes committed
by US nationals in Okinawa and in other areas.
Speaker 4 (01:03:58):
It's a very sensitive supp I.
Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
Think that's exactly what it is. Perhaps, Yeah, especially in
the moment when this occurred and they're like, well, there
does seem to be some there's evidence that does seem
to tie this person potentially to the United States. Well, okay, great,
what is that evidence? Sand that was in one of
the things. Yeah, get out of here. You can't you
can't have access to any of our records, you know.
(01:04:21):
I mean, I don't know. Maybe that's what it feels
like to me.
Speaker 3 (01:04:24):
And this is one of those cases where we cannot
conclusively give an answer, but we hope very much that
there is one. As we record today, there is a
reward for twenty million yen, the largest reward in Japanese history. Matt,
you pointed out that's north of one hundred and forty
five thousand dollars US for credible information leading to the
(01:04:49):
arrest of a suspect. If you have any information about this,
there is a number you can call specifically for this.
Be aware that your country codes may differ depending on
where you are in the world. That number is zero
three three four eight two zero one one zero. Again,
that's zero three three four eight two zero one one zero.
Speaker 4 (01:05:14):
Guys. One last thing for me before we close, At
least as far as I'm concerned. Do you think that
the lack of or rather the lack of motive, uh,
and the difficulty that police are having given you know,
the insane amount of evidence, implies that maybe this was
just a random act.
Speaker 3 (01:05:34):
It's also a possibility. It's it's also a possibility because.
Speaker 4 (01:05:38):
That makes it harder to connect if it's just somebody that. Yeah,
but you know, there there are some things that indicate
there was some premeditation or knowledge of the house, but
that could have been gleaned pretty quickly, you know, maybe
following the kid around at a park and then just say, oh,
a kid lives right over there. You know, let's just
see how this shakes out.
Speaker 2 (01:05:57):
But just remember, since the DNA was in any of
the Japanese databases, this would be the first crime that
the person committed. It was serious enough that he was
caught for, right.
Speaker 4 (01:06:09):
Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (01:06:09):
That's and aguess not lost on me. Yeah, not impossible.
It's not an impossible situation. They're having things where people
have stored up a lot of the evil inside themselves
and they appear to have snapped overnight. In each of
those cases, there's a long there's long build up once
you know what to look for. If you'd like to
learn more about this case, I highly recommend checking out
(01:06:30):
the limited series The Faceless Podcast. It's a seven part
dive into the details, into deep into a lot of the theories.
Full disclosure, this is not a podcast we're associated with creating.
It's just a good source if you want to learn
more with that, Folks, we're gonna We're going to end
it here and we want to know what you think.
(01:06:53):
Is there a likelihood that this case may ever be solved?
Why or why not? And tell us about your experiences
with Japanese law enforcement. We'd like to hear them, and
we aim to be easy to find online.
Speaker 4 (01:07:07):
We do. You can find us at the handle Conspiracy
Stuff on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. On Facebook, we also
have our Facebook group Here's where it gets crazy. You
can also find us under the handle Conspiracy Stuff Show
on Instagram and TikTok if those are your things.
Speaker 2 (01:07:23):
A If you like using your phone, you can speak
to us. Just dial one eight three three std WYTK.
It's a voicemail system. You've got three minutes to leave
a message. Please give yourself a cool nickname and let
us know if we can use your voice and message
on the air. If you've got more to say than
can fit in three minutes, why not instead send us
(01:07:44):
a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 3 (01:07:46):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:08:08):
Stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
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production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Nol.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul, Mission controlled decand most importantly, you are you.
You are here and that makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know. Please listen closely, fellow conspiracy realists.
Today's episode concerns an absolutely horrific brutal crime. It remains
(00:48):
unsolved in the modern day. There's almost nothing in the
way of solid leads in a baffling case that is
stretched for decades now. This episode will contain at times
affect depictions descriptions of violence against children as well as adults.
As such, it may not be suitable for all listeners,
But we talked off air, we believe this story is
(01:10):
important and we hope exploring it on air tonight may
just possibly in some small way, help spread the word
and lead to a breakthrough. This is the story of
what's called the Setagaya family murders and the so called
faceless man. Here are the facts. Setagaya or Setagaya City
(01:32):
as it's referred to often in English.
Speaker 4 (01:34):
It's huge.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
You guys know, Paul and I have spent some time
in Japan. I never made it out there. I haven't
been there yet. But it's called a special ward of Tokyo,
kind of like how you know you have burrows of
New York.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Right.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
We've talked in the past about how big Tokyo is.
It really hit me when we were learning about Setagaya City.
So if you look at a map, it's in the
southwest of Tokyo and it's along the Tama River, so
it's right at the border of the larger Tokyo Metropolis
and Kanagawa Prefecture. We are not native Japanese speakers, I
(02:12):
mean spoiler alert, so please bear with us if we
get some pronunciations wrong.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
Here.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
We do have the fact straight. Special wards are pretty big,
and this is like the biggest one, the first or
second biggest one in the US. This place would not
just be a city in its own right. The population
as of twenty twenty is just a little bit under
one million people. That means it has a population larger
(02:39):
than several US states.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
Right at first, I was thinking, like, is this sort
of akin to a village, But no, this is not
at all. This is much more like a mini country,
almost like within a country. That's interesting.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
And this our story takes place in relatively well to do,
not super opulent, but well to do neighborhood in Sedegaya.
It is a place called Kamisoshigaya. It's think of it
like a western suburb of Tokyo. It's a family place,
a lot of family homes, and.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
You know, following suit with that, it not a lot
necessarily goes on in terms of criminal activity. It's very residential.
It's something you might describe as being a little bit
of a sleepy, kind of peaceful bedroom community. But on
December thirtieth and thirty first of the year two thousand,
that tranquil, peaceful feeling was completely uppended, shattered. At the
(03:39):
very end of the year, during that same period, the
Miyazawa family was murdered during a home invasion.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Hey, yeah, and let's talk about who that family is.
Miko's forty four years old. This is that the father
of the family. Yasuko is the mother. She's forty one
years old. And they are. There were two children, and
eight year old named Nina and a six year old
named ray r Ei. Yeah. I think that therein lies
(04:15):
why this is such a tragic story and why we
all kind of are in this place with our energy today,
because it's a family that was slaughtered in their home
at a time of celebration. The rest of the town,
the rest of the city, all of the whole area,
everybody is preparing to celebrate, and everyone is celebrating basically
(04:39):
at a time when this family is brutally murdered.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Yeah, law enforcement as well is down to skeleton crews.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
You know.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
It's it's the border of one year to the next.
It's the time when people, even in a notoriously overworked
country like Japan or a notoriously overworked what country like
the U, even those even those cultures, try to take
some time off and be with their loved ones. Yasuko,
if you want to learn a little more about the family,
(05:10):
she had worked in cosmetics until she got married and
then she started essentially a cram school. Knowing that you know,
Japan has a very rigorous, quite competitive education system. Suicides
actually quadruple in Japan when some of those exam results
(05:30):
get released, so you need those cram schools. She you
could call it a tutor, but we just want everybody
to know it's a lot more intense than the word
implies in English.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Well yeah, I mean i'd heard that term for the
first time actually in an anime not terribly long ago,
and it wasn't one that I was familiar with. Is
that like specifically kind of a Japanese thing? I mean
usually here they would maybe be referred to as like
taking you know, SAT tutoring or like kind of like
you know, studying in advance for US Pacific test. Can
(06:01):
you talk a little bit about more about that kind
of cultural phenomenon of what a cram school is.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
Sure, yeah, it's a technically it would be like an
extracurricular but because it doesn't occur in you know, the
actual school system, but it's considered a mandate, it's considered
a necessity. There are things like this in Korea as well.
What happens is you are a lot of your future
(06:27):
success is going to be determined by your performance on
these tests. So cram schools, a class in cram school
can last for four to five hours after your actual
school is over.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
So some kids.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Don't get home to even start on their homework until
like nine or ten at night. It's pretty brutal.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
And my understanding is that she taught those classes in English.
Is that correct? That's at least what I had read
on Reddit, which again I don't know if I can
verify that.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
I believe. I believe that is correct.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Matt.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
She again, like this would typically they're going to be
focusing on specific tests, So she probably had some specializations,
and if one of them was language, then it absolutely
makes sense because the best way to learn a language
is to hold discourse in that tongue.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Yeah, and only bring that up to open that door
for later in this episode about potentially a student of hers.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
I think that's wise. Yeah. And the children were, let's
see Nina, that's Inia was in second grade and Ray,
being just six, was a kindergartener. Their bodies were found
at ten forty am on December thirty first, the very
last day of two thousand. Yasuko's mother, who lived in
(07:44):
a house directly next door, came by. She was concerned
because she had tried to call her daughter earlier and
had not been able to reach her on the phone,
and so this is if you look at the houses
and you can see pictures of them, they are they're
pretty much what you would call semi detached houses in
(08:06):
Britain or in the UK, excuse me. And they were
once part of a residential community that had hundreds and
hundreds of homes. But there was this move to create
a park that plays a role in the story. And
as people were getting bought out of the neighborhood, there
were fewer and fewer houses, and they were getting paid
(08:27):
a lot of money what would be called compensation money
to relocate. So this family, the Miyazawa family, Mikio Miazahwa,
his wife and kids. They lived next to his in
laws basically, and they're two of only four houses left
in the neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Yeah, and we should just say, right behind both of
these houses is that park you're speaking about, Ben, And
we're saying how nothing really happens in this town. There's
no brutal crime like this. There are little annoyances like
there are in every other place. And one of those
annoyances was part of that park, right in.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
The skate park skaters. Yeah, and so yeah, this is
the kind of suburb where the big news would be
that someone complained about the skate park right, or someone
was seeing punk and druplic and so on. So this
in this sleepy time what it's horrific because the grandmother
(09:29):
is the one who discovers the scene of the crime
at ten forty am. She goes just next door. The father,
the wife, and the eldest child, the daughter, have been
repeatedly stabbed in incredibly brutal ways, and the youngest family member,
the boy, whose room was on the second floor, have
(09:50):
been strangled, probably first, probably before the rest of the
family was murdered. Tokyo police arrived, they start investigating. It's
an mistigation that continues even today in twenty twenty three.
It's one of the biggest murder investigations in all of
Japanese history. It didn't take them long to determine a
(10:10):
rough timeline. They said the murders occurred probably somewhere around
eleven thirty pm to just after midnight, like twelveh five,
and it looked like a home invasion, as we're going
to see. The police were incredibly thorough credit where it's due.
They have a real solid sense of a timeline. They
have an absurd amount of physical evidence up to and
(10:34):
including DNA. What they do not have, however, is the killer.
And more than twenty years after the murders, this criminal
remains on the loose and possibly could be listening to
this show. Here's where it gets crazy. Let's walk through
this timeline, because again, the police have been they seem
one hundred percent convinced that they know the timeline up
(10:58):
to and including the order of the murders.
Speaker 4 (11:00):
That's right, they believe, or at least the narrative that
the police constructed was that the killer entered through an
open window on the second floor bathroom the back of
the house. The rear of the house is directly next
to a park called Soshigaya Park, and the killer was
believed to have reached the window by climbing up a
(11:21):
tree and then you know, removing the screen from the window.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Strangely, the light in that room was supposedly on, which
is an odd choice for you know, someone entering a home,
you think that window, yeah, yeah, you'd go to a
darkened room or something.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
But they also noted that if this were a robbery,
there's a lot of speculation we'll see because there is.
Weirdly enough, there's a dearth of evidence to support, like
for any kind of motive. We have a lot of
evidence for what happened, but not a lot of evidence
for why it happened, So it could be random, could
(12:01):
be targeted. You know, often in a home invasion, people
have a misconception and they say robbers want to look
for the most wealthy homes. It's not entirely true. Successful
robbers want to look for accessible homes, And with that
in mind, it is weird to go into a lighted window. Specifically,
(12:26):
I've got a picture of the of the house here,
and if you look at it part it's kind of
hard to tell which window this would have been, but
some of the windows are have bars on them, but
you can see there are a lot of trees close
by the park. Really does a butt right to the
(12:48):
rear of the house, I don't know. It makes you
wonder how much they knew about the house in advance.
Right Because the killer went directly to the youngest child's room,
entering the bathroom, and the kid's room was next to
the second floor bathroom, the killer used their bare hands
(13:09):
to strangle the child. Possibly this was to minimize noise.
The father, Mikio down in the living room slash study area.
He clocks something is wrong. He runs up the first
floor stairs. This house has three stories. The mother and
the daughter are already asleep on the third story. The
(13:30):
father catches the murderer. The struggle ensues. We know that
the father injured the killer, and then the killer took
the father's life. He was armed with a knife specific
type of knife, sashimi boto knife, which is used conventionally
(13:50):
to make sashimi.
Speaker 4 (13:51):
A long, very sharp, thin blade, you know, that comes
to a very sharp point.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
And it appears that the killing blow was the most
damaging blow was to the father's head. The knife was
stabbed in with such force that a piece of the
blade actually broke off.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
Yeah, and that was in the police report. Of course.
The killer then went on to attack Yasuko and Nina
with the remaining part of the blade. And also then
I believe obtained an additional knife from the house. This
sashimi blade was when he had brought with him, correct
or was that so okay? So then the second knife
(14:37):
was when he found in the home a different topic
blade called a sountoku knife.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
And part of that is so strange to me, just
when you if you look at the diagram of where
the victims were found, right, Ray was in it was
in his bed, That's where he was found. The father
was found at the bottom of the staircase, kind of
near the door air and then the mother and child
were found up at the top of the staircase, kind
(15:06):
of to the side of it. I guess, around a
bit of a corner and.
Speaker 4 (15:12):
Over the daughter.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Yeah, the mother attempting to protect the daughter. Just imagining
where it all took place. Right, If you're a crime
scene investigator and you're trying to come up with all
those facts that we just stated, just that's a tough
thing to do. But it's also, in my mind, really
hard to completely get a picture of what exactly happened.
(15:36):
And you know where the killer came in. But in
this case, we're going to keep saying it. There's so
much evidence that's left at this scene that you really
could kind of piece it together.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
I want to get to that part. Yeah, we're talking.
The extraordinary thing here is that the killer does not
leave the scene of the crime. The killer stays for
at least two hours, possibly up to ten, the entire
time they are we're certain its mail the entire time,
this murderer is leaving tons of evidence, using the family
(16:13):
computer or hopping online around one in the morning, eating
and drinking stuff from the fridge. He disconnected the landline,
and that landline disconnection is you know, what actually led
to the discovery of the body so recently after the incident.
If we think in terms of, you know, the other
variables of family murdered like this during a massive holiday
(16:37):
could have gone unreported for much longer. So he drank
a bunch of barley tea, we know, he ate melon
that was around. He ate four little ice cream containers.
He used the restroom and he didn't flush, so they
had his feces as well. And then he also used
(16:58):
first aid kits. They found, howel with blood on them
some of his uh. He napped on the sofa in
the living room on the sec They think, yeah, yeah, they.
Speaker 4 (17:09):
Think to me, this is the kind of thing you
picture in like, you know, a silent Silence of the
Lambs type film, you know, where it's like a killer
who is just so callous and or unconcerned with being
caught that they just linger around, you know, and then
hang out and like sort of live in this you
know what I'm thinking of. It was not Silence of
(17:30):
the Lambs. It was actually the it's called it was
the original Hannibal Elector film by Ryan De Palma called Manhunter,
And there is a killer who kind of does this,
who like goes into homes as home invasions, kills the family,
and then sort of hangs around and just sort of
like occupies the life of that family. And that's just
utterly chilling to think about. You also have to wonder
(17:53):
if there's some deep seated psychological issues at work here
they would call someone to be so unconcerned with being caught,
I'd really quickly affair. Paul corrected me. Actually, Manhunter was
directed by Michael Mann, not Brian De Palma. But I
do kind of I don't know, maybe I've switched those
guys up in my head. Sometimes they have similar stylistic choices,
(18:15):
but really cool film.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Well let's get let's stay over one second, just because
I do think you're on something there, Nol. It does
feel like either this person was extremely comfortable with death
and murder and murdering people to the point where they
would just stick around like this, or I think you're right,
something is really off, there's a some kind of state,
(18:37):
mental state that this person is in where they're not
even registering really mistakes or what's happening.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Unless you have repeatedly been in situations where you take
people's lives. We have to naturally assume that a perpetrator
of crimes like this will experience shock, a profound amount
of shock, possibly disassociation.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
You know.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
Mental state definitely comes into play here. I agree with
you guys.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
They might be losing a lot of blood quite.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
Possibly, Yeah, but they wouldn't have lost enough blood to
impede their escape because, as we'll see, they got away.
The murderer did some things that also would ordinarily point
toward motive. But we'll see why. This is difficult to
say anything conclusively. The house had been ransacked, like you
(19:35):
know how it is. If you've lived in a family house,
you probably have a drawer somewhere with valuable paperwork, right
or certificates, bills, utilities, etc. All the jazz, all that stuff. Well,
the drawers containing that stuff they were torn open. There
were papers scattered everywhere. Some papers have been dumped in
(19:56):
the bath, some in the commode. And some money was taken,
specifically money from the cram school where people were paying cash,
but not all of it. The killer actually left a
lot of money, and they also left a ton of
items that they had brought to the house. The broken
knife was found on the scene. Uh, there was this
(20:18):
stuff was on the sofa, a scarf, a hip bag
kind of like think like a fanny pack or sometimes
they call them a bum pack. Uh, a sweater, a jacket, hat, gloves, shoes,
two handkerchiefs, one of which was probably used to wield
the knife, and one that may have been used kind
of like a mask.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Ye. Again, one has been ironed, right, mm hmm, it's
really weird. Uh.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
The also the handkerchiefs had Drakard noir on them.
Speaker 4 (20:49):
It's just weird that now.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Colge Yeah, the colone, yeah, which has a very specific scent,
right it does.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
And you'd have to imagine if that there could be
DNA involved in that as well, well, maybe sweat or
whatever it might be. I mean, good lord. You know
you point out in your research that it's like the
killer went out of his way or went out of
their way to leave evidence. And I think the previous
conversation that we have maybe in the case another element
there might be that it wasn't that they were going
(21:16):
out of their way to leave evidence, but just that
there was a lack of awareness, you know, a lack
of care because of any number of reasons. We'll discuss
further and get into.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Or and this is just conjecture on my part. Guys,
the killer was awoken suddenly after sleeping on that sofa
or falling asleep by the grandmother and had to just
GTFO and just left everything there on the sofa. That's
just I think a possibility.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
It is a possibility. There are also shoeprints. We know
the killer was wearing size eleven white running shoes. These
were type of shoes that were manufactured in South Korea.
No shoes of this type and this size were sold
in Japan. Because what the police did after this was
to track down the provenance of any of these items.
(22:07):
They found that some of the clothing, not the shoes,
but some of the other clothing, and that broken sashimi
knife had both been purchased in Kanagawa Prefecture. They analyzed
the poop, they saw that the murderer in the twenty
four hours leading up to the crimes had eaten string
beans and sesame seeds. They know a lot about this criminal.
(22:30):
There's also you'll see a report that the computer went
online twice, once at one eighteen am in the wee hours,
and another a second time at ten am. But police
now believe that that ten am hop online with the
computer was because the grandmother had perhaps accidentally moved the
(22:52):
mouse when she discovered the crime scene. They did some
good police work here, and of course people are people
are baffled. People on closure. There's no shortage of independent
investigators who will allege that there was incompetence or even
corruption on the part of the Japanese police. But we
(23:16):
see that they they did digging that led to some
pretty important breakthroughs, like they found the provenance where the
knife and the clothing was manufactured. It turns out that
the sweater left there is pretty rare. Only one hundred
and thirty versions of this sweater were made and sold,
(23:37):
and police were able to track down twelve different people
who purchased those sweaters. Imagine those conversations. You bought a
sweater and the police are at your door, you know
what I mean. That's a very strange way. That's a
very strange day to have none of those people, in
the opinion of the authorities, could have committed those murders.
(24:00):
And there's one more piece of evidence that.
Speaker 4 (24:07):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
We'll see what everybody thinks. But this really surprised me.
This is not what I was expecting. We'll fill you
in after a word from our sponsors.
Speaker 4 (24:23):
We've returned.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
Let's talk about the hip bag, the bum bag, the
Fandi pack.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Uh. Yeah, so we've already seen with other pieces of
evidence that were recovered that signs are pointing to this
person probably not living full time in Japan, or maybe
not being from Japan and being here as a foreigner
in one way or another. And that's the same thing
you find with the bag, because inside there is sand
(24:52):
that is not from Japan.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Yeah, and this is impressive. You can trace sand. You
can trace sand. I mean somewhere out there there's a database,
likely multiple databases, of different types of sand. This sand,
as you said, Matt, does not come from Japan, any
part of Japan. It is all the way across the Pacific.
(25:17):
This sand originates from the Nevada Desert, most likely from
an area around Edwards Air Force Base.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
WHOA, right, it's now strange. Well, let's talk about that,
because you know someone who is military or ex military
at least trained with a knife in that way, that
would make sense for the severity of you know, this
crime and the cool potential cool displayed after such a
(25:46):
horrendous set of acts. So I don't know, that's interesting, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
And I looked around to to see what of US
military bases are located in Tokyo, and there are seven
US military facilities of some.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Sort anything near Kanagawa.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Not necessarily supernir, but there is obviously US military presence
in Japan. Police have the DNA, they have the fingerprints,
they have bloody fingerprints, and they of course they ran
this through their files. Whomever this person is, their info
is not available in any of those databases, so we
(26:36):
know this person, whomever they may be, never got booked
for a previous crime in Japan.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
Yeah, that's just really troubling that they're not in any databases,
or at least that the Japanese police who are investigating
the crime have access to right any of those databases.
Then I'm sure there's cross reverencing that was done, but
I wonder how wide that DNA has been distributed over
the years to look at other databases. It also makes
(27:06):
me wonder about the friends of genealogy. Maybe there's something
there with this case. But let's talk about what we
know about the killer.
Speaker 3 (27:14):
Yeah, let's also note on the database thing that one
of the big questions I have at least two is
just on the just on the providence of that sand
is it. Is it enough for Japan to convince the
US to run this stuff through military database?
Speaker 2 (27:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (27:33):
Why not?
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Yes, yes, I'm saying yes, I'm saying yes as well,
let's go.
Speaker 4 (27:39):
But we didn't.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
We didn't find at least so far, we haven't. We
haven't found any evidence of that or whatever happened, They
didn't set up, it didn't set off a match. And
like you were saying, Matt, based on this, the Tokyo
police have made some rough estimates about the person, some
of which are controver vial.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
The first is the height. So the height of the
person is around one hundred and seventy centimeters, which is
five feet five point seven inches, so about five foot
six so a fairly short mail. We also know that
this person was very thin. They found because of their
(28:24):
clothes that were left behind. They found that his waist
was rather small.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Yeah, yeah, And they also believe that he would have
been born sometime between nineteen sixty five to nineteen eighty five,
conjecturing that he was a younger person fifteen to thirty
five years old at the time of the crime. This
is based on their estimates regarding the level of physical
fitness required to get into the house and commit the murders,
(28:50):
and the idea of him having a slim build is
also based.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
On that, yeah, climbing a tree to get into second
story window.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
In a relatively small window at that so he was
also Unfortunately, this is part of the research that has
to be done that they looked at the bodies. Medical
examiners and detectives came in and they concluded that the
killer was most likely right handed due to the nature
of the wounds. As we said here, there's a lot
(29:19):
of blood, and you can learn quite a bit from
human blood. The killer had Type A blood, so that
means they could not have been a member of the
Miyazawa family. That's one of the things they had to check,
you know. Unfortunately, the killer is male, and there was
some in depth discussion of the killer's genealogical or genetic background.
(29:41):
Whether they were of mixed race, because originally you'll see
reports where they say the maternal DNA indicates some European lineage,
and the first way it was phrased was the mother
is of European descent, possibly from a South European country
near the Mediterranean or Adriatic Sea. Paternal DNA shows a
(30:05):
father of East Asian descent. However, we have to remember
two thousand was two decades ago. DNA testing, as you
guys know from various shows VP'D has come a long
way since then, and it wasn't like testing at this time.
(30:25):
One of the primary objections I've seen to it is
that they're saying, well, maternal DNA could just be an
ancestor on the mother's side, you know what I mean,
Like if there's a small amount of European DNA, then
I don't know. And it's shady. The way the public
got that news about the DNA. It wasn't from the police. Originally,
(30:46):
it was from someone who worked at a university that
was also testing it, and they leaked it to the press.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Well, yeah, and now that we're twenty three years on
and we've got things like twenty three and me and
all of these companies, like, why not test that DNA
all over the place because they've still got samples. I mean,
put that thing in every database, see what you find.
Speaker 4 (31:08):
You might get a ping from a known relative who
might be able to help point out and the whereabouts
or have information. You know, you go interrogate this relative
and they're be like, oh, yeah, yeah, cousin Steve or
whatever was always kind of weird, you know.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Which, Yeah, was that Edward's Air Force base?
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Mm hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
And there there's another thing. There's a specific piece of
the DNA that is more common in people from China
or Korea. This goes back to what you were setting
up earlier, Matt, the idea that this person may not
this criminal may not have been a Japanese national, or
(31:48):
may not be based in Japan or from there. And
this analysis led the police to contact Interpol because they
currently one of the prevailing opinions is that this killer
might not be a Japanese national, might not even be
present in Japan anymore. Because remember Japan as a big
(32:11):
destination for tourism for kids on gap year, for international business,
a lot of people visit Japan or stay for a
number of months or stay for a number of years.
And as we said right now, this is one of
the largest murder investigations in the entire history of Japan.
We're talking the number keeps changing as time goes on.
(32:33):
Two hundred and sixty thousand individual investigators with eyes on
this case over the years, thousands and thousands of pieces
of evidence, more than like twelve thousand individual pieces, thousands
and thousands of tips that so far haven't really gone
anywhere nothing. That's why over the years the press started
(32:54):
calling this criminal the faceless man. They also used another
phrase for this that some of us may have heard,
which I don't love, called the Goldilocks murders. Gets heard
it called that it's gross, but I get it. Yeah, yeah,
it feels somehow disrespectful.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Yeah. I want to mention something that was brought up
in some of the reporting, and it's something I didn't
think about, and I honestly can't see really the relevance here,
but I would just want to get your guys opinion.
Some of the reportings stated that the initial team of
investigators that went to this scene were essentially a reserve
(33:36):
unit or something because of basically everybody's on holiday, so
this is like the team that the B team or
C team that comes in to do crime ZNE investigation,
and all of the parts, basically all the information we're
working on was based on this team's findings. I don't
see how that could really have an effect on, you know,
(33:58):
the stuff we're analyzing right now and the things we're discussing.
But just want to put that out there to you guys.
Do you think there's a possibility that either stuff was
tainted or seen wrong or.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
I just don't. I mean, yes, of course there's a possibility,
for sure. I just so many opportunities, various opportunities to
get clean DNA, to get clean samples. I mean, he
left poop in the toilet, you know. I mean, I
just don't understand. It's like it's like a slam dunk.
It just seems I mean, you know, I think this
(34:30):
is what it seems like.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
If the investigation had not continued for so long, with
so many people re examining different pieces of it, then
I could see a stronger possibility that maybe a reserve
unit did the did the wrong thing. But we have
to remember too, a reserve unit is not necessarily like
the JV version. Yeah, the squad. They're they're the skeleton crew.
(34:54):
They're the folks who drew the short straw, and we'll
just have to celebrate New Year's next time.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Exact I mean, well, and everything, you know, even in
the year two thousand, everything is digitized, right, So even
the stuff that we're examining right now, it's the it's
the same. It's not the exact same, right, crime scene
photos and all of those pieces of evidence that were collected,
but it's very similar. It's digitized media that everybody else
is looking at of what the place looks like and
(35:21):
what was there?
Speaker 4 (35:21):
Wait, sorry, was this was this ninety nine rolling into
two thousand or two thousand, early into two thousand.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Two thousand into two thousand and one, two thousand and one.
Speaker 4 (35:29):
Okay, so it wasn't amidst the whole y two K chaos.
I mean, not that that matters. I'm just saying, you know,
the why two K killer I could just see that.
Oh yeah, I can see that as well.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
I mean, people can be kind of soulless when they
start putting those names on things.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
But even arguing that somebody lost there.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Because of the name, to mention things like Goldilocks and faceless.
But I just see, you know, that kind of stuff
can't be exploitative.
Speaker 4 (35:54):
I just meant specifically, if it were during that time,
the argument could be made that people were really like
going bananas, you know, because of paranoia about all the
things you're describing. I mean like digital you know, computers
resetting and all of that stuff. But there's all kinds
of doomsday preppers and stuff. I mean, I know that's
not that would happen, but that's just what occurred to me.
It's a good observation too.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
I mean that's because again, nothing occurs in a vacuum.
And that's why there are no shortage of theories attempting
to explain this crime. And to be very clear with everybody,
none of the theories that we're about to discuss have
been proven, and we'll dive into those theories after a
word from our sponsor. Theories, Okay, the killer's motive, motives,
(36:45):
whatever they may be, remain elusive today. Again, none of
these theories have been conclusively proven. That's why there's still theories.
There are some people who are convinced they figured it out,
which we can talk about. But right now, I think
the biggest thing on The biggest one that you'll hear,
especially in the early days, was suspicion of a robbery.
Speaker 4 (37:07):
Right.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Yeah, Given the fact that this is a pretty wealthy
area we talked about at the beginning there, and the
fact that the house that we're talking about here, the
one that got entered into, was fairly isolated out by
that park, it would make sense that it would be
targeted in at least a moment of opportunity.
Speaker 4 (37:30):
Right.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Maybe you're at the park and you see these kind
of loan houses right here, and you think, oh, I'm
going to go in there and take everything that I
can that's not locked down.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
Yeah, I mean, maybe we know that. One of the
theories argues they draw on all kinds of stuff. They
say that there was a person aware of the compensation
being paid to relocate right from the park, and that
they have believed that that money existed in cash in
(38:05):
the house. Maybe that was part of it, which is,
you know, an attempt to explain the paperwork being shuffled
around the fact that some money was taken, but again
other money was left on the scene, and the Miyazawas
had sold their home, but they just hadn't moved yet.
Speaker 4 (38:24):
This.
Speaker 3 (38:25):
Somehow, this let some people to speculate there could have
been a hired killer and it could have been a hit.
The biggest proponent of this is an investigative journalist named
Fuyima Ichi Hashi, who claims to have solved the case.
Speaker 4 (38:41):
I don't understand the whole idea of how I mean,
this is the hit. This is the least successful hit
man I could ever imagine hiring, you know, I mean again,
it's insane, and this person hasn't been caught yet. But
you know, if you're a hired killer, you're gonna come.
You're gonna pop in, pop out, do your business, and
leave no trace.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
Yeah, ideally unless you have been unless you have been
paid to do specific things like to kill someone in
a specific way, or to remove or lead or remove
or deposit specific items. I tend to agree with you
because it is very clear that at least two of
the victims, the mother and daughter were brutalized, were stabbed
(39:24):
and attacked after they had died, far after they had died,
So this could be indicative of an emotional motivation for
the crimes. If someone's doing a job, then they're probably
not going to stick around.
Speaker 4 (39:35):
Remember that other family murder case that we did relatively recently,
where the bodies were posed sort of like a creepy sculpture, like,
and we talked a lot about the motivations there, you know,
as to whether this was done to like send a message,
you know, maybe you're even like paying extra to get
someone to do some of these things to really like,
(39:57):
you know, make it appear as as though something different happened,
or as though there was some sort of cultic reasoning
behind what was, you know, ultimately just a murder. I'm
not saying they're they're that similar, but it's something to
think about. We did talk about a similar angle on
that story, and the name of the family is eluding
me on that.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
One, the Sherman double murders that's right there in Canada. Yeah,
I was thinking the same thing with that murder in Toronto.
It's actually specifically what I was thinking because we had
talked in that episode about how it could be possible
that someone with an emotional motive paid a professional operator
to you know, to do that posing you're talking about,
(40:38):
which is not out of the realm of possibility.
Speaker 4 (40:41):
I agree.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Well, let's let's talk about this. This emotional reaction here.
So let's say it was a murder for higher situation
the person was supposed to go in or maybe it
wasn't murder for hire. Maybe it was get that money.
That's what the job was initially, and you know the
money is supposed to lead that was inside that house
(41:04):
that was given to them to move right, it's for
selling their house. Whoever sent the murder for higher believe
that was in there and they just wanted that money
and maybe that money wasn't at the house and this person,
you know, it made this person extremely angry that now
they have you know, been seen by an entire family
(41:25):
of people. And then it turns into the situation it
turned into that's a possibility, But that seems that seems
pretty far fetched to me, at least to my.
Speaker 4 (41:36):
Lot of it.
Speaker 3 (41:37):
THENDS to get there is the issue, right, like we
we would have to have a lot of things work
out just so.
Speaker 4 (41:43):
And the individual just you know, to be annoyed to
that degree would specifically refer to like, oh, now I've
been put in this position where I'm at risk. So
to continuously exhibit behavior that just puts them further and
further at risk just doesn't really line up.
Speaker 3 (41:59):
I want to talk little bit about Ichi Hashi just
so everyone knows where this investigator is coming from. Chihachi
has bona fides and has extensively researched other cases in
an incredible way. Their conclusion here remains controversial, and this
is one of the people who believes they solve the case.
Speaker 4 (42:18):
They say in.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
Their book on this that they got in contact with
a South Korean national who is only called K, like
the letter K in the book, and that this person
K pointed ichi Hashi to the direction of the actual killer,
a South Korean hitman who is given the pseudonym R
(42:42):
like the letter R in this book. And ichi Hashi
says that they spoke to or they excuse me, they
say they made contact with R, who is a former
member of the South Korean military. Further, ichi Hashi says
they take the man's fingerprints and these are a match
(43:04):
with those collected at the crime seen by the police.
That's one author saying this not a member of Japanese
law enforcement.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
If that's true, then the author needs to like, what
the heck? If that's true, why has there been no
arrest made?
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Exactly there would if that was true there would have.
Speaker 4 (43:25):
To be we talked about the Buddhist statue.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Not yet, we haven't gone to the Buddhist y.
Speaker 4 (43:30):
I'm sorry. This is just interesting and sinister, right, I mean,
unless I'm misreading it, the idea that perhaps the killer
may have even returned to the scene of the crime.
Speaker 3 (43:40):
Maybe, Yeah, that's an interesting way. I mean, there's also
I think this is something we're building toward a little
bit earlier. There's the concept of possible revenge. Maybe someone
felt emotionally scorn, maybe they resented the husband, maybe they
resented the mother, something like that. We just we don't know.
It's well, let's lock get into that. Yeah, the cram school.
(44:03):
Let's get into the Cram school.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
Right, because there there's possible there's a possibility here that
a five to six, very thin person who was potentially,
you know, pretty young, was the person who did this,
and that could be a student, right possibly.
Speaker 4 (44:22):
It doesn't that stuff seem like something a kid would
do eating ice cream, you know, drinking like you know,
not flushing the toilet, not flushing the toilet, just eating
the junk food, you know. Just yeah, man, okay, go on, Well.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
To me, like that's that's where most of this points
just in my mind that it's a student that was
either angry because he was unable to perform on whatever
test he was cramming for, right, or he developed emotional
feelings for his teacher or you know, his tutor, which
is something an adolescent person going through puberty might do.
Speaker 4 (44:58):
But what about the sand from from the United States,
and and and uh, you know the whole they were
likely not a Japanese citizen.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
Maybe they were studying and you're right.
Speaker 4 (45:08):
That's exactly right, you're studying abroad, And then you would
be you would have because it's a private school. This
isn't a government but you pay to go to the
school out.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
The Cram schools, yeah, are private, private outfits. But then, uh,
to play point counterpoint with this, uh, it seems absolutely
unreasonable that the authorities would not have interviewed families associated
with the Cram school.
Speaker 4 (45:34):
Oh yeah, well it's true, there wouldn't have been so.
Speaker 3 (45:36):
Well as Mikio co workers. I mean, I think it's
I think it's a very valid argument. I was thinking
the same too. We just didn't if they talked to
the families and possible students at the Cram School to
get information which they absolutely did.
Speaker 4 (45:54):
Then they would have clocked.
Speaker 3 (45:56):
Something, right, I mean maybe the thing we don't know
is they test everybody's fingerprints, right.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
Well, yeah, or DNA or you know, any of that,
And I doubt they did. I doubt they went around
asking for DNA tests from any of those people.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
They may have later in later decades, right as DNA
becomes uh, DNA technology becomes more affordable and more sophisticated.
And I see the idea, like we can we can
interpret that behavior after the murders as the behavior of
an adolescent. But again, like so many other people, we're
(46:34):
we're attempting to build out possibilities based on very limited information.
Speaker 4 (46:39):
Really, and again, it could also have been the behavior
of an adult exhibiting some psychosis. You know, there's some
some fugue states some you know, uh yeah, one hundred percent. Wow. Now,
But when you said that, though, Matt, I was immediately like, yes,
but then you're rippen. Of course, they would have meticulously
(47:01):
gone through This isn't a massive population. I mean, you know,
of students going to the school, they could have they
could have run through those possibilities relatively quickly.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
They also ran through the skateboarders nearby. We shall mention
this before you get to the buddhiat statue. So there's
a skate park in the area and kids having fun,
you know, trying to do kickflips and Olly's and all that,
and Mikio the father, had complained about the noise from
(47:34):
the skate park, which is, you know, something a dad
in a suburb will do. But this led some people
to say, hey, because he complained about the skate park,
did he trigger or anger. Some of the local skateboarders
and police actually went and investigated whether that was the case,
(47:57):
and they, I don't want to say, shook down. They
questioned the local skateboarders and again they came up with buppkis.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
Well, let's talk about this too. Didn't we discuss this
in a previous episode, The culture around police investigations in
Japan and how it is very different.
Speaker 4 (48:14):
Ah, I would say that for the let's do it now. Yeah, sorry,
I know, An, you're right, No, you're right.
Speaker 3 (48:19):
You're right, because one of the concerns is like, that's
why we're saying they're doing for what we can tell
good police work at the top. Japan has an incredibly
high conviction rate. Essentially, if they like you for a crime,
you are going to be found guilty. And their conviction
(48:40):
rate has raised a lot of questions over the years,
a lot of very valid questions about how much emphasis
is put on determining the true guilt or innocence versus
how much is put on successfully closing cases.
Speaker 4 (48:53):
But then to that end is maybe the preponderance there
ponerance is a lack of the glutt of evidence maybe
a bad thing because they can't just pin it on
anybody because they have so much damn evidence, so it
has to really fit. So the fact that they can't
that you'd think, in other words, if maybe they were
less evidence, they would have found some fall guy to
(49:15):
pin it on. But in this case, because there's so
much evidence that they can't find the real guy, they
can't pin it on anybody.
Speaker 3 (49:21):
Yeah, there's also there are also some behaviors or procedures
of Japanese law enforcement that other countries would find either
unethical or incorrect. And so for anybody listening in law
enforcement outside of Japan, tell us what you think about this.
Speaker 4 (49:43):
This is from Freakonomics.
Speaker 3 (49:45):
Highly recommend Freakonomics just if you want to learn interesting
things about the world. Japan has this very high conviction rate.
Japan famously has a low crime rate too.
Speaker 4 (49:57):
Right.
Speaker 3 (49:59):
Apparently, if Japanese authorities, for instance, discover a body in
a public space, and let's say it as stab wounds,
it's clearly a violent death, they'll set standards like a
ticking clock for how much time they have to find
a suspect. If they don't find a suspect by that time,
it's not an unsolved murder. It's reclassified as a abandoned body.
(50:23):
So the case of manslaughter or murder is no longer
officially on the books. They got cooked, right, So what
do you think if you're a law enforcement professional in
some other country? Does this happen? Should this happen? Is
this the right way to approach things? This also reminds
me of our older episode of The Monster with twenty
one faces. You guys remember that one?
Speaker 4 (50:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (50:43):
Yeah? And what does it say that this is a
twenty three year old case and there's still not a
single suspect.
Speaker 3 (50:51):
Right exactly, And because of public pressure, of course, and
because of the just horrific nature of the crime, they
cannot do a reclassification trick on this one. You simply
cannot try to frame this as anything other than a
multiple murder.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
Well, and that's another thing. Imagine that you live in
the area, and on the front page of your paper
the day you wake up, you know, on January first,
or you know, I think it was, you would have
been really on the thirty first or the first when
when you read about this thing, it's like the first
day of a new year. This is the major case
(51:33):
that's on the front page. You would remember that right
going forward. And that's why I think there's so much
that's been written about this case.
Speaker 3 (51:42):
Yeah, I agree with that. And now we know that
the case definitely stayed right in the mind of Japan,
in the in the mind of the community, and I
think now we can let's get to that that statue.
So a few months after the murders, right in December
thirtieth thirty first of two thousand, in April of two
(52:04):
thousand and one, someone went to the neighborhood, went near
the house, and they left this two foot tall Buddhist
statue there.
Speaker 4 (52:15):
And you can pull up a picture of this. It's not.
Speaker 3 (52:21):
It's not a statue that I was familiar with beforehand,
but it was definitely. It seems to have been left
there in reference to the murders.
Speaker 2 (52:30):
Okay, in reference to the murders, like in honor of
the victims.
Speaker 3 (52:34):
Or unclear, And they still don't know who gave the no.
I think is probably why it sticks out in your
mind too. They still don't know who put the statue there, Like,
is it like a commemoration where you would see at
a roadside accident.
Speaker 4 (52:47):
Yeah, I mean, you know, it is the protector of
lost or dead children, but it also I don't know,
maybe that's just my or our brain's kind of filtering
it through pop culture. The idea of a you know,
murderer returning to the scene and leaving some token, you know,
that's where my brain goes. But that's probably the least
likely option. This person is probably long long gone. I
(53:11):
just can't you know, again, the police really treated this
with a lot of attention to detail and fastidiousness, and
I just can't imagine if this person wasn't utterly in
the wind, that they wouldn't have, you know, gotten a
whiff of of this person's whereabouts.
Speaker 3 (53:28):
Yeah, this is a Jizo bodhisatfa, which is, as we mentioned,
considered to be a guardian of dead children. Police, you know,
still desperate for leads. Police printed thousands, thousands of posters
with a photo of this statue, and you can pull
up you can pull up one of the posters. Now
it's in Japanese, but you can see it online. And
(53:50):
they were hoping members of the public could come forward
with information, right because again, any unanswered question might be
the thing that breaks the case. This set. It's difficult
to say just how much this rocked the country of Japan.
It triggered changes in the law. For a long time,
(54:12):
Japan had a statute of limitations, and as time went on,
relative survivors, the grandmother who found the bodies and remains alive,
they were horrified by the idea that due to the
statute of limitations, this murderer might be found after that
statute had expired and then they couldn't be prosecuted. This case,
(54:36):
in fact, is the primary reason Japan removed that statue
of limitations in twenty ten, which I think is a
positive change. They didn't remove it for everything. They removed
it in cases where conviction might lead to the death penalty,
and of course Japan still ast the death penalty and
they do it in a very strange way. We talked
about this before on air. I think, like how they
(54:58):
execute you. They don't tell you what day it is, Yep, surprise,
they just show up. Could be several months, could be
several years, one day it's the day.
Speaker 2 (55:10):
It's an interesting psychological technique.
Speaker 4 (55:15):
You're a mind freak.
Speaker 3 (55:18):
And while we're on the subject, you can read a
bunch of flyers that have come out over time. Detectives
have put them in, Retired detectives have put them in.
Supporters of the family action groups have printed pamphlets. People
hold demonstrations at the train station near the neighborhood or
near the house, and police are still handing out flyers
(55:41):
each year around December, around the anniversary of the crimes.
In twenty nineteen, police made plans to tear down the house.
You know, Japan and general treats older houses differently from
what we might expect in the West, but families and
supporters appealed the decision and so the house still stands today.
(56:05):
You can see a video tour from when one of
the survivors opened the house to the press and it's
just heartbreaking, man. I don't say it lightly. It's people
who are living just a wonderful dream of a life
just cut short in such a horrible, horrible way. And
(56:27):
this is the same thing that has haunted investigators like
we were talking off here. Takashi Sushida, who headed the
initial investigation, still visits the site regularly, still goes over
the clues obsessively hoping to get a break in the case,
and has become a very close friend of the grandmother.
Speaker 4 (56:47):
Yeah again, I think, well, maybe we could be visit
just for a few seconds, this idea of the super
high conviction rate. I don't think we're necessarily making any
accusations there, but is the conjecture that, perhaps, especially in
a part of the country that maybe is a little
(57:07):
bit more iron fisted in terms of the way they govern,
that maybe some of these cases are being pinned on
fall individuals. Is that, oh, absolutely okay? Just to make
you putting them all on the tables, making.
Speaker 3 (57:19):
Sure interrogations are not recorded, stress positions are used, they
will lock you up four days.
Speaker 4 (57:27):
Apparently.
Speaker 3 (57:27):
The kind of thing is if they're actually arresting you
and detaining you, and they like you for the crime,
they'll just do their best to get.
Speaker 4 (57:35):
You to say you did it unless they find someone
they like better.
Speaker 3 (57:39):
Yeah, unless they find unless there's a new bell of
the criminal ball.
Speaker 4 (57:42):
Yes, so it is unusual in this case, they wouldn't
have even had a true person of interest. And I
think maybe I was right, or we're all leading the
same direction that the absolute overwhelming amount of evidence could
have been a hindrance to them being able to do that.
Speaker 3 (57:58):
That may be the case. We are not We're not
able to make the call on that. There was something
really interesting, Sushida said. A few years back, you're or
two back, he said the same thing we're saying earlier.
Speaker 4 (58:15):
DNA has come a long way.
Speaker 3 (58:18):
And he said, why haven't we used DNA to attempt
to make a facial composite, right, which is technology that
now exists. It's very imperfect, but it's something he's saying,
let's give a face to this faceless man as we record.
That hasn't happened. I don't know how much how much
health help it would be, because we've talked about it
(58:40):
in the past. Those creating a face from DNA evidence.
Speaker 4 (58:45):
Is I don't know.
Speaker 3 (58:48):
It doesn't account for anything that might happen as a
result of environment.
Speaker 4 (58:52):
You know, or lifestyle.
Speaker 3 (58:54):
It's it's still is something and I think at this
point you got to do something right.
Speaker 2 (58:59):
Yeah, I think for genealogy is the way to go,
Like just send out that DNA for sampling testing, added
to the database, see where where those connections are, and
I think you you'll get as close as you'll ever
get to solving this thing. Let's talk quickly, guys. We
didn't even mention on the night of the murders, and
(59:19):
like a couple of days before the murders, and even
like the morning after, there were eyewitness accounts of somebody
wearing this strange I call it a fisherman's hat. I
don't know what hat it's like, yeah, but it's you know,
the material isn't very stiff. It's like a I don't
(59:39):
know how to describe it.
Speaker 4 (59:43):
The top sometimes you can tuck things. I agree.
Speaker 2 (59:48):
My grandfather wore one all the time, so I always
always think of it like that. And then the jacket.
There were I went this accounts of somebody matching that
description all over the place, all over town, at a
train station, at what else, getting into a cab. There
was a cab, a taxi cab that left that early
early that morning. Three men got in, so it was
(01:00:11):
a shared ride in a taxi cab and one of
the three men was bleeding all over the taxi. They
left a bunch of blood behind. Is it possible that
that's a person that got into that cab. I think
it might be possible. There was one eyewitness account that
said around eleven thirty pm on the night of the murders,
(01:00:31):
somebody was hurriedly, like rushing in the direction of the house,
not directly towards the house, right, because houses kind of isolated.
Maybe that's not what they actually saw or where this
person was headed. But they matched that same description with
the hat in the jacket.
Speaker 3 (01:00:47):
If the eyewitnesses are reliable, right from twenty three years ago, right, Yeah,
But I mean it's a good point. It also calls
to mind again the Sherman murders, where we had to
talk about eyewitness accounts of the guy walking some unknown
individual and then yeah, so the police were I mean
they did amazing things. Being able to trace down the
(01:01:09):
clothing is impressive. In the sand, yeah, and the sand
there's some secrets there. There's like a sand repository. Now
we know there's not one, but multiple people who just know,
like a cartoonishly disturbing amount about sand. I don't think
(01:01:32):
it was until quite recently that we learned there are
different grades of sand, and there's good sand and then
there's the bad sand, and you can only build with
certain types of sand.
Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Guys, what do you think about a traveling a student
who was traveling maybe with their father or mother who
was in the military and was studying going to the
Cram school, Like maybe you came from the United States
from that exact area near Edward's Air Force Base, and
was a student and was angry for one reason or
(01:02:01):
another and did this.
Speaker 4 (01:02:04):
And not just I mean, yes, that's where that's I
think where it's easy to have your mind go in
that direction. But I think this is this is a
severely disturbed and demented individual that could have been set
off by any number of perceived slights, perhaps you know,
or being feeling as though they were on some sort
(01:02:25):
of outsider The idea of revenge, I mean, revenge is complicated.
You know, It's like, is it enough just to kill somebody?
Do you want it to do? You want to make
them suffer? All of that stuff. But this, to me,
and the behavior indicates just an incredibly deranged individual, and
that it would have been, you know, the kind of
thing that maybe even they just did for fun. One.
Speaker 3 (01:02:47):
It does not seem to be a professional operation, right,
just based on some of the just the lack of
operational hygiene. Right, It's a very cold thing to call it,
but you get the gist to I think, because of
the lack of really compelling evidence, it's easy for us
to put kind of tropes on this thing, the trope
(01:03:11):
of the like the scorned disassociated kid or the you know,
almost like a Columbine kind of thing that's very familiar
to us here in the US because mass shootings continue
and it's a very familiar concept, and it's quite possible.
The damning thing is, we just don't have enough detail there.
(01:03:35):
If it's someone traveling from abroad, which I also do
feel is there's a strong likelihood of that, then if
they are associated with the military, just again, why is
that DNA not sent out, as you said, Matt, everywhere,
especially to US military. I mean, is there something they
want to stay away from because of the crimes committed
by US nationals in Okinawa and in other areas.
Speaker 4 (01:03:58):
It's a very sensitive supp I.
Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
Think that's exactly what it is. Perhaps, Yeah, especially in
the moment when this occurred and they're like, well, there
does seem to be some there's evidence that does seem
to tie this person potentially to the United States. Well, okay, great,
what is that evidence? Sand that was in one of
the things. Yeah, get out of here. You can't you
can't have access to any of our records, you know.
(01:04:21):
I mean, I don't know. Maybe that's what it feels
like to me.
Speaker 3 (01:04:24):
And this is one of those cases where we cannot
conclusively give an answer, but we hope very much that
there is one. As we record today, there is a
reward for twenty million yen, the largest reward in Japanese history. Matt,
you pointed out that's north of one hundred and forty
five thousand dollars US for credible information leading to the
(01:04:49):
arrest of a suspect. If you have any information about this,
there is a number you can call specifically for this.
Be aware that your country codes may differ depending on
where you are in the world. That number is zero
three three four eight two zero one one zero. Again,
that's zero three three four eight two zero one one zero.
Speaker 4 (01:05:14):
Guys. One last thing for me before we close, At
least as far as I'm concerned. Do you think that
the lack of or rather the lack of motive, uh,
and the difficulty that police are having given you know,
the insane amount of evidence, implies that maybe this was
just a random act.
Speaker 3 (01:05:34):
It's also a possibility. It's it's also a possibility because.
Speaker 4 (01:05:38):
That makes it harder to connect if it's just somebody that. Yeah,
but you know, there there are some things that indicate
there was some premeditation or knowledge of the house, but
that could have been gleaned pretty quickly, you know, maybe
following the kid around at a park and then just say, oh,
a kid lives right over there. You know, let's just
see how this shakes out.
Speaker 2 (01:05:57):
But just remember, since the DNA was in any of
the Japanese databases, this would be the first crime that
the person committed. It was serious enough that he was
caught for, right.
Speaker 4 (01:06:09):
Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (01:06:09):
That's and aguess not lost on me. Yeah, not impossible.
It's not an impossible situation. They're having things where people
have stored up a lot of the evil inside themselves
and they appear to have snapped overnight. In each of
those cases, there's a long there's long build up once
you know what to look for. If you'd like to
learn more about this case, I highly recommend checking out
(01:06:30):
the limited series The Faceless Podcast. It's a seven part
dive into the details, into deep into a lot of the theories.
Full disclosure, this is not a podcast we're associated with creating.
It's just a good source if you want to learn
more with that, Folks, we're gonna We're going to end
it here and we want to know what you think.
(01:06:53):
Is there a likelihood that this case may ever be solved?
Why or why not? And tell us about your experiences
with Japanese law enforcement. We'd like to hear them, and
we aim to be easy to find online.
Speaker 4 (01:07:07):
We do. You can find us at the handle Conspiracy
Stuff on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. On Facebook, we also
have our Facebook group Here's where it gets crazy. You
can also find us under the handle Conspiracy Stuff Show
on Instagram and TikTok if those are your things.
Speaker 2 (01:07:23):
A If you like using your phone, you can speak
to us. Just dial one eight three three std WYTK.
It's a voicemail system. You've got three minutes to leave
a message. Please give yourself a cool nickname and let
us know if we can use your voice and message
on the air. If you've got more to say than
can fit in three minutes, why not instead send us
(01:07:44):
a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 3 (01:07:46):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:08:08):
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