On
this date, 17 June 2008, a Japanese Pedophile Serial Killer, Tsutomu Miyazaki
was executed by hanging in Tokyo, Japan. I will post Part 1 of his profile on
this blog post before posting Part 2 and my thoughts on his execution on
another blog. I got the information from Wikipedia and some other news source.
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| Tsutomu Miyazaki |
Background information
|
|
Also
known as
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The Otaku
Murderer
The Little Girl Murderer Dracula |
Born
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August 21,
1962
Ōme, Tokyo, Japan |
Died
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June 17,
2008 (aged 45)
|
Cause of
death
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Hanging
|
Sentence
|
Death
|
Killings
|
|
Number
of victims
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4
|
Country
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Japan
|
State(s)
|
Saitama, Tokyo
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Date
apprehended
|
July 23,
1989
|
Tsutomu Miyazaki
(宮﨑 勤 Miyazaki Tsutomu, August 21, 1962 – June 17, 2008),
also known as The Otaku Murderer or The Little Girl Murderer, was
a Japanese serial killer.
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Miyazaki in high school
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Background
Tsutomu's
premature birth left him with deformed hands, which were permanently gnarled
and fused directly to the wrists, necessitating him to move his entire forearm
in order to rotate the hand. Due to his deformity, he was ostracized when he
attended Itsukaichi Elementary School, and consequently kept to himself.
Although he was originally a star student, his grades at Meidai Nakano High
School dropped dramatically; he had a class rank of 40 out of 56 and did not
receive the customary admission to Meiji University. Instead of studying English
and becoming a teacher as he originally intended, he attended a local junior
college, studying to become a photo technician.
Murders
Between
1988 and 1989, Miyazaki mutilated and killed four girls, aged between four and
seven, and sexually molested their corpses. He drank the blood of one victim
and ate a part of her hand. These crimes—which, prior to Miyazaki's
apprehension and trial were named "The Little Girl Murders", and
later known as the Tokyo/Saitama Serial Kidnapping Murders of Little Girls (東京・埼玉連続幼女誘拐殺人事件 Tōkyō Saitama renzoku yōjo yūkai
satsujin jiken?)—shocked Saitama Prefecture, which
had few crimes against children.
During
the day, Miyazaki was a mild-mannered employee. Outside of work, he randomly
selected children to kill. He terrorized the families of his victims, sending
them letters recalling in graphic detail what he had done to their children. To
the family of victim Erika Nanba, Miyazaki sent a morbid postcard assembled
using words cut out of magazines: "Erika. Cold. Cough. Throat. Rest.
Death."
He
allowed the corpse of his first victim, Mari Konno, to decompose in the hills
near his home, then chopped off the hands and feet, which he kept in his
closet. They were recovered upon his arrest. He charred her remaining bones in
his furnace, ground them into powder, and sent them to her family in a box,
along with several of her teeth, photos of her clothes, and a postcard reading:
"Mari. Cremated. Bones. Investigate. Prove."
Police
found that the families of the victims had something else in common: all were
bothered by silent nuisance phone calls. If they did not pick up the phone, it
would sometimes ring for 20 minutes.
Arrest
On
July 23, 1989, Miyazaki attempted to insert a zoom lens into the vagina of a
grade school-aged girl in a park near her home and was apprehended by the
girl's father. After fleeing naked on foot, Miyazaki eventually returned to the
park to retrieve his Toyota car, whereupon he was arrested by police who had
responded to a call by the grandfather. A search of Miyazaki's two-room
bungalow turned up a collection of 5,763 videotapes, some containing anime and slasher
films (later used as reasoning for his crimes). Interspersed among them was
video footage and pictures of his victims. He was also reported to be a fan of horror
films and had an extensive collection. Miyazaki, who retained a perpetually
calm and collected demeanor during his trial, appeared indifferent to his
capture.
The
media soon called him "The Otaku Murderer". His killings fueled a moral
panic against otaku, accusing anime and horror films of making him a murderer.
However these reports were disputed: in Eiji Otsuka's book on the crime, he
argued that Miyazaki's collection of pornography was probably added or amended
by a photographer in order to highlight his perversity. Another critic, Fumiya
Ichihashi, suspected the released information was playing up to public
stereotypes and fears about otaku, as the police knew they would help cement a
conviction.
Miyazaki's
father refused to pay for his son's legal defense, and eventually committed suicide
in 1994.
Trial
and execution
The
trial began on March 30, 1990. Often talking nonsensically, he blamed his atrocities
on "Rat Man", an alter ego who Miyazaki claimed forced him to kill;
he spent a great deal of the trial drawing "Rat Man" in cartoon form.
However, the Tokyo District Court judged him still aware of the gravity and
consequences of his crimes and therefore accountable. He was sentenced to death
on April 14, 1997. His death sentence was upheld by both the Tokyo High Court,
on June 28, 2001, and the Supreme Court of Justice on January 17, 2006.
He
described his serial murders as an "act of benevolence" and never
apologized. Child killer Kaoru Kobayashi described himself as "the next
Tsutomu Miyazaki or Mamoru Takuma." However, Miyazaki claimed that "I
won't allow him to call himself 'the second Tsutomu Miyazaki' when he hasn't
even undergone a psychiatric examination."
Kunio
Hatoyama signed his death warrant and Miyazaki was hanged on June 17, 2008.
Although the unusual swiftness of his execution as well as its timing soon
after the Akihabara massacre prompted questions regarding the two incidents,
the Ministry of Justice had no comment. Ryuzo Saki said, "His trial was
long" and that he was "not willing to criticize Hatoyama."
Victims
Deceased
- Mari Konno (今野真理 Konno Mari): Four years old
- Masami Yoshizawa (吉沢正美 Yoshizawa Masami): Seven years old
- Erika Nanba (難波絵梨香 Nanba Erika): Four years old
- Ayako Nomoto (野本綾子 Nomoto Ayako): Five years old
In
Popular Culture
Dutch
experimental drone/noise/black metal band Gnaw Their Tongues released a
2010 EP titled Tsutomu Miyazaki as a concept EP based on Miyazaki's
crimes.
INTERNET SOURCE: http://web.archive.org/web/20070818192957/http://www.charlest.whipple.net/miyazaki.html
The Silencing of the Lambs
by Charles T. Whipple
by Charles T. Whipple
Shortly after 3 pm on August 22, 1988,
four-year-old Mari Konno left her home in the Iruma Village apartment complex
in Saitama to play at her friend's hours. At 6:23 pm, after she failed to
return, architect Shigeo Konno, struggling to quell his panic, called the
police to report that his daughter was missing. About the same time as Konno's
phone call, in a dark forest 50 km away, Mari was being slowly strangled to
death.
As Mari made her way through the complex earlier
that afternoon, a Nissan Langley sedan had pulled up nearby, and a man had
climbed out of the driver's seat. "Wouldn't you like to go somewhere where
it's cool?" he asked. Mari nodded and taking his hand, skipped towards the
car.
While Mari played happily with the buttons on the radio,
the car purred down National Highway No. 16 toward Hachioji in western Tokyo.
Just before reaching Musashino Bridge, it swung right onto a road leading
towards Itsukaichi. An hour and a half after it had left Iruma Village, the car
came to a halt on a narrow dirt road in the woods near the Shintama power
station, which loomed like a mammoth gravestone above the trees.
The man and Mari got out of the car and walked down
a mountain path fringed by hinoki and sugi trees to where the hiking trail toward
Komine Pass begins. The cicadas were in full cry and the mountain doves cooed
in the stifling heat. After 20 or 30 minutes, the two sat down at a spot some
20 meters off the path.
Mari was tired; she might also have been
frightened, because she began to sniffle. The man panicked. What if she started
to bawl? The hiking course was a popular one, and someone might hear. But he
had no intention of returning her to her parents.
While Mari's face froze in surprise, the man put
his hands on her throat, thumbs on the larynx, and squeezed the life from her
tiny body. When she finally went limp, he reverently undressed and fondled her.
Then he laid her out as if in repose, bundled up her shorts, panties, shirt,
and shoes, and walked, unnoticed, out of the forest and back to his car.
So ended the brief life of Mari Konno. And so began
the murderous career of Tsutomu Miyazaki, a 26-year-old printer's assistant. By
the time he was arrested, Miyazaki had strangled and sexually abused three
other young girls, terrorized a whole prefecture, and for 11 months, evaded an
unprecedented police hunt for the man responsible for "The Little Girl
Murders."
When the police finally apprehended Miyazaki, they
entered his home to find 6,000 videotapes of kiddy porn, splatter flicks, and
cartoons. Among the grisly collection were videos and photos of his victims. It
was evident that, for Miyazaki, his killing spree was little more than an
extension of a lonely fantasy world. "It was like a game to him--a one-man
play," said Akira Ishii, a law professor at Aoyama Gakuin University and
psychotherapist who followed the case closely. The case of Tsutomu Miyazaki,
Interprefectural Felon No.117, ground its way through the courts. This fall
(1993)the psychological evaluation that should finally decide Miyazaki's
fate--and lay to rest the ghosts of four murdered girls--will be announced.
This is the second time the court has ordered an investigation into the crucial
question: Is Miyazaki mad or bad? The answer will dictate whether or not
Miyazaki is held criminally responsible for his crimes and will decide his
sentence. "Miyazaki's crimes were thrill killings of a rare kind,"
concluded Dr. Susumu Oda, a psychologist at Tsukuba University. "Yet you
could call him a textbook case."
The text of Tsutomu Miyazaki's life began in
Itsukaichi, Tokyo, on August 21, 1962, where he was prematurely born. He
weighed only 2.2 kg, and the joints in his hands were fused together, making it
impossible for him to bend his wrists upwards. The deformation haunted him from
early on. When he was five years old, a classmate teased him about his
"funny hands." In family photos after that, Miyazaki never showed his
hands, and his eyes were often closed.
By the time he reached Itsukaichi Elementary
School, Miyazaki was almost invisible. When he is remembered at all by teachers
and classmates, it is as a quiet, lonely child who seemed utterly incapable of
making friends. But young Tsutomu, like any other boy, did have dreams; in the
third grade, he wrote an essay: "When I grow up, I want to buy a car and
go driving. I'll stop at a restaurant and eat some curry rice or something. I
might even visit my relatives." More often than not, however, he increasingly
blamed his deformed hands for his inability to achieve anything concrete. He
began to stay up into the night reading comic books.
Tsutomu was clearly a clever child. Locked in his
own isolated world, he studied hard, and became the first student from his
junior high school to pass the entrance exam to Meidai Nakano High School. He
commuted two hours each way, every day, for three years, but eventually began
to lose interest in his studies. Instead of joining his fellow students,
Miyazaki would retreat to a quiet corner to work on another home-drawn comic
book. His plan--to enter Meiji University (with which the high school was
affiliated), major in English and become a teacher--was over by his final year,
when he ended up 40th in a class of 56, with grades so poor that he failed to
receive the customary recommendation to the university. Naturally, he blamed
his handicap.
Miyazaki settled for a photo-technician's course at
a junior college and, after graduation in the spring of 1983, went to work at a
printing plant owned by an acquaintance of his father. After thee years, during
which he saved more than 3 million yen, he moved back to the family home, where
he shared with his eldest sister a two-room annex to the main house near his
father's printing business. Known around town for his unfailing courtesy,
Katsumi Miyazaki owned the _Akikawa Shimbun_, a major local newspaper in the
Itsukaichi area, Tokyo's most inland point. There, the Miyazaki family had
considerable political influence.
The family had little influence over Tsutomu,
however. His workaholic father was more interested in collecting political
video clips and the latest cameras--enthusiasms that would echo grimly in his
son's crimes. Miyazaki's mother Rieko also worked, but tried to compensate by
buying Tsutomu gifts, such as the Nissan Langley sedan in which two of his
victims died. "If I tried to talk to my parents about my problems, they'd
just brush me off," Miyazaki confessed to police. "I even thought
about suicide," he said.
Miyazaki's two younger sisters, Setsuko and Haruko,
merely found him repulsive. Only his grandfather Shokichi, a widely regarded
man who had served on the city council, seemed to take a genuine interest in
the boy.
Miyazaki avoided women his own age, perhaps because
he was physically immature. "His penis is no thicker than a pencil and no
longer than a toothpick," a high-school classmate remarked. Yet his sex
drive was stronger than average. At college, he took his still and video
cameras to the tennis courts to take crotch shots of female players. He also
soon tired of adult porn magazines. "They black out the most important
part," he complained. So, by 1984, he had turned to child porn, which
shows everything, since obscenity laws ban the showing of pubic hair, not sex
organs.
"As a boy, he made no close friends and
therefore gained no information about sex in the real world," said Oda.
"Instead, he turned to videos, comics, and pornography for his
thrills." Oda also believes that Miyazaki thought himself important
because of his small penis and deformed hands.
How then did Miyazaki's unnatural vices lead him to
kill? As Prof. Ishii at Aoyama Gakuin University pointed out, "People grow
up in similar environments yet never become murderers."
The trigger seems to have been the death of his
grandfather in May 1988, three months before the first murder. His grandfather
had been his only warm adult relationship, and the death marked the breaking of
Miyazaki's last bonds with society. Miyazaki later said that he even ate some
of his grandfather's cremated bones--a claim that Shunsuke Serizawa, a literary
critic and witness for Miyazaki's defense, believes. "He wanted to
reincarnate his grandfather, and believed that this reincarnation would not be
complete if any of his grandfather's body remained," Serizawa said.
His grandfather's demise also complemented
Miyazaki's estrangement from his family. Once, when his youngest sister yelled
at him for peeking at her in the bath, he burst in and smashed her head against
the bathtub. Later, when his mother suggested he spend more time at work and
less with his videos, Miyazaki exploded and beat her. Miyazaki's father had
long since given up trying to talk to him.
"I felt all alone," Miyazaki explained
later. "And whenever I saw a little girl playing on her own, it was almost
like seeing myself."
The first of those little girls to die from
Miyazaki's attentions was Mari Konno. After her disappearance, police squad
cars with loudspeakers patrolled the streets warning parents to keep their
children in sight at all times. Although it was officially tagged as a missing
person case, "the police started the investigation as a murder right from
the beginning," said a journalist who followed the Miyazaki case.
Eventually, the police spent 2,930 man-days
interviewing people around Mari's home and sent 50,000 posters with Mari's
picture to police, train, subway, and bus stations across the nation. Nothing
came of these efforts. Not even police dogs could pick up the girl's scent.
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Two boys said they had seen Mari walking behind a
man toward the nearby Iruna River, and the _Asahi Shimbun_ interviewed a
38-year-old housewife who had spotted Mari with a stranger. Apart from the age,
the description was accurate: late thirties, about 170 cm tall; face: round and
pudgy with curly hair; clothes: white slacks and a white summer sweater. There
was only one other potential clue. A few days after Mari disappeared, Yukie
Konno, Mari's mother, received a postcard with a haunting message after she had
expressed hope in a news bulletin that her daughter was still alive.
"There are devils about," it read. The police dismissed the note as
the act of a crank.
The fruitless hunt for Mari Konno eventually
dwindled after four weeks. In September, Sayama Hikari Gakuen Kindergarten
began its new term without her. Since the police had received no demands from a
kidnapper and found no body, her file, categorized under _missing persons_, lay
dormant. But many parents in the area were taking no risks. "From the time
Mari disappeared until Miyazaki was caught, parents led their children to
kindergarten every day," recalled one mother.
Six weeks after Mari's disappearance, Miyazaki
struck again. Driving through Hanno, Saitama Prefecture, on the afternoon of
October 3, 1988, he spotted Masami Yoshizawa, a seven-year-old first-grader,
walking along the roadside. He coaxed her into his car, drove to the hills
above Komine Pass--the scene of his first murder--and strangled her to death.
Then he stripped her--quickly, before rigor mortis set in--and sexually abused
the corpse.
When the little body shuddered involuntarily,
Miyazaki, frightened, ran back to his car and drove off. He left her remains
less than 100 meters from where the bones of Mari Konno lay whitening in the
sun.
After she was reported missing later that night,
local search parties fanned out across the area. Soon Masami's face stared down
from hundreds of posters issued by the police, who subsequently spent over
2,300 man-days interviewing local residents. Again, no clues to the girl's
whereabouts were found. Masami's home is only 13 km from Mari's. The police
were suspicious enough to compare the two cases, but had neither leads nor
bodies. Masami, too, was declared a missing person.
Killing Masami had upset Miyazaki, but he would
kill again before 1988 was over. The December 12 murder of a four-year-old from
Kawagoe, however, would be different. First, Miyazaki would nearly be caught.
Second, the body would be discovered soon after the act, setting off a murder
hunt that would compel police to reassess the disappearance of Mari and Masami,
and confirm the worst fears of many Saitama residents: that there was a serial
child killer on the loose.
Miyazaki never displayed much concern for life.
"I've killed cats," he later said casually. "Threw one in the
river. Did another in with boiling water." He also throttled his own dog
to death with a strand of wire. His absorption in a video world, explains Oda,
"removed his consciousness from reality. Everything became an item to him,
including people. The little girls he killed were no more than characters from
his comic-book life."
Erika Namba was returning from a friend's house
when Miyazaki lured her into his sedan. She was crying by the time he pulled
into the parking area at the Youth Nature House in Naguri. He told Erika to
undress in the back seat, then began to photograph her, the strobe flashing in
the dark.
A car drove by, its headlights sweeping momentarily
across Miyazaki's face. Erika began sobbing again. Miyazaki grabbed her by the
throat and straddled her, holding her kicking body down with his weight as he
strangled her. By 7 pm, his third victim was dead. Miyazaki carefully wrapped
the body in a sheet and put it in the trunk. Then he disposed of her clothes in
the woods behind the parking area and drove off. Miyazaki's mind clearly wasn't
on the road. As he turned a corner, one of the Langley's front wheels slipped
into the gutter; the car was stuck. So he switched on the hazard lights, and
disappeared into the dark woods with the sheet-wrapped body in his arms. He
returned with the crumpled sheet to find two men standing by his car. Casually
opening the trunk to put the sheet away, he explained his problem to the men,
who then helped lift the car out of the rut. Miyazaki got in, and without a
word of thanks, sped away.
This time, the Kawagoe police immediately connected
Erika Namba's disappearance with that of Mari Konno and Masami Yoshizawa, and
the Saitama prefectural office set up a special operations center to solve the
three _missing persons_ cases. The next day, a worker at the Naguri Youth
Nature House found some of Erika's clothes, and hundreds of police began
combing the area. Meanwhile, the PTA at Erika's kindergarten pasted handbills
around the apartment complex where the Namba family lived.
Police found Erika's corpse the next day, its hands
and feet bound with nylon cord. The murder scene was 50 km from Erika's home, a
journey of about an hour and forty-five minutes. Five hundred riot police
explored the woods for more clues, but found nothing.
The two men who had helped Miyazaki with his car on
the night of the murder came forward to identify it. They correctly recalled
that the car had Hachioji plates, but misidentified the model as a Toyota
Corolla II--an error the police realized only after they had checked out more
than 6,000 Corolla IIs. This blunder deprived investigators of what could have
been their strongest lead.
Seen in the macabre light of the recovery of
Erika's body, the disappearance of Mari and Masami pointed strongly toward a
more serious crime. All the girls were from Saitama Prefecture; all lived
within 30 km of each other. "As soon as they found the body of the third
girl, they began to treat it as a serial murder case," said a police
journalist.
Police found that the families had something else
in common: they had all be bothered by strange phone calls. The phone would
ring, but when answered, the person on the other end would say nothing; if they
didn't pick up it up, the phone would ring for up to 20 minutes.
And, less than a week after his daughter's murder,
Shin'ichi Namba, like the Konnos, received a postcard. It was formed from kanji
characters cut from magazines and newspapers, then photocopied and enlarged to
conceal their origin. It read: "Erika. Cold. Cough. Throat. Rest.
Death."
The hunt for Mari and Masami led nowhere. No clues
were unearthed that shed light on Erika's murder. Hardly a day passed when television
reports didn't cover the cases. AFter the discovery of Erika's body, the
atmosphere of apprehension among Saitama's parents and teachers turned to
alarm. An _Asahi Shimbun_ editorial at the end of 1988 caught the mood of
subdued panic. "In the end," it read, "we must depend on the
police . . . . So se add our plea: investigators, redouble your efforts."
Miyazaki would not kill again until the following
summer. But he was still busy. At about 6 am, on his way to work on February 6,
Shigeo Konno, Mari's father, found a box on his doorstep and called the police.
Along with ashes, dirt, fragments of charred bones, and 10 baby teeth, it also
contained photos of a child's shorts, underwear, and sandals--and a single
sheet of copier paper with five words on it: "Mari. Bones. Cremated.
Investigate. Prove." Miyazaki had returned to the death site, as he had
done several times, and removed the remains.
The 10 small teeth found among the ashes were
immediately turned over to the legal division of the Tokyo Dental University
for examination, where Dr. Kazuo Suzuki concluded the probably did not belong
to Mari. After a police press conference announced this finding, Suzuki changed
his mind, to the agony of the Konno family. His examination was mistaken, he
said; the remains might be Mari's after all. Then a police forensic expert gave
his verdict on the 220 grams of bone fragments: they were not only human, they
were Mari Konno's.
Miyazaki, avidly following news reports, heard only
the original verdict--that the teeth were not Mari's--and immediately sat down
to write. On February 11, a three-page letter arrived at the Konno home. The
society desk of the _Asahi Shimbun_ also received a copy, along with a
Polaroid-type photo of Mari. The letter was entitled "Crime
Confession" and signed "Yuko Imada," a pun on "Now I'll
tell."
"I put the cardboard box with Mari's remains
in it in front of her home," it began. "I did everything. From the
start of the Mari incident to the finish. I saw the police press conference
where they said the remains were not Mari's. On camera, her mother said the
report gave her new hope that Mari might still be alive. I knew then that I had
to write this confession so Mari's mother would not continue to hope in vain. I
say again: the remains are Mari's."
The confession caused an uproar. The next day, the
Saitama police finally classified the Mari Konno case as a homicide, and set up
a special center to investigate her abduction and murder. Handwriting experts
examined the confession note but could not establish the author's sex. Over a
half million police leaflets quoting the confession were delivered to houses in
the areas where the girls lived. The police did, however, correctly identify
the snapshot of Mari as one taken with a Mamiya 6x7 camera "like those
used by printers"--another clue that was perhaps inadequately followed up;
they also rightly concluded that the box was the double-walled corrugated kind
often used to ship camera lenses. The typeface on the postcards was determined
to have come from a phototypesetter, and copied on an industrial copier. Police
later refused to comment on whether or not they launched an investigation of
printing shops in the area.
The Konnos waited three weeks before the police
officially announced that the box contained the remains of their daughter. The
box contained almost an entire skeleton of a four- or five-year-old girl; and
two of the teeth matched perfectly with X-rays of her dental work. On March 11,
1989--over seven months after she was declared missing--Mari was laid to rest.
"Her hands and feet didn't seem to be with the remains," said Shigeo
Konno at the funeral. "When she gets to heaven, she won't be able to walk
or eat. Please return the rest of her remains."
The nightmare wasn't over.
The Konnos returned home from the funeral to find
another letter from "Yuko Imada." This one, labeled simply
"Confession," chronicled the changes Miyazaki had observed in Mari's
dead body: "Before I knew it, the child's corpse had gone rigid. I wanted
to cross her hands over her breast but they wouldn't budge. . . . Pretty soon,
the body gets red spots all over it . . . . Big red spots. Like the _Hinomaru_
flag. Or like you'd covered her whole body with red _hanko_ seals. . . . After
a while, the body is covered with stretch marks. It was so rigid before, but
now it feels like its full of water. And it smells. How it smells. Like nothing
you've ever smelled in this whole wide world."
In spite of hints offered by "Yuko
Imada," the police were unable to pick up Miyazaki's trail. Some observers
have interpreted the letters as Miyazaki's gloating at the society that he felt
had shunned him. Prof. Akira Ishii disagrees: "None of it had any social
meaning for him. It was just like playing a video game--you know, 'plus one
point for causing a sensation.' He wasn't trying to gain society's recognition.
He had a society in his mind, of which he was the nucleus."
By the summer of 1989, Miyazaki was growing
restless. He skipped work more often to spend hours sitting crosslegged in his
room, editing his precious videotapes. On the first day of June, he saw girls
playing near the Akishima Elementary School, and coaxed one of them to take her
panties off. As he began to photograph her, some neighbors spotted him and
chased him off. Despite this close call, Miyazaki butchered his fourth victim
five days later.
On June 6, he left his bungalow for the tennis
courts at Ariake, near Tokyo Bay, but the courts were closed. In a nearby park,
he found five-year-old Ayako Nomoto playing alone. Casually removing the lens
cap from his camera, Miyazaki approached Ayako and asked her to pose for
pictures. He then took several shots until Ayako got used to him. "Let's
take some shots inside the car," he coaxed, leading her to his Langley.
Miyazaki parked some 800 meters away as Ayako
bounced in the back seat. As he handed her a stick of gum, the young girl
commented on his deformed hands. Enraged, Miyazaki pulled on a pair of vinyl
gloves. "Here's what happens to kids who say things like that," he
growled, seizing her by the throat. "She kicked and kicked, but went limp
in four or five minutes," he later confessed. To make sure she was dead,
he taped her mouth and tied her hands with vinyl rope, then wrapped the body in
a sheet and put it in the trunk of the car.
This time, he took the body home, stopping at a
video shop in Koenji to rent a camera. The house was dark when he parked next
to the two-room bungalow. He waited two hours, then carried the tiny corpse
inside, where he stripped off the clothes and wiped it with a towel. He laid it
on the low _kotatsu_ table, spread the legs and taped the vagina apart. He then
took photographs and videos while he masturbated. Afterwards, he bound up the
hands and feet again with nylon cord and covered the body with three sheets.
Two days later, the odor of the decomposing corpse
became unbearable. Although he was right in believing that police were nowhere
near identifying him as the "Little Girl Murderer," Miyazaki knew he
had to dispose of the body. With a knife and a saw, he hacked off the cadaver's
head, hands, and feet to hamper identification. Then he hid the torso near the
public toilet at Hanno's Miyazawa-ko cemetery at midnight, four days after the
murder. He roasted Ayako's hands in his back yard, ate some of her flesh, and
tossed what remained, including the skull, into the woods of Mitakeyama, a
230-meter hill in front of his house.
Realizing the risk of having the remains so near
his home, he retrieved and hid them two weeks later in a bag in the storeroom
behind his bedroom. Later, he scattered the bones in the woods, then burned the
hair, the clothes, and the blood-stained plastic bags and sheets.
Five days later, after police had distributed
10,000 handbills with Ayako's description and picture, the little girl's
mutilated torso was discovered at the cemetery. Despite Miyazaki's butchery,
the remains were quickly identified. The blood type and chest size matched
those of Ayako Nomoto, reported missing by her mother at 8:40 pm on June 6. The
stomach contents matched Ayako's last meal.
In the end, Miyazaki's gruesome career was cut
short by a citizen, despite the massive police forces pitted against him.
On Sunday, July 23, 1989, two sisters were playing
near a public washstand in Hachioji, when a young man stopped his car and got
out. "You stay here," he told the elder nine-year-old, cajoling the
younger child toward a nearby river. But the older sister ran home for her
father, who sprinted back to find his daughter naked, with a young man focusing
a camera between her legs. He grabbed him and knocked him down. The man twisted
away and ran to the swampy edge of the river to escape. Then, incredibly, he
returned to his car where the Hachioji police, who had already been called,
apprehended Tsutomu Miyazaki on the charge of "forcing a minor to commit
indecent acts."
The police clearly believed they had found their
serial killer. One Saitama housewife remembers how house-to-house police
questioning in her apartment complex ended abruptly on the day the news broke,
though nothing was officially revealed of the suspect's involvement in other
crimes. "Even then, television reports were saying he was the serial
killer," she recalled. The news media were so convinced that Miyazaki was
the man that they beat the police to the Miyazaki home, where they filmed
Tsutomu's room.
Seventeen days later, Miyazaki confessed to
murdering Ayako nomoto, whose skull was found the next day in the hills of
Okutama. The other confessions followed swiftly: first, the murder of Erika
Namba; then Mari Konno, of whom video clips were discovered among the 6,000
tapes in Miyazaki's lair. By mid-September, after a preliminary psychological
test by NPA psychiatrists concluded that Miyazaki showed "No immediately
apparent disorders," he confessed to the fourth of the "Little Girl
Murders."
On September 6, Masami Yoshizawa's remains were
found in the forest near Komine Pass, Itsukaichi. The half-chewed bones of Mari
Konno's hands and feet were discovered nearby a week later. Her father's plea
for the return of his daughter's hands and feet had finally been answered.
Could the police have tracked down Miyazaki sooner?
Until Miyazaki's arrest and subsequent confessions,
the police were far from identifying the murderer, despite an intense and
costly investigation. "It's almost impossible to catch a murderer when
there's no relationship between them and the victims," a police journalist
explained. "It becomes just a matter of luck." In Erika's case alone,
more than 600 calls from the citizens of Hanno kept the police occupied for
days.
What if the National Police Agency had got involved
sooner?
Then, as when the FBI moves in, all information
would have been immediately relayed from local police to a national center; the
NPA would have also helped foot the mammoth bill for the manhunt. But the NPA's
sphere of influence dictated that it could not get involved until an incident
occurred in Tokyo. The NPA did set up a missing persons team after Ayako went
missing in Tokyo, but this, according to an NPA source, does not constitute an
investigation. The NPA's real involvement began only when Miyazaki started
confessing.
Miyazaki's father refused to hire a lawyer for his
son. "It wouldn't be fair to the victims," he said. The public
defender's office looked long and hard before finding two lawyers, Junji Suzuki
and Keiji Iwakura, who were willing to take the case. Suzuki agreed because of
his vehement opposition to the death penalty.
The defense team's case revolves around the claim
that Miyazaki has only limited sense of responsibility for his crimes, that he
is unable to choose between right and wrong. "We want to build enough of a
case for the judge to sentence Miyazaki to life in prison," said Suzuki.
The court's first action was to assign a team of six psychology professors from
Keio University to examine Miyazaki. Last year, they filed their report:
Miyazaki was fully capable of taking responsibility for his actions. Attorney
Suzuki disagrees.
"The more we see of him, the more we think he
lives in a different world," said Suzuki. "We felt the report did not
establish Miyazaki's mental capabilities beyond reasonable doubt, so we asked
for a second evaluation. Fortunately, the judge agreed." Late last year, a
team of three Tokyo University professors began the evaluation of Miyazaki that
is due this autumn. "It is very unusual for a team to evaluate a
defendant," Suzuki added. "Usually, a single psychologist is
used." This will be the defense team's last appeal. The prosecution can
appeal for another evaluation if it disagrees with the upcoming report: the
defense cannot.
There are three possible outcomes to the
psychological evaluation. If the second report agrees that Miyazaki is mentally
incompetent, he will be sent to a mental institution where, if precedent is
followed, he'll be released in 12 or 13 years. However, public prosecutors, who
have over 750 items of physical evidence, have no intention of letting Miyazaki
loose. They will surely petition the court for a third testing, and a fourth,
until--in theory--Miyazaki is as dead as his victims.
The second possibility--the result Suzuki seeks--is
that Miyazaki will be judged to have a limited sense of responsibility for his
crimes. "He may not have an incapacitating personality disorder such as
paranoia or schizophrenia, but I think he may be borderline," said Suzuki.
"We hope the psychological team agrees." This result, thinks this result
will earn Miyazaki a life sentence without parole. Prof. Ishii expects the same
psychological outcome, but believes Miyazaki's life sentence will, in effect,
last about 12 to 15 years. "It is impossible to say whether he will still
be dangerous by then," said Ishii. "However, keeping him in prison
for the rest of his life raises other questions of human rights."
The third possible outcome is that Miyazaki is
deemed mentally competent enough to take full responsibility for his crimes. In
this case, the judge would have no choice but to condemn him to death. Although
Suzuki cannot appeal the psychological evaluation, he can--and would--appeal a
death sentence.
Nobody involved in the case doubts that Tsutomu
Miyazaki is a very, very disturbed young man. Dr. Oda lists a grab bag of
obsessions: pedophilia, necrophilia, sadism, fetishism, and cannibalism. Prof.
Ishii believes Miyazaki was a pedophile first, a murderer second. "Killing
was an extension of his interest in little girls, a way of possessing them,"
he said.
But is Miyazaki insane? "I don't see how
Miyazaki could be judged responsible for his actions," said Shunsuke
Serizawa. "He shows no signs of being aware of being aware of the gravity
of his crimes. He has no sense of guilt. Even the judge seems to agree that his
first psychological testing was very inadequate, which is why a second testing
was ordered." But, although he strongly believes that Miyazaki should not
be held criminally responsible for his deeds, Serizawa stresses that "it
still would not do to let him loose in society." Miyazaki's lawyer echoes
this sentiment. "The defense team will do its best to see that he gets
life," Suzuki said.
Next month Tsutomu Miyazaki will celebrate his 31st
birthday in prison. "He's perfectly happy," said Suzuki. "He is
allowed to read comic books all day." As they near a decision, the Tokyo
University psychologists observe their subject every day. Yet, Suzuki claimed,
Miyazaki barely registers the fact that people are staring at him. "He
hates that," said Suzuki. "He's very self-conscious."
All that remains of the Itsukaichi house and
printing plant complex is an open lot and the small two-room annex where
Miyazaki slept among his teetering stacks of gruesome video tapes. Miyazaki's
parents, who visit once a week to replenish his supply of comics, shut down the
_Akikawa Shimbun_, and went into hiding soon after their son's confessions were
made public. In a 1989 interview with the _Tokyo Shimbun_, Katsumi Miyazaki
regretted that "I didn't pay more attention to the feelings of my
son." After his arrest, Miyazaki had written a furious letter to his
father, blaming him for everything.
To his mother, however, Miyazaki was more
conciliatory. "Mother, I've caused you much heartache," he wrote
once. Then he added, "Don't forget to change the oil in my car, or it will
get so you can't drive it.
AFTERWORD
Miyazaki was judged to have multiple personalities
at the least and schizophrenia at the worst by the Tokyo University
psychologists. He is still in prison. His father committed suicide. CTW January
27, 1999.
INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.drkiller.net/the-cannibal-nerd-the-rise-and-fall-of-tsutomu-miyazaki.html
The Cannibal Nerd: The rise and fall of Tsutomu Miyazaki
While
the name “cannibal nerd” may appear to be a term of endearment, it is assigned
to an individual that became Japan’s most reviled cannibal serial killer. When
the cannibal killer
Tsutomu Miyazaki was hanged in June 2008, it brought closure and resolution to
a most horrifying chapter in Japanese history. While niches of Japanese society
have strange fixations on schoolgirl panties and sadistic game shows, manga
strips, these perversions are viewed by outsiders to be more comical than
horrifying. This is only because these odd perversions are taken at face value.
The story of Tsutomu Miyazaki demonstrates when these perversions are
perverted; his story has elements of the universal regarding cannibal killers,
but also something very distinctly Japanese. Tsutomu Miyazaki and his cannibal
stories continue to horrify even in death.
The
background of Tsutomu Miyazaki reads like a manual of how the habits of serial
killers are cultivated and developed. Born prematurely with a deformity to his
hands, Tsutomu Miyazaki was a loner and exhibited antisocial behavior
throughout his life. Discovered only following his arrest was his addiction to
hardcore pornography – chiefly, graphic cartoons known as Hentai and manga
strips characterized him as a “cannibal nerd” by the media. However, his desires
and fetishes reveal a common trend universally involving serial killers, and
especially cannibal killers – they do not kill or eat human flesh out of hate
or malice. Psychologists argue that cannibal killers lose their control in
channeling their sexual fetishes that only become compounded and exaggerated
the more repressed and isolated they become from society. Tsutomu Miyazaki is
not the first serial killer to fit this description, and, unfortunately, he
likely will not be the last.
Miyazaki’s
sadistic murders took place between 1988 and 1989, where his actions shot a
massive blow to Japanese self-perception of being a harmonious society.
During this brief period, blood lust Tsutomu Miyazaki mutilated and murdered
four girls, which included two four year olds, one five year old, and one seven
year old. After murdering them, he sexually molested their corpses, ate
portions of their bodies, and reportedly drank their
blood, which earned him a nickname of “Dracula.” His murders were not
systematic or strategic – they were dictated by opportunity and impulses he
claimed he had to listen to. When he was captured engaging in an act of
molestation, he was put on trial in 1990. His trial offered unique, yet oddly
familiar, characteristics of cannibal stories.
During
his trial, Tsutomu Miyazaki showed signs of suffering from severe
schizophrenia. One psychiatrist argued that Tsutomu Miyazaki confessed that he
drank blood of children to resurrect his deceased grandmother – an excuse of
suffering from delusions and acting
out of necessity seen in other cannibal killers, such as the “Vampire of Sacramento” Richard Chase. During his trial, he
often sketched cartoons of his alter-ego – Rat man – that he claimed forced him
to do such things. While his defense rested on insanity and schizophrenia,
other statements and psychiatrists assert that there are signs that he was very
aware of his blood lust actions and was absolutely remorseless about them. As a
result, he was hanged in 2008, to which even the staunchest critics of capital
punishment remained silent.
Tsutomu
Miyazaki was shattering to Japanese society. He was a breed of serial killer
seen in other places, but not Japan. Blood lust Tsutomu Miyazaki and his
cannibal murders represented the worst in serial killers – random yet
systematic; hedonistic yet vengeful; insane yet aware. These contradictions
offer a window into why someone like Tsutomu Miyazaki has never been understood
by society, and likely never will.
PLEASE GO TO THIS BLOG POST TO SEE PART 2 OF THIS KILLER’S PROFILE.
PLEASE GO TO THIS BLOG POST TO SEE MY THOUGHTS ON HIS EXECUTION.
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