People Who Eat Darkness

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  Rupert was fascinated by Japan: the vast, orderly throngs of people on the pavements and pedestrian crossings, the sight of thousands of umbrellas keeping off the early spring rain. “I’d never been anywhere like that,” he said. “I love the respect that everyone has for one another. It’s humbling to see that. But it made it even harder to accept that this thing had happened in this city.” Towards the end of the week, the police drove them down to the beach at Moroiso, across the astonishing Rainbow Bridge, which curves in the sunlight across the breadth of Tokyo Bay.

  They got out of the car above the cliff and descended to the beach down a set of rusty stairs. Rupert wanted to see the place where Lucie had lain in the sand for seven months because he wanted to feel close to her. He wanted some of the intimacy that they had never had, as a sensible big sister and little scamp of a brother, and never would have now. Rupert had flowers to leave for Lucie. They had stopped at a petrol station so that he could buy paper and a pen to leave a farewell note for his sister.

  At the bottom of the steps, thirty or forty Japanese photographers and TV cameramen were waiting. Some of them were standing or crouching in readiness, with their weighty black cameras. Others had erected metal stepladders on the sand to get a better view, no more than three or four yards in front of the cave.

  Rupert described it as “like a right hook,” a punch to the jaw, to descend onto the beach and find all these strangers waiting.

  The three of them walked forward with their flowers, and the camera shutters hissed and whizzed. When Tim, Sophie, and Rupert were facing the cave, the photographers crept even closer behind them. Tim turned, and the cameramen paused, and something caught light in both Tim and Sophie. Sophie was swearing and screaming at the photographers, who scuttled back like crabs, and Tim was shouting too, and picking up the abandoned ladders and hurling them awkwardly down the beach. The cameramen kept shooting and filming, and Rupert watched it all, and then turned away. “There was Dad picking up these cameras and ladders, and shouting, and them all shuffling back,” he said. “And Sophie shouting too, telling them all where to go.” And there was Rupert, kneeling on the slimy sand and weeping, staring into the dripping cave that had been his sister’s tomb.

  PART FIVE JUSTICE

  19. CEREMONIES

  Lucie’s funeral was at the end of April 2001. It would have been a grim occasion under any circumstances, and it was made doubly bleak by the palpable enmity between Jane and Tim.

  It was organized by Jane and held in an Anglican church in the town of Chislehurst, twelve miles from Sevenoaks. It was a puzzling choice of venue. Sevenoaks has plenty of churches of its own, and Lucie, with Jane, had converted as a teenager from nominal membership of the Church of England to nominal Roman Catholicism. The church’s principal significance in the lives of the Blackmans had been as the venue of Tim and Jane’s wedding, twenty-five years earlier. Was this the point for Jane? I wondered. To reproach Tim, consciously or unconsciously, by tracing a link between his dead marriage and his dead daughter?

  There were 260 people in the church; outside, a rabble of photographers and reporters were kept at bay behind aluminium barriers. There were flowers from Tony Blair and from the Japanese ambassador to London; the incense burned during the service was the gift of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. Many of Lucie’s contemporaries from Walthamstow Hall were there, as well as former colleagues from SocGen, a contingent from British Airways in their blue cabin uniforms, and even Helen Dove, who had worked with Lucie in Casablanca. Gayle Blackman and Caroline Lawrence arrived together; at the last minute, Gayle decided that she could not face the church and had to be coaxed out of the car.

  Several of those present would describe a sensation of lightness and depersonalization, almost of trance, as if they were watching the funeral at a remove from reality, as in a dream. The sensation was accentuated by the absence from the church of Lucie herself. The aura of decay about the coffin was too strong, so it was kept at the crematorium, and a large photograph of Lucie in a blue dress took its place. “That was the worst thing, that she wasn’t there,” Gayle said. “I’d written a card which I wanted to go with Lucie, and I took it to the undertaker before the service. It wasn’t a question I’d ask now, but at the time it seemed necessary to know. I asked him, ‘How bad is she?’ And he said, ‘It’s bad.’”

  There was no direct confrontation between Jane and Tim, who did not speak to one another at all. But black energies crackled between them. The friends who filled the church found themselves bent to their force, like iron filings arrayed around the field of a magnet. When the members of Tim’s and Jane’s families arrived, they seated themselves on opposite sides of the aisle, as if in parody of the wedding ceremony they had attended a quarter of a century before. Jane’s seventy-four-year-old father, John Etheridge, was dying. He had heart disease and had recently had his second leg amputated. He was pushed into church in a wheelchair, a man who in his prime had been a strapping six three, now weighing little more than 125 pounds.

  Even in their grief, her friends and family were struggling, mentally, for possession of Lucie. Gayle experienced a squirt of anger at the sight of a group from Walthamstow Hall, girls who had never known Lucie well or even liked her, who at various times had been her tormentors. “Jane had said no flowers, and Lucie’s friends respected that,” Gayle remembered. “But there were these girls from school, all dressed up and with their big bouquets. They were just there to be seen. You could hear them a couple of rows away, saying, ‘Oh, look, so-and-so’s here,’ and ‘Look who’s with so-and-so!’ It was disgusting. I didn’t go to the crematorium after that. I couldn’t face it.”

  No one had a more acute sense of detachment than Tim Blackman, and no one was under closer scrutiny. Many of the congregation were people whom Tim had never met and did not know, but they knew him, or versions of him, from his television appearances and newspaper interviews, and from the word of friends and acquaintances: Lucie’s dad, who had worked so hard to find her, but whose demeanor and temperament remained, somehow, suspect. “I remember saying, ‘I can’t believe he’s so composed,’” said Sarah Guest, one of the British Airways contingent. “He didn’t give away his feelings at all, whereas the mum had a more normal reaction. I mean, I didn’t know the guy at all, and I think people deal with grief in different ways. But people at the funeral were quite critical.”

  No one would have said so to their faces. But, among many of the mourners, a standard was being applied to those who had lost Lucie; a code of behavior was being invoked. Jane conformed to it; Tim, to the minds of people there, fell short.

  * * *

  A year and three days after she disappeared, on July 4, 2001, Joji Obara was brought to trial for the rape and killing of Lucie Blackman. The courtroom, in the towering judicial complex two hundred yards down the road from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police headquarters, was full to capacity. Obara had made seven previous court appearances and had been charged with five other counts of rape. Rather than being held day after day, Japanese trial hearings were held about once a month. So far, most of those in the Obara trial had been held in closed court so that the victims who were called on to testify—Clara Mendez, Katie Vickers, and the three Japanese women—could give their evidence in private. But this morning nine hundred people lined up for the sixty public seats, which were allocated by computerized lottery. On the stroke of ten o’clock, Obara entered the court, closely flanked by two uniformed guards.

  He wore a charcoal gray suit and an open-necked shirt. He was handcuffed, and a length of heavy-looking blue rope was tied around his waist, its ends grasped by the guards who uncuffed and unknotted him after he had sat down. This was routine in Japanese criminal cases, but I found myself registering a twinge of shock at a sight so out of keeping with the gleam and modernity of Tokyo: a human being bound helplessly in ropes.

  Obara was instructed to stand facing the panel of three judges as the prosecutor read out the charges of jungokan chishi�
��“rape resulting in death,” a charge similar to manslaughter but short of murder—of Carita Simone Ridgway and Lucie Jane Blackman. Defendants in Japanese criminal courts do not respond with a simple plea of guilty or not guilty but, after being reminded of their right to remain silent, are invited to comment on the charges. Obara read aloud from a piece of paper on the podium before him; his voice was clear but unexpectedly soft and lisping, almost soggy. He admitted to having been with Carita and Lucie on the nights in question, but he denied any responsibility for their deaths. His sexual relationship with Carita had been one of mutual consent. He had been entertained by Lucie in Casablanca (as “Mr. Kowa,” the lisping English-speaker whom Louise had vaguely remembered), but it was she who had asked to go out with him, not vice versa; the question of a mobile phone had never come into it. “We drank alcohol and watched videos at my apartment in Zushi,” he said. “We did not ‘play’”—and he used the Japanized English loan word purei—“even once that night. I did not make her consume drinks containing sleeping pills or any other drugs.”

  When he had left the apartment the next morning, he continued, Lucie had been fine. “I know that Lucie died,” he said. “But I did not take any action which led to her death. Though I might have some responsibility for the incident, I didn’t do anything listed in the criminal indictment.”

  A dozen reporters bustled out of the courtroom to file news of the plea for their television stations and wire services. Obara sat down again, and the chief prosecutor rose to read aloud the detailed indictment. He spoke in a breathless monotone, flipping over each page as he ended it, at a speed that was difficult for the reporters to follow. “By 1983 at the latest, using various names and without revealing his [real] identity,” the indictment read, “the accused began taking women to Zushi Marina, giving them drugged drinks, causing them to lose consciousness, raping them while wearing a mask, and videoing it. He committed this crime quite regularly. He called it ‘conquest play.’”

  * * *

  One thing stands out above all in considering the differences between the courts of Japan and those of Western Europe and North America: the conviction rate. Courts in the United States typically convict 73 percent of the criminal defendants who come before them, about the same as Britain. In Japan, the figure is 99.85 percent. Trial, in other words, brings almost guaranteed conviction: walk into a Japanese court, and you have the slimmest chance of leaving through the front door. And this is reflected in the way that the public, the media, and even lawyers regard defendants. In Japan, for all practical purposes, you are not innocent until proven guilty. “You’re guilty from the moment of arrest,” one of Obara’s lawyers would tell me. “Look at the amount of space given to reports of criminal cases. In a newspaper, the arrest of the suspect is huge. When charges are brought, that’s smaller. Conviction and sentencing is a minor story.”

  Even the Japanese language colludes in this assumption. From the moment of arrest, sometimes before charges have been laid, a suspect ceases to be referred to by the conventional honorifics, -san or -shi, and becomes -yogisha. Obara-yogisha: not Mister, but Criminal Suspect Obara.

  Prosecutors insist that the conviction rate is high because they send to trial only cases in which the suspect’s guilt is clear and certain. Guilt or innocence, in other words, is established during the investigation, behind closed doors, not publicly in the courtroom. “Prosecutors, like just about everyone in Japan, believe that only the guilty should be charged and that the charged are almost certainly guilty,” writes the sociologist David Johnson. “The vast majority of Japan’s criminal trials do not resemble fights, battles, or sporting events, as the adversarial logic of its laws seems to prescribe, but rather ‘ceremonies’ or ‘empty shells,’ devoid of even minor disagreements.”

  The converse of this is that acquittals, on the very few occasions they occur, are a humiliating blow for the authorities. In Western courts, defense lawyers win cases; in Japan, prosecutors lose them, and the loss can be devastating. When Joji Obara was led into court, bound and shackled, the odds were stacked overwhelmingly against him. But there was an enormous amount at stake for the other side too. The document being gabbled out in the courtroom that morning was the culmination of a year of joint effort by the detectives and prosecutors. Careers and reputations rested on it.

  * * *

  After setting out the facts of Carita’s case—her swift and unstoppable decline, her chloroform-saturated liver, the masked man in the video—the indictment moved to Lucie and to Obara’s movements during her last day of life.

  At midnight on June 30, he had bought grapes, grapefruit, melon, and mandarin oranges from an all-night shop in the Akasaka district of Tokyo. Forty minutes later, he filled up his Mercedes-Benz at a nearby petrol station. At half past one the following afternoon, he phoned Lucie and postponed the time of their meeting. He went to the dry cleaner in the New Otani Hotel to drop off some laundry, then called Lucie again and picked her up in front of Sendagaya Station at three thirty. As they drove down to Zushi, at just after five o’clock, Lucie borrowed his phone to call Louise Phillips from the car. Obara took his photographs of her at five twenty judging from the quality of sun and shadow. By six o’clock, they had gone into apartment 4314 of Zushi Marina. Lucie, who had eaten little all day, must have been hungry by this point; Obara called a local restaurant and ordered fried chicken and deep-fried tempura of shrimp and eel. A notice had been delivered to the apartment reporting a fault with the gas supply, so he phoned Tokyo Gas and at seven fourteen a repairman appeared to carry out the routine job. It was while Obara was dealing with him that Lucie called Louise from the new phone that Obara had just given her. Then she left a message for Scott; and there she disappeared.

  “Between that time and 2 July 2000, in the same apartment,” the indictment explained, “the accused gave her a drink containing sleeping drugs and used chloroform to make her lose consciousness. He raped her, and around that time he caused her death through the effects of the aforementioned drugs, either through cardiac arrest or failure of respiration.”

  The prosecutors’ narrative picked up again on Sunday afternoon, when Obara, traveling by train and taxi, visited one of his apartments in Tokyo, returning to Zushi Marina that evening. Early the following morning, he went back to Tokyo, where he activated another one of his large collection of prepaid mobile telephones. Just before half past five in the afternoon, he used it to call Louise Phillips.

  “My name is Akira Takagi,” he said. “Anyway, I’m ringing on behalf of Lucie Blackman.”

  Over the next two and a half hours, he made a series of further calls, to an electrical shop, a hardware shop, and L. L. Bean. The following afternoon, Tuesday, he visited them in turn and purchased tents, mats, a sleeping bag, flashlights, a hammer, cutters, a handsaw, a chain saw, a shovel, vessels and tools for mixing and stirring, three 35-pound sacks of cement, and a chemical agent to speed its setting.

  On Wednesday, July 5, he drove to the apartment at Blue Sea Aburatsubo, in a Mercedes stuffed with objects covered by white sheets. The following day the caretaker became suspicious and called the police, who glimpsed the sweating Obara amid a mess of cement and bags, before he apologized to them, bearing the frozen body of his dog.

  In the early hours of the following morning, the caretaker’s boyfriend saw someone who looked like Obara walking near the beach with a shovel.

  “Between 5 and 6 July 2000,” the prosecutor droned, “with the use of an electric chain saw, either within Kanagawa prefecture or places nearby, or within apartment 401 of Blue Sea Aburatsubo, he cut off the head and arms and legs of Lucie. He put Lucie’s head in cement and dried out the cement, and put it and the rest of the body into rubbish bags, and buried them in a cave under a cliff, and abandoned them.”

  On Sunday the ninth, Obara called a Japanese woman whom he had encountered on a telephone dating service. She had never met him in person and didn’t know his real name. It was only by connecting the web of
telephones and telephone calls that the police had tracked her down. But she remembered being told by Obara, “I’ve done something terrible, and I can’t tell anyone about it.”

  Between late July and early October, he sent four letters to the police, two of them in English, signed in the name of Lucie, listing her debts and enclosing money to pay them off. The police found the same list, along with drafts of the letters, in one of Obara’s apartments.

  In the cave where Lucie’s body had been buried was a bag for a tent identical to the kind that Obara had purchased from L. L. Bean. The chain saw was never found, but the marks on Lucie’s bones were consistent with the model he had bought on that same day. They found Lucie’s notebook on Obara’s property; they found chloroform and Rohypnol and GHB, and other powerful sleeping drugs.

  The indictment was based upon evidence amassed over months by Superintendent Udo’s men: telephone records, toll receipts, highway CCTV cameras, the testimony of the delivery boy, caretaker, and fruit vendor. Everything was documented; the twenty-eight files on the case filled three shelves in the corner of the courtroom. But between Saturday, July 1, and Sunday, July 2, and between the fifth and the seventh, there was a vacuum, a void in the narrative that the telephone calls, witnesses, and transactions failed to fill. A confession would have filled them; so would a sample of Obara’s DNA—blood, hair, or semen—on Lucie’s body. But—either because too much time had passed, or they had never been there—the forensic examiners never found a trace. Lucie had died, somehow. Someone, somewhere had cut her up with a chain saw and buried her in a cave. The circumstantial evidence posed the insistent question: If it hadn’t been Joji Obara, who else could it have been? But literal, unimaginative, unforgiving Japanese justice demanded to know: How exactly did it happen?