People Who Eat Darkness

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  In court, he had presented receipts for his charitable work and asked to be judged by the good this brought about. Why not, in the same way, judge the damage he did, and let that be the measure of his character? Shape-shifter, he was the pain of his victims; whatever mysteries he kept close, he was the damage he had done.

  He was Jane’s crusading fury over the “blood money” and Tim’s stubbornness and humiliation in accepting it. He was the pills and vodka in Sophie’s blood, and Rupert’s lost year of mental breakdown. He was the rage kindled in Jamie Gascoigne. He was the effect of all of this pain at two or three removes—the suffering and confusion it brought to Jamie’s girlfriend, the family memory of dead Lucie—aunt, great-aunt—in children yet unborn.

  Humans are conditioned to look for truth that is singular and focused, hanging for all to see, like a clear, full moon in a cloudless sky. Books about crime are expected to deliver such a photographic image, to serve up a story as dry as a shelled and salted nut. But as a subject, Joji Obara sucked away brightness; all that was visible was smoke or haze, and the twinkling upon it of external light. The shell, in other words, was all that was to be had of the nut. But the surface of the shell turned out to be fascinating in itself.

  * * *

  Everyone who came into contact with the Blackmans, and many of those who knew them only through newspapers, formed powerful and entrenched opinions about their story. Everyone insisted on being in the right. Not only about the question of Joji Obara’s guilt but also about Lucie herself, her family, and Japan as a nation. This drive to pass judgment was one of the extraordinary effects of the case.

  It was focused most intensely upon Tim and his decision to accept the ¥100 million. In the weeks that followed, it often felt as if he had been convicted of a crime equivalent to that of Obara. “His pain will be twofold,” a columnist in the Daily Mail prophesied. “He will agonise over what he could have done differently to save his beautiful daughter from the tawdry hostess career that led to her death; and he’ll be racked by guilt over the part he played in denying her the justice she deserved.” Or as Jane said to me, “I feel I’ve been fighting two men. I’ve been struggling to bring them both to justice—Obara and Lucie’s father.”

  What precisely had Tim done wrong? There was a single question to be answered about the condolence money, and an undeniably important one: Did it influence in any way the outcome of the case? In their written decision, the judges had stated explicitly that the payments received by the rape victims had made no difference to the life sentence that they had imposed, the maximum that the law allowed. In Japanese justice, this was the only effect that a payment of this kind was capable of making. Japanese courts can be reproached for various shortcomings, but acquitting killers because they have money is not one of them. Obara was found not guilty of harming Lucie because the court, rightly or wrongly, found the evidence to be lacking.

  Of course, the popular verdict passed upon Tim was not legal but moral. “How could any father take cash [from] his daughter’s [accused killer]?” asked one reader of The Sun newspaper, in a page of similar letters. “Tim Blackman should now hang his head in shame.” It was one of those pronouncements that serve as a statement of one’s own superiority of character. In between the lines of each of these letters flickered the unspoken brag: I would never do such a thing. To which my instinctive response was: How do you know? and Why do you care anyway?

  It is exciting to imagine ourselves in extreme circumstances in which we are tested, morally and physically; in our own minds, we always pass such a test. Everyone who has children has dreamed of their deaths and understood it to be the worst of all losses. But beyond that, we can do no more than fantasize. We may hope that we would behave with dignity, restraint, and determination. But none of us can know with certainty, any more than we can predict the course of a rare and life-threatening disease.

  This is all the more true when the element of money is introduced. The letters pages of the newspapers were full of sneers about the “price” that Tim was accused of having set on Lucie’s life. But there are few people for whom money, at some level or other, is not a crucial element in many of the choices they make. Justice was unaffected by ¥100 million paid to Tim Blackman; he harmed no one else by his decision. And the leisure it purchased for him brought ease to a life that had been twisted out of shape by anxiety and pain. He put some of it into the Lucie Blackman Trust, he promised to set some of it aside for Sophie and Rupert, and he spent part of it on the purchase of a classic yacht, the sixty-year-old Infanta, in which he would spend a happy year sailing around the world in 2008.

  There was much public tutting about such indulgence. But if the money had come from a court victory, or from an officially administrated compensation fund, it would not be considered anyone’s business how it was spent. Most people, in Tim’s circumstances, would also discover their “price.” If the money proffered was enough to wipe out a burdensome debt, or bring comfort to a sick relative, or see a surviving child through her education, or provide security for retirement, how many of us, given a certain level of reward, would not eventually say, “I have suffered: I deserve this”?

  I hope that I never have to confront a loss like that of the Blackmans, and that I never discover my own set of those particular moral bearings. Perhaps I would grieve like Jane, or like poor Bill Hawker. Perhaps I would be all energy and action like Tim. I might reject any financial compensation, or I might regard it as the very least to which I was entitled. I don’t know, and nor does anyone else—and none of us has the right to judge those who have been unlucky enough to suffer such a torment.

  Jane Steare was in a position to pass that judgment, and so were Annette, Nigel, and Samantha Ridgway. The Ridgways shared Tim’s loss exactly, and despite repeated blandishments from Obara’s lawyer, they consistently rejected the same offer of money. Jane took comfort in this solidarity with the Australian family. She and Annette used to speak to one another over the phone, and they became friends of a kind, united by the loss of their daughters. Until July 2008—when Nigel Ridgway, with the agreement of his ex-wife and daughter, signed a document stating that he believed Obara was capable of “rehabilitation” and questioning some of the evidence used to convict him of killing Carita. In return, the Ridgway family received ¥100 million of their own. They had suffered; there were no other sources of compensation; they felt they deserved it. Jane received the news with deep distress. Carita’s father, mother, and sister, she told me, had “all sold out to evil.”

  * * *

  People are afraid of stories like Lucie’s, stories about meaningless, brutal, premature death, but most of them cannot own up to their fear. So they take comfort in the certainty of moral judgments, which they brandish like burning branches waved in the night to keep off the wolves.

  Jane, too, needed to be right about Lucie, and she needed those who felt differently, including her daughter, and above all her ex-husband, to be in the wrong. Her own conviction was not enough; she wanted Tim’s wrongness to be proclaimed upon him in court. But there is no right and wrong to loss, to grief. The pain is circular; it is its own fulfilment. Summoning the strength to break out of it was the task each of the Blackmans faced.

  Part of the struggle was to find some good in Lucie’s death, a silver lining to the black fog. Tim looked for it in the Lucie Blackman Trust. It had begun as a bank account number handed out in Tokyo at one of his press conferences. Eventually, and despite Jane and Roger Steare’s efforts, it was legally registered as a charity. Apart from the rape alarms and antispiking kits, its website carried commonsense information about safety for young people traveling and nightclubbing. There were fund-raising events, patronized by a comic actor and a famous model; in 2007, a teenage Liverpudlian named Nathalie was “crowned” Miss Lucie Blackman Trust. Not all its schemes worked out—the manufacturer of a gadget called the BuddySafe, promoted by the trust, went bust within a few months; and several of the links on the website wer
e broken and nonfunctional.

  But Tim was proud of the trust’s Missing Abroad program, which offered help to British families in the same situation in which he had found himself after Lucie’s disappearance. Once, he would have thought of his experience as unique in its exotic awfulness. But every few months, there was a new case very like it.

  There was Wendy Singh, a thirty-nine-year-old mother, murdered by her husband in Fiji. There was Amy Fitzpatrick, a shy Irish girl of fifteen, who disappeared close to her mother’s home in Spain on New Year’s Day. There was Michael Dixon, a thirty-three-year-old journalist, who vanished during a holiday in Costa Rica. And there was Alex Humphrey, a twenty-nine-year-old health-care worker, who walked out of a hotel in Panama on his way to visit a famous waterfall and never returned.

  None of these missing people conjured the intensity of coverage given to Lucie’s case: because the victims were older or less photogenic, because there was no international summit meeting in Fiji or Costa Rica that season and no Tony Blair to take an interest in the case—chance, in other words. Tim’s trust did the kinds of things for the families of the missing or killed that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office could not do—provide twenty-four-hour hotlines for tip-offs and sightings, upload posters and case histories onto its website, and pay for visits by relatives and the repatriation of bodies. The FCO lent its support as a partner to the scheme; and, also as a result of Lucie’s disappearance, the Metropolitan Police instituted a system of family-liaison officers for the relatives of those who had gone missing abroad.

  All of this brought a kind of satisfaction, but Tim smiled wryly and shook his head when well-meaning people spoke tentatively to him of the possibility of “closure.” No success imaginable—in his charity, in his professional or personal life—was ever going to equal or exceed or cancel out the loss of Lucie. The most he could hope for was to contain the loss and prevent it from overwhelming everything else in his life. The image came to his mind of a bulging black rubbish bag, stuffed with all the grief and frustration and regret associated with Lucie and her fate. The thought of opening the bag and sifting through its slimy contents made him feel that he was unraveling. He never acted upon suicidal thoughts, but they occurred frequently. It was not only the urge to escape from the heaviness of life but also the hope that, in dying, he would be reunited with Lucie.

  “Lucie was dead,” Tim said. “Sophie was an inpatient in a sanatorium. Rupert had flunked out of university and had a nervous breakdown. It had been such a burden for such a long, long time, and instead of getting better it was actually all getting worse. I was feeling in great danger. It was hard to see that I’d ever, ever come out on the other side.” Certain days were especially bad—the anniversaries of Lucie’s life and death, which were spaced out regularly throughout the year, so that there was never more than a few months without a reminder of what had happened. “She was lost on 1 July,” Tim said, “her birthday was 1 September, she was found in February, and Christmas is difficult in any household, but worse when people are missing. The day she died is the worst, and I like to spend it sailing out in the Solent. She loved that stretch of water, and when I’m there I have a huge sense that she’s not there with me.”

  * * *

  Tim was at sea on December 16, 2008, when the satellite telephone on the Infanta rang. It was the deepest hour of the night. When he picked up it was my voice on the other end.

  For the second time in two years, I was standing in front of the Tokyo courts complex, surrounded by reporters stammering into mobile phones. The judges in the High Court had just given their ruling on the appeals by Obara and the prosecutors. They had upheld Obara’s convictions for the eight rapes and the rape and killing of Carita Ridgway. And they had partly overturned the acquittals on the Lucie Blackman charges. Obara had been found guilty of the abduction, drugging, attempted rape, and dismemberment of Lucie, and of illegally disposing of her body. The life sentence against him was confirmed.

  “To violate the dignity of so many victims, using drugs, in order to satisfy his lust, is unprecedented and extremely evil,” the chief appeal judge, Hiroshi Kadono, said. “There are no extenuating circumstances whatsoever for acts based on determined and twisted motives.”

  The verdict was complicated because on a single charge—of causing Lucie’s death—Obara had once again been acquitted. It was true that the postmortem had not identified what killed Lucie, and it was impossible to know with certainty what had happened in the hours after her last telephone call. But Japanese courts could, and did, convict on circumstantial evidence.* It was very difficult to understand how, in the absence of any other suspect, a man could be found guilty of drugging, raping, and carving up a woman who had spent her last evening in his company—but not of killing her. Still, these new convictions were as surprising as the original acquittals; everyone I knew had expected the judges to rubber-stamp the earlier verdicts. Jane Steare, who was in court with Roger beside her, wept tears of relief. “This has been a harrowing ordeal, not just for today, but for over eight years,” she said afterwards. “But at last we have two guilty verdicts and a life sentence … Today, truth and honor have prevailed, not only for Lucie, but for all victims of violent sexual crime.”

  I told Tim all of this over the satellite telephone line, and there was a silence filled with the hiss of the atmosphere. I had never known Tim to be speechless; I thought at first that the connection had been broken. I had to coax out of him the phrases that I needed for my newspaper story. “It is fantastic, and completely unexpected, and no less than Lucie deserves,” he said eventually. “It’s been such a long haul, such a merciless torture. But for the police and prosecutors to get him like this is a great achievement.”

  Tim thanked me for calling him and hung up. The Infanta was between Morocco and the West Indies, halfway through a transatlantic yacht race. There was almost no wind; sea and air were stilled by a dense tropical heat. On board his yacht, eight thousand five hundred miles from Tokyo, Tim was becalmed.

  * * *

  Obara appealed again, to the Supreme Court. This time his lawyers directed their attention to the story told in the prosecution indictment. They wanted to demonstrate the physical impossibility of maneuvering a dead body out of the apartment in Zushi Marina, back to Tokyo, down to Blue Sea Aburatsubo, and into the cave. This argument had been made before, and rejected, in the lower courts; this time, Obara attempted to make his point by means of a bizarre experiment. He had his lawyers purchase the same model of refrigerator in which he was accused of having stored the corpse in the house at Den-en Chofu, and he spent ¥1 million on a precisely molded mannequin of Lucie. “The mannequin is very delicate, and its skin is like human skin,” his lawyer Yasuo Shionoya told me. “It weighs the same [as Lucie] and the size is the same. One of the lawyers who is about the same size as Obara tried to carry it and to put it into the freezer—it was completely impossible.” A video of the fellow’s exertions formed a central part of the appeal dossier.

  From his cell in the Tokyo Detention Center, Obara continued to direct his legal battles, suing the Yomiuri newspaper for libel and fighting a claim for unpaid fees from the publisher of the strange book with the dead dog on the cover. Shionoya talked about the appeal with modest confidence; there would be no verdict, he predicted, until the middle of 2011 at the earliest. But then, early in December 2010, Tim, Jane, and the Ridgways in Australia each received a telephone call from the Tokyo police with unexpected news. The appeal had been rejected by the Supreme Court. The guilty verdicts and the life sentence were now confirmed irrevocably; there was nowhere left for Joji Obara to run.* A life sentence in a Japanese court rarely means life, but on average the term served before parole is more than thirty years. Even counting the decade he served in detention, Joji Obara is unlikely to walk free before 2030, when he will be seventy-eight years old. As a convicted criminal, he was transferred to a prison with a regime drastically different from the detention center where he had lived si
nce 2001. He shares a cell with other convicts; he is allowed none of the books and documents that furnished his life for the past decade. Visits are allowed just once a month, and even then only from members of his immediate family. Prisoners are not barred from seeing their lawyers, but permission must be obtained for each visit and is typically granted only once every few weeks.

  “Until now, Obara has been his own chief lawyer, but that is impossible for him in prison,” Shionoya told me. His legal team spent the last days before his incarceration huddled with their client, making hasty arrangements so that they could continue to manage his affairs without the daily contact to which they had grown accustomed.

  The prosecutors had not appealed to the Supreme Court, and so the single acquittal, on the charge of killing Lucie Blackman, stood. Jane held fast to her view that even the partial conviction of Obara was a victory, if not for Lucie then for Obara’s victims in general. It was true, of course, and yet emotionally it hardly mattered at all. Well before the conclusion of Obara’s trial, it had become impossible for those most closely connected with the case to hold it and all its details in mind.

  It was not that justice was unimportant. But it altered nothing, or nothing that really mattered. It was as if, after a frantic contest of strength between two equally determined and unyielding opponents, one had simply relaxed its grip and walked away. Lucie was still gone—and what could ever make a difference to that? Such a loss was unquenchable. What might have been consolations—arrest of suspect, trial, a guilty verdict, ¥100 million—evaporated into it like spoonfuls of water tossed into a desert. What if Obara had admitted guilt, begged forgiveness, wept out his black heart? What if he had been charged with murder, rather than manslaughter, and sentenced to hang? Imagine the most extreme vindication and retribution—nothing that mattered would be alleviated or improved by it. There was no satisfaction that could be imagined, only greater and lesser degrees of humiliation and pain. Lucie had been a unique being, a precious, beloved human creature. She was dead, and nothing would ever bring her back.