People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished From the Streets of Tokyo--And the Evil That Swallowed Her Up

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  Until ten years ago, he had been a member of a circle run by a man named Ryuji Matsuda, a wealthy businessman from the neighboring port city of Yokohama. He had first met him at a session where like-minded hobbyists pooled resources to hire a few girls (often university students working for pocket money), trussed them up in leather and ropes, and photographed them in a room fitted out as a “dungeon.” He had immediately been alarmed by Matsuda, who was what Japanese, borrowing the English word, referred to as a “maniac.” His sexual appetites were extreme, and they repelled the more moderately sadistic Ono. All the members of the circle bragged about their exploits—or fantasies—but there was something chilling about the way Matsuda talked. “I have a daughter myself,” Ono said, turning to Tim. “It’s a hobby for me, but there is still a line that should not be crossed.”

  Matsuda’s favorite fantasy was to take sadistic sex to its ultimate conclusion. He would abduct a woman, he said, a big, blond foreign woman with large breasts, and film the scene as he tortured her to death in his private dungeon.

  “As a man,” he used to ask Ono, “don’t you long to do one big thing, just once in your lifetime?”

  “That was ten years ago,” Ono said. “Such a childish plan. What kind of a person would do such a thing?”

  Ono had fallen in with a new circle of more gentlemanly sadists and cut his ties with the Matsuda group. But he had stayed in touch with one of its remaining members, a man named Akio Takamoto. Like most members of the Matsuda group, he was outwardly a highly respectable figure, a fifty-two-year-old senior manager for Fuji Film, whose head office was a few hundred yards from Roppongi. In mid-July, the week after news of Lucie’s disappearance, Takamoto had contacted Ono in a state of excitement and anxiety.

  “He came to this office, very upset,” Ono recalled. “He was jabbering away, saying, ‘I must speak to Matsuda.’ He kept saying, ‘He did it. Finally, Matsuda did it.’ Then he said, ‘Perhaps there is a video, so we should go together to his place and steal it.’”

  With a chill, Ono suddenly understood. His friend Takamoto believed that the braggart Matsuda had finally enacted his fantasy and kidnapped Lucie Blackman.

  Matsuda had recently acquired a new “dungeon,” Takamoto told him, a secret den where he could indulge his enthusiasms. But rather than showing it off to his S & M chums, he had refused to take anyone there, which Takamoto found suspicious. And once, Takamoto remembered, while elaborating on his kidnap plan, Matsuda had suggested a method of confusing the police—by making out that the missing victim had joined a religious cult.

  Ono couldn’t deny how likely it seemed. “There’s something about Matsuda,” he said. “He’s the kind of person who would think nothing of killing. He treats women like dolls.” After Takamoto had left, Ono went straight to Azabu Police Station and told them the whole story. The detectives listened with interest, took down the names and addresses of everyone he mentioned, and told Ono that they would need to speak to him again.

  Takamoto returned to see Ono the following week, full of agitation; again, he expressed his conviction that Matsuda had killed Lucie. Then two weeks passed, and there was no further word from Takamoto, and no word from the police. One morning Ono got a phone call from another acquaintance. Takamoto’s wife had been in touch with this man, reporting that her husband had failed to come home from work the night before. Did Ono have any idea where he might be?

  Ono did in fact know something that few others did, including Takamoto’s family: the respectable Fuji Film executive had a “dungeon” of his own, a small rented apartment a few train stops from his house.

  Ono left his porn studio early that afternoon and went to the place.

  It was a single room on the second floor of an old and decaying wooden building, the cheapest kind of apartment. Ono knocked, but there was no reply. He tried the door, which opened on to a tiny entryway. A pair of Takamoto’s shoes lay side by side, so he must be at home. Ono slid open the paper door that divided the entryway from the apartment room. The first thing he noticed was a strong smell, of cars and latrines. The room was cluttered with piles of books, magazines, and videotapes, and Ono glimpsed the screen of a computer. Then he saw a pair of pale legs beside a cupboard.

  It was Takamoto, obviously dead. He was hanging by a rope attached to a wall-mounted hook. He was not dangling but slumped against the wall, his feet trailing the floor; and he was naked from the waist down. The smell was petrol from an overturned can, which had soaked into the tatami mats on the floor, and excrement, apparently human, that was drooling out of Takamoto’s mouth.

  Ono stepped shakily outside and telephoned the police.

  There was one other detail that he immediately registered in the few seconds he was in the room. On the walls, distinctive with their blue borders and white lettering in English and Japanese, were several missing-person posters bearing the smiling face of Lucie Blackman.

  * * *

  Within an hour or two, twenty police officers were on the scene, both uniformed and plainclothes. Ono talked to them at length over the next few days.

  They told him that, based on his information, they had summoned Takamoto for questioning just three days earlier, on August 5. It was a Saturday, and the police had not wanted to embarrass him by asking him to be absent from work. Takamoto had told them his fears about Matsuda. The next day he had paid the paltry rent—¥20,000 a month—on his sex den. On Monday, he had said goodbye to his family and gone to work as normal. Sometime between that afternoon and the following day, he had died.

  The magazines and videos in the apartment were pornographic; the computer, which was new, contained files of hard-core pornography downloaded from the Internet. Most of the images were of white women in postures of humiliation. The neighbors confirmed that the quiet bespectacled salaryman came by the apartment most days in the early evening, although they had no idea who he was or what he was up to. Rather tentatively, the police concluded that it was an accidental death caused by autoerotic asphyxia, the practice by which a masturbating man temporarily cuts off the supply of oxygen to his brain to intensify the sensation of orgasm. This dangerous game has caused many deaths over the years, although distraught families often prefer to announce publicly that the death was a suicide.

  Ono didn’t believe it.

  Could Takamoto have killed himself out of fear of being exposed as a sadomasochist by the inquiries of the police? But if his aim had been to avoid censure and humiliation, why would he end his life in such a grotesque way? And the Lucie posters on the walls—why hadn’t Takamoto mentioned them to his friend Ono, since they had talked about the case so much? Had they, in fact, been put up by someone else—after Takamoto’s death, perhaps—to put the police off the trail? Could the petrol on the floor have been the beginning of an attempt to burn the place down, by an intruder who found himself suddenly interrupted?

  According to Ono, the crucial clue lay in the vilest detail of all, the filth that filled Takamoto’s mouth and smeared his face. According to the police, it belonged to the dead man himself. “Ono told us that if you’ve got someone else’s smeared all over you, that’s kinky,” Adam Whittington recalled later. “But if it’s your own, it’s a sign of disrespect. It’s an insult.”

  This was why Ono had summoned Tim and Adam: to convey his belief that Matsuda had kidnapped Lucie and had murdered Takamoto because he had guessed the truth.

  * * *

  “I certainly met some strange people during the course of this whole thing,” Tim told me. “But that was probably the strangest of all. I mean, the whole idea that he was suggesting … it couldn’t be worse, could it? Perhaps it could … At any rate, I was quite dysfunctional by that point, and perhaps that saved me. Because if I’d really taken in what this might have meant for my daughter, and her fate … Well, I couldn’t take it in, and that was just as well.”

  But Adam had taken everything in, including the specific information that Mr. Ono had given them as they left: the ad
dresses of the secret dens of both the late Mr. Takamoto and his alleged killer, Mr. Matsuda.

  A few days later, Adam set out for Matsuda’s dungeon with Yoshi Kuroda, a Japanese journalist who was helping the Blackmans. They parked in a residential area of Yokohama, a neighborhood of low apartment buildings, a dusty, old-fashioned kind of district, where old ladies walked small dogs in the evenings and where you never saw children. From the outside, the building looked less like a torture chamber than a storage shed. A wooden fence surrounded it. After climbing over, Adam could make a circuit of the building concealed from view, as Yoshi kept a nervous watch. There were drapes on the inside of the windows, but between two of them was a gap through which a fraction of the interior could be made out. Adam glimpsed a carpeted floor; videotapes were scattered across it.

  A sharp tap with a stone was all that was needed to break the pane. Adam, small and fit, reached through to release the latch, climbed through the window, and let Yoshi in through the front door.

  They found themselves inside a single rectangular room; a sheet had been hung rather crudely at one end to conceal a dingy sink. The drapes on the windows filtered out most of the light, but they could make out chairs, a television and video player, and mattresses on the floor. There were pornographic magazines and many, many videotapes. Their labels bore photographs of Japanese and Western women. Most of them were commercially produced, although there were a few that looked homemade. “Then there were sex toys everywhere, littering the place,” Adam said. “Dildos, clamps—vile, sick things. Harnesses, straps, and things I’d never seen before. One of them had tubes for inserting inside a woman. It had some kind of clamps to hold the legs apart, and then this tube that must have gone between the legs.” Instruments of humiliation and pain, designed for pleasure.

  They shuffled through the labels on the videotapes, looking for something that might suggest a connection to Lucie. But there was nothing. The walls were bare: no missing-person posters here. Their hearts were racing, for they found themselves in an authentic dungeon, a place of sexual degradation, the kind of which everyone has heard but that no one ever expects to see for himself. It was unspeakable and bizarre. It was so extreme and unthinkable that it had come to seem inevitable, almost a matter of logic, that it contained the answer to the mystery. So to find it lifeless and empty was an intense disappointment. Her friends had looked everywhere for Lucie, and now they had followed her trail here, to the darkest chamber of the human heart, a world of manacles and excretion and death—and still she was not here. It would have been easier to discover a gang of sadomasochists in mid-orgy, or a coven of witches engaged in a human sacrifice: some palpable, visible evil, something that could be engaged with blows, anything but what confronted them at every corner: the stubborn absence of a girl.

  The room was lifeless and unclean. A sheen of dust coated the glossy, textured vibrators and the outspread pages of the magazines. Adam scrutinized the floor, the mattresses, and the sink, looking for blond hair. After that, there was little more to do. Yoshi knocked on a few of the nearby doors, but none of the neighbors knew anything about the place or the man who rented it; none had seen or heard anything suspicious.

  Later, Yoshi went alone to the apartment where Takamoto had died. It had been emptied of its contents and cleaned. He even called at the hanged man’s former home, three stops down the commuter line that he had taken to work every day. When Takamoto’s widow opened the door, Yoshi was appalled by how young and beautiful she was. After introducing himself as a reporter, he didn’t know what to say. “I tried to talk to her, but she just cried,” he said. “It was so tragic, so sad. He had this wife, and beautiful kids and a beautiful house, and he just died like that. There’d been other journalists there before, and she was desperate. She was begging me, ‘Please leave, just leave.’ I felt so bad, and I left.”

  Finally, Yoshi called at the home of Matsuda himself, in a more affluent suburb of Yokohama. He could have rung the bell here too, but instead he took up a discreet position across the road. Eventually Matsuda emerged, a stocky, vigorous-looking man in middle age, with a full round face and a head of bristly hair. Yoshi contemplated approaching him and introducing himself, but he refrained. Instead he took photographs through a long-lensed camera, as Matsuda came out of his front door and drove away.

  But what to do with these pictures, or with any of this information? For a few weeks, Ono pestered Tim and Adam with calls and visits, repeating his conviction that Matsuda had to be involved in Lucie’s disappearance. But Adam had begun to wonder about him and his motivation. He was persuasive, but who could tell what grudges and feuds might flourish between estranged sadists? “He was like a kid in his own action movie,” Adam remembered. “He wanted to get involved in everything. He was getting off on it, to be honest. Towards the end he was quite annoying, trying to run the whole thing, telling us to do this and do that. I would have done something if there was any proper information. But all I had was this Japanese guy spinning on a merry-go-round.

  “I went to the police station with Tim, and we told them what Ono had said. But they had all that anyway—the names, the address where Matsuda lived. What they did with it, your guess is as good as mine. When we talked to them about it, there was no reaction at all. They listened, they took some notes, and then they showed us the door.”

  11. THE MAN-SHAPED HOLE

  The first day of September was Lucie’s twenty-second birthday. It might have been a day of despair, but the Blackmans made it the occasion for a series of events to invigorate flagging media interest in the case. In Sevenoaks, Jane and Rupert Blackman released one thousand pink and yellow balloons above the town’s famous cricket ground, the Vine. Sophie had wanted to do the same thing in Tokyo, but the police refused permission on the grounds that the floating balloons would distract the attention of motorists. Instead, Sophie handed out flyers at Roppongi Crossing; above her, Lucie’s face and the number of the hotline were broadcast on the giant screen. The day before, Sophie had put on a black dress and been filmed as she walked from Sasaki House to Sendagaya Station, as her sister had done on that Saturday in July. The hope was that television stations would broadcast the sequence, and that new memories would be shaken loose from witnesses. But a reconstruction in itself was not enough. Without some fresh development to report, the story was dwindling and fading.

  What more could Lucie’s family do to help her? The only thing left was money. In the late summer and early autumn, a series of rewards was offered, each several times larger than the last. The announcements generated a brief flurry of sightings, which quickly subsided into silence. Like the doses of an addictive drug, a bigger and bigger financial incentive produced over time a smaller and smaller effect.

  Tim’s family put up a reward of £9,500 for information leading to Lucie. An Australian tourist contacted the BBC to report a sighting of Lucie in Hong Kong, “shouting incoherently and talking gibberish” as she withdrew money from a cash machine. Tim spoke to the man, but the girl he described was not tall enough to be Lucie.

  The anonymous British businessman increased the reward to £100,000. A call came to the Tokyo police from the Gulf state of Qatar, where Lucie had been seen walking down a street. The British embassy in Doha investigated; the tip came to nothing.

  Tim and Sophie continued to shuttle back and forth. Even during the time spent back home in Britain, it was impossible to concentrate on work or adjust to the routines of day-to-day life. Tim’s business was grinding to a halt; the hunt for Lucie had personally cost him tens of thousands of pounds. It was a measure of his desperation that in mid-October he made an appeal to the “newly risen religion” that was holding Lucie—a detail from the “Akira Takagi” phone call that had been scoffed at as an absurd red herring for all these months. “Perhaps the possibility that Lucie was taken to some sort of cult should be given a bit more thought,” Tim told a small gathering of journalists at his ninth press conference. “I can understand that it may
be difficult to return Lucie because of the media attention. But it is possible to do so and I would be pleased to receive some information as to how we could meet in complete confidence. If indeed she was initiated into a cult, I would understand that there may be a cost of money for the expense of her training. If it’s a question of money, I know that the family would be able to find it.”

  At this stage, the question everyone else was asking—What had happened to Lucie?—was of very little interest to Tim. Who cared what had happened, as long as she could be returned home? “I’ve heard horror stories about girls who’ve gone missing,” he said. “Drugged, taken away, photographed, abused, then returned. I would be overjoyed at this point if that would be Lucie’s fate. We can make it all better once I get her home. But I’ve got to find her first.”

  The anonymous businessman increased the reward to £500,000.

  One day, Tim was out in Roppongi with a sheaf of missing-person posters. He was taping them to telegraph poles along the main street. A policeman approached and sternly explained that this was not allowed. If Tim did not take them down immediately, the officer said, he would just have to do it himself later.

  “No,” said Tim.

  “Please cooperate,” said the policeman.

  Tim shook his head and held out his hands with the wrists clenched together, submitting to arrest.

  The policeman stamped off, his bluff called, and Tim moved on to the next telegraph pole. But it was already plastered with small paper flyers bearing photographs of seminaked women, advertisements for local “fashion health parlors,” “soap lands,” and “aesthetic salons.” Tim plucked off a few of them for closer examination; in his other hand, he held the Lucie posters. He looked from the photograph of his missing daughter to the advertisements for the sex clubs and back again. Then he held the flyers up with a look of incomprehension. “But these are all right?” he said.