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

  Christa Mackenzie had come around feeling no more than badly hungover. But Katie was left reeling with nausea, which lasted for days. She staggered into Club Cadeau, her lips blue and her speech slurred. The club was owned and managed by Kai Miyazawa, the ponytailed businessman who would explain to me the secrets of the bar business. When he saw Katie, he sent her to a doctor and went with her the next day to Azabu Police Station.

  The reaction of the officers on duty dismayed them. “We were not even taken into a private room or asked to take a seat, just simply left standing at the reception desk,” Katie wrote later. “The officers showed no interest whatsoever to help us or take any further action. They would not make a formal report, just wrote down some notes on a piece of scrap paper … They said they could not investigate my incident because of a lack of evidence … I was able to give an accurate description of the man and clearly describe the location. I also gave them the mobile telephone number written by ‘Koji’ himself. This I feel was sufficient evidence to at least research who the man was, and if he had any prior criminal records. I was made to feel as if I were a nuisance and just wasting police time.”

  Kai even called a policeman he knew personally. “But in the end, they say, ‘Kai, these foreign women, hostesses—they all take drugs. It’s her personal problem—just forget about it.’ I tell Katie, and she’s very angry. For a week she keeps on about it, so I go and talk to them again. But again they say, ‘Forget it, forget it.’”

  Katie was still living in Tokyo three years later, when Lucie disappeared. As soon as she heard the news, she went back to Azabu Police Station. A female detective recorded a few more details this time but showed no particular interest or concern. Once again, Kai called his detective friend. “But he moved jobs—now he’s in a different department,” Kai told me. “He says, ‘This is not my business.’ But now I think one hundred percent that I am right: this must be the same guy.”

  * * *

  In July, the police were considering three possible explanations for Lucie’s disappearance: a religious cult, a crime involving the trade in illegal drugs, or something to do with the yakuza (hence the questions to Louise about men with tattoos, the badge of the Japanese gangster). They were obvious and sensible lines of inquiry, given the character of Roppongi and of crime in Japan generally. But the police were being told another story, about a criminal who had been operating for years under their noses. Was it this suggestion—of willful negligence on their own part—that explained why, at the beginning at least, they refused to hear it?

  Christa Mackenzie had traveled from Osaka to Tokyo to tell the police about “Yuji.” Katie Vickers related the story of “Koji.” Huw Shakeshaft’s friends Isobel Parker and Clara Mendez, who had shared their story with the shell-shocked Tim Blackman, went to them with different names but the same narrative. All four met with indifference. “It was a month before they took anything I said seriously,” said Christa. “They were so slow to pick things up. It was partly inertia—they didn’t seem interested for a while. They were saying, ‘Well, yes, but she’s probably joined a religious cult.’ Just not listening to people who told them that Lucie wasn’t that kind of person at all. But they genuinely thought it was a possibility. Or maybe they just wanted to believe it because they couldn’t be bothered to follow through on the alternative.”

  The police had barely set up their investigation headquarters when the first of the fake letters arrived, signed in Lucie’s name. It was the one dated July 17—Tim’s birthday—and postmarked Chiba, and Louise recognized it immediately as a forgery. The signature was impressively accurate, but the spelling was poor. The extracts shown to Tim and Sophie had been carefully bowdlerized—in its entirety, it was violent, graphic and angry.

  The detectives had forbidden Louise from taking notes, but when they were out of the room, she scribbled down a few phrases on a scrap of paper:

  —Louise I love you like a sister but as a matter of fact you fuck up my plans by making me famous.

  —he took me to the hotel and fucked me—fuck hostesses

  —I want to be what I want to be

  —Purpose of coming to Japan is for money yes that is a fact

  —wanted to escape

  —I begged him to call you

  —Tell Scott that I love him, but I don’t want to be with him any more

  —not innocent had several happenings

  —fucked customers with money

  —Louise you think you know me but you don’t

  “It was all really hard language,” Louise said. “It was awful.” She was spending all day in the police station and going back alone to the police apartment. Her sleep was lurid with nightmares. For a few days, Christa stayed with her, but she was in the grip of her own guilt—for not going to the police earlier and because she had ignored the inner prompting to warn Lucie when she first met her. Instead of giving comfort, she and Louise compounded each other’s despair.

  “I couldn’t stop imagining where Lucie might be,” Louise said. “I thought she must be kept in a room, but what kind of room? Every night I thought, ‘Is she hungry? Is she cold? Does she have enough to eat and drink? What if she’s having her period?’ Then I thought that she’s been raped, tortured. I imagined there were six guys there, doing awful things to her. I imagined a row of prison cells, room after room. I never believed in my heart she was dead. I thought if she’d died, I’d feel it in my heart.”

  * * *

  For Kai, the owner of Club Cadeau, the summer of 2000 was also a trying time. “The story about Lucie Blackman was on TV every day,” he said. “Everyone’s going crazy. All the journalists are in Roppongi, crazy, crazy, interviewing people, and no one is coming to my club.” Then one day in August, a telephone call came from Azabu Police Station, the first contact since he and Katie had been fobbed off in the week of Lucie’s disappearance. It was one of Superintendent Udo’s detectives. “He says, ‘I heard that back in July you talked to my colleague. Please come to Azabu Police Station.’ I say, ‘Fuck off. It’s surrounded by journalists. I have a club, I’m trying to make a business, and I don’t need this shit. This is bad for business. I just want it all to be over quickly. Come to my office and bring a car. We’ll talk, and then we’ll go for a drive.’ Then I call Katie.”

  Having got nowhere with drugs, gangsters, or gurus, the investigators were being compelled to consider other possibilities. Two detectives, Usami and Asano, drove Kai and Katie out of Tokyo to look for the place where she had been taken and drugged by “Koji.” She had only a vague idea of the direction—south and west of Tokyo, along the Miura Peninsula. Kai recollected the drive vividly; he claimed much of the credit for what followed. “For some reason I said to the police, ‘Take a right down here,’” he told me. “Maybe some god was pulling me.”

  Soon they had reached Zushi Marina, two miles down the coast. When it was new, in the 1970s, this had been a famous and glamorous resort, a place where rich couples retired and where Tokyo celebrities bought holiday apartments with a view of Mount Fuji. The Nobel Prize–winning novelist Yasunari Kawabata had gassed himself to death here in 1972. Boats and water, tall apartment buildings with balconies, and—a rare sight this far north—hundreds of tall palm trees. Katie knew the place immediately. “It gave me chicken skin, the whole thing,” Kai told me. “I have chicken skin now, talking about it. Because I was right after all. I knew from the beginning, just knew. And I was right. I knew I was one hundred percent right, and I was right. At that moment, I thought I was really great!”

  * * *

  Isobel Parker and Clara Mendez had told their story to Tim in his first days in Tokyo. Much like the police, in his own state of stifled dread and stupefaction, he had completely missed its significance. After that, the progress of the investigation, or the lack of it, was carefully concealed from him. “The father would come to see us and ask how the investigation was going,” a retired senior detective told me. “But all we could say was, ‘The investig
ation is proceeding well.’ To be frank, we were not comfortable that he was giving all these big press conferences. He would say, ‘Why don’t you tell me more?’ and we would reply, ‘Because the press is there in the background. If we tell you what we are doing, you might tell the press, and that could jeopardize our investigation.’”

  The police lied to Tim about their progress. At first, it was probably to conceal how little they knew. But later it was because they didn’t want their suspect to learn how hotly they were breathing down his neck. This was partly what made the investigation so baffling.

  By late summer the detectives were, in fact, tracking down telephone records. They wanted to identify the origin of the calls made to the pink pay phone in Sasaki House by the man Lucie was to have met that day, and to identify the owner of the numbers that “Koji” and “Yuji” had given to Katie and Christa. They had known about these numbers in early July (in Katie’s case since 1997), but it seems only to have been in August that they seriously began to investigate them.

  It was an immensely time-consuming and complicated exercise. For any given number, the telephone companies recorded only outgoing, not incoming, calls. It was impossible to start with the pink phone, for example, and trace backwards to the mystery caller. The telephone number given to Christa turned out to have been registered in the name of a Hajime Tanaka, a name as common in Japanese as Michael Smith or Paul Jones. The account had been opened with a public health insurance card that turned out to be fake. The address to which it was registered was real, but no one of that name lived there. The second cell phone, whose number Katie had, was charged with prepaid vouchers, requiring no contract and no billing, the kind of phone popular with people who had something to hide. Every time the detectives asked for telephone records, they had to obtain a warrant from a judge. It could take as long as a week to prepare the necessary documents, present them to the court, and wait for the result.

  The detectives began with the pink phone. They knew approximately what time Lucie’s customer had called her on the day she disappeared, and they blocked out a time period six minutes before and after that moment. Then they asked the telephone companies to search through all of their subscriber numbers to find out which of them had called the pink phone during that period. Such an exercise involved the scanning of millions of accounts; the companies took a lot of convincing even to attempt it.

  “It had never been done before,” a former senior detective told me. “It took several days and required many of their staff. This happened after Prime Minister Blair’s visit and after he had asked the Japanese government for special cooperation. Having been asked in that manner, we had no choice but to do this to maintain the dignity of the Japanese police.”

  The search produced a single eleven-digit number. Further checks revealed that it was the number of another anonymous, prepaid cell phone. But the circumstances of its purchase were intriguing. It had been sold in an electronics shop in Tokyo in June 2000, one of a batch of seventy phones bought by a single customer. The name he had given was bogus, and the sale had been made just a few days before the introduction of a law requiring that buyers of such mobiles show proof of address and identity. But now the detectives had the numbers of the other phones from the same batch, all of them owned, they could assume, by the man who had telephoned Lucie and met up with her that day.

  Only about ten of them had ever been activated. Now, with fresh warrants, they were able to identify the numbers that had been dialed from those ten numbers and then the numbers that had been called from those. They referred among themselves to “parent,” “child,” and “grandchild” numbers; the information was recorded in complicated charts resembling family trees. Eventually, in this thicket of digits, they uncovered the number of Louise’s mobile phone: this was the call that Lucie had made to Louise on the Saturday evening to say that she would soon be coming home—Lucie’s last call.

  The telephone company was able to identify the relay station that had transmitted the call. It was in the town of Zushi.

  Katie Vickers had identified the Zushi Marina apartment complex as the place where she had been taken by “Koji.” Now the detectives took the other girls there. Christa, Clara, and Isobel all recognized the marina as the place where they had been drugged and undressed. But none could remember with certainty the individual apartment, or even the building. The detectives procured a list of all the apartment owners and ran criminal-record checks on each one. Plenty of old offenses came up, but among the hundreds of names, there was only a single sex offender.

  He was the owner of apartment 4314, and his file contained details of two offenses. In 1983, he had paid a small fine after driving into the back of another motorist. Then in October 1998—just two years ago—he had been arrested for peeping at a woman in a ladies’ lavatory in the seaside town of Shirahama in western Japan, with a camera in his hand—the second time he had been caught in such an act. To start with, he had given the police a false name, the Japanese media reported later, and described himself as a “nonfiction writer.” He pleaded guilty and was fined by the Summary Court without ever having to go to trial. The penalty was ¥9,000, less than the cost of an hour with a hostess at Casablanca or Club Cadeau.

  The criminal file contained a mug shot of the man, taken at the time of his arrest, and the police were also able to call up the photograph on his driver’s license. They identified cars registered in his name, several companies of which he was listed as president, and numerous properties owned by these companies across Japan.

  The photographs of the man were placed in an album containing scores of other faces. Christa, Katie, Clara, and Isobel each identified him as their customer and assailant. “It was a really weird picture,” Clara remembered. “His eyes were hardly open, like they’d picked him up out of the gutter. If you didn’t know, you’d think he was drunk or something. But I think that he was just trying to make it difficult for them to photograph him by looking away.”

  They tracked one of the man’s cars, a white Mercedes-Benz sports car, through the surveillance cameras that monitor Japan’s highways. They confirmed that he had traveled from Tokyo to Zushi on the day of Lucie’s disappearance and made several journeys in the days that followed, to and from the city, and up and down the Miura Peninsula.

  Superintendent Udo ordered a watch to be kept on the man. Rather than risking detection with a fixed tail, he had him tracked by individual officers in different positions who radioed the suspect’s movements to one another. In any one day, there might be ten different people following the suspect, on foot, on motorcycle, or in a car. Udo referred to this style of surveillance as the “pinpoint method.” It was not completely reliable, and the detectives often lost their man. One day he went for a drive in the direction of Chiba, where he disappeared. And the next day, the foul, angry letter signed in Lucie’s name arrived at Azabu Police Station bearing a Chiba postmark.

  * * *

  By the end of September, Superintendent Udo was confident that he had found his man. His movements on the day that Lucie disappeared and the stories of the other hostesses left no doubt. But proof was lacking. In Katie Vickers herself, the police were no more interested than when they had turned her away three years earlier; she and the other women were a means to an end. “What was important was to find out what happened to Lucie, how he had killed her, and where her body was,” Udo said. “That was our goal—to find out what had happened to Lucie.”

  The detectives began to look into the background of their suspect and his movements over the past few weeks. His companies owned properties from the island of Hokkaido in the north to Kyushu in the south. Some of these were rented apartments, but several of them were personal residences, including three apartments in central Tokyo, and a huge two-story house with a swimming pool in the affluent suburb of Den-en Chofu. There was also a property in a village called Moroiso, on the west coast of the Miura Peninsula, sixteen miles south of Zushi. It was a coastline marked with
rocky inlets and beaches, where the homes of fishermen stood beside blocks of holiday apartments. The suspect owned an apartment in a building called Blue Sea Aburatsubo.

  The detectives called on their colleagues in the town of Misaki, the police station closest to Moroiso. The patrolmen there had an interesting story to tell.

  On July 6, three officers had gone to Blue Sea Aburatsubo, after a complaint from its caretaker, Ms. Abe. A man had turned up suddenly that afternoon and entered apartment 401, which had been unused for several years. He didn’t have a key for the place and, without consulting the caretaker, he had summoned a locksmith to open the door. He had left his sports car, a two-seater Mercedes, alongside the building. Ms. Abe’s partner, Mr. Hirokawa, reported that it had been full of lumpy objects covered by white sheets; only the driver’s seat had been clear. The suspicious man was now in his room, and unusual bangs could be heard. Inspector Naoki Harada and one of his officers climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. As they approached, they heard a loud bumping noise from within.

  There was no reply at first. They rang the bell again, and spoke into the intercom, identifying themselves as policemen and asking to be allowed in. Eventually a man opened the door. He was short and middle-aged, with thinning hair. “He was half naked and wearing something like pajama trousers,” Inspector Harada said later. “I was struck by the beads of sweat on his face and chest, and his trembling. He was panting, too. I had the impression that he was sweating from every pore, and he was very dirty. I thought he must have been doing some really vigorous work.”

  The man said something about changing his clothes and closed the door; there were more bangs from within. When the man appeared again, Inspector Harada stepped inside the entryway of the apartment. “I saw some kind of tool in the corridor, and pieces of concrete scattered around,” he said. “There was a kind of linen bag in the back room, with something in it. It was something round and gray with a diameter of about twenty centimeters [eight inches].”