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

  They were in color and of good quality. Some began with a brief preamble of one young woman or another laughing, raising a glass, and drinking. Then they cut abruptly to the central scene: the same young woman, naked, lying on a bed. Her eyes were closed, and she was motionless, but her slow breathing was visible. Sometimes she lay on her front and sometimes on her back; often, her legs were tied to hooks to keep them apart. Powerful lamps stood on either side of the bed to illuminate the activity on it.

  The camera was steady and unwobbling, as if mounted on a tripod. In a moment, a man entered the picture. He too was naked. “His body was normal,” someone who had seen the videos told me. “No sign that he exercised very much—the ordinary body of a middle-aged man.” Only one thing about him was outstanding and sinister: in many of the films, he wore a mask.

  I spoke to three people who had seen the videos or the detailed dossier of still photographs taken from them by the prosecutors, and each had a different recollection of the mask. One said that it was gray and concealed the entire face, like a bank robber; another remembered that it was black and covered only the eyes, like the mask of Zorro; the third thought that it had yellow and black stripes, like the skin of a tiger.

  The penis of the man in the mask was erect. Before the steady gaze of the camera, he embarked on a long and rigorous violation of the unconscious woman.

  “He does various things,” one man who had seen the dossier told me. “Sex in a normal position. Sometimes anal sex. Sometimes he uses … tools, and objects. The kind of instruments that doctors use. He would look inside, if you understand what I mean. And a cucumber—insert it. His penis is … in a normal state. There were lights on both sides of the bed, and sometimes while … having sex enthusiastically, he failed to pay attention and the lights touched the woman’s naked body.”

  Off camera there were two television monitors. According to Obara’s own explanation, one of them played a foreign pornographic film, while another relayed the live image of him engaged in his “play.” He would look up at these for further visual stimulation. “His libido was very strong,” one witness to the videos told me. “He was always active, he never rested.” After the completion of one sexual act, he would begin again. Sometimes, there were two, or even three, videotapes of the same woman filmed at a single session, which might go on for hours. “He treats women as things, not as people,” I was told. “Those women show almost no reaction at all, they hardly made a noise.” And whenever one of his costars did show signs of stirring from her stupor, Obara always did the same thing: he would reach for a piece of towel or gauze and hold it under the nose of his victim, close to, but not touching, the face. With that, her struggles would cease.

  There were wildly different accounts of the quantity of videocassettes. One report said that the police had recovered a thousand of them, another that there were 4,800. Superintendent Udo told me that there were 170, and that they featured more than 150 different women. But the court noted that there were 40, and Obara claimed the number was as few as 9. By Udo’s account, more than half of Obara’s partners were foreigners, but many were Japanese. But there was something else about the two kinds of women that set them apart, other than their race.

  Most of the foreign girls recognizably bore the hostess stamp: tall, slim, groomed, made up, and often, although not always, blond. But physically, the Japanese were of a different type. Many of them were stout and plump, or frankly fat, with none of the conventional prettiness of the gaijin girls. “With a Japanese girl, my preference is that she should be ugly and have no bodily curves,” Obara would say later. “After I had talked to them often [on the telephone], I came to recognize their body type. Those who had a dry voice were skinny, while those with a moist voice were fat.” He said, “I like an ugly girl. Selecting an ugly one is part of my play. I like ugly play with an ugly girl.”

  He chose his foreign partners, or so he claimed, according to the same criteria. “Foreign hostesses are all ugly,” he said. “Not in the sense of appearance, but in their minds.” Years later, an account would be published, in English, of “conquest play” from Obara’s point of view. It is full of self-serving distortions and evasiveness, but it conveys the sacramental quality of the performance.

  Before his “play” the accused pours into a small shot glass nasty liquid with [a] burning smell, commonly known as “Philippine liquor.” Then he and his female “partner” drinks [sic] from the glass in turn. The accused drinks two glasses of the liquid.

  As made clear at court, Obara loses the last bit of his sense of shame after drinking two glasses of the liquid. Then, the accused alone takes great quantity of a stimulant. His “partner,” as she continues to drink the “Philippine liquor,” loses her consciousness. Then the accused puts on a mask and begins the “play.” This mask makes him turn into someone else, a person outside the ordinary. Then he gets into his nasty “play.”

  To “play” with, the accused preferred non-Japanese bar hostesses who were drug-addicted, punk women (with a mean personality), known as “bitches” … He also chose his “play partners” from those [Japanese] women searching for some male company over the phone. In such a case, the accused preferred waistless, plumpy women who were often compared to a pig or a hippopotamus. Under a mask, Obara had his nasty “play” with such ugly women.

  After Obara’s arrest, Clara Mendez was invited back to the investigation headquarters. There the police showed her images from the videos, of the night in 1996 when she had gone to Joji Obara’s apartment in Zushi, and the missing hours after she had sipped her drink. “They spared me the worst of it,” she said. “They were just pictures, still pictures they’d taken from the video so I could identify myself. It was just me, unconscious, lying on the bed, still in my clothes. It was … very creepy. I just looked like a doll, a girl-shaped doll.”

  * * *

  Among the list of names and videos, the police found other women they knew: Katie Vickers and Christa Mackenzie. They followed the telephone numbers and addresses on the list and identified a dozen more. Much of the information was too vague to identify the victims, and many of the foreign girls had left Japan years before for untraceable destinations. Several of those whom they did find were unwilling to cooperate, out of shame, or timidity, or a wish to forget the whole story. Other cases would have been difficult to bring to trial for other reasons—such as Isobel Parker, who had taken her own action against Obara by successfully blackmailing him. But the detectives found several women for whom the combination of a video and the testimony of a credible victim made a strong case.

  On November 17, the prosecutors formally charged Obara with drugging and raping Katie Vickers. They immediately “rearrested” him on suspicion of doing the same to a thirty-one-year-old Japanese woman named Fusako Yoshimoto. On December 8, they charged him with that rape and arrested him for another against twenty-year-old Itsuko Oshihara, followed in 2001 by twenty-five-year-old Megumi Mori. To the usual charge of rape and drugging was added one of causing a burn to Megumi Mori’s leg—from the heat of the lights that had pressed against the skin of the unconscious woman.

  The day after Lucie’s disappearance, the police discovered, Obara had called the Zushi Fire Station, asking for Department Headquarters. According to one newspaper, he said, “Something serious has happened. Please tell me where the emergency hospital is.” He called the number of the hospital that he was given. The conversation, in which he inquired about its opening hours, was recorded, but he never appeared. A few days later, he did turn up at a hospital in Tokyo, where he was treated for a rash caused by caterpillars.

  The police were sure that they knew what had happened. They believed Obara had drugged and killed Lucie, and somehow disposed of her body. But how could they prove it? Lucie was not on the list of names, and there was no video of her. They could show that she and Obara had spent that afternoon together, and that after her disappearance he had behaved suspiciously. But what exactly had he done to her? A
nd where was Lucie now?

  The detectives searched the garden of the house at Den-en Chofu and open areas close to his other properties. They probed the ground with hollow rods of bamboo, and half a dozen policemen with sniffer dogs combed the beach and the cliffs close to Blue Sea Aburatsubo. It was anxious work, for the grass and weeds in the area were thick and littered with rubbish, and the detectives were afraid that they would disturb poisonous snakes.

  17. CARITA

  For Lucie’s family and friends, there was little comfort in Joji Obara’s arrest. In itself, the news did nothing to dent the mass of pain and uncertainty weighing down upon them. The Tokyo police never shared with the Blackmans their conviction that Lucie was dead; in fact, apart from the fact of Obara’s arrest, they told them very little at all. The Blackmans gleaned a little of the leaked titbits that were published in the Japanese, and sometimes the British, newspapers, and the Lucie Hotline continued to generate sporadic, and useless, information. Louise Phillips, who had finally flown home after weeks of questioning, had been ordered by the police to tell the Blackmans nothing. Tim and Sophie flew out again to Tokyo in the middle of November but, in his meeting with them, Superintendent Mitsuzane maintained the official pretense—that, for the time being, Obara was being investigated for a series of rapes and, although the police were still pursuing Lucie’s disappearance with vigor, there could not at present be said to be a connection between the two cases.

  At his press conference after the meeting, Tim gave a skittish, unhappy performance, with flashes of his odd, out-of-kilter humor.

  “How optimistic are you that you’ll find Lucie?” a journalist asked.

  “The optimism never dies,” said Sophie, looking at her father.

  Tim said, “There’s realism in the fact that she’s been missing for four months, and there’s always the possibility that she’s come to her end. But that’s something you have to cross when you come to it. Whereas before it was a fifty-fifty chance, I suppose now it’s an eighty-twenty chance that she is gone.”

  “My bid would be sixty-forty,” said Sophie.

  Tim gave an unnatural smile. “That’s the realism of old age against the optimism of youth.”

  Christmas was approaching, a time of strain for any family divided by divorce. This year, each of the Blackmans dreaded the holiday for the way it would expose the absence in their lives. Jane, Sophie, and Rupert escaped to Barbados, and spent Christmas Day sunbathing on the beach, as far away as possible from any associations with Lucie. Tim was in the Isle of Wight with Josephine and her children. “I was trying to hold Lucie in one particular area of my head,” he said. “I was trying not to let the trauma of what had happened overwhelm everything else. I was in my late forties. I had three children of my own and four children of Jo’s to look after. Of course, Lucie was important, but I had to give time and priority to the other people I loved too.

  “I used to drive from the Isle of Wight to work in Kent, an hour and a half’s drive. There was a CD of music which Lucie used to like, and I’d listen to that in the car driving back and indulge my sorrow and my thoughts of Lucie. And that’s what enabled me to be there for Jo, and for the other children, and to do my work.”

  Cautiously and steadily, Tim was loosening his grip on false hopes. He was abandoning the idea that Lucie might still be alive, the faith that had compelled him for six months and enabled him to find hope in con men, charlatans, and journalists. But he could not control his anger, which now directed itself not only against Lucie’s abductor and the police but also against the system of collusion and institutional complacency that had made her disappearance possible. Two days before Christmas, he sent a furious e-mail to one of the detectives:

  It is six months since Lucie went missing, and incredibly I find that week after week goes by [and] I do not receive any communication from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. I am very very upset and traumatised that the Police do not give a single consideration to how the family feels as victims, and it is disgraceful and inhumane that you do not provide any news or information to the family to help them cope with this terrible and tragic event …

  It is evident that many many girls have been abducted and raped from Roppongi in the last 5–6 years (some have disappeared). These are girls many of whom are working illegally on tourist visas. Because of this, some are not able to report the crime to the Police for fear of arrest and/or deportation. This puts all the girls in danger.

  However, some of these girls have reported the crime to the Police. Why has this man Obara, or others like him, been able to get away with these crimes for years, continuing to abduct and rape girls? Because the Police have not acted, and the Police have not arrested him. This makes the Police guilty of the disappearance of Lucie … and when the next girl is abducted and raped or murdered the Police and the Immigration Department will be guilty of that crime too.

  * * *

  So far, it was in Britain and Japan that Lucie’s disappearance had drawn the most attention. But with the arrest of a suspect and the emergence of victims of other nationalities, the case was soon being reported all over the world. Stories about Joji Obara popped up in Spain, Italy and Turkey, in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. One Friday in October, a thirty-five-year-old solicitor named Robert Finnigan was sitting at his desk in Sydney, Australia, when his eye fell upon an article on page 10 of the Sydney Morning Herald. “Fears of More Missing Women,” ran the headline.

  Have Australian women fallen prey to the nightclub prowler believed responsible for the disappearance of Lucie Blackman, a British bar hostess? Newspapers have reported their fears that the main suspect in the case, Joji Obara, a Tokyo businessman, could have been involved in the disappearance of other foreign women … Australians are well represented among the foreigners working the Roppongi bar hostess trade, earning huge sums entertaining businessmen. It is believed that at least two Australians and one New Zealander contacted police through other channels to complain of being abused by Obara … The women all said Obara had lured them to his luxurious flat on the coast south of Tokyo and drugged them.

  “It was lunchtime when I read it,” Robert Finnigan told me later. “And straightaway, there was a moment of recognition. I knew instantly, even though I didn’t have all the facts. It was just too similar. I wasn’t surprised or shocked, because I’d had all those years to think about it. I didn’t feel relieved. But I knew. There was an unanswered question, and this was the answer.”

  The question was: What had really happened to Carita Ridgway, the beautiful young Australian woman whom Robert had fallen in love with, and lost, almost nine years before?

  * * *

  Carita Ridgway grew up in Perth, on the far coast of Australia’s immense Western Desert, one of the most isolated cities in the world. Her parents, Nigel and Annette, were creatures of the 1960s. They met when they were very young, married quickly, and soon found themselves deeply unhappy together. Annette, who was eighteen on their wedding day, was a seeker of enlightenment, a student of dreams and meditation and astrology. Nigel, who had emigrated from Britain in 1966, was a drummer in a rock-and-roll band called Purple Haze. “If I’m honest, I wasn’t really a good boy,” he told me years later, after he had remarried and become a respectable middle-aged primary-school teacher. “Not a model husband. I was easy prey for sex and booze. Not so much the booze, but the girls were always a temptation.” Their marriage finally broke up in 1983, when their two daughters, Samantha and Carita, were fourteen and thirteen. “Again, that’s something I look back on and cringe,” Nigel said. “The girls were just getting into puberty, young womanhood, and their parents split up. Not a good time. I think it affected them a lot.”

  Carita had always been energetic and creative, a talented dancer who loved English literature and acting and the outdoors. After her parents’ separation, she became quarrelsome, withdrawn, and depressed. At the same time, she emerged into her teens as a beauty, with long blond hair, curved red lips, and sma
ll, even features. Annette, who was struggling to support her two daughters, did not know how to help her. Carita’s despair became deeper; she spoke of suicidal thoughts, and Annette was alarmed enough to have her committed to a psychiatric clinic. The enforced isolation from the outside world, and the attention of nurses and doctors, had a soothing effect on Carita, and for a while she seemed to be getting better. But then the hospital psychiatrist, who turned out to have a record of abusing his female patients, began taking her out for seductive lunches. He was sacked before any serious harm had been done. But by now Carita’s education, and her self-confidence, had been thoroughly shredded. “If you don’t have a strong family background, and you don’t have self-esteem, it’s almost a liability to be that good-looking,” Annette said. “It’s difficult to stand up for yourself. You get preyed on.”

  Carita left the psychiatric home and dropped out of school. She lingered in Perth for a year or two but soon became bored by its smallness and familiarity. When her best friend, Lynda Dark, suggested a move to Sydney, she seized the chance; together, the two of them hitchhiked east across the Western Desert. In Sydney, she met Robert Finnigan, newly arrived from Britain. The two of them fell in love and moved in together.

  Annette, like any mother separated for the first time from her daughter, worried about Carita. Her anxieties took the form of intense nightmares and, being interested in such things, she recorded the details over the course of several years. There were scenes in which Carita was attacked and violated; mysterious robed strangers imparted warnings of danger and tragedy. Then there was a dream in which Carita came to her mother and comforted her, and placed a ring on her finger. Annette wrote down these visions meticulously, and subsequent events would impart a terrible resonance to her dream journal.