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

  The worst of all the nightmares pictured Carita sitting at a table with a group of Asian men. She appeared happy and secure. Her companions, lightheartedly it seemed, were inviting Carita to choose one of them. Only Annette could understand the true meaning of the scene and the intense malevolence of the men. “She felt that she was quite safe,” Annette said. “She had to choose one of the men. But they were so cold and calculating, and she didn’t know, and couldn’t see them for what they were. It was such a terrible, terrible nightmare. And I had these dreams but I didn’t do anything about them. I thought they were symbolic, but they were precognitive. They were literal. I still have that dreadful feeling about it.”

  * * *

  The attention she received from men disconcerted Carita. In an effort to deflect it, she dyed her blond hair auburn, but she remained outstandingly attractive. Robert Finnigan, who was serious, quietly spoken, and bespectacled, was overwhelmed by his feelings for her. He had arrived in Sydney after trailing around Southeast Asia; he and Carita had met in one of the city’s many backpacker hostels. They would be together for the next five years. “I’d wake up in the morning and she would be there next to me,” Robert said. “I just couldn’t believe it. I remember walking on Bondi Beach, with beautiful women everywhere, women from the covers of magazines. And I’d look at Carita beside me—and she was more beautiful. We were young, so you can’t be sure about these things. But I think we both expected we’d be together for the rest of our lives.”

  The two of them lived in a series of cheap rented houses in Sydney, shared with other young migrants to the city. They took casual jobs, Robert on a building site, Carita in a launderette and then at a restaurant. She designed and sold T-shirts, did a bit of modeling, and acted in a student film, but the two of them lived for traveling and for the long journeys that they would make together to the Philippines, Nepal, Mexico, and America, before returning to Sydney when their money ran out. Their first year together, 1987, was Australia’s bicentennial, a round of barbecues, parties, and open-air celebrations. Then, in the summer of the following year, Carita’s friend Lynda persuaded her to go with her to Japan to work as a bar hostess.

  Robert was concerned, and not only because it meant an extended separation from his beautiful girlfriend. But Lynda had worked in Tokyo before, and she insisted that there was no danger in the work itself. “Like most people, I was led to believe that it was one of the safest societies in the world, that a woman can walk around the streets at two a.m. and nothing happen to her,” Robert said. “This business of hostessing seemed a bit strange—paying someone to talk to you in a bar. But it was just one of the peculiarities of Japanese society, a bit pathetic to Westerners, but just a way for these businessmen to let off steam.”

  The months of separation were uneasy for Robert. It was difficult to imagine the kind of life that Carita was leading apart from him. There were postcards; she phoned once every week or two; he sent her cartoons of Sinbad, the ginger cat they had rescued as a stray. She and Lynda were in Utsunomiya, a colorless regional city an hour north of Tokyo. They worked at two clubs, Madam Adam and the Tiger’s Lair, alongside Americans, Brazilians, Filipinas, and New Zealanders. Carita seemed cheerful enough. She quickly attracted regular customers, including one man who took her on a dōhan in his chauffeur-driven Ferrari. “And absolutely no monkey business either,” she wrote to her mother. “The guys just love to take Western girls out to show them off … Japanese men have about three different women each. They leave their wives at home, take their girlfriends to the club, ignore their girlfriends and chat up the hostesses.”

  “I’d have been happier if she’d been teaching English or something more like that,” Robert said. “But I didn’t want to stifle Carita—sometimes you have to let people do what they want to do.” And after a few months she left the Tiger’s Lair, and Robert flew to Hong Kong to travel with Carita to Singapore and Thailand.

  In 1990, she and Lynda went back for another three-month stint, this time at a club in Roppongi, where they had to “dance.” Robert did not say as much, but this probably meant topless dancing. “I think Lynda was fine with it, but Carita was a bit embarrassed,” he said. “She tried it a couple of times, but I don’t think it worked out.” By September, she was back with him in Sydney, waitressing and modeling again, and helping to support Robert as he applied to study law at the University of New South Wales.

  The following year, Carita went back to Tokyo for a third time, accompanied by her sister, Samantha, who had a Japanese boyfriend. The two of them lived together in a gaijin house close to the language school where Sam was teaching. Carita was working at a Ginza club called Ayakoji, where the hostesses were expected to wear huge frilly, old-fashioned dresses with petticoats. The two sisters spent December and January of 1992 together in Japan. On Christmas Day, they ate spare ribs at the Lion restaurant in Ginza, and truffles sent from Perth by their father. On Boxing Day, snow fell over Tokyo, and at New Year they went to the countryside to stay with the family of Sam’s boyfriend, Hideki.

  Robert received exhilaratingly good news: he had won a university place to study law. Carita was delighted and told him how proud she was. Sometimes, people who knew them wondered whether they were well matched, and whether Robert’s steadiness and calm were right for Carita, who had a taste for glamour and adventure, and was still only twenty-one. But if she had doubts, she did not speak of them. After five years together, it was difficult to imagine Robert and Carita apart.

  Then one Monday in February, Samantha telephoned Robert in a state of confusion and distress. Carita had gone out for the weekend and not come back. And now she was in a Tokyo hospital, unconscious and dangerously ill.

  * * *

  Annette, Nigel, and Robert flew out to Tokyo together and went straight to Carita’s bedside. It was impossible to digest what had happened. Carita, who was never sick, who didn’t smoke or drink or take drugs, had been perfectly healthy on Friday evening, when she had gone to work at the hostess club. Then on Monday, Sam had received a phone call announcing that she had been admitted to a nearby hospital. She hurried over, perplexed and annoyed, and prepared to give her sister a telling-off for not calling over the weekend. But Carita was barely conscious and was hardly able to acknowledge Sam’s presence. She had been brought in that morning by a Japanese man named Akira Nishida, who had then abruptly left. Later that day, she fell unconscious. A few hours later, the doctors diagnosed acute liver failure and announced that Carita had less than a 50 percent chance of survival.

  By Wednesday, when her parents and Robert got to the hospital, Carita was being kept alive with drips and breathing tubes, and her skin was yellow with jaundice. The following day, she fell into a deep coma. Robert and the Ridgway family took turns sitting by her hospital bed as the doctors carried out an expensive “blood-washing” procedure. There was no visible improvement, and Carita was moved to a bigger and better-equipped hospital. But by the weekend, unpurged by her liver, the toxins had built up in her body and she was experiencing convulsions. By the end of the following week, the doctors confirmed what was already unbearably obvious: Carita’s brain was no longer functioning.

  The doctors pressed needles into her skin, but there was no reaction. Beneath the lids, her eyes were blind and dull. Samantha and Robert found it impossible to accept. But Nigel and Annette agreed that there was no point in keeping her alive artificially. On Saturday, February 29—Leap Day—the four of them went to the hospital for the last time. “Carita was lying there, surrounded by tubes and machines and connected to the ventilator, and they removed all of those,” said Nigel. “You could see the heartbeat get slower and slower and slower, until it was one long line. And when they’d taken the tubes out she looked like Carita again, and she looked beautiful and very peaceful. It wasn’t a horrible experience, watching someone die. She was already dead; it was just letting her go. But Rob and Sam, and especially Rob, found it hard, so hard. And we were all crying, and hugging Ca
rita, and then the nurses said could we go out for a moment. When we came back in, they’d dressed her in a beautiful pink kimono, with her hands folded neatly across her chest, and flowers, so many flowers, all around the bed.”

  Carita’s body was placed in front of a Buddhist altar in the basement of the hospital. Annette and Nigel spent the night there, watching over her and lighting sticks of incense. The day after next, they made the long drive to the crematorium on the outer edges of suburban Tokyo. They said goodbye to Carita, who lay peacefully in a coffin full of rose petals, and watched her disappear behind the steel doors of the furnace. None of them was prepared for what came next.

  After a pause, they were led into a room on the other side of the building, and each given a pair of white gloves and chopsticks. In the room, on a steel sheet, were Carita’s remains as they had emerged from the heat of the furnace. The incineration was incomplete. Wood, cloth, hair, and flesh had burned away, but the biggest bones, of the legs and arms, as well as the skull, were cracked but recognizable. Rather than a neat box of ashes, the Ridgways were confronted with Carita’s calcined skeleton. As the family, their task, a traditional part of every Japanese cremation, was to pick up her bones with the chopsticks and place them in the urn.

  “Rob couldn’t handle it at all,” Nigel said. “He thought we were monsters even to think of it. But perhaps it’s because we were the parents, and she was our daughter … It sounds macabre, as I tell you about it now, but it didn’t feel that way at the time. It was something emotional. It almost made me feel calmer. I felt as if we were looking after Carita.”

  Nigel, Annette, and Sam picked up the bigger bones and placed them in the urn with the ashes. The bigger pieces of the skull went on the top.

  * * *

  Carita was dead three days before her twenty-second birthday because during the course of a single weekend her liver had suddenly stopped functioning. How was this possible? The doctors were unable to explain it. At first they had assumed that Carita was a drug user, but Sam and Robert, and everyone else who knew her well, insisted that she was not and had never been. Then the doctors proposed that her death was the result of viral hepatitis but failed to agree on which type or how she might have contracted it.

  The only person in a position to explain was Mr. Nishida, the man who had dropped her off at the hospital on Monday morning. He had left no contact details. But he had Samantha’s number, and during the week that her family was watching Carita die, he had called her several times.

  He spoke fluent English. He was calm and solicitous, even when Sam became upset. He told her that he had met Carita at the hostess club and taken her to Kamakura, a seaside town south of Tokyo, where she had eaten a bad oyster and suffered food poisoning. He seemed pained to learn that she had become so terribly ill. Sam demanded his address and telephone number, but Mr. Nishida regretfully refused, but he always called again a day or two later. Robert Finnigan, in particular, was deeply suspicious. The unexplained nature of Carita’s relationship with this man, and of the weekend they had spent together, were an additional torment to him. At his urging, Sam’s boyfriend, Hideki, contacted the police and urged them to investigate Mr. Nishida.

  Two detectives came to the hospital to interview Sam and Hideki. It was a bizarre encounter. After perfunctory inquiries about Nishida, they accused Hideki of being a drug dealer, the implication being that it was he who was responsible for Carita’s illness. “We didn’t call the police again,” Samantha said. “The truth is we felt more threatened and intimidated by the police than by the soft-spoken man who called himself Nishida and appeared to be concerned for us.”

  The day Carita died, Nishida telephoned again and talked at length to Hideki. He said that he wanted to make a contribution to the cost of the family’s air fares and the funeral. He spoke of a sum of ¥1 million; he also wanted to talk to Nigel and Annette. The day after Carita’s death, the family drove out to meet him in a hotel close to Tokyo’s domestic airport.

  They waited in the lobby for an hour until Mr. Nishida called them up to a room that he appeared to have taken for the occasion. It had been made clear that he wished to see only Carita’s parents; Sam and Robert waited resentfully downstairs. In Annette’s recollection, the hotel room was divided by a kind of screen, and she had the unnerving impression that there was someone else waiting and listening invisibly on the other side. Nishida himself made little impression: a man in early middle age, dressed in a dark suit, “not overly good-looking,” as Annette remembered, “with an odd nose, a strange pinched nose.” The most noticeable thing about him was perspiration; he mopped his sweating face constantly with a handkerchief or towel. “It was an uncomfortable situation,” said Annette. “We had just seen Carita die. And here we were in this room, with the feeling that someone was going to jump out at any moment from the other side of the screen.”

  Mr. Nishida faced Nigel and Annette Ridgway across a low coffee table.

  “I loved your daughter,” he said to them. “And I wanted to spend more time with her.”

  “So did we,” said Annette.

  He described the weekend that they had spent together, beginning at the hostess club on Friday evening. “He said that on the Saturday evening, they were going to go out to dinner,” Annette remembered. “But Carita wasn’t feeling well so they’d stayed in. They went to bed—the way he told it, it didn’t sound like the same bed—and in the middle of the night Carita got up. But when she came back, she wasn’t the same as she’d been before. She was very unwell, and on the Sunday morning she was worse. So he called a doctor, and the doctor had given her an injection for the nausea and the pain. But then she got worse again, and by the time he took her to hospital on Monday she was nearly comatose. He was making out that he tried to care for her, to look after her, and that he didn’t know what was wrong or why she was sick. He told us things in passing, comments which Carita had made to him, and they were the kind of thing which Carita really might have said—how she’d apologized for being sick and for not being good company, the sort of thing Carita would have said if she’d been ill.”

  Nigel remembered, “He kept saying how sorry he was about what had happened, what a dreadful thing it was. He seemed to know Carita well, as if she was his girlfriend. He was really upset. I said things like ‘Dreadful accident,’ ‘Don’t blame yourself.’ I took him at face value.”

  After about three-quarters of an hour, Nishida produced two boxes and gave them to Nigel and Annette. One contained a gold necklace, the other a diamond ring. They were not wrapped, as a present would have been, and the ring was not clasped in velvet but rattled loose in its box. “He said again, ‘I loved your daughter, and I wanted to spend much more time with her,’” Annette recalled. “He said, ‘These would have been her birthday presents next week.’”

  Later, Annette would turn over and over in her mind the significance of these objects and remember the dreams she had had about the predatory men and that other ring Carita had brought to her in her sleep. At the time, though, there was nothing to say and nothing more to do but to accept the gifts of gold and to leave. “We were very, very numb,” Annette said. “And there is some information that you can only accept at face value. We couldn’t accuse him of anything, because we didn’t know what had been wrong with Carita. The police weren’t interested, the Australian embassy was not interested. What he was saying sounded reasonable—that he’d done what he could.”

  The Ridgways made their awkward goodbyes, and stepped out into the corridor. As they were walking towards the elevators, Annette glanced back and saw Mr. Nishida looking out from the half-open door, peering after them as they disappeared out of sight, with an unreadable expression on his face.

  * * *

  They left Japan with Carita’s ashes the day after the funeral. Samantha stayed on in Tokyo for a few months, the Ridgways flew to Perth, and Robert returned to Sydney and the apartment he had shared with Carita. For seven months, he wept every night as he we
nt to sleep. He sleepwalked through his first year at the university. For much longer than that, he believed that he would never be able to lead a happy life. He stayed on alone in the apartment and looked after Sinbad. He finished his law degree, qualified as a solicitor, and got a job in Sydney with Phillips Fox, one of the biggest law firms in Australia. And it was in their offices on Market Street that he was sitting that afternoon when he read the story in the Sydney Morning Herald and knew beyond any doubt that fishy Akira Nishida and Joji Obara were one and the same.

  18. IN THE CAVE

  The crumbling film and yellowing paper of Obara’s seized possessions filled an entire room in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police headquarters. Superintendent Udo put in a lot of time there himself, supervising the younger detectives and looking over their finds. “I wanted to stay as close as possible to the evidence,” he told me. “I checked as much as I could personally, because sometimes a less experienced investigator might fail to spot something which to me was a diamond.” There, at the end of the year 2000, glittering among the dust and insects, he came upon such a jewel: a receipt from a hospital in western Tokyo for the treatment of Carita Ridgway.

  Udo wanted to give the impression that the police would have nailed down this case anyway, by their own efforts. But there was no sign that they were aware of Carita Ridgway before November 2000, when, after prolonged pestering by Robert Finnigan in Sydney, they were contacted by the Australian embassy. Once the police had been alerted, however, the facts fell quickly together.

  The receipt led to Hideshima Hospital, where Carita was first admitted, and to the Tokyo Women’s Hospital, where she died. Equipped with a photograph of her, the police identified Carita among the unconscious foreign faces in Obara’s video collection. During the rape, which extended over the course of several hours, he was seen shaking fluid from a bottle onto a cloth and holding it beneath her nose. At the Tokyo Women’s Hospital was the most crucial evidence of all: a tiny sliver of Carita’s liver, removed after her death and preserved for all these years through an administrative fluke. When the liver was analyzed, the police lab soon found what the doctors had inexplicably missed: traces of chloroform, which attacks and poisons the organ.