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

  Obara made no response.

  The prosecutor flicked through the document and pointed to another page. “This one here says ‘a possible method is to use a high-temperature furnace to burn even the bones to ashes, but this is too difficult.’ And also, ‘one way to melt down even bones is by immersing the bones in concentrated sulphuric acid.’ This is about disposing of a dead body, isn’t it?”

  “I [also] looked up pages like that in June,” Obara said. “It wasn’t from the motive that Prosecutor Mizoguchi suggests.”

  “Then why did you look at such sites again on that day?”

  “It’s just because, as I told you, I chatted with Lucie about the kidnap case in London.”*

  “Do you remember those two methods [incineration and dissolution in acid] being described as ‘too difficult’?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  This was a rare thing in a Japanese court: a psychological contest, a struggle of wits between accuser and accused. Obara dabbed at his perspiration. How his heart must have turned over in his chest when Mizoguchi presented the next piece of evidence, a heavy folder containing yellowing pages.

  This was where Obara had recorded his sexual adventures, the logbook of his “play.” Having quoted from Lucie’s diary, Obara was now being confronted with his own.

  “Here is a book in which you made notes, from around 1970,” the prosecutor said.

  Obara had no difficulty remembering this document. He said, “I wrote about my relationships with girls five years after they actually happened. Waiting five years made the stories more interesting. So I wrote it after five years had passed, and made the stories more pornographic.”

  “So the stories written here are fiction?”

  “Not all of them are. The girls mentioned exist, but the stories are fables.”

  The log of sexual encounters was numbered and in some cases dated, from 1970 to 1995, from 1 to 209. “Take a look at number sixty-three, line three,” Mizoguchi asked Obara. “What do you mean by SMYK?”

  “This is just something I wrote to make it more interesting, five years later.”

  “What does it mean?”

  A pause, then: “I won’t answer that.”

  “Number four—‘I gave her sleeping drugs.’ Number twenty-one—‘Today, I gave her sleeping drugs.’”

  The Japanese word for sleeping drug is suiminyaku.

  “That is what you wrote,” the prosecutor said. “Does SMYK mean sui min ya ku?”

  “I don’t want to answer that.”

  “Number one hundred forty—‘Gave too much SMY and CHM. I was very shaken up.’ What is the meaning of this CHM?”

  “I forget.”

  “In number one hundred fifty, you write about ‘CRORO.’ What does this mean?”

  “I don’t want to answer that.”

  “It means chloroform [in Japanese: kurorohorumu, pronounced “crororo-hormu”], doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mizoguchi turned over the pages of the notebook. “Number one hundred ninety. You wrote, ‘She realized in the middle of it, and I made an excuse, but she knows.’ What does this mean?”

  “This too is ‘play,’ so I’m not answering.”

  “Judging from what’s written in the notebook, it seems you were very shaken up when [the girls] realized that you had performed ‘conquest play’ without consent.”

  “No. It’s not true. It was ‘play.’”

  “So, what kind of ‘play’ was it?”

  “I’m not answering.”

  “Number one hundred seventy-nine, February 1992. ‘Met Nanae, and later Carita.’ Is this Carita the same Carita in this criminal case?”

  Obara said nothing. It was maddening to be unable to see his face.

  “You insisted that you didn’t use chloroform on Carita,” said Mizoguchi.

  “I didn’t [use it].”

  “Number one hundred ninety-eight. ‘Used SMY and CROCRO. Used too much CROCRO. [Although I] used CROCRO in the case of CARITA, the drug from the hospital was the cause, I think.’ This is what you wrote. You did use chloroform, didn’t you?”

  Obara said, “It’s fiction.”

  A few hearings later, he had a go at repairing some of the damage done in this cross-examination by having his own lawyers question him about the Internet searches and the sex diary. Over the months, he had browsed many websites, he pointed out; it was unreasonable to take in isolation those which he visited on that morning. As for the diary, CRORO and CROCRO and CRO and the other code words referred not to chloroform but to various alcoholic spirits that Obara and his female companions used to sniff and snort from plastic bags. But having taken the stand on his own behalf, he had to submit himself to another grilling from the prosecutor. Mizoguchi’s first question was a simple one: “Does SMY mean sui min yaku?”

  “SM means ‘Super Magic,’” said Obara. “And, in foreign countries, Y is a general term for hallucination. The letter Y expresses something unknown. Yellow sunshine … er, yesca … y…” He trailed off into incoherence.

  Justice Tochigi flashed his beautiful teeth. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  * * *

  Amid all of this, in April 2006, Jane Blackman, Tim Blackman, and Carita Ridgway’s mother, Annette, flew out to Tokyo to give evidence of their own. Sensitive to the state of relations between Lucie’s parents, the prosecutors scheduled the two women to appear first, and Tim five days later.

  The prospect of a face-to-face confrontation between the accused killer and the bereaved parents packed the public gallery. But the ushers were late in admitting the press and public to the courtroom; when the doors were opened, Jane and Annette were sitting at the front of the public gallery, but Obara’s usual space was empty.

  Chief Justice Tochigi was beaming warmly. “The court has received word,” he said, “that the defendant has refused to appear before the court today.”

  By law, he explained, a criminal trial could not proceed without the presence of the accused. But this rule could be waived if the defendant had received a summons and had no good reason for not being present. Obara had indeed been informed in the usual way, and the officers of the Tokyo Detention Center had gone to his cell that morning and requested him to come to court. “But he has been taking off his clothes and clinging to the sink, and he refuses to appear,” Justice Tochigi explained. “The defendant hasn’t given any justifiable reason for not appearing. Given that the bereaved families have come from abroad, the court has decided that despite the absence of the defendant, we won’t wait for him.”

  Jane took the witness stand first. She spoke of her memories of Lucie as a baby, and as a child and a young woman, and of their closeness, like that of sisters. “I used to believe that the sorrow of any parent losing a child is the greatest sorrow anyone can know,” she said. “I was wrong. To lose a child and know her body was desecrated in such an inhuman way is the greatest and most unrelenting pain I have ever had to endure.” She went on: “The fact that Obara has refused to attend court today is very dishonorable and a clear sign of his guilt. He is a coward.”

  Annette was next. She talked about the effect of Carita’s death on her older daughter, Samantha, and on Carita’s boyfriend, Robert Finnigan. “Even though fourteen years have passed, I still think of her every day and feel the pain of her loss,” Annette said. “She was a wonderful daughter and nothing can replace her. My preference for Obara’s sentence is that he should be executed. However, in the circumstances that is impossible. Therefore, he should be in prison until he dies.”*

  Five days later, Tim appeared in court. Obara was absent again. This time, the judge reported, he had squeezed himself into a narrow niche in the walls of his cell and refused to come out.

  Tim spoke for nearly half an hour. “The death of my daughter, Lucie Blackman, has been the most terrible, terrible event of my life,” Tim’s statement began. “The shock and trauma … has changed me.”

  Lucie
lived for eight thousand days and I carry many images of her in my mind, and there are many things in everyday life which I see which make me cry in public, which make me cry in business meetings, which make me cry when with friends and which make me cry in the night.

  Sometimes when I see a child in a pushchair I can see Lucie and tears come to my eyes. Sometimes I see children playing with their daddy in a park and their fun and joy makes me so sad for Lucie. I may be standing next to a lovely twenty-five-year-old young woman on a train and Lucie fills my eyes with tears. Seeing a young woman with her young children makes me think of how Lucie will never be …

  I will never feel her loving arms around my neck and feel warm breath as she tells me she loves me. I cannot stop myself thinking of the moment when her life stopped; the moment when her brain stem ceased to function; her last deep and tragic breath. Was she in pain, was she terrified, did she call for me?

  Now I have images in my head of her cut-up body, the chain saw marks on her bones, her rotting, decomposing flesh … her parts in plastic bags buried beneath the sand, the grief on Sophie and Rupert’s faces. These images will stay with me for the rest of my life and when I am reminded of Lucie, when I see a little child, I see these terrible images too.

  I hear her voice in my sleep and, for a moment, I forget she is dead. For a moment I feel the joy of hearing her voice and then the pain hits me because I know she is not there, and I know that I can only dream of her now.

  I have been changed by all these things … I have been left distraught and traumatized with a depth of indescribable sadness. I do not sleep properly. I cry very often uncontrollably. I am frightened to meet with friends and family because I know how upset it will make me as I see the grief in their eyes … Some days I find it impossible to concentrate on my work and am too upset to make important decisions at work, as it seems so pointless and unimportant.

  I feel guilt for all the times when I could have seen Lucie but was maybe too busy; guilt for the times I was cross with her as a girl; guilt for not giving her the money she needed and guilt for not being with her at the times when she needed me most. This guilt may not be logical, but it will always be with me and makes me feel terrible and deepens the terrible wound left by Lucie’s death.

  But the worst guilt of all is the feeling of guilt I have when I do not think of her, the guilt I feel when I am happy for a moment about something. This guilt feeling makes it impossible to ever be really free during my life from the devastating effect of her [death]—and part of me knows that I will never be free from this tragedy until I am able to be with her in my future life. Only death will release me from this pain. Only knowing that when I die I will feel her arms around my neck again helps me live my life.

  It was the most powerful statement that Tim had ever made. The Tokyo District Court was a colorless and unemotional place, but the impact of these words was unquestionable. The prosecutor’s case was tight and consistent; Obara’s defense was a thicket of contradictions: And now, here was the father of dead Lucie, setting out in searing terms the anguish brought about by their deaths and pleading for the heaviest penalty. So it was all the more jolting to learn, later that year, that Tim Blackman had accepted half a million pounds from Obara and signed a document questioning the evidence against him.

  22. CONDOLENCE

  “Lucie’s funeral meant that she was no longer missing,” Sophie Blackman said. “That period of limbo was done with; we didn’t have to keep looking for her anymore. But it was the burial of her ashes—that, to me, was when I understood that her life was over. More so than her funeral. The burial was her death to me.” It came close to being the death of Sophie too.

  Four years separated the cremation and the interment of the remains. They were marked by a destructive, stubborn argument among the surviving Blackmans about what should be done with Lucie’s ashes. At first, Tim had suggested scattering them from his boat into the waters of the Solent, where the family used to go sailing when Lucie was a child. Rupert preferred a burial place somewhere close to Sevenoaks, where it would be accessible to all the members of the family. But the heat and bitterness in this debate were between mother and daughter. Sophie desperately, achingly, wanted the ashes to be divided among the four members of the family. She wanted to be able to recapture her visit to the cave in Moroiso, when, for the first time since Lucie’s death, she had felt close to her sister in spirit. “I would like to have some of Lucie’s ashes placed in a beautiful, delicate silver trinket box which I can keep in my life,” she wrote in a passionate letter addressed jointly to her mother, father, and brother. “I am not ready to sacrifice Lucie to the earth. I want to have her with me a little while longer. Somewhere I can talk to her every day. And perhaps in my future, when I have my own family, or my own house, I can bury her at the perfect place where I can be with her forever.”

  But Jane was immovable. In 2002, she had been named by the court as administrator of Lucie’s estate, which gave her the final say in all such matters, an authority that she was determined to wield. At one point, she placed the ashes in a household safe bought specially for the purpose. Her fear, although she stopped short of spelling it out, appeared to be that Tim or Sophie might steal Lucie’s remains. The strength of these feelings had much to do with the aspect of Lucie’s death that haunted and horrified Jane the most—the dismemberment and destruction of her body. “Lucie had been cut up,” she said. “There was no way that her ashes were going to be divided too. I felt very strongly about that. I didn’t want half of my daughter.” The interment of the ashes was arranged for March 23, 2005, at St. Peter and St. Paul Church in the village of Seal, a mile from where Jane lived.

  Since she was a teenager, Sophie had always had ferocious quarrels with her mother. It was as the mediator of these squabbles that Lucie had become so precious to both of them. At the age of fourteen, Sophie had left home and moved in with the family of a friend for several months; she had dropped out of school halfway through the sixth form. When Lucie went missing, Sophie was studying to be a cardiac technician, the specialist who monitors pacemakers and tests people’s hearts. She flew to Tokyo expecting to spend a few days there at the most. In the end, she lived in the Diamond Hotel for weeks. In between visits to Japan, she returned to London and resumed the life of a medical trainee. But with Lucie’s sudden, violent absence, the elements of Sophie’s life shifted and resettled in patterns that cut her off from the consolation of human contact. Some friends, she found, avoided her, at a loss for what to do or say; these, she despised. Others displayed an exaggerated, stifling wish to comfort and support; them, she rejected. Sophie’s pride and defensiveness, manifested so often as aggression and contempt, drove away many of those who might naturally have helped her.

  She got along far better with Tim, but he had long been an absent father, living hours away in the Isle of Wight with his large new stepfamily. “I isolated myself, quite happily,” she said. “And really, truly, the only person in my life who has ever been consistent or reliable was Lucie. I got myself in a situation where the more depressed I became, the fewer and fewer people I could turn to. I ended up on the day of Lucie’s burial with no one.”

  It was agreed from the beginning that it would be a private ceremony for the four members of the immediate family. But journalists somehow got wind of it, and so to avoid the inevitable scrum of reporters and photographers, the burial was brought forward at the last minute from four o’clock to one. Jane’s seething conviction that Tim had tipped off the press added to the awkwardness of the whole day.

  It was a short and very simple service. Almost five years after her death, Lucie’s urn was buried in a plot in Seal churchyard, overlooking the fields and low hills of west Kent. Rupert placed in the grave a CD of songs that he had written and recorded for Lucie. Sophie had had two silver plaques made, engraved with the opening lines of Lucie’s favorite poem, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” by W. B. Yeats. The first line she placed in the grave with
Lucie:

  I know that I shall meet my fate

  The second Sophie kept with her and resolved to carry with her wherever she went, for the rest of her life:

  Somewhere among the clouds above

  After the service, the four Blackmans went for a late lunch. They drove to the Rendezvous, a restaurant where, as a younger and happier family, they had celebrated Lucie’s birthday. It was the first time that Tim and Jane had been in such close proximity since soon after their divorce. Tim ordered champagne and was surprised to find the occasion “reasonably okay—it was really quite convivial. The children could never resist quips and laughs.” Jane even found her ex-husband’s presence less unbearable than usual. “Everyone was civil to one another,” she said. “Tim told me I looked nice. I wouldn’t have chosen to spend the day like that, but we did it for the sake of Rupert and Sophie.” But for Sophie, it was a moment of horror and hypocrisy. Beneath a cheerful exterior, her emotions were writhing within her heart.

  “It was fucked up. It was weird,” Sophie said, and four years later, her voice broke as she spoke of it. “Because everyone was trying to be nice to each other, playing the game of let’s pretend that we’re a happy family, sitting in a restaurant—and we’d just buried Lucie. It was weird, this pretense of everyone being united, when actually there was nothing between us anymore, there was nothing that related us. Even now, I find it very upsetting. It made no sense. What was most glaringly obvious was how Lucie’s death had changed the relationships between all of us, and how as a brother and a sister, and a mum and a dad, we were just four strangers sitting round a table.”

  It was Sophie’s pride that caused her to conceal her feelings and to set her unhappiness as a challenge to her friends and family. “The only small sign I put out that I was not really okay,” she said, “was that I invited everyone to come back to my flat. After wanting to run away from that awful lunch, I then extended my time with them. And that was me saying, ‘Don’t leave me quite yet. I’m not ready.’” The Blackmans had a few more drinks and cups of tea at Sophie’s, then said their goodbyes. Sophie’s flatmate, Emma, who worked as a flight attendant, was going out—so, on the night of Lucie’s burial, she was to be alone. “I didn’t say, ‘Please stay, I really need you to be here,’” Sophie recalled. “It’s true that I should ask people to help me when I need it. But the test I laid down for people was whether or not they could see that for themselves. Surely, if they knew me, they wouldn’t even have to ask—they would just be there.