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

  Rather self-conscious about going out on a blind date at the age of forty-nine, Jane arrived at the agreed pub and parked next to a silver car with its interior lights on. This, it turned out, was the car of the man she was meeting.

  “I said to him, ‘Is that silver Mercedes in the car park yours? Because your inside lights are on.’ He said, ‘That’s impossible,’ but he went out to have a look. When he came back in, he said, ‘You were right. But if that’s your car next to mine, then your inside lights are on too.’ And now it was my turn to say, ‘No, that’s impossible.’ But when I went out, he was right too.”

  The name Lucie, of course, comes from the Latin word for light. And light, Jane had discovered, was as important to Lucie in death as it had been in life; its unexpected flickering was a reliable sign of her presence. “It was Lucie,” Jane said. “She was giving her approval, telling me it was okay.” Roger proposed to Jane five weeks later. Eight months after that, in August 2003, they were married.

  Roger was five years younger than Jane. Like her, he had been married and divorced. He was the son of a Methodist minister; he had worked as a banker, a social worker, a City of London headhunter, and a self-employed career adviser. At the time he married Jane, he was establishing himself as a “corporate philosopher,” advising companies on moral and ethical issues. He published a book titled ethicability®: how to decide what’s right and find the courage to do it. “Moral values such as humility, courage and self-discipline are the keys to success, well-being and sustainability,” his website explained. “ethicability®”—the lowercase e, one gathered, was as important as the ®—“is a decision-making and cultural framework that helps people stop, think, talk, unite—and then do the right thing.” Roger would go on to be appointed a professor of “organisational ethics” at Cass Business School in London. He was also the unofficial secretary of a concerted campaign devoted to the prosecution and criminal conviction of Tim Blackman.

  Roger was a bearded, gentle-faced man in his fifties. The first time I met him, he seemed to find the insecurity of being a self-employed, self-published philosopher a mild, but constant, strain. In the photograph on the ethicability® website, he leans forward into the camera, smiling confidingly through heavy black-rimmed spectacles. Beneath his pin-striped jacket, he wears a flowery open-necked shirt. But Roger always struck me as more at home in Marks & Spencer than Paul Smith. His love and respect for Jane, and his desire to protect her from the harsher aspects of her situation, were obvious and unaffected, and it was natural that he should help her with the practical aspects of being the mother of Lucie Blackman.

  When Jane saw Lucie in a butterfly that crossed their path on a country walk, Roger saw her too. When she faltered, as she often did during my conversations with her, over a painful—or an unbearably happy—memory, Roger was always there with an outstretched hand or a cup of tea. But I was taken aback by the zeal he brought to the struggle against Tim and the extent to which he had taken on his wife’s fight for moral supremacy as his own. At times, he seemed to vie with Jane to outdo her in his contempt for Tim, a man whom he had never met.

  I spent hours talking to Jane in the house they shared in Kemsing, outside Sevenoaks, usually with Roger on hand. Sometimes, it was difficult to get an answer from her, so avid was he to answer every question I asked. “I think I am quite a perceptive person because I’ve been a social worker and I do understand behaviors and I do understand personality types,” Roger told me. “And Tim has all the signs of a serious personality disorder. He’s a Walter Mitty character … He switched from being a genuinely caring father, and great with the kids—and brought Lucie back when she was having her fit, and saved her life—to becoming someone who lashed out and ended up hurting not only [Jane], but the children. He’s an ideal psychologist’s case study in that respect.”

  “It’s called a sociopath,” said Jane at this point.

  “Yes, I believe he’s a sociopath, basically.”

  The legal campaign against Tim began in the months following his acceptance of the “blood money.” Another of the former volunteers in Tokyo, a British banker who like Huw had acquired a powerful loathing for Tim, paid for Jane to engage Mark Stephens, a flamboyant media lawyer. With Stephens’s help, the Steares persuaded the Hampshire police, Tim’s local constabulary, to investigate him on suspicion of fraud.

  It was an ingenious accusation, which on the face of it had little to support it. Whom had Tim defrauded, after all? Not Obara, who had pleaded with him to accept the money. Not Jane, who had repeatedly refused a similar payout. “Lucie’s estate was the victim,” Roger explained to me. One of the statements drafted by Obara’s lawyers and signed by Tim affirmed that he accepted the ¥100 million “representing on [sic] the family of Lucie.” But it was Jane who administered the estate; by misrepresenting himself, the argument went, Tim had defrauded not a living person but dead Lucie. This argument was considered strong enough for the Hampshire police to dispatch a detective sergeant to take a statement from Jane and for the Crown Prosecution Service to write to the Japanese authorities requesting more information.

  Jane had a particular resentment for the Lucie Blackman Trust. It had become one of the battlefields on which Lucie’s parents struggled for possession of her spirit. Over five years, the trust had evolved into a small charity with a handful of paid and volunteer staff. It sold safety equipment aimed at young people, such as rape alarms and kits for testing whether a drink had been spiked. Tim would visit schools to tell Lucie’s story and talk about the importance of personal safety at home and abroad. Jane wrote to the Charity Commission, lobbying for the trust’s charitable status to be revoked, and to the trustees, urging them to disassociate themselves from Tim. Roger e-mailed one journalist, “off the record and strictly unattributable,” urging her to investigate the trust’s finances. Another line of attack was opened up in April 2007, when Roger received an e-mail from a woman named Heidi Black, formerly Tim’s assistant and “deputy chief executive” of the trust. Ms. Black had been sacked the month before; she was contesting her dismissal at an industrial tribunal. She had also made a complaint to the police about money donated to the trust that she claimed had gone missing. The same week that she wrote to Roger, the information found its way to the Daily Mail. “Lucie’s Father in Trust Fraud Probe” ran its headline. The following day, Matt Searle, the trust’s only full-time employee, was arrested and questioned.

  After five weeks of investigation, he was cleared. Having been through the trust’s accounts, the police had found nothing to suggest that money had gone missing, or that any other crime had been committed. There was nothing in the complaints made to the Charity Commission, nor in the claim of fraud against Lucie’s estate, either. By the middle of 2007, all Roger and Jane’s efforts had come to nothing.

  “This is why I don’t have contact with my mum,” Sophie said. “This need that Mum has to seek out and destroy Dad and what he’s doing, irrespective of the consequences and the impact that it would have on me and Rupert. She puts herself before us and our emotional needs, or any needs at all. I think that’s an unforgivable trait in a parent.

  “If you’re over him, and have moved on and remarried, then let him be. How happy and secure is she in her life and in her new marriage if the focus of her interest is her ex-husband? And Roger—he needs to man up a bit. What’s that about? Spending so much time investigating the workings of your wife’s ex-husband when you’re the current husband—isn’t that just a bit weird?”

  23. THE VERDICT

  Over the years, I kept on trying to bring about a meeting with Joji Obara. I sent repeated letters through his lawyers asking to be allowed to interview him in the Tokyo Detention Center. I wrote of the unresolved mysteries about the case (of which there were several) and of my wish (which was sincere) to balance my reporting of the victims and police with his own point of view. I sent lists of the kinds of questions that I knew he liked to answer, about the evidence against him, the �
�condolence money,” and the work of the police. But what I really wanted to ask him about was growing up in rich Osaka as a Korean pachinko magnate’s son, and living with a disturbed older brother, and how he had heard the news that his father was dead in Hong Kong, and what he used to see when he looked in the mirror in the years before he changed his face.

  Once, he replied, asking me to get hold of Lucie’s health records, the same information his lawyers had tried to obtain through British private detectives. The implication was that my cooperation would be rewarded with his. I declined. After another of my letters, one of Obara’s lawyers, a brooding, unsmiling man named Kiyohisa Arai, called me to his office in central Tokyo.

  He began by reading to me a personal message from Joji Obara. “I’m quite grateful to receive such a letter from you,” it began. “Sooner or later I’ll have a chance to meet you, but before that please have a look at the materials which I can provide.” Across the table, Mr. Arai pushed a sheaf of documents—court transcripts, Lucie’s diaries, photographs of Christa Mackenzie in Obara’s apartment. Most were reprinted in the strange book that would later be commissioned, but several were not and could never be. These were police photographs of Lucie’s remains as they had been recovered from the cave—her head, her arms, her torso, her thighs, her calves, her feet and ankles—coldly arrayed on the pathologist’s table. The images were appalling, of course, and after the visceral shock of beholding a dismembered body came a sense of shame, the shame that pornography imparts. “Of course, these are terrible and unbearable to see,” Mr. Arai said as he passed them over. “We all feel great pity.” He seemed to be observing my reaction as I looked over them.

  Ostensibly, the point of the photographs was to draw attention to the “black substance” on Lucie’s head and in her mouth, which the prosecutors, in Obara’s view, had never satisfactorily explained. But later, I wondered if there was more to it than this, and if it wasn’t, in fact, a kind of warning, or even a threat aimed at me personally—a tipping ajar of the trapdoor above the pit, a glimpse into the hellishness of what had befallen Lucie, and the mind of the person who had done it.*

  I received two other letters from Obara’s lawyers, alleging inaccuracies in stories I had published—dates, the nationality of one of Obara’s victims, the sequence of events. “What is more,” Obara’s lawyer Shinya Sakane wrote indignantly, “the dog kept in the … freezer was reported as being a German shepherd, although it was in fact a Shetland sheepdog. So this is also contrary to the facts.” I expressed my thanks for this correction and asked again for an interview. Again, there was no response. But in May 2006, after years of rebuffs, Obara reached out to me in his own way, in the intimate embrace of a legal action.

  Obara, represented by the grave Mr. Arai, was suing me for defamation. It would have been more conventional to have gone after my newspaper, as the publisher of the alleged libel, but he had chosen to pursue me personally. He was demanding damages of ¥30 million, and I was summoned to appear three weeks later at the Tokyo District Court. The legal language of the written complaint was dense and intimidating, but on examination, the complaints that it contained were characteristically and comically bizarre. The most unexpected of them concerned the hearing at which Jane had given her evidence, for which Obara had failed to appear in court. At the time, as I and every other journalist present had reported, the judge announced that Obara had taken off his clothes and clung to the basin in his cell. But according to Mr. Arai, this was an absurd and damaging libel. “There are no facts whatsoever which indicate that the Plaintiff … stripped himself naked to avoid appearing in court on that date,” the complaint insisted. “The Plaintiff’s reputation has been severely marred by this act of tort.”

  The Times engaged a firm of Tokyo lawyers on my behalf. There were meetings and conference calls, notes and documents were mustered, and lengthy drafts of my rebuttal were passed back and forth. Alarm at my new status as a defendant gave way to excitement and curiosity. Would I face Obara in court? What would it feel like on the far side of the courtroom that I knew so well? So it was disappointing to learn that Obara was not required to appear for any of the hearings—and that I didn’t need to either. Even more than a criminal trial, civil litigation was a bureaucratic procedure, conducted between lawyers, in which the presence or absence of plaintiff and defendant made no difference whatever. I went to one of the hearings anyway and sat on the defendant’s bench. The proceedings lasted less than ten minutes. My lawyer presented items of evidence, statements from other reporters attesting that they too had heard Justice Tochigi describe Obara’s déshabillé.* These were scrutinized and accepted by Mr. Arai and the judge and then the three of them set a date for the next hearing. My case had attracted no public attention whatsoever; the three people in the public gallery were not spectators but lawyers waiting for the next case to come up. Yet for all the banality of the proceedings, I could identify the thrill, and the terror, of being a defendant, of being under the eye of the law. It was the opposite sensation of sitting on the other side, taking notes; it was like being on a stage, but as director as well as actor.

  * * *

  The last two hearings in Joji Obara’s trial—the sixtieth and sixty-first—were set aside for the closing arguments of prosecution and defense. There was nothing new to say, but both sides spoke at length anyway. Obara was on his feet for two hours, gnawing away at the holes in the prosecution story. How could he—a small man—have maneuvered the body of such a large woman into a car without being spotted? How could anyone be sure about the truth of a charge that contained so many unanswered questions? “There is no decisive evidence, nor is the cause of the victim’s death clear,” the defense statement read. “Nothing has been found that can be traced back to the defendant’s [involvement] in her death, including his DNA. No chloroform has been detected in the corpse, even though prosecutors say she was killed by such drugs.”

  The prosecution laid out the now familiar evidence—Obara’s long and self-documented history of “conquest play,” the accounts of the surviving women, the videos and drugs, the whole sequence of suspicious phone calls, purchases, and Internet searches in the days after Lucie’s disappearance. It attempted to turn Obara’s own defense against him, or the most far-fetched part of it, the unbelievable story about Katsuta, the “whateverer,” whose involvement was revealed so late in the case. “The irrational quality of his excuses,” the statement observed, “is itself evidence of his guilt.”

  Bureaucratic understatement, rather than emotionalism, is the characteristic mode of the Japanese courtroom. The young prosecutor’s delivery was as droning and uninflected as ever, but in its language the statement summoned an indignation seldom heard in an official setting. “This is an unprecedentedly bizarre and vicious case,” it read. “The chances of Obara committing the same crime are extremely high. He is nothing but a cunning beast, who has shown not a trace of human remorse, nor paid heed to the voices of the bereaved families. We see in him not a trace of humanity; he has displayed no feeling of contrition. This case is extraordinary in the annals of sexual crime. Therefore we insist on lifetime imprisonment for the defendant.”

  Before the reading of this statement, Obara’s lawyers made repeated requests that Tim Blackman should be called to give evidence in person.

  “What do you want to examine him about?” asked Justice Tochigi, with his customary beam of irritation.

  “About the fact that he received one hundred million yen. Although he had been rejecting the money, now he has accepted it. We wish to understand that thought process … He is an important witness in considering mitigation. So I want an examination.”

  “We have already questioned him fully enough,” Tochigi said.

  The lawyer muttered something inaudible, and Tochigi spoke forcefully. “I will not permit anything of the kind. Rejected.”

  “I object,” said the lawyer.

  “Rejected!”

  Justice Tochigi invited the pr
osecutors to begin their closing argument. “I object,” said Obara’s lawyer again. “I object to the decision of the court. This goes against the court’s obligation to fully examine the case.”

  “Rejected,” said Justice Tochigi. “Raising meaningless objections can be regarded as contempt. Watch your step.”

  It seemed hopelessly misguided, an obvious tactical misjudgment deliberately to provoke, in the fading moments of the trial, the man who would decide Obara’s guilt or innocence. On December 11, 2006, the trial came to an end. The court would deliver its verdict in five months’ time. There was little doubt what that verdict would be.

  * * *

  The sixty-one sessions had extended over the course of six years. Even at the pace of a British court, with hearings five days a week, morning and afternoon, it would have lasted for more than a month and a half. Obara had brought to bear every resource at his disposal—legal, financial, investigative, technological. In 2004, according to the account of a British newspaper, one of his lawyers had hired British private detectives to investigate the backgrounds of Tim, Jane, and Lucie, as well as Louise Phillips and her sister, Emma. Two years later, a website materialized in cyberspace. In English and Japanese, it presented at rambling length Obara’s version of events, as well as parts of Lucie’s diary, the documents signed by Tim, and selected transcripts of the court hearings.* And in 2007, a few days before the verdict was due to be delivered, a book appeared on the shelves of a few shops in central Tokyo with a cover photograph of a dead dog.