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

  This was The Truth About the Lucie Case, a distillation of the tedium, creativity, and grotesquerie of the defense—the Bible of Joji Obara studies. The cover carried a lengthy subtitle: Elite Prosecutors vs Defendant Joji Obara Who Has an IQ of 180—In No Other Case in Recent Years Have the Reporting and the Reality Been So Different. “Why did the prosecutors in this case run amok?” ran the blurb. “Revealed: Destruction of Evidence and Forgery of Official Documents by Prosecutors.” It was two inches thick, 798 pages long, and weighed two pounds.

  The book was “written and edited” by the “Team Seeking the Truth of Lucie’s Case,” who were also credited on the website. Who were these independent crusaders for veracity, and why were they so shy of identifying themselves? In fact, the book was a vanity publication commissioned by Obara’s lawyer; its publishers, for one, believed that he did so at the instigation, and under the supervision, of Obara himself.* It included page after page of court transcripts, articles of evidence, and long narratives describing in the third person Obara’s early life, alcoholic adolescence, and the events before and after his fateful evening with Lucie. There were photographs of the interior of Blue Sea Aburatsubo and of Obara’s Mercedes-Benz sports car. There was a series of pictures of Christa Mackenzie apparently smoking heroin on Obara’s sofa. Tim’s e-mails negotiating the payment of condolence money were reproduced in full, together with transcripts of his telephone conversations with Obara’s agent, and a receipt for ¥3.2 million paid to Tanya Nebogatov, the Ukrainian woman whom Obara had raped. There was Lucie’s diary again, reproduced and annotated in English and Japanese. There were drawings of the cave, indicating exactly where Lucie’s body parts had been found, and a photograph of the beach being battered by a typhoon.

  Most of these materials could be seen to make some point or other, or raise a question that might be seen to work to Obara’s advantage. Questions such as “Isn’t that car rather small for transporting a dead body?” And “How could the body have remained undisturbed in the cave through the winter, inundated by high seas?” Points such as “Foreign hostesses—drug-crazed sluts” and “so he actually did freeze his dog after all.”

  But the body of material was so vast, so promiscuously inclusive and unfocused, that any value it had was overwhelmed in a slurping swamp of weirdness and tedium. Did Obara genuinely believe that anyone would digest all this raw documentary matter? Whom did he expect to influence by its publication? The judges had heard it all in court. Even if they were assumed to be susceptible to public opinion, there was nothing here, if any member of the public bothered to read it, to sway it in his favor. Obara did it because he could do it, because he had to do something, and because by this stage there was nothing else left to do.

  And yet there was one obvious ploy to which he had never resorted. Japanese courts attach much credit to evidence of previous good behavior and to the testimony of character witnesses. The upstanding fraud, the philanthropic arsonist, and the well-liked flasher who offer evidence of their worthiness can all expect to be treated more leniently. Obara understood this, which was why he had boasted of his ongoing charitable donations—in May 2006 alone, he gave ¥5 million each to Save the Children, Amnesty International, and the Japan Red Cross.

  Much more valuable would have been the personal testimony of those who knew, and liked, Obara: the childhood classmate, the old schoolmaster, the university chum, the business partner—anyone with anything at all good to say about him.* Obara had tried everything else; he would surely have produced such people if they existed. But, on the face of it at least, this was one of the most extraordinary of the many extraordinary things about him—he had advanced through childhood, youth, and well into middle age without possessing a single friend.

  * * *

  The verdict was to be delivered at 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, April 24, 2007. This was 1:00 a.m. in Britain; if all went to schedule, it would just be possible for me to get the news in the last edition of that morning’s newspaper. But the timing would be uncomfortably tight, particularly if there was a delay. That morning I woke early and wrote the draft of a news story to which I could add details over the telephone after the verdict was announced.

  It began:

  The Japanese property owner Joji Obara was convicted of the killing of the British bar hostess Lucie Blackman this morning and sentenced to life in jail [to be confirmed] after a sensational six and a half year trial.

  [Insert family reaction in court, judge’s words]

  The verdict is a vindication for Ms Blackman’s family, especially her father, Tim, who spent months in Japan pressing the police to search for his daughter after her disappearance in July 2000 …

  I e-mailed this draft to London, drank a cup of coffee, and gathered up my laptop and notebooks. There would be a crowd at the court this morning; I needed to leave home early to get a place. My stomach was light with excitement, almost with trepidation.

  Next week, it would be seven years since the day of Lucie’s arrival in Japan. It was fifteen years since Carita Ridgway’s life support had been switched off, and twenty-seven years since Tim had saved the baby Lucie from febrile convulsion. Thirty-eight years ago this week, Joji Obara’s father had died, or been murdered, in Hong Kong, and around that time his second son, the repository of his hopes, had had his heart broken by the half-American girl named Betty. It was seventy years since Obara’s parents had come to Osaka as poor colonial immigrants and eighty-four years since the pogrom after the Great Kanto Earthquake, when Japanese had killed Koreans like animals. Something connected all those moments, if only I could see it. I pictured the image of a tree, with sap circulating from roots deep in the earth. Its branches spread immeasurably high and broad; from them bristled an infinity of lesser limbs, each one quickened with moisture from deep below. Obara’s distorted life was a twig of one of these; Lucie’s death, her family’s grief, and Sophie’s near death were its fruit. No one of us had eyes capable of encompassing more than a tiny part of this twisted black tree; it was impossible to describe it in words. But this morning, Justice Tochigi would make official pronouncement on a tiny part of it. His terms—of guilt and innocence, harshness and leniency—were crudely narrow, but perhaps they were the best that anyone would manage. Out of the human mess of Lucie’s and Carita’s deaths and Obara’s strange life, some kind of meaning was to be unpacked.

  After all these years, it was momentous. I wrote in my notebook, “Can there be any chance that he will be acquitted? Surely not. The mass of circumstantial evidence. The absurdity of the defence. The overwhelming weighting of the scales of justice in favour of the prosecution. And yet…”

  On the verge of leaving the house, anxiously aware of how late it had become, I switched on my laptop again and hastily wrote a second draft of the news story that began as follows:

  The Japanese property owner Joji Obara was acquitted of the killing of the British bar hostess Lucie Blackman this morning after a sensational six and a half year trial.

  [Insert family reaction in court, judge’s words]

  The verdict is a devastating blow for Ms Blackman’s family, especially her father, Tim Blackman, who spent months in Japan pressing the police to search for his daughter after her disappearance in July 2000 …

  In the end, 232 people lined up for the public seats, barely a quarter of the number at the opening hearing. It confirmed the view of the Japanese trial as a hollow ceremony: people were not interested in verdicts because they were so predictable. But every seat in the court was occupied. I could see the blond heads of Tim and Sophie in the front row, and beside them Annette, Nigel, and Samantha Ridgway. Obara was already seated, looking away from everyone and everything. I took my own seat. I had not expected this sensation of fluttering nervousness. But my deadline was so close. I found myself looking every fifteen seconds at my watch and then up again at the faces of the people in the courtroom around me, several of whom had become familiar. There was Yuki, the blogger groupie. There were the frow
ning court artists, and a detective whom I recognized, and behind him the old man with the flower in his trilby. A young and rather gaunt blond man in a mackintosh was seated in the very back row, taking notes.

  The judges swept in abruptly from the back of the court, and everyone rose to their feet.

  Eight minutes later I was in the open air outside the courthouse, stabbing at my mobile phone, with other reporters milling all about me. “It’s the second version,” I said when the voice in London answered.

  “Go with the second version. He’s been acquitted. But he’s got a life sentence. Well, I’m sorry, that’s what the judge said. I know, I know. I don’t understand it myself.”

  From: Lloyd Parry, Richard

  Sent: Tue 4/24/2007 14:36

  To: Times Online; Times Foreign Desk

  Subject: Lucie Blackman verdict copy__refile

  [Resending this, having talked again to the lawyers. I think I’ve finally got it straight now.]

  Richard Lloyd Parry

  Tokyo

  The Japanese property owner Joji Obara was acquitted of raping and killing the British bar hostess Lucie Blackman this morning in a devastating blow for her family and a grave embarrassment for Tokyo police and prosecutors.

  Obara received a life sentence in prison, nonetheless, after guilty verdicts on eight other charges of rape and one of raping and killing an Australian hostess, Carita Ridgway. His legal team immediately said that he would appeal.

  The chief judge in the Tokyo District Court, Tsutomu Tochigi, acquitted Obara of the abduction, rape, killing and dismemberment of Lucie Blackman, whose body was found buried in a seaside cave close to his home seven months after she went out for the day with him.

  Justice Tochigi said that, despite circumstantial evidence, there was no direct proof—such as DNA evidence—linking Mr Obara to Ms Blackman’s death.

  But the text of the judgement reveals the court’s revulsion for Mr Obara and the crimes of which he is convicted. “You treated these women as sexual objects to satisfy your lust,” the judge told Mr Obara as he faced him in the dock.

  “Your behaviour is not healthy sexual behaviour, but a filthy crime. Furthermore, you used lethal drugs such as chloroform that can cause death due to disordering of the liver function. One opinion might be that these women were careless, but I believe that they could not anticipate your deviant behaviour … You repeated the same routine, treating their lives and their bodies carelessly.

  “It is rooted in your self-centred attitude based on your perverted sexual taste and deserves the most severe reproach.”

  Ms Blackman’s family expressed outrage at Obara’s acquittal on the charges relating to Lucie’s death, and disgust at the Tokyo prosecutors for failing to construct a watertight case against him.

  “I’m afraid to say the lack of justice for us today has been the failure of the prosecution team to develop the case adequately,” said her father, Tim, who attended the hearing with Lucie’s younger sister, Sophie. “Lucie has been robbed of her justice.”

  Ms Blackman’s mother, Jane Steare, said in a statement from her home in Sevenoaks, Kent: “My worst fears have come true. As for my darling Lucie, I miss you so much. This aching void in my heart feels like it will never go away, but I truly believe that one day we will hug each other again. Your mummy will never give up hope of finding justice and the truth.”

  Mrs Steare, who divorced Mr Blackman before their daughter’s disappearance, has denounced him for accepting ¥100 million from “a friend” of Obara in return for signing a statement questioning some of the evidence against him. But yesterday’s ruling made it clear that the judge was moved to acquit Obara, not because of the payment, but because of the lack of a “smoking gun” linking him directly to Ms Blackman’s death.

  “The defendant is recognised as being involved in the damage and abandonment of Lucie’s dead body in some form,” Justice Tochigi said. “There is a suspicion that he was involved in the death of Lucie in one way or another. [The fact] that the defendant … gave false information as if Lucie was alive and tried to cover up the death supports such recognition. Then the problem is how the defendant was involved in the death of Lucie.”

  In Japan, both prosecutors and the defence are allowed to appeal against an acquittal, so it is likely that the case will continue for several more years.

  ends

  PART SIX LIFE AFTER DEATH

  24. HOW JAPANESE

  “When the police were done, I flew back home to England and I was in a trance,” said Louise Phillips. “I didn’t sleep. I cried all the time. I thought that there were people coming to get me. I drank my way through it. I took a lot of drugs. I hated myself; I just didn’t care about anything. I was staying at home, at my mum’s house in Kent, and I was terrible to live with. It was terrible for my family too. I suppose that I didn’t want to be alive. I had nightmares too, about being chased by someone, or trying to save Lucie from a house, and the house was burning down. Or about Lucie coming back, and saying, ‘Here I am, I’ve been looking for you.’ And about that phone call—the phone ringing and a voice saying, ‘You’ll never see her again.’”

  The experience of bereavement is often compared to the loss of a limb, but rarely is it a neatly sutured surgical amputation. In the case of a young person who dies violently and unexpectedly, it is like the tearing of an arm from its socket. Muscles and arteries are ripped open; the shock and loss of blood threaten the functioning of organs far from the wound. After Lucie died, the private world through which she had moved was tipped permanently off its axis. The pain of the event surged outwards, afflicting not only her immediate family and close friends but people she had never known.

  Sophie narrowly failed to kill herself and spent nine months in psychiatric care. During his first term at university, Rupert Blackman became severely depressed. He came home and lived with Jane and spent much of his time alone in his room, weeping. Lucie’s friend Gayle Blackman spent a year in counseling, and Jamie Gascoigne, the ex-boyfriend of Lucie who had gone out with Sophie to look for her in Tokyo, went through months of anger management. “After I found out what had happened, I just wanted to kill someone,” he said. “I was a really horrible person. After a few months I started seeing a girl I worked with. I was an arsehole. I was brought up to treat women with one hundred percent respect, but the way I treated her was disgusting.”

  But the most stricken of all was Louise, who spent years in the clutch of suicidal thoughts. Booze and cocaine did less and less to keep them at bay. The ordeal was made all the harder by the promise, solemnly extracted by the police, that she say nothing about the case to the Blackman family. As a result, Lucie’s closest friends, and Jane Blackman herself, shunned Louise, convinced that she was concealing some crucial article of evidence. She lived at home; apart from intermittent stints as a waitress, she never worked. Eventually, she fell in love and married a man she had first known as a teenager in Bromley, but always the dark shape of Lucie’s death loomed on the edge of her vision, ready at any moment to roll in and black out her happiness. “Nobody was talking to me,” Louise said. “Everybody blamed me. The guilt was crushing. I felt guilty at Christmas, guilty on my birthday. I felt guilty on my wedding day—so guilty that I was getting married, and she wasn’t. I felt guilty for being happy, guilty for getting older. It seemed like it was my fault that I was here and she wasn’t.”

  Lucie had gone away, and it had been understood that she would be invisible for a while. But, invisibly, she died; for the seven months that her limbs lay in the cave, she was nowhere. It would have been easier to assimilate if she had been struck down in public, in full view of family and friends. None of them was surprised when she was found to have been killed. Privately, although they would never have owned up to it, all had admitted to themselves that she was never coming back.

  But when she was found, it was in a state that might have been calculated to inflict the greatest sense of violation on those who knew her
. “I remember thinking about it while Lucie was missing,” said Sophie. “I thought, ‘She’s probably not going to come back now—she’s gone, and I can begin to accept that, but please don’t let her have been chopped up.’” As the photographs that had been thrust before me confirmed, there could be no question of saying goodbye to Lucie’s remains in person. Even her hair—Lucie’s great pride, reflective of the light, the emblem of her loveliness—had been hacked or burned off. And then there was the baffling, protracted trial: grim and comic, lurid and tedious at the same time, with dead pigs in tents, frozen dogs, politely obliging gangsters, and the dark, evasive villain at the center of it.

  A crew-cutted thug, a svelte psychopath, or a twitching inadequate—any of them would have been more satisfactory than Joji Obara, with his lisp and his loneliness and his fastidious, outlandish determination. Finally there was the verdict, which pronounced him guilty of everything except harming Lucie, and not because the judge thought he hadn’t done it but because of the inadequacy of the evidence. And now the appeals, by prosecution as well as defense, with a further appeal available after that, and the possibility of all ten verdicts, convictions as well as acquittals, being reversed. There was nothing that could be taken for granted in this case; none of the comforting clichés applied, about just deserts and patience rewarded. Everything seemed designed to deny its victims the consolation of a familiar storyline.

  The stresses generated by the case were centrifugal: they forced people apart rather than bringing them together. This was true not only within the Blackman family; many of those who knew Lucie well found themselves becoming alienated from friends, family, and one another. To those who cared about her, almost any reaction to Lucie’s death was unsatisfactory. People were either coldly indifferent or intrusively curious. Everyone had a confidently held opinion, based on superficial exposure to newspaper and television reports, and often implying a judgment about the shadiness of Lucie’s hostessing work and her stupidity in climbing into a stranger’s car. Equally enraging were those acquaintances who exaggerated their closeness to Lucie, because of the glamour of association with such a celebrated victim and the status bestowed by an affected grief.