“If you keep studying Japanese as hard you are doing, I might be able to help. Get you in? I’m just a plebe, a lowly soldier. I don’t have any pull.”
“Oh, that’s okay. Anyway, this is all so exciting. By the way, is there really a Chinese mafia in Japan? The Snakeheads, I think.”
“You should ask Yamamoto, my boss. He knows that stuff.”
“The three of us should go out for drinks, then. By the way, have you been to Club Codex yet? One of the victims worked there, I hear.”
I assured her that to the best of my knowledge one of them had indeed worked there in the past. She gave me one more name, Melissa. Melissa had been working at the club with Lucie. Layla had spoken to her at length, and she told me what she’d heard.
According to Layla, Melissa had seen Lucie and a long-haired Japanese man talking at the Casablanca club a week before Lucie had vanished. The man had looked very rich. He’d ordered expensive brandy and champagne. He’d spoken to Lucie for almost three hours, in a very friendly fashion. He’d paid in cash.
He hated being talked to in Japanese and would make a horrible face if you did. He preferred to speak English.
Melissa had been questioned by the police several times about the customer and his interaction with Lucie. Melissa wasn’t working in Roppongi anymore; she didn’t have the proper visa, and now that the police had interviewed her, she was afraid she’d be deported if she wasn’t careful.
I thanked Layla profusely. Now I knew what the cops knew. Lucie and Obara had met each other, and there were witnesses to prove it. He wasn’t going to be able to deny that. I called Yamamoto and passed on the information. He thanked me. I thanked him for thanking me and hung up the phone. What I’d given him was enough for a big scoop on the story. I’d delivered: it was a scoop for us when we reported it. It helped justify the huge amount of cash I’d blown in Roppongi. The article pissed off the TMPD, which had wanted to spring a surprise on Obara. (The other newspapers reported it roughly a week later.)
I got in at three in the morning. Beni was crying her head off. Sunao looked completely exhausted, holding Beni, walking around trying to soothe her. I took Beni off her hands and carried the little runt in my arms while gently walking on the step machine. I put U2’s greatest hits on the boom box, low volume, and moved gently until Beni started to yawn and close her eyes. She was still completely hairless, and her eyes were so swollen that you could see only her black pupils. She looked like an alien baby from an episode of The X-Files, but it didn’t bother me. She was my own flesh and blood, even if she was an alien. She reminded me of Alien Cop, come to think of it.
As I held her in the middle of the night, I had a little time to reflect on things. I thought of Tim and Jane Blackman. They must have memories like that of Lucie.
I thought of Obara, and it made me feel sick to my stomach. I realized that having my own child was making me feel personal about this story. For a reporter, that is not necessarily a good thing. If stories become personal, they start to tear you up.
The last thing I did after laying Beni down on the futon next to Sunao was to call Dai Davies, a private investigator hired by the Black-mans to look into Lucie’s disappearance. He told me that the police had asked Mr. Blackman for a sample of Lucie’s handwriting. Obviously, they were now trying to determine who had written them a false note, trying to throw them off the scent. I suppose they had to be certain that it wasn’t Lucie’s signature, even though Tim had already told them as much.
The investigation seemed to be proceeding smoothly. Obara was arrested and rearrested on multiple charges, including the 1992 manslaughter of an Australian girl, Carita Ridgway, and several cases of rape. In Carita’s case, he had used chloroform to knock her out and then filmed himself raping her. She’d died of liver failure. Her parents had been told it was food poisoning. It’s doubtful that an autopsy was performed—they rarely are, even for Japanese people who die under suspicious circumstances.
The police searched the apartment building where Obara took women and the surrounding Miura area but didn’t find a body. At least not the first time.
Also, Obara would not confess to killing Lucie. The police response was to rearrest him on other sexual assault charges. They figured they’d break him eventually. They didn’t.
Around 6 P.M. on November 10, Obara’s lawyer sent out a statement to the mass media. Obara named the victims in the document, thus slandering them at the same time as repeating the same line he’d given the police. He did admit in the letter that he’d at least met Lucie, clearly an attempt to make sure that the letter was taken up by the mass media. It was the work of a totally unrepentant sociopath, according to one profiler I spoke with.
It began like this:
Right now I am being accused of a crime, because in the past, I paid for sex with foreign women at foreign pubs and hostess clubs and engaged in compensated dating with Japanese women who performed prostitution services as professionals or at a professional level. I paid a fair price for this sex play (which I refer to as subjugation play).
Because I paid the equivalent price for services rendered, and had the permission of these women when we engaged in sexual play, I do not believe [I have committed] rape or sexual assault.
He then went on to name each of his accusers by her initials, accusing them of being prostitutes, heroin addicts, and liars. The only interesting note was the one concerning the name TM: Obara claimed that he had been shielding her from the pursuit of Issei Sagawa and had never even had paid sex with her.
In 1981, while studying abroad, Issei Sagawa had shot and killed a Dutch girl, committed necrophilia, and then eaten parts of her body. He had been declared insane by the French courts, released to Japan, and never served a day in prison. It wasn’t surprising to see him linked with Obara.
Obara also tried to clear up some questions that had everyone puzzled. One of them involved the frozen carcass of his pet dog being found in a meat locker he owned.
I believe when cloning technology progresses enough, that I will be able to revive my dog, whom I love so much. Therefore, I placed him in the freezer along with roses and the food he loved so much, just as he was. The police have photos. The morning television programs have been reporting that he was in pieces, and that is a total lie.
He went on to explain why he possessed large amounts of human growth serum.
He also insisted that he was using sleeping pills only to access his unconscious and fully develop his potentialities to the max. He also used them to cure his insomnia but never used them for sex play.
He had been using cement to fix the tiles in the apartment building.
Point by point, he denied the reports about him. He denied knowing Akira Takagi. He denied reports of dressing in women’s clothing and having been arrested for Peeping Tom activity.
He threatened to sue the media for their misleading stories and file criminal complaints for slander. Finally, he notified us that the police were planning a large-scale search of the places where he had been living, noting that mobile police forces and helicopters would be used, all to take place within seven days.
The chief detective on the case was furious about the statement. He wanted to strangle Obara’s lawyer. On that day, at the Azabu police station, he let everyone know just how pissed off he really was.
“I warned that lawyer a thousand times that if he writes about the victims, it’ll be criminal slander, and he did it anyway. What the hell is this lawyer guy thinking? We’re not supposed to be stopping in the middle of a critical interrogation to give him time to meet with the client for this crap. If this is made public and the victims make a criminal complaint, I’d love to arrest this lawyer as an accomplice for criminal slander. I’d do it. With this letter and with all the crap that’s been in the press, it’s pretty damn easy to figure out who the victims are. It’s a whole different level from the mistaken, off-centered stuff the press is writing. It’s slander.
“This giant searc
h of the area he’s talking about. Crap.
“Does he use the phrase ‘subjugation play’ in the interrogation? I have no damn idea.
“It’s true that some of the victims received money, but that has nothing to do with the crime. They hadn’t agreed in advance; when the victims awoke after he’d finished with them, he’d give them money to try to buy their silence. The victims, they’d lost consciousness, so they don’t remember anything.
“They’d wake up and know that something was funny, wrong, and Obara would go into his usual song and dance. ‘Oh, you got so sick.’ He’d give them cab fare to get home.
“Even if he gave them money, the facts don’t change. He tricked those women, made them drink alcohol laced with drugs. It’s attempted murder. I want to get this bastard on charges of attempted murder.
“If you really read this letter, you’ll see that it’s nothing but convenient information for him. It doesn’t touch on the videos at all. Not one line.
“And the tile explanation? Bullshit. Everyone knows that to fix a tile you don’t need to use cement; any strong glue will do the trick.”
If Obara’s motive was to shake up and infuriate the police, he’d succeeded with that letter beyond his wildest dreams. He was taunting the cops and ridiculing the victims. The man knew no shame.
On February 9, based on a new “tip,” the TMPD sent nearly a hundred officers back to the beach in Miura where they had searched for Lucie’s body almost four months previously. The explanation was that after analyzing the distance on the speedometer of a car rented by Obara shortly after Lucie vanished, they had made a determination of where he’d likely buried the body. One veteran police reporter from the Mainichi said he believed that the police had found Lucie’s body on the first run and were waiting for Obara to substantiate their find before officially announcing it, just to make sure the case was solid and waterproof. It’s possible.
I was awakened at five in the morning on that day and told to go to the City News Department and be on hand to talk to any foreigners involved in the story as soon as the body was found.
I was hoping that the TMPD would already have notified Tim, but I knew they wouldn’t. The cops didn’t like him because he had been critical of their methods, which he had every right to be.
The whole squad was grouchy and angry and tired. Accusations of incompetence and criticism, real or perceived, were not being taken well. The two factions were clearly at odds with each other. Tim was kept out of the picture, as much as possible.
Instead, the police had brought Jane Blackman to Japan a week before the search. They’d hidden her in a hotel room away from the press and wouldn’t even let her take a call from another family member. She’d been accompanied by victim support officers from Scotland Yard. The Japanese police had quizzed her about Lucie in detail: What special physical features did she have, what illnesses had she had, what did she normally eat, what were her habits? Mrs. Blackman knew that something was about to break, but the police were giving nothing away. Tim was in the dark.
It didn’t take the police long to find the body this time, hidden in a makeshift wall in a cave along the oceanfront. Supposedly, the smell of decomposed flesh was so strong that a few of the younger cops became physically ill. They found Lucie’s head encased in concrete. Identification couldn’t be done that day, but everyone knew who it was. Googly called me from the scene and let me know what was going on. He knew that I was talking to Tim. I guess he wanted Tim to know.
In the end, it wasn’t hard to break the news. Well, not as hard as I thought. When Tim Blackman answered the phone, he already knew why I was calling and what I had to say.
“Tim, this is Jake at the Yomiuri.”
“Yes, Jake.”
“I don’t know any way to break this to you gently, so I won’t. It’s just as you feared it would be. The police found her body this morning.”
There was a long silence.
“Buried?”
“The body was partially dismembered; it looks like she’s been dead for several months, judging by the decomposition. The identification is not official, but all indications are that it’s her. I’m very sorry for your loss. Is there anything else you’d like to know?”
“No, Jake. Thank you very much for calling. It’s good to know what really happened.” You could barely detect a waver in his well-chosen words, a murmur of something else. I was ready to hang up, and then he spoke again.
“Yes, I have one question. Where did they find the body?”
“Near his place. Hidden in a cave along the beach.”
There was another long silence.
“Are you all right, Tim?”
“Oh, yes, it all comes as, well, not a shock, but it … it is … not what I’d hoped for. Didn’t they search the beach before?”
“They did, Tim. I don’t know why they didn’t find her then, but they didn’t. Do you have anything you want to say to the press, to the police?”
“I’m very happy that the police found Lucie. We’ll have to come to Japan and pick up the remains to give her a proper burial once everything’s confirmed.”
“Understood. Tim, I wish I could say something to make it less painful for you. All I can do is keep you up to date on what comes next in the investigation.”
“Yeees,” said Tim, drawing out the word almost dreamily. “Yes, please do. You’ve been very good to keep us abreast of all the events in the investigation up to now, much more than the Japanese police, in fact. Thank you.”
“Well, I’ll talk to you later.”
“Yes, yes. Thank you for calling me.”
“You’ll be getting a lot of calls from the other media about this, quite soon I would imagine.”
“Yes, thanks for the warning. I may turn the phone off for a bit. Good night.”
“Good night, Tim.”
Several hours later, I had to call Tim back. The Yomiuri wanted an official comment. This is the life of a reporter. I didn’t feel like intruding on his personal grief any more than I already had, but the job is the job.
Tim had prepared a comment by then.
“In my heart of hearts, I’d like to think that Lucie was still alive, but I have to face the reality that this might not be the case. If I stop and think about all the circumstances involved, I can’t deny the strong possibility that the body in question is, in fact, my daughter Lucie. In a ghastly way, I’m kind of relieved. Not knowing whether she is alive or has been killed … is the hardest thing of all. I only hope that there are no more bodies.”
Lucie was positively identified on the tenth. In early April, Obara was officially charged with raping her, causing her death, and then mutilating the body and abandoning it in the cave. In his first trial he was found not guilty of the charges involving Lucie. Sometimes Japanese courts simply baffled me. On the other hand, he received life imprisonment for eight rapes and other charges. The case is in appeal, where it will probably be for years and years to come.4*
A lot of people in Japan would like to shrug off the Lucie Blackman case as just some sort of freak crime in one of the world’s safest countries. Although it was an unusual crime, it raises questions. The biggest question for me was always this: how did this man get away with allegedly raping woman after woman for more than a decade, and why didn’t the police catch him sooner?
It’s not that the police have a bad attitude toward crimes against foreign women—it’s all women. They still don’t seem to anticipate how stalking behavior such as the kind demonstrated by Obara can lead to serious injury and even death.
I think—and since I’m not writing for the newspaper, I can actually express my opinion here—that sexual assault against women was always a low-priority crime for the police. The penalty for rape is so negligible (usually two years maximum) and the possibility of a suspended sentence for a first offender so great that it hardly seems like a felony at all.
Hostesses aren’t seen as victims by many of the police; they’re se
en as victimizers, greedy, manipulative prostitutes. Especially the foreign hostesses. I don’t know how you can change that frame of mind. Even if the victim is a prostitute, she’s still a victim. Prostitutes are entitled to say no. Women who are drugged against their will can’t say anything at all.
In the last five years, the TMPD has started putting female officers in charge of investigating sexual assault; it’s a good start. Male officers have tended to treat the victims like criminals in the past, asking questions such as, “How did you egg him on?” or “Why didn’t you say no?” I’ve talked to three women who have had very unpleasant experiences with the police after being raped. Each of them was made to wait between three and eight hours before being taken to a hospital for examination. During that time, all of them were allowed or encouraged to go to the bathroom, thus, of course, destroying the physical evidence.
Rape kits are not a standard item at police stations, and very few officers know how to use them, though I’ve been told that rape kits themselves do exist. In a country where rape is not considered a serious crime, it’s not surprising that people like Obara flourish.
A source in the British Embassy told me that there had been complaints filed with the police about Obara many years before Lucie vanished. I don’t know if that’s true; I can’t find anyone in the TMPD who will confirm that officially. I know this much: if someone had taken those complaints seriously, not only would Obara have gone to jail long since but Lucie Blackman would still be alive.
1* For each drink the customer orders for himself and the woman, a portion of the money is kicked back to the hostess. This is why customers who order expensive bottles of brandy, champagne, and other spirits are much beloved by the hostess community.
2* In December 2008, Obara was convicted of eight rapes and one count of rape resulting in death.
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