Bodies in the Back Garden--True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home

by Cawthorne Nigel

  Agnes, 49, and children Tomas, 21, Arthur, 18, Anne, 16, and Benoit, 13, had all been shot dead after being drugged before their bodies were buried, in a clear attempt to conceal them from police. Meanwhile, the aristocratic Xavier had disappeared.

  Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès could trace his lineage back to the aristocrats of pre-revolutionary France. He lived with his wife and four children in a large house in the expensive part of Nantes. The children attended private schools, while Agnes was a catechism teacher at the local Blanche-de-Castille Catholic high school.

  Although Xavier was away a lot on business, the couple led an active social life in the town and seemed happy, for instance the whole family dined together at a local restaurant on Sundays. Then family and friends got a letter from Xavier, saying he was an undercover agent for America’s Drug Enforcement Agency. And that he and the family were being moved to an undisclosed location under the witness protection programme. Soon after, the dead bodies of the family were found in the back garden of their home.

  At first, the police expected to find Xavier’s body nearby, but credit card records showed that he had been staying in chic hotels in southern France. Soon after, his car was found abandoned near a cheap hotel on the Riviera, nearly 700 miles from home. After that, he vanished and an international warrant was issued for his arrest.

  The newspapers soon dubbed him the ‘Most Wanted Man in France’ and began digging into his background. They found that he was not a successful businessman, as he had pretended, but had instead managed to maintain the veneer of affluence while actually being on the brink of financial ruin.

  Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès had grown up in aristocratic Versailles. His mother was deeply religious. ‘All my adolescence was devoted to religion and faith, under the influence of my grandmother and mother,’ he wrote. ‘To such an extent that I did not rebel like other adolescents, nor indulge in drugs or run after girls.’

  Later, he had his doubts. Immediately before his family were murdered, he visited an online Catholic forum. In his posts, he said that memorising masses in Latin and French and getting up at 6.00am to go to mass before school was not good for him when he was growing up. However, he revealed a morbid fascination with the concept of sacrifice, saying, ‘Mass is about the sacrifice of Christ, which continues as part of the ritual of worship.’

  Xavier’s father was a playboy and left for Africa when his son was ten; they saw little of each other. But for his 18th birthday, his father bought him a vintage Triumph Spitfire sports car. However, his father failed to pay for him to go to university, so Xavier was liable for national service – and he had to enlist, rather than enter the French Army as an officer. Nevertheless, he remained convinced that he was a cut above others. ‘I think I’ve got a superiority complex, you could call it that,’ he wrote in an email. ‘But it’s based on a simple observation: I belong to a group of people who are intelligent, determined, balanced and in good moral and physical health. Such people are rare compared to the masses.’

  After the Army, he took a series of low-skilled jobs in various parts of France. Eventually, he returned to his mother in Versailles where he caught up with Agnes, a woman who he had first met five years earlier. She was pregnant by another man, but Xavier married her and adopted the child.

  As the Dupont de Ligonnès family grew, they travelled around the country while Xavier looked for work. Often, though, they survived on unemployment benefit. Eventually, in 2003, they settled in Nantes. There, Xavier set up a business reviewing hotels for the executives of wealthy firms. However, his expenses outstripped any income.

  Alhough Agnes worked and had inherited 80,000 euros, there was not enough money to maintain their upper-middle-class lifestyle. Agnes went on to online forums to bemoan the state of their finances, and she also complained that her husband was away most of the time and, when he was at home, he was ‘cold and rigid’. She also confided that Xavier had once said, ‘If we die all at once, then everything would be over. We would no longer miss anything.’

  Meanwhile, Xavier was consoling himself with an affair with an old flame, now a successful businesswoman, who lent him 50,000 euros. Soon, he was asking for more. In an email to his mistress, he said he was behind with the rent and had barely enough to feed his family until the end of the month.

  ‘I don’t sleep any more and lay awake with morbid ideas, such as burning down the house after giving everyone sleeping pills or throwing myself under a truck so that Agnes would get 600,000 euros,’ he wrote. This money would be the payout from a life assurance policy.

  The lady was not impressed. Not only did she end their affair, she also began legal proceedings to reclaim the money she had lent him.

  Xavier’s father died a few months before his son’s family was killed, and Xavier inherited an automatic .22 calibre pistol. This was the murder weapon. Receipts found in the house show that he bought a silencer, along with a spade, a two-wheeled trolley, chalk lime and other equipment he used to bury the bodies.

  After the murders, he emailed his former mistress again, saying she ‘would live in hell for the next 30 years’. Fearing for her life, she contacted the police.

  As Xavier fled, his use of credit and cash cards made him easy to trace. He was seen near Lorgues where 50-year-old mother-of-four Colette Deromme was murdered. Her body was found under a pile of rocks. It is not known whether he was connected to her demise, but the Dupont de Ligonnès family had lived in Lorgues in 2003.

  By then, the aristocratic Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès had been reduced to driving a Citroën C5, which he abandoned at Roquebrune-sur-Argens, along with the battery from his mobile phone. He was last seen leaving a budget hotel there. Wearing a backpack, he was picked up by CCTV strolling through the car park and out into the surrounding countryside.

  Wanted posters were put up around the region, but Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès has never been found. The area around Roquebrune-sur-Argens is riddled with underground caves and abandoned potassium mines. The theory is that he disappeared down one and shot himself.

  23

  THE ORNAMENTAL GARDEN

  Twenty-eight-year-old horticulture student Tatsuya Ichihashi did not have a back garden; he lived in a high-rise apartment in Tokyo. When he killed 22-year-old English teacher Lindsay Hawker, he was forced to improvise, burying her body in a bath full of soil and sand on the balcony of his apartment. It was thought that when he had finished filling the bath with the soil that he brought to the apartment in a shopping trolley, he was going to turn it into an ornamental flower garden.

  Lindsay Hawker was taking a year off between graduating with a first-class honours degree in biology from Leeds University and beginning her masters. In October 2006, she moved to Japan to teach English in the Koiwa International Language School in Tokyo. She shared a flat in the Funabashi area with two other English teachers.

  Five months later, Tatsuya Ichihashi had spotted her hanging out with friends in the Hippy Dippi Doo, an English pub in Chiba Gyotoku. She was a tall, good-looking Western girl, the type that Japanese men idolise. When she left the bar, he followed her and, on the train home, engaged her in conversation. During their chat, she let slip that she was an English teacher.

  He got off with her at her stop. There she said goodbye and set off home on her bicycle. But Ichihashi was a fitness freak and chased after her on foot. He almost kept up and, when he arrived at her door soon after her, he said, ‘Do you remember me?’

  Somewhat out of breath, he asked for a glass of water. Lindsay invited him in so that he could see she was living with two flatmates. Inside her flat, Ichihashi took out a pen and paper and did a quick sketch of her. He signed it and added his telephone number.

  Ichihashi said that he needed English lessons and Lindsay agreed to meet him in a café five days later. Lindsay had given private lessons before, usually in cafés near the school; she needed the money for her flight home. The Koiwa International Language School permitted this, but advised its teachers, for
safety’s sake, to give their private lessons in public places and to leave a note of who the student was and where they were going to meet.

  Having completed their lesson in the café, Lindsay left with Ichihashi. It was raining and they took a taxi a few hundred yards down the street to his apartment in Ichikawa City. She told the taxi driver to wait just a minute, so he could take her on to the language school.

  CCTV caught them getting out of the cab at around 10.00am on Sunday, 25 March 2005. The taxi driver waited but, after seven minutes, he left to take another job. Lindsay’s father, Bill Hawker, said that in the CCTV footage his daughter looked like she had been drugged, but no trace of any drug was found in her body. But Bill Hawker could not think of any other explanation for his daughter having gone back to Ichihashi’s apartment.

  While in Japan, Lindsay had kept in close contact with her boyfriend and family by phone, email and Skype. They were concerned for her safety when they heard that an earthquake had hit Japan. It happened just 20 minutes before Lindsay got out of the cab. They grew more worried when she did not respond to their emails or calls.

  Lindsay missed her classes on 25 and 26 March, something she had not done before. At around 2.30pm on Monday, 26 March, the school informed the police. Her flatmates had also reported her missing when she did not return home or answer her mobile phone, although the message had not been passed on. Following the school’s advice, Lindsay had left a note giving Ichihashi’s name and address, so it was not hard to trace him.

  The police pulled up his record. In 2006, he was given a police caution for stalking a female student at the university and stealing money from the coffee shop where she worked. Some time before that, an allegation of ‘theft and injury’ had been made against him. This led the police to think that Lindsay may have been the victim of a violent crime. Even so, the police did not arrive at Ichihashi’s apart-ment until 7.00pm.

  The lights were off, but clearly there was someone at home. Assuming they were dealing with a kidnapping, the police called for backup. Soon, there were nine officers on the scene. The police managed to get into a flat that overlooked Ichihashi’s balcony. By then, it was dark and they could not see the bath, filled with soil, with Lindsay’s hand sticking out of it.

  At 9.45pm, the police were standing guard outside Ichihashi’s flat when he came out.

  ‘Are you Mr Ichihashi?’ asked one of them.

  He said he was.

  ‘We want to talk to you about a foreign woman and we want to come in,’ the policeman continued.

  Ichihashi turned as if going back into the flat, then doubled back and tried to run off, barefoot. He was carrying a rucksack. An officer made a grab for it; it came off his shoulder and Ichihashi left it behind as he sprinted away. There were police at the bottom of the staircase, but Ichihashi simply jumped from the top of the last flight into the stairwell and disappeared into the surrounding buildings.

  As the police searched for Ichihashi, he suddenly reappeared. He now had some running shoes, apparently stolen from outside another apartment. He ran right past officers and disappeared into the maze of apartment blocks.

  Inside Ichihashi’s flat, the police found that he had removed the bath from the bathroom. This was not hard to do as, in Japanese apartments, the bath is commonly freestanding. On Sunday night, neighbours had heard the sounds of banging metal and something being dragged. He had put the bath, which measured 47in x 27in x 20in, out on the balcony. In it was the naked body of Lindsay Hawker. She was bound and gagged with scarves and the plastic cord used to tie plants. It was clear that she had put up a terrific fight.

  Lindsay Hawker had been the victim of a prolonged attack; almost every inch of her body was covered with bruises or other injuries, even her feet. She was 5ft 10in and had been trained in the martial arts; Ichihashi was 6ft and a black belt. The egg-sized bruises on the left side of her face seemed to have been inflicted by a fist, while other marks on her upper body were the result of colliding with furniture during the struggle.

  In an initial statement, Superintendent Yoshihiro Sugita of the Chiba Prefecture Police said, ‘There was no sign of strangulation, and no sign that the body had been stabbed, but there were signs of violent assault – bruises on the face and in numerous places all over the body. We have found no traces of blood and there was no sign of a physical struggle. The victim was completely naked and her clothes were scattered around the apartment, although we don’t know whether they were taken off by her or by the suspect.’

  Later, the post-mortem report revealed that she had been tied up and repeatedly beaten over several hours. She had struggled as the ligatures had tightened around her wrists. ‘It would have been a long and terrifying time for her,’ said an officer. ‘Judging by the bruising on her body and the fact that our examination showed she was tied up for a long period of time before her death suggests she went through a great deal of pain and fear before she died.’

  It was thought that Lindsay was gagged as neighbours heard no screams or cries for help. The police concluded that Ichihashi had used torture to force her to have sex with him. In the end, he had strangled her – so forcefully that he broke the cartilage of her neck. Then he had buried her in the bath on the balcony – his would-be ornamental garden. Lindsay’s clothes had been left strewn across the room, along with her handbag and passport.

  It was widely reported that the bath was full of sand. In fact, Lindsay had been buried in a mixture of sand and composted soil, soaked in a chemical that the Japanese use to compact and decompose waste, turning it into fertilizer. A shopping trolley was removed from Ichihashi’s building, which it was thought was what he used to transport the bags of sand and soil. Before he was interrupted by the police, Ichihashi had made six trips to a local hardware store get soil and other supplies for his ‘garden’.

  Lindsay’s head had been shaved after she had been killed. Studying horticulture at university, Ichihashi would have known that hair takes longer to decompose than other tissue. Her hair was found in bag in the apartment.

  The Hawkers feared that Lindsay may have been buried alive because, when the police found her, one arm was sticking out of the soil, as if she had been trying to claw herself out. But experts assured them that Lindsay was dead by the time she was covered in soil. It was small comfort.

  Travelling to Tokyo to identify the body, Bill Hawker said, ‘I knew it was Lindsay because she was so tall and because she was my daughter, but she was so badly beaten. Her hair was wrapped in gauze, her body in a Japanese gown and they’d had to put a lot of make-up on her. They let me say goodbye and I just stayed there, holding her toe under the blanket. She was beautiful and to see her lying on a mortuary table like that … All I can say is that it’s a very dangerous man that did this.’

  The apartment had originally belonged to Ichihashi’s maternal grandmother, who had started a dental practice with her husband. They had one child, Ichihashi’s mother, who was also a dentist. When she married, she and her husband took over the apartment. Ichihashi and his sister were born and brought up there. But after his earlier assault, his sister wanted to have nothing to do with him, while his parents had gone to live in a larger house 200 miles from Tokyo.

  The flat was sparsely furnished. There was a computer, a large number of empty cartons of pomegranate juice and hundreds of manga comics, featuring scenes of rape and torture. It is thought that he took his cue to torture, rape and murder Lindsay from their plot lines. There were also 12 sketches of women – both Western and Japanese. It seems Ichihashi used his drawing ability as a pick-up strategy. He had often been asked to leave bars frequented by Western women for harassing the customers.

  The police also found a number of wigs. This led them to believe that Ichihashi was a ‘sister-boy’ in Japanese parlance. However, he had been dating a Japanese girlfriend for about a year. They were to have met that Sunday night but he had emailed to cancel. She said their relationship seemed normal enough. There was no other evidenc
e that he was a bisexual or a transvestite except for one man’s unsubstantiated claim to have had gay sex with Ichihashi, since his escape, in a club in Tokyo’s gay quarter, Shinjuku.

  Lindsay’s shoes were found in the rucksack grabbed by the police as he fled, along with Ichihashi’s gym kit and clean underwear. The police believe that he was on his way to the gym to wash, as he no longer had a working bath in his apartment. Plainly, he was not expecting the police. Indeed, had Lindsay not written the note giving Ichihashi’s name and address, her body might never have been found and she would have remained as fertiliser for the flowers in his ghoulish ornamental garden.

  An arrest warrant was issued for Ichihashi – not for murder but for abandoning a body. Because of the wigs found in his apartment, one of the wanted posters showed Ichihashi disguised as a woman. The police took particular interest in possible sightings in gay areas. And as pomegranate juice is a rarity in Japan, the police drew up a list of retailers who sold it and questioned them.

  The days after his escape turned into weeks, and then they became months, without any real leads for the police to follow up. Ichihashi had simply disappeared − although he had left his passport in the apartment so, almost 20 months since the murder, police investigated all passport applications made over that period. This was complicated by the fact that Ichihashi spelt his surname in three different ways. There were rumours that he had fled to Canada, where he had once lived as a student in Edmonton. There were reports that a man named Ichihashi, who was the same age, had entered the Philippines, a traditional haven for Japanese fugitives. Sightings in Hong Kong and Singapore were also followed up.