The Tokyo police put 140 officers on the case. They travelled widely, following up 5,200 reported sightings generated by the 4,000 wanted posters and 30,000 flyers that were distributed. Officers also cruised bars, clubs and hotels in central Tokyo with photographs of the suspect.
Ichihashi had little money; he did not work and lived on an allowance of 100,000 yen, or around £600, a month. After he escaped, he made no attempt to access his bank accounts. He did not have a credit card or a mobile phone that might have made him easier to trace.
He was a loner and had few friends he could call on. The Japanese police have limited powers of surveillance. One theory was that he was being protected by the Yakuza; another theory was that he had killed himself.
Fearing that the Japanese police were winding down their investigation, the Hawkers kept the case in the headlines by travelling to Japan and making direct appeals to the public. At the behest of the British prime minister, a senior investigating officer from the Wiltshire Constabulary, DCI Ally Wright, was assigned to liaise with the Japanese police.
Two years after the murder, the Japanese police raised the reward for Ichihashi’s capture from one million yen to ten million yen – over three times the usual offering. When Ichihashi was eventually captured in November 2009, this had to be divided between a cosmetic surgery clinic in Nagoya, who had grown suspicious and given a photo-graph of his new appearance to the police, an employee at an Osaka construction company where he had been employed for 14 months, and an employee at the ferry terminal at Osaka, where Ichihashi was arrested waiting for a ship to Okinawa. He was found to be carrying a toy gun.
Ichihashi had deliberately mutilated his own face to disguise his appearance, cutting off two moles on his cheeks and snipping his own lips with a pair of scissors. Then he also underwent plastic surgery several times. A fold was added to his eyelids and the bridge of his nose was raised to give him a more Western appearance. He paid for the surgery by working at the construction company where he earned about one million yen. When he was arrested, he had to be identified by his fingerprints.
Ichihashi’s fingerprints were found in a dormitory belonging to the construction company. He used the name and address of Kosuke Inoue, a dead man who had lived in the area. Among his possessions were comics, an English dictionary and a passport application, leading police to believe he may have been planning to flee overseas. Colleagues said that he was learning French.
They described him as a quiet and hard-working man. He did not mix with them much and spent his time reading comics and watching videos. He further disguised himself by wearing glasses and had grown a goatee beard.
‘We gossiped that he was an odd guy, but I never thought that he was the suspect,’ said a former colleague.
Before he was captured, he had had a brawl with a fellow worker. Afterwards, an acquaintance told him, ‘If a grown man hits another like that, someone could be killed.’ Suddenly, he began weeping and apologised.
He disappeared after taking his last monthly pay packet of 100,000 yen. Two days later, he went to a clinic in Fukuoka and asked them to alter the shape of his mouth. They refused because there were signs of previous operations to thin his lower lip. Ten days later, he went to another clinic in Nagoya, where he requested another operation on his nose. He paid in cash and told staff at the clinic that he was staying at local ‘love hotels’, where couples rent rooms by the hour. Staff at the clinic grew suspicious and went to the police. They were then able to release images of Ichihashi as he looked after surgery. Workers at the construction company recognised him and contacted the police.
When charged with abandoning a body, Ichihashi remained silent. Subsequently, he was charged with murder and rape as his semen had been recovered from Lindsay’s body. He later admitted to having been involved in her death, but said he had not meant to kill her and had attempted to revive her, but failed. ‘In the early morning of the 26th, Lindsay repeatedly shouted she wanted to go home. So I choked her by putting my arm around her neck from behind. I didn’t intend to kill her. I also tried artificial respiration,’ he said. His lawyer also said that Ichihashi had used scissors to cut the hair of Hawker because ‘adhesive tape came off [from the mouth] and it caught Lindsay’s hair so I cut her hair’.
According to the indictment, Ichihashi punched Hawker in the face and other parts of the body several times and tied her hands. He then killed her by strangulation and, in the meantime, he raped her.
Threatened with the death penalty, Ichihashi eventually admitted to raping and strangling Lindsay Hawker and was sentenced to life imprisonment. It is thought unlikely that he will ever get any further opportunity to indulge his interest in gardening.
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