Read People Who Eat Darkness Online
Authors: Richard Lloyd Parry
The website of the Lucie Blackman Trust is at
www.lucieblackmantrust.org
.
Jane Steare supports the Hospice in the Weald:
www.hospiceintheweald.org.uk
.
ALSO BY RICHARD LLOYD PARRY
In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos
PRAISE FOR
People Who Eat Darkness
“An extraordinary true crime book that sheds light on one of the most horrific killings of the last decade. Difficult to put down … impossible to forget.”
—Minette Walters, author of
The Chameleon’s Shadow
and
Disordered Minds
“
People Who Eat Darkness
is an extraordinary, compulsive, and brilliant book. The account of the crime, the investigation and the trial—particularly in its knowledge and understanding of the Japan in which this tragedy took place—is both insightful and gripping; the attempt to understand Obara is fascinating but never ghoulish; and finally, and most of all, the compassion for Lucie Blackman and her family is very, very moving.”
—David Peace, author of the Red Riding quartet and the Tokyo trilogy
“A riveting and clear-eyed account of a family struggling to deal with unimaginable trauma. Richard Lloyd Parry combines extraordinary investigative skills with a natural storytelling ability to create an utterly compelling read.
People Who Eat Darkness
comes with the cast-iron guarantee that you will read to the very end.”
—Mo Hayder, author of
Gone
and
The Devil of Nanking
“A masterpiece of writing this surely is, but it is more than that—it is a committed, compassionate, courageous act of journalism that changes the way we think. Everyone who has ever loved someone and held that life dear should read this stunning book, and shiver.”
—Chris Cleave, author of
Little Bee
and
Incendiary
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2011, 2012 by Richard Lloyd Parry
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2011, in slightly different form, by Jonathan Cape, Great Britain, as
People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2012
All materials from the notebooks, schoolbooks, and journals of Lucie Blackman are reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Lucie Blackman.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parry, Richard Lloyd.
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 / Richard Lloyd Parry. — 1st American ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-374-23059-3 (alk. paper)
1. Blackman, Lucie Jane, 1978–2000. 2. Obara, Joji—Trials, litigation, etc. 3. Murder—Investigation—Japan—Tokyo. 4. Young women—Crimes against—Japan—Tokyo. I. Title.
HV6535.J33 T664 2012
364.152'3092—dc23
2011047019
eISBN 978-1-4668-2002-9
*
During the years covered in this book, one British pound was worth approximately $1.50.
*
When Lucie went missing in July 2000, one U.S. dollar was worth approximately ¥106.
*
Several of the most notorious scandals were about missing persons. The most appalling concerned the murder the previous December of a nineteen-year-old boy named Masakazu Sudo, whose body had been found in a forest in Tochigi prefecture, north of Tokyo. Sudo had been missing for more than a month, and his parents had a good idea why. Three other youths, whom they identified by name, had been holding the young man captive, marching him to cash machines and loan shops, and forcing him to take out and hand over large sums of money.
The Sudos went repeatedly to the police, but the police refused to investigate, insinuating that Masakazu was a delinquent, and even a drug user, himself. Then one day, on the orders of his captors, he called his parents on a mobile telephone. They happened to be in the police station at the time, and they begged the sergeant on duty, who was still refusing to look into the case, to pose as a friend of their son and speak to the kidnappers. The officer took the phone—and immediately introduced himself as a policeman. Soon after, Masakazu Sudo was taken into the forest and strangled. One of the three killers, who were eventually tried and convicted of murder, turned out to be the son of another local officer.
Equally alarming, from the point of view of the Blackman family, was the case of a ten-year-old Japanese girl from Niigata who had gone missing in 1990. Ten years passed without a hint of what had happened to her, until in February 2000 she turned up at a local hospital. For almost a decade, she had been held captive in a single room in a house a few hundred yards from a police station. Her abductor was a convicted child molester. Four years earlier the police had received a tip that he was holding her, but they had not even bothered to knock on his door.
*
One of the cultural differences revealed by the Lucie case was the differing international attitudes to flight attendants. In Britain, the figure of the “trolley dolly” is regarded with as much mockery as admiration. But in Japan, air stewardesses are a high-altitude elite, the epitome of feminine glamour and sophistication. At the height of their ascendancy, in the bubble years of the late 1980s, they were from time to time chosen as brides by pop stars and sumo wrestlers. For many Japanese, it was incomprehensible, indeed highly suspicious, that a woman would choose to give up a job at British Airways to become a bar hostess in Roppongi.
*
In an account commissioned by Joji Obara’s lawyer thirty-nine years later, it was reported that he had indeed undergone eye surgery at the age of sixteen, but that it was treatment for injuries when a pair of sunglasses broke against his face in a car accident.
*
Of the four acquaintances from Keio University School whom I interviewed, none remembered hearing anything about a car accident involving Seisho Hoshiyama, or his hospitalization.
*
“Lay judges”—members of the public who sit on the panel alongside the professional judges—were introduced in 2009, part of broader reforms intended to increase the pace and efficiency of Japanese criminal trials.
*
I have been unable to find any record of the missing-person case to which Obara referred.
*
Japan retains the death penalty for murder, and a handful of death-row inmates are hanged every year. But capital punishment is imposed only in the most extreme cases—child murders, multiple murders, and premeditated killings carried out for cynical motives such as life-insurance fraud. No one ever accused Joji Obara of deliberately attempting to kill his victims—although the prosecutors might have chosen to argue that, having unintentionally killed Carita Ridgway with an excess of illegally administered drugs, his recklessness in repeating the mistake with Lucie Blackman amounted to murder. But given their reliance upon circumstantial evidence in proving Obara’s guilt, they concluded that a lesser charge of “rape resulting in death” was more likely to secure a conviction.
Annette’s final comments speak to what, in a Western jurisdiction, are two crucially distinct duties of the court: the adjudication of guilt or innocence, and the sentencing of a convicted defendant. If Obara had pleaded, or been found, guilty, then the views of his victims’ families would reasonably have been taken into account in deciding his sentence. But at this stage, he was a defendant who vigorously denied all the charges against him.
To invite the views of the bereaved at this stage, when the accused should still have been under the presumption of innocence, reinforced the impression given by so many other aspects of the Japanese justice system that the defendant’s guilt had been unofficially established before he stepped into court and that the trial was a hollow ritual.
“I have never accepted any count of the criminal prosecution on this trial,” Obara wrote in a statement prepared for these hearings. “On the other hand, the statements by the relatives of Carita Ridgway and Lucie Blackman are supposed to be directed towards the offender. Therefore, if I appear in court, I am afraid that I would be regarded as the offender and I would be supposed to accept it … I am afraid that this must reduce the criminal court to a venue for retaliation and criticism, resulting in hatred and regret.” Justice Tochigi refused to allow this document to be read out in court.
*
The existence of a “black substance” on Lucie’s head was raised repeatedly by the defense. Postmortem photographs showed a tarry liquid on her head and in her mouth. The lawyers never spelled out what they thought it was, but the implication seemed to be that it was formed when the head was burned, and that this further exculpated Obara because none of the witnesses to his behavior in the days after Lucie’s disappearance had reported signs of a fire.
*
Huw had by now moved to Kuala Lumpur. He had embarked on a short-lived engagement to a Malaysian princess, and had a new business, as the partner of the psychic Ron Bard.
*
Mr. Arai encouraged me to take away the photographs; I sent them back to him, as he had asked, the following week. Four months later, in an indignant letter, he accused me of “delivering copies to Scotland Yard which then showed the copies to the family of the deceased Ms Lucie Blackman.” He went on: “This act of yours not only violated the promise you owed to your source and damaged a relationship of mutual trust, but also hurt the family and increased their grief. Such an act should never be forgiven as a journalist and as a human being.” There was no truth whatever to any of these assertions.
*
The principal article of evidence, of course, was the stenographer’s transcript of the hearing. But although the trial was conducted in public, this was not a public document and it required the permission of the judge for it to be made available to my lawyers.
*
It was forbidden to make public official documents such as this without the court’s permission; police muttered angrily of a prosecution for publishing evidence in an ongoing criminal case. But somebody had thought of this: the website—with its suffix “.cx”—was hosted in the obscure Australian territory of Christmas Island. No criminal investigation was ever pursued.
*
For a fuller account of the publication of
The Truth About the Lucie Case
, see pp. 448–49.
*
The Truth About the Lucie Case
(pp. 751–52) refers to various former teachers who “doted” on Obara, but none was ever called in his defense. In particular, “Professor Emeritus Sekiguchi” of Keio University is described as having been “shocked” at the news of Obara’s arrest. Unfortunately, the professor died shortly before his former student was charged.
*
Other taboos include the power of organized crime and the ultranationalist far right, and the Imperial Family and its role.
*
The most notorious such case was the “Wakayama curry killings.” In 1998, two adults and two children died after consuming curry served at a village festival in Wakayama prefecture. A forty-seven-year-old woman, Masumi Hayashi, was eventually sentenced to death for the murders, after traces of arsenic were found in her home. Hayashi insisted that the poison was the residue of a pest-control business once operated by her husband. No one saw her lacing the curry, and the prosecutors failed to adduce a convincing motive for the indiscriminate killings.
*
In fact, a single legal avenue remained open: a retrial. Obara’s lawyers argued that there was new evidence that had not been heard in the lower courts. But all of this had already been submitted to, and rejected by, the supreme court. As a means of winning Obara’s freedom, retrial appeared to be a theoretical possibility only.