The police obtained an arrest warrant for Ichihashi – not for murder but for abandoning a body. Clues from the crime scene were brought into play in the manhunt. As pomegranate juice is so unusual in Japan, the police obtained a list of retailers and spoke to all of them. They took particular interest in sightings of Ichihashi in gay areas and issued a wanted poster with an image of the suspect disguised as a woman.
Ichihashi’s passport had been left in the apartment so police investigated some 350,000 of the 700,000 passport applications made in the twenty months following his escape. The matter 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, or the Philippines, a traditional haven for Japanese fugitives. There were reports that a man named Ichihashi, the same age as the suspect, had entered the Philippines. The 140 police officers investigating the case travelled widely in Japan, following up 5,200 reported sightings generated by the 4,000 wanted posters and 30,000 flyers they had distributed. They went from building to building in central Tokyo, to bars, to clubs and to hotels showing people a photograph of the suspect. They also followed up sightings in Hong Kong and Singapore.
It was also known that Ichihashi had little or no money. He did not work and lived on an allowance of 100,000 yen, or around $1,000, a month. After he fled, he made no attempt to access his bank accounts. This led to the suspicion that he was being sheltered by his family. The Japanese police have limited powers of surveillance, but it was thought that his parents’ communications were monitored. Otherwise, Ichihashi was a loner and had few friends he could call on. Other theories were that he was being protected by the Yakuza or that he had killed himself – though a man referred to as a “psychic dreamer” visited the scene of the crime and said that Ichihashi had escaped on a bicycle and was still alive. However, Ichihashi did not have a mobile phone or a credit card that might make him easier to trace.
Suspecting 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 Japanese people. At the instigation of the British prime minister, a senior investigating officer from the Wiltshire Constabulary, Detective Chief Inspector Ally Wright, was assigned to liaise with the Japanese police. Travelling to Tokyo three times, Wright said he was convinced that the Japanese police’s methodical approach would eventually pay dividends. As he put it, Ichihashi has to be lucky every day of his life but the police only need to be lucky once to catch him.
Two years after the murder, the Japanese National Police Agency raised the reward for Ichihashi from one million yen to ten million yen – over three times the normal top reward in serious cases. As it was, when Ichihashi was captured in November 2009, this had to be split between an employee at an Osaka construction company where Ichihashi had been employed for fourteen months, a cosmetic surgery clinic in Nagoya who had grown suspicious and given a photograph of his new appearance to the police, and an employee at the ferry terminal at Osaka where Ichihashi was arrested waiting for a ship to Okinawa. He was carrying a toy gun.
Ichihashi had undergone plastic surgery several times, after deliberately mutilating his own face to disguise his appearance. He had two moles on his cheek removed, a fold added to his eyelids to give him a more Western appearance, his lips made thinner and the height of his nose increased. This was paid for by his work at the construction company that earned him about one million yen. When arrested, he had to be identified by his fingerprints.
Ichihashi’s fingerprints were found in a dormitory belonging to the firm, along with 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. He used the name and address of Kosuke Inoue, a dead man who had lived in the area.
Fellow workers described him as a quiet and hardworking man who spent his time reading comics and watching videos, and who mixed little with them. He wore a red cap and glasses and had a goatee beard.
His colleagues nicknamed him
“Dai-chan”
, or “Lanky”, because of his height. When they persuaded him to go bowling in April, he hid behind a colleague when the group posed for a photograph.
“We gossiped that he was an odd guy, but I never thought that he was the suspect,” said a former colleague. “It strikes me now that he was saving the money for cosmetic surgery.”
Before he was caught, he was in a brawl with a fellow worker. Afterwards an acquaintance said to him: “If a grown man hits another like that someone could be killed.” At this, he suddenly began weeping and apologized.
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 for surgery to alter the shape of his mouth. He was turned down 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 to raise the bridge of 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, who then released images of Ichihashi as he looked after his surgery. Workers at the construction company recognized their former colleague from the picture and contacted the police.
After being charged with abandoning the body, he remained silent. Subsequently he was charged with murder and rape – his DNA had been recovered from Lindsay’s body, the police said. According to his lawyers, 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 was quoted as saying. 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 plucked hair”. He said she was angry about her hair being cut, his lawyer reported.
According to the indictment, Ichihashi punched Hawker in the face and other parts of the body several times and tied her hands with binding at his apartment on or around 25 March 2007. He then strangled her to death and, in the meantime, he raped her, the indictment says.
Although forensic evidence indicates they had sex, Ichihashi denied rape and murder, though he admitted abandoning her body. The lack of a confession caused the prosecutors problems and delayed the course of justice. The bulk of convictions in Japan are secured on confessions. According to Ichihashi’s lawyers, he was threatened with the death penalty if he did not talk, though usually only multiple murderers face hanging in Japan.
During his captivity, Ichihashi wrote the book,
Until I Was Arrested
, about his time on the run. In it, he claims he travelled the length of the country by train and ferry and spent some weeks on the remote Okinawan island of Oha. The island is less than 2 miles (3.2 km) in circumference and home to just four families. In drawings in the book, Ichihashi indicates that he lived rough in a concrete bunker and caught fish that he cooked over an open fire to survive.
The book makes no mention of Lindsay Hawker or the motive for the murder, but Ichihashi said that while on the run he had “apologized in his heart” to her. He wanted to donate the proceeds to her family, who expressed their disgust at the venture. In Japan, criminals are not permitted to profit from their crimes.
Returning to Japan after Ichihashi’s arrest, Bill Hawker thanked Japan’s press and public for the role they played in helping to catch Ichihashi.
“I’d like also to thank every single person in Japan who looked at the television, who looked at the newspaper and watched for Ichihashi,” he said. “This has been a long, long investigation but it has been a team effort . . . and we thank you.”
Holding up a photo of his smiling daughter, he added: “She came here, she loved the children of Japan. I now feel as if Japan has not let her down.”
During his trial, Ichihashi admitted killing Lindsay, but denied murder. He tried to use a loophole in Japanese law to escape conviction by showing contrition to the family – he dropped to the floor of the courtroom and bowed repeatedly, clasping his hands and weeping. The ploy did not work. On 21 July 2011, Tatsuya Ichihashi was finally sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Lindsay Hawker.
J
OSEF
F
RITZL CONSTRUCTED
his own crime scene. He painstakingly built a dungeon under his house where he imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth for twenty-four years, repeatedly raping her and giving her seven children, to which she had to give birth without assistance.
A convicted rapist, Fritzl had already served eight months in jail when, in 1978, he applied for a permit to turn his cellar into a nuclear shelter. Elisabeth was just twelve years old at the time. This was to be her prison. He had begun abusing his daughter the year before, when his wife Rosemarie and their other children were away on vacation in Italy. Fritzl had refused to let his wife take Elisabeth with her.
Building a nuclear shelter was not an unusual thing in the 1970s. The Cold War was at its height and the Fritzl home at Amstetten in Austria was barely thirty minutes’ drive from the Iron Curtain that separated Czechoslovakia and the rest of the Communist bloc from the nations of Western Europe.
Fritzl was anything but discreet about the building work. Once, he fixed a heavy-duty industrial winch to the roof of the house to move massive concrete blocks, which he used to turn the cellar into an unbreachable fortress. In 1983, building inspectors came to inspect the bunker and gave it their seal of approval. They even gave him state funds towards the conversion.
By then Elisabeth was fifteen and had left school. She began running away from home. Although it was common knowledge that she was being raped by her father, the authorities tracked down Elisabeth and returned her home.
Elisabeth was eighteen when, on 28 August 1984, her father woke her and told her to come down to the cellar. He needed her help to fit a heavy steel door. It was a strange request, but her father often worked downstairs in the cellar at night and years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse had drilled absolute obedience into her. Once the heavy door was in place, he knocked her out with a towel drenched in ether. When she awoke, she found herself locked in and chained to a metal pole. After two days, she was put on a dog-leash that allowed her to reach a makeshift lavatory, but otherwise inhibited her movements. There was no escape. She banged on the walls and screamed for help, but her tiny prison was soundproof. Nobody could hear her cries for help. For the first few weeks, she was held in total darkness. Her father only visited to feed her, or to rape her. It soon became clear that either she submitted to rape or she would starve to death. In reality, it was no choice at all.
After two years of captivity, she had a miscarriage. Three years later, in 1989, a child, her daughter Kerstin, was born. Elisabeth had to cope without medical assistance, though Fritzl boasted that he bought her medical books, as well as towels, disinfectants and nappies. He did not even visit her much during that period. Apparently, he went off having sex with his daughter when she was heavily pregnant. The product of incest, Kerstin was sickly from the start.
The following year, she gave birth to a son, Stefan. Then in 1992, Lisa was born. But things were becoming a little cramped underground. At nine months, the child was found outside the family home in a cardboard box. A note was attached from their supposedly runaway daughter Elisabeth, begging her parents to take care of the infant. Josef and Rosemarie took her in and, eventually, adopted her as their own. The story was put out that Elisabeth had joined some strange religious sect where children were not welcome and she begged her parents not to look for her.
Two years later, ten-month-old Monika was found outside the front door and was taken in, too. This time there was a strange call from Elisabeth asking her mother to take care of the child. It seems to have been recorded. The authorities expressed surprise that Elisabeth knew her parents’ new unlisted number.
By this time, the conditions were becoming dire below ground. Elisabeth helped her father extend the basement to give more room for her growing family. In 1996, Elisabeth gave birth to twins. One of the children, Michael, died after three days. Fritzl threw the infant’s body in the household furnace. The surviving twin, Alexander, was found outside the Fritzl home at fifteen months.
Then, in 2002, Felix was born. He was kept in the cellar as Fritzl said his wife was too old to look after another child. Felix too would be condemned to life in a tiny cellar where adults could not stand upright, where there was no natural light and the ventilation was so bad the captives had to sit down and restrict their movements most of the day.
In 2008, Fritzl planned to release Elisabeth and his incestuous family in the basement. He had already forced his daughter to write a letter saying she was planning to leave the sect and would return home soon. The letter was in the same handwriting as previous notes, and DNA tests later confirmed that it came from Elisabeth.
But things began to go wrong with Fritzl’s meticulous planning. Kerstin fell seriously ill. Fritzl treated her with aspirin and cough mixture. He had no medical training and his children downstairs had never seen a doctor. Kerstin had been ill before, but she had always recovered. Being deprived of sunlight and good air had taken its toll. She was also prey to genetic weaknesses. This time her condition worsened. She began to have fits. Blood spewed from her mouth and she fell into a coma.