⛩️#50 Eleven Hours From Getting Away With Murder Pt2
Japan's "Catch Me if You Can" Killer
Some of the many faces of Kazuko Fukuda. Images: various
Dear Readers,
In Part 1 of this story, we learned:
Japan used to have a 15 year statute of limitations on death penalty cases like murder…
In 1982, a woman named Kazuko Fukuda killed a former co-worker named Asako Takaoka...
And was fingered as the suspect within four days…
Then abandoned her husband and children to go on the run.
We then delved into the fact that this seemingly mild-mannered housewife had been a teenage victim of one of the filthiest prison scandals in history — and had vowed never to be put behind bars again.
Today, we’re continuing the tale: how Fukuda managed to stay one step ahead of the authorities for more than a decade of Catch Me If You Can-style narrow escapes, until the 15-year deadline approached where she would literally get away with murder…
26 August 1982 (1 week after the murder)
Kazuko Fukuda is put on the nationwide wanted list on suspicion of murder, despite the fact that no body had been recovered. The evidence:
Fukuda’s former co-worker, Asako Takaoka, had vanished...
That night, Takaoka’s boyfriend arrived at her apartment to find Fukuda (a stranger to him) waiting outside. She said Takaoka wanted to meet him at a remote beach. He went—but Takaoka never showed…
Meanwhile, Fukuda enlisted a distant relative to help clear out Takaoka’s apartment of possessions — furniture, furs, clothes, cash, bank books — everything except a sofa, on which the police then found traces of blood…
The next day, another Fukuda relative was convinced to use Takaoka’s bank book to withdraw hundreds of thousands of yen, and handed it to Fukuda…
Who deposited ¥650,000 of it into husband’s Nobuo’s bank account.
Now the newspapers were speculating about Takaoka’s fate, and wedged full of photographs of suspect Kazuko Fukuda — so surely it wouldn’t be long until she was in police custody…
Realizing the law was on her heels, Kazuko escaped the family home in Ozu, Ehime Prefecture and, via buses and trains, got to Osaka, where she immediately re-withdrew the stolen ¥650,000 from hapless hubby Nobuo’s bank account.
Then she took a train to Kanazawa City, Ishikawa Prefecture — leaving the police fruitlessly scouring Osaka for traces of her.
Displaying her amazing Catch Me If You Can-esque ability to immediately inveigle herself with people, within hours of arriving in Kanazawa she had found a “snack” — a small, casual bar, serving drinks and offering karaoke — and, using the name Shinobu Onodera, sized up the place and realized the mama-san proprietor could do with a new, energetic thirty-something staff member.
Cue a few hours of flirting with male customers and belting out some decent karaoke — and she was offered a job.
Meanwhile, back in Ehime, the police began questioning her husband Nobuo, who was, for now, refusing to talk — despite his dark knowledge of the murder.
27 August 1982 (8 days after the murder)
The follow day, detectives detonate a bomb on Nobuo — explaining that four days after the murder, his wife had spent the night at a motel with with a secret lover, who had also stood guarantor to help Kazuko rent an apartment...
..an apartment that had been used to store the dead woman’s possessions, stolen on the night of the murder.
This is enough to get Nobuo to confess he had helped bury the dead woman — his wife had called him on the night of the murder, claiming a friend was trying to escape a violent husband.
But when he arrived to help — with their 5-year-old son in the car with him — he was met by his wife’s confession she’d killed a former co-worker and he had been summoned to dispose of the body.
(The dead woman was hidden in a packing case which the wretched Nobuo had to load into the backseat next to the oblivious child).
As he gave it up to the police, 400 miles away at the Kanazawa snack where she had sweet-talked herself into a job, “Shinobu Onodera” was showing inordinate interest in an article in a women’s magazine about advances in plastic surgery…
28 August 1982 (9 days after the murder)
The very next day — testament to lax 1980s airport security — despite being on the most wanted list, Kazuko was able to fly from Kanazawa to Tokyo in order to visit a hospital to undergo extensive facial surgery.
She would spent the next 10 days — plus ¥500,000 — having various silicon apparatuses installed in her face. Including the plane fare, she had spent all the money stolen from Takaoka’s bank account.
As Kazuko’s face was being carved up, back in Ehime Prefecture her husband Nobuo led police to Asako Takaoka’s body.
Days later, lying mummified in bed, Kazuko watch details of Nobuo’s confession on hospital television, and took in the news show outrage over the fact she had abandoned her four kids to go on the lam — seemingly without feeling a prick of conscience.
6 September 1982 (18 days after the murder)
Decked out with her new face, Kazuko returns to Kanazawa and is welcomed back to work at the snack bar, despite having only worked for 48 hours before taking 10 days for the surgery.
7 September 1982 (19 days after the murder)
The next day, Fukuda makes a call to someone from the case — but not her husband and not her kids. Instead she phones her lover Nakagawa at his Kobe office.
An exasperated Nakagawa asks rhetorically if Kazuko really believes she can evade capture for 15 years and beat the statute of limitations. It may have been the first time she was directly confronted with the gravity of her situation, but it certainly didn’t shake her, as the next call to Nakagawa — recorded and later broadcast nationwide — would make clear.
18 September 1982 (30 days after the murder)
A month after the murder Fukuda finally calls home, and speaks to her husband for the first time since walking out on the family. He appeals to her to think of their children. It falls on deaf ears — she’s committed to the outlaw life.
2 October 1982 (44 days after the murder)
Fukuda calls Nakagawa’s office again, as usual from a random payphone — with line-tracing technology in its infancy the cops can’t accurately trace locations. But they can record incoming calls — and she’s sounding very jaunty for someone who skipped out on her kids to escape a possible death penalty case: “People are looking forward to me getting caught, but I’m not going to mess up.”
Here’s a snippet, which, 15 years later — as the statute of limitations approached — will be played repeatedly on television and radio.
She ends with “The call’s being traced? I’m hanging up. This is dangerous! (逆探知されてる？もう切るよ。ほんとうに危ない危ない！)
13 November 1982 (2 months after the murder)
An envelope arrives at husband Nobuo’s younger brother’s house, postmarked Central Kyoto Post Office.
It’s from Kazuko, containing divorce papers and some money for the kids.
Nobuo only has to affix his personal seal and his marriage to Kazuko will be over.
He doesn’t — yet — because at that moment he’s still under arrest.
20 November 1982 (2 months 1 week after the murder)
Nobuo is released from custody with a suspended sentence for the uniquely Japanese crime of “abandoning a body” — in other countries he would face much harsher penalties as an accessory to murder after the fact.
Nobuo is welcomed home by four traumatized children plus the divorce papers.
Then Kazuko calls — and, amazingly, Nobuo does not criticize her, instead politely requesting she think of their children and give herself up…
Nobuo’s mother-in-law, however, has no qualms in berating her daughter-in-law, suggesting she do the decent thing and commit suicide.
February 1983 (5 months after the murder)
Winter 1982 passes with Kazuko working at the snack in Kanazawa. In early ‘83, she becomes involved with a regular from the bar. He’s divorced, and doesn’t get to see his child — they bond over this, and soon The Regular is head over heels in love.
May 1983 (8 months after the murder)
Kazuko quits the snack and moves in with The Regular, whose family welcomes her and hopes she’ll become his second wife. However, as might be expected, the love-match does not go smoothly…
September 1983 (1 year after the murder)
…and she’s soon goes back to working at the snack bar, where…
October 1983 (1 year, 1 month after the murder)
She falls in love at first sight with a rather better-heeled customer we’ll call Candy Man, the owner of a traditional Japanese confectionary store.
November 1983 (1 year, 2 months after the murder)
Back in Ehime, Nobuo belatedly realizes it’s not worth hanging on for his wife to return home, and completes the procedures to divorce Kazuko…
…who meanwhile starts to cheat on Regular with Candy Man, keeping them both on the hook simultaneously.
She tells Candy she’s the daughter of the owner of a traditional Japanese restaurant in Sagano, Kyoto City, and confesses her real name isn’t Shinobu Onodera — it’s Hanayo Onodera — another lie.
March 1984 (1 and a half years after the murder)
After a tug-of-war between the two men — which becomes common knowledge at the snack bar, forcing her to quit for good — she ends up choosing The Regular, and moves into a tiny space above his soldering business, a situation that lasts barely three months until…
May 1984 (1 year, 8 months after the murder)
…Fukuda fraudulently uses the health insurance card of one of the Regular’s employees to obtain free medical care.
This is not the only financial brouhaha she finds herself in — showing her usual ability to spend money like water, she’s also in ¥2m debt to consumer loan companies.
Somehow she convinces the Regular’s grandmother to pay off the money, but when the health insurance card scam is discovered, she quits the job.
The Regular quickly finds another woman, and Fukuda hits the road, finding herself alone in Kyoto — and free of male entanglements for the first time since she was a very young child, before she moved into her mother's brothel at the age of 13.
Fukuda describes this Kyoto sojourn in halcyon terms— and it’s a measure of her compulsive attachment to men that it was while on the run for murder that she was capable of feeling a new sense of freedom.
…But the single life didn’t last for long.
Candy Man / Bicycle Escape
Within months she was back in Kanazawa, working in a different snack which the Candy Man quickly begins visiting.
Not holding a grudge over the lost tug-of-war with the Regular, Candy Man quickly began spending ¥200,000 a time at the snack, hoping to impress Fukuda.
March 1985 (2 and a half years after the murder)
By the following March, Candy Man has set Kazuko up in an apartment, and spends half of his week there.
Soon he divorces his wife, who moves out of the confectionary store, and has committed himself to the relationship with Kazuko.
April 1985 (2 years, 7 months after the murder)
Just a month after his divorce, Candy Man invites Kazuko to accompany him to his eldest daughter’s elementary school entrance ceremony. The daughter is the same age as Kazuko’s youngest, who she has now not seen for more than 2 years.
Candy Man’s daughter — plus his other child — took an instant and abiding dislike to Kazuko.
In this period, every 2-3 months Kazuko would travel to a random city and call her family. During one of those calls Nobuo her he is breaking up the family, taking his two biological children (including their son, who was in the van the night they disposed of the dead woman’s body), and vowing to never let Kazuko see them again under any circumstances, including if she hands herself in.
May 1985 (2 years, 8 months after the murder)
Soon Kazuko moves into the confectionary store in Nomi, Ishikawa Prefecture as Candy Man’s de facto common-law wife, and, despite the continued hostility of the children of the house, she proves an excellent worker.
Sales skyrocket, and soon Candy Man is making plans to replace the aging store building with a new, 3-story concrete edifice.
(In one of the more bizarre cameos from any true crime story we’ve covered, future NY Yankees slugger Hideki Matsui — AKA Godzilla — was a regular customer of the store as a child, and later said Fukuda seemed extremely beautiful and kind. (とても綺麗で優しいおばさんという印象だった))
August 1986 (4 years after the murder)
By August 1986, Fukuda had willed herself a new, solidly middle-class life — cementing her new status with a triumphant “debut” in the confectionery world. She was introduced as Candy Man’s new wife at a major nationwide confectionery association event, proudly wearing the diamond ring worth millions of yen he had lavished on her.
Fukuda was getting comfortable, and she reacted by reaching back into her past — and this would lead to a major mistake.
10 September 1986 (4 years, 1 month after the murder)
A month later, Kazuko arranged to meet her eldest son — who was not biologically Nobuo’s, and thus had not been cut off.
The teenager travelled incognito to Ishikawa to meet his mother for the first time since she went on the run — and Kazuko had an idea how she could make up for lost time…
September 1986-February 1988
Passing her son off as her nephew, she arranged for a live-in job for him at the confectionary store.
Before long, they were spending all their free time together, with Kazuko showering him with gifts.
But as the rush from the store’s grand reopening settled down, and a lavish wedding loomed, Candy Man’s sister grew suspicious of “Hanayo Onodera”.
Then she blundered — registering her son with the local authorities under his real name. Soon the sister’s distrust was proven-out, when local police discovered the son of Kazuko Fukuda was living in their town….
12 February 1988 (5 and a half years after the murder)
It’s 18:00 on a Friday. “Hanayo Onodera” has spent the day helping to cater a funeral at a community center.
She’s in the back kitchen, washing dishes.
She sees a car pull up. Three men get out.
Kazuko Fukuda knows from detectives.
Still in her utilitarian kitchen slippers, she walks out of the back door, steals a bicycle from a garage and goes, leaving Candy Man, the store, her son behind — with zero indecision.
The bicycle escape. Still from 2016 Fuji TV drama 『実録ドラマスペシャル 女の犯罪ミステリー 福田和子 整形逃亡15年』(“True Crime Drama Special: Woman’s Crime Mystery - Kazuko Fukuda’s 15 Year Plastic Surgery Escape”). Image: Fuji TV
Osaka Homeless Blues
Her next address is a cardboard house in a park in Osaka.
She tries to slit her wrists, but fails.
She calls Candy Man, thanking him for 3 years of happiness.
An old homeless woman jabbers out some nonsense to her — “It’s hell to be alive” — not so encouraging — “Just staying alive is penance” — Kazuko takes the latter as signal to keep on running…
Next week we’ll conclude the story of Kazuko Fukuda, including the nail-biting conclusion 11 hours before the statute of limitations on Asako Takaoka’s murder was to pass…
Thanks for reading — click the ♡ below if you liked this edition.
Until next week,
The Kyote
New here?
Feedback? Just Hit Reply
Read this next: The Unbelievable Story of the Missing 9-Year-Old
The Kyote is published in Kyoto, Japan, every Sunday at 19:00 JST