⛩️#51 Eleven Hours From Getting Away From Murder ENDS
The downfall of Japan's Catch Me If You Can Killer
Kazuko Fukuda, homeless in Osaka. Image: ぶんか社
Winter 1987
40-year-old mother of four Kazuko Fukuda wakes up in a soggy-bottomed coffin of cardboard in an Osaka park.
Fukuda’s life had been comprehensively torpedoed — sometime by others, often by herself.
She’s on the run for murder after a fight with a friend went bad, and — with Japan’s statute of limitations for death penalty cases standing at just 15 years — she’s trying to stay free and beat the rap.
The first two installments of this story explained how she ended up in that homeless hell:
Part 1: Fukuda, living in Ehime Prefecture on Japan’s fourth island of Shikoku, kills former co-worker Asako Takaoka during a physical altercation over the snack bar they were to planning to open together.
Fukuda prevailed upon husband Nobuo to dispose of Takaoka’s body, then another, more distant relative to steal her possessions so it appeared the dead woman had skipped town.
Then, in a supremely unsophisticated scheme, she had a third relative withdraw money from the dead woman’s bank, immediately ploughing most of the cash into hubby’s Nobuo’s account.
Within a week the police were on her tail and Fukuda fled, leaving behind Nobuo and their four children…
Part 2: Fukuda fled to Kanazawa City on Japan’s West coast and, within hours, charmed her way into a job at a snack bar. The next day, she saw an article on plastic surgery and wasted no time in flying to Tokyo to have her face filled with silicon appendages.
While she spent 10 days mummified in bandaged recovery, back in Ehime, hubby Nobuo was confronted with the fact that Fukuda had been having an affair, and quickly gave up the facts of the killing and subsequent body-dump.
Meanwhile, Fukuda returned to Kanazawa, unrecognizable from the woman wanted for murder, and managed to stay incognito at the snack bar, despite occasional telephone calls back home — the police stymied by primitive phone tracking tech.
In one of those calls — recorded and subsequently played on national television — she told her lover she was trying to outrun the 15 year statute of limitations on murder.
And she did keep one step ahead of the cops, even embarking on a relationship with the owner of a famous confectionary store, becoming his common-law wife, then, remarkably, summoned her biological son from Ehime (passing him off as her nephew), and got him a job at the store.
At the end of Part 2, when the police had tracked her down and arrived to arrest her, Fukuda stole a bicycle and made a pedaled escape, ditching another family (and her son for the second time)…
Now, in today’s finale…
Fukuda’s path encompasses homelessness, becoming a target of yakuza blackmailers, a sojourn at a famed onsen and some version of a Buddhist enlightenment, a brutal theft that drags her back into the depths of depravity, a fleeting rise, then the frantic manhunt as the statute of limitations nears its end…
Can’t Keep Her Down For Long…
Ever-resourceful, Fukuda sees a newspaper advert for workers for a love hotel in Nagoya.
The kind of place where rooms are rented by the hour, it turned out to be a haven for women with pasts who didn’t want too many questions asked.
Kazuko Fukuda began her new career claiming to be 34-years-old, the age at which she killed Asako Takaoka and went on the run six years earlier.
Kazuko gets the job, plus the free room that went with it.
…But Can’t Stay Up Long Either
March 1988 (5 years, 7 months after the murder)
In a matter of months, however, a new woman with a past joins the hotel — the wife of a yakuza gangster who is in prison for drugs charges.
Yakuza Wife begins to creep Kazuko out with curious stares and passive-aggressive comments. Did she know? For the first time, the supremely (over)-confident Fukuda felt herself on the back foot.
One day soon after, Yakuza Wife extends an invite to visit her room, where, to Kazuko’s horror, there’s a magazine open on the table a wanted photo of her.
Yakuza Wife — plus some other gathered slimeballs — now grab Kazuko and shoot her up with stimulants.
And, while they think she’s out of her head, discuss a plan to either sell her out to the yakuza or the cops, whichever will pay more.
It’s time for another escape.
Kazuko gets out of the hotel, and, now desperate for money, interviews at another Nagoya hotel of the same class, at which time the owners take a Polaroid photo of her — which would later be used as a wanted poster.
Kazuko Fukuda, the Nagoya love hotel years.
But Nagoya was proving too dangerous, so Kazuko leaves the city, traveling to Gero Onsen in Gifu, considered one of the three most famous hot springs resorts in all of Japan.
June 1988 (5 years, 10 months after the murder)
Realizing Kazuko had given her the slip, Yakuza Wife contacts police, and they set out on a dragnet to more than 1000 hotels in Nagoya, finding the photo but not the person.
At Gero Onsen, Kazuko was learning to chant Buddhist sutras for the soul of Asako Takaoka — and, by her own account, claims to have felt a sense of forgiveness.
Meanwhile, back in Ehime, Takaoka’s mother was praying to the Buddhist altar in her living room every day, hoping her daughter’s murderer would be caught.
January 1989 (6 and a half years after the murder)
Kazuko spent the next few years in her usual snack bar work, picking up rich patrons whenever she could. She began to center herself around Fukui City, adopting the moniker “Kanako Mishima”.
Kanako in fact became a favorite false name, as, under the names Kanako Kobayashi and Kanako Yamamoto she underwent more cosmetic surgeries, including the removal of the silicon bridge in her nose which had become the focal point of media attention after the immediate post-escape facial work became widely publicized.
By the time the 1990s dawned, Kazuko Fukuda had settled into an appealing lifestyle of snack bar and hotel work, moving between Fukui and Osaka depending on which temporarily offered better financial prospects. But then disaster struck…
23 April 1990 (7 years, 8 months after the murder)
Kazuko is reading a novel at a train station in Osaka when her handbag is swiped by an opportunistic thief — and, without the means the open a bank account, her entire net worth disappears: around ¥8m (~$130,000 today).
Obviously, she couldn’t go to the cops and report the theft.
So, just over halfway through the 15 years she would have to remain on the run to get away with the killing of Asako Takaoka, she was back to square one.
1990-1991
These were very hard years.
Kazuko works as a prostitute in Osaka and Chiba, trying to rebuild her bankroll.
She suffers terrible indignities, not only from the men who pay for her body, but also fellow prostitutes — theft and violence.
But here’s the thing (and, if you have followed this story in its entirety, you should have a sudden vertiginous sense of the world shifting beneath your feet:
All three parts of our story have been based on Fukuda’s autobiography, Valley of Tears, written in retrospect.
Anything we have reported that could not be verified by third persons — for example the witnessless killing of Asaka Takaoka (a dispute about a bar they were to open — Takaoka forces Fukuda into a humiliating apology and assaults her — Fukuda kills her in a spontaneous act of rage), or the ¥6m pickpocket at an Osaka station leading to horrible years of prostitution years we just mentioned — come for her account alone.
In other words, some or all of what you have been reading may in fact be self-serving bullshit — as we shall soon learn…
February 1991 (8 and half years after the murder)
Dragging herself out of the abyss of prostitution — if her account is to be believed — by 1991 Kazuko was working at a Kyoto izakaya when her son, now 22, gets in touch with her.
Despite having been abandoned twice by his mother — after the original murder, and when he was apprenticed to the confectionary shop as her “nephew” — a strong bond somehow abides, and son now wishes mother to meet his fiancé.
Spring 1991
The meeting goes ahead at a famous department store in Kyoto city. Son had confided in his fiancé the precise details of his mother’s identity, and the fiancé had accepted this and wished to go ahead — but, in one of many bizarre episodes in this story, had also told her parents, who opposed the marriage to the son of a fugitive (as you might imagine), however they kept the secret and didn’t go to the authorities (rather more difficult to understand — especially as the marriage went ahead!).
And then nothing more was heard of Kazuko Fukuda for the next five years…
Quick break before the climax to say: every week we report on outré Japanese crimes that have escaped the English-language world — subscribe so you never miss an edition!
19 August 1996 (14 years after the murder; 1 year until the statute of limitations ran out)
CUT TO: the 14th anniversary of Asako Takaoka’s murder.
Exactly one year to go until the statute of limitations would pass and Kazuko Fukuda would quite literally get away with murder.
It may seem quaint to the average Westerner, but it was only at this stage the Ehime Prefectural Police Association had a brilliant idea: why not offer a reward for information?
This, obviously, was a less-than-shattering creative pace, but in fact become “Japan’s first bounty case”.
Amid doom-laden editorials about how justice was being undermined and public morals corrupted by offering financial inducements, the head of the Police Association decided on a round ¥1m (~$20,000) reward, basing the denomination on the maximum prize offered by TV game shows of the period.
As you might anticipate, publicity was duly generated, and the police were drenched in thousands of tips — many of them variations on “The hostess at a nearby snack bar looks like her”.
40 investigators were launched across country to investigate every snack bar mama who had a face lift of the windtunnel variety — to no immediate result...
1 February 1997 (6 months until the statute of limitations ran out)
Half a year before she was to get off scott-free, Kazuko visited a certain oden restaurant in Fukui City for the first time, introducing herself as “Reiko”.
It was a very Kazuko type of place — cozy, aging — where her gift for conversation would quickly make her a new star, and attract whatever men of means frequented the place.
It would become her new haunt…
22 July 1997 (1 month to go)
At 30 days out, the reward ante was suddenly upped 400% when Jūnin Hospital in Tokyo announced that it would pony up 4 million yen to anyone who provided information leading to Fukuda’s arrest.
This was is one of the great publicity moves of all time — because Jūnin was the hospital at which Fukuda got her plastic surgery immediately after the crime. They explained the reward thusly: “We feel responsible for ultimately helping her escape. We hope we can help solve the case.”
…but the implication was: we’re so good at cutting no one recognized her for 15 years!
With a total of ¥5m now on offer — far higher even than the richest lottery — the press attention went wild.
Fukuda became a constant fixture on television, accompanied by a recording of a phone call she made on 2 October 1982 (44 days after the murder) which we featured in Part 2 of the story…
27 June 1997 (22 days to go)
“Reiko” didn’t know it, but a regular at the oden restaurant thought she might be famed murderer Kazuko Fukuda — and he liked the sound of that reward.
He lacked the cojones to pull off a snitching by himself, so he confided in the mama-san of the place. They contacted the local police, who exhibited the laissez-faire attitude that can sometimes appear endemic to the Japanese cop (obsessed with paperwork; zero proactive investigatory work) — and instead of expending any effort themselves, the cops told the mama-san to get “Reiko”’s fingerprints by whatever method she could.
She scraped together a plan with the regular, and a couple days later got “Reiko” into a boozy karaoke session, where they foisted free beer and encouraged her to accompany on the maracas.
Beer glass and maracas were then handed to the cops for fingerprints examination: and they came back as belonging to Kazuko Fukuda.
It should have been a simple matter for cops to arrest her after this, but again the Fukui Prefectural Police tried their best to overcomplicate things by having the regular and mama-san invite Fukuda back to the restaurant two days later…
29 June 1997 (20 days to go)
…at which time they forced the regular and mama-san to pass what must have been an excruciating few hours with Fukuda without moving in, before finally arresting her as she left the restaurant.
She was 49 years old, and had been on the run since she was 34.
She had ¥600,000 on her, proving she had again somehow clawed herself back to financial security.
Back in Ehime, new began to spread and crowds gathered outside Matsuyama Higashi Police Station, where the fugitive task force was based.
Finally: Kazuko Fukuda’s mugshot. Image: Fukui Prefectural Police
Google Map Link: Kazuko Fukuda's long odyssey
Click the link above if you’d like the see major events of this story plotted on a map of Japan.
Rugby match at Okayama Station. Image: NHK
Never Take Your Murder Suspect On Public Transport
The press knew Fukuda was in custody, and they also knew she would be returned to Ehime on public transport.
This, my friends, is not good.
Kazuko Fukuda (in orange) being hauled into a “Thunderbird” Express Train
Needless to say it was dynamite television.
18 August 1997 (11 hours to go)
Still, there was no quick resolution.
The Ehime cops had to build a case, including finding witnesses they hadn’t contacted in 15 years.
They were also engaged in frenzied attempts to quick-trace Fukuda’s movements during that decade and a half — the equivalent of researching this story, from scratch, in less than three weeks.
Ultimately, they had to go with what they had, and finally referred her to prosecutors 14 years, 354 days, and 13 hours after the murder, only 11 hours before the statute of limitations would pass.
Trial
27 October 1997 (15 years, 2 months after the murder)
More than 2000 people lined up outside Matsuyama District Court, hoping to snag one of the 33 seats in the courtroom for the first hearing.
And Kazuko Fukuda freely admitted to killing Asako Takaoka — so the sole issue at trial was intent.
And the stakes were life and death, because capital punishment was on the table.
Fukuda’s narrative of the killing was the one that opened Part 1 of this story — she and Asako had fought over plans to open a snack bar together; the fight became physical; Asako forced her into a dozega apology, kneeling with her forehead to the floor, then kicked her in the chest; Kazuko spontaneously grabbed an obi belt tie and strangled her friend in trance of fury.
But there was no eyewitness who could confirm the story.
The prosecution attempted to circumstantial evidence their way to proving the killing was premeditated.
They called Shigeki, the distant relative who unwittingly helped Kazuko steal the dead woman’s furniture on the night of the murder — and he claimed to have been asked to help 2-3 months beforehand, suggesting the theft was part of a long-gestating scheme.
An old friend of Kazuko’s testified about a plot she had tried to entice her into, involving drugging and robbing customers of a hostess bar they worked out.
Kazuko’s hapless second husband Nobuo said that when he arrived on the day of the murder — responding to his wife’s plea to help an old friend escape a violent spouse — his wife was already priming him not to go to the police, making him suspicious she had planned the killing in advance.
A former colleague of the dead woman claimed there was never any plan for Asako and Fukuda to jointly run a snack bar together — in fact the dead woman was saving to open a coffee shop in her parent’s home town instead.
A friend of Asako also said she would never have forced someone into a grovelling apology or kicked anyone in the chest, actions Kazuko claimed provoked the murder.
Finally, the most moving testimony was given by Asako’s younger brother. Tearful throughout his evidence, he described his sister as kind and caring and when asked what he had been thinking during the more than decade Fukuda was on the run, he said, “For the past 15 years, my mother put her hands together at the Buddhist altar every day and prayed for the culprit to be caught quickly.”
He ended by asking for the death penalty to be imposed on his sister’s killer.
31 May 1999 (16 years, 9 months after the murder)
With no jury system in Japan, verdict and sentence would be decided by judge Shusaku Tamura.
He began by stating the murder could not be considered premeditated because Fukuda had not prepared any murder weapon in advance and had not considered where to dispose of the body.
However, he considered that the robbery of Takaoka’s possessions had indeed been planned, and sentenced Fukuda to life imprisonment for murder.
Wait: Is Our 3-Part Story Mainly Bullshit?
While she appealed the verdict, Fukuda released an autobiography named Valley of Tears (波の谷), written during pre-trial detention.
It was a Cinderella story with a far from self-aware main character.
Were the details of the murder correct? We don’t know.
Were the details of her long escape from justice true? Only where they could be verified by other witnesses, like Candy Man.
Was she pickpocketed of ¥8m at an Osaka station, sending her into a spiral of abusive prostitution? Perhaps.
However, one major, verifiable impact of the book was to reveal details of the Takamatsu Prison Outrage to the wider world, after the suicide of two vice-wardens had led to the original hushing-up of the scandal.
Here was something worthwhile which came out of the autobiography — which became such a success Fukuda earned millions of yen in royalties, which were given to the family of her victim.
Meanwhile, a legal team was working on her appeal — which came with a surprising new narrative about the murder: what really happened, they explained, was that Kazuko killed Asako out of passion brought on by a lesbian attraction.
The presiding judge upheld the life sentence.
Then, in 2003, all legal avenues were terminated when the Supreme Court rejected Kazuko’s final appeal and finalized the life sentence.
Final Exit
Feb 2005 (22 and a half years after the murder)
Two years later, in February 2005, Kazuko Fukuda collapsed suddenly while working in a factory inside Wakayama Prison — the cause a brain hemorrhage.
According to fellow prisoners, some of her last words were “When I get out one day, I want to open a restaurant again. I'm confident in my cooking skills. I want my children to see me in good health.”
10 March 2005 (22 years, 7 months after the murder)
She died on March 10th 2005 without regaining consciousness.
The woman of seven faces, 20 names, 15 years on the run, 7 years in prison, a ¥4m reward and one murder died aged 57.
Reform
27 April 2010 (27 years, 8 months after the murder)
Finally, after decades of campaigning by victims’ advocate groups, Japan’s Diet revised the Criminal Procedure Law, abolishing the statute of limitations for murder.
Japan retains the death penalty.
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Until next week,
The Kyote
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