LUCIE JANE BLACKMAN (AGE 21)
More than a week has passed since Lucie Blackman has gone missing.
The Metropolitan Police Department
has been investigating links to a religious cult.
A friend of mine who manages a guesthouse contacted me…
and said that he was very worried about a 21-year-old girl named Lucie
who lives in his guesthouse and that he couldn't get in touch with her.
It was the first time for my friend to experience something like this
and he was quite upset.
And from his tense look,
I felt that the situation was serious.
BRITISH STEWARDESS KIDNAPPED BY A CULT
ROPPONGI HOSTESS
A 1-MILLION-YEN DEBT
A PHONE CALL FROM A MYSTERIOUS MAN
CALLED ON PHONE BY UNKNOWN PARTY
SUICIDE ALSO CONSIDERED
I was in charge of the Lucie case as a superintendent.
In the beginning, it was possible that she had simply run away,
so we needed to know from her family in detail
whether she had any reason for doing so.
Back then…
there were a lot of foreigners who overstayed or worked illegally,
and many of them went missing quite often.
So, when I first heard about it,
I wasn’t sure whether it was a criminal case or not.
LOOKING FOR MISSING BRITISH WOMAN
Any information would be helpful.
Please call us.
I met with Tim on behalf of the police and explained the situation.
I hadn't had much experience
of talking to people from other countries,
so I was surprised by the questions he had in certain areas.
He asked me whether I had done a proper security camera investigation.
At that time,
I explained to him the limited use of security cameras in Japan
because of privacy concerns.
He said, "Mitsuzane, you must be joking."
"In London, there are cameras on every street,
and they are all made in Japan."
The first team which was involved in the Lucie case from the beginning
was the Teramae team.
Our team only heard from them that they had identified a suspect.
He was a Japanese man who frequented the hostess clubs in the Roppongi area,
including Casablanca.
So, we were ordered to bring that suspect into custody and find out
whether he was innocent or not.
We were nervous that the suspect
would find out what we were doing,
and would kill her if she were still alive.
We approached his car before he went to work.
We asked that he voluntarily come in for questioning.
We caught him
and accompanied him to the nearest police station to investigate.
The guy had an alibi, which we ended up corroborating.
The suspect was not the one
that took Lucie.
We were forced to go back to the drawing board.
You can put up the sign on the pole, but you cannot do it there.
The Japanese Prime Minister had said,
"The Japanese police will catch the suspect."
We thought that’s an easy thing to say but it's not easy to do.
We felt that pressure ourselves.
I felt that there was
a slight inconsistency in the investigation policy.
So, some of my cops started to make their own moves.
I call them Suppon detectives,
detectives who don't let go of a lead.
We thought it’d be better to start the investigation from the beginning
instead of wasting time on red herrings.
Kuku is tenacious and persistent.
Once he bites, he never lets go, like a suppon.
We spent nights going over the daily reports
that the main unit filed from day one,
and checked everything in them.
While I was checking the reports
to understand how the investigation had been conducted,
I discovered a report
from the Roppongi area where there were many clubs.
A foreign hostess working at a club
was invited by a regular male customer for a drive to the seaside.
At some point, she fell unconscious
and slept for many hours.
When she woke up, her head was hurting badly
and she suspected that she had been drugged.
They said the manager of the club who came up with the information
was an unreliable guy.
No one should rely on what he says.
After reading this, we thought that was ridiculous.
A person like this might provide a legitimate clue.
We would find club owners claiming that
a girl who worked for them had the same experience.
These stories would pop up
here and there.
So we decided to talk to all the employees
from every club.
In the beginning, the ladies who worked at the clubs
didn’t want to come forward.
We couldn’t talk to them at work,
so at first, we’d stop them on the streets
and ask them questions there.
Eventually, several women came forward
because they wanted to help us find Lucie.
In the end,
we discovered that all these women had experiences that were very similar.
Criminals generally stick to the same modus operandi.
Just like thieves have their own way of breaking and entering,
it's a habit.
Those habits don't change.
He drove them in luxury cars
like Porsche, Mercedes-Benz,
and so on.
The invitations were to go to a place with a view of the ocean
or to have dinner somewhere.
And he used drugs.
The victims said they felt as if they had been drugged.
They’d wake up feeling uncomfortable all over their body.
Some threw up.
Some felt a burning sensation.
I felt very sorry for them.
There were a lot of people from the press around Tim.
We judged that he might reveal something
that would hinder the investigation.
I always said that the investigation is progressing steadily.
"I can't tell you about it yet."
Thank you. Okay.
So, we had discovered numerous reports
of a man taking hostesses out for a drive
and then drugging them in order to molest them.
One of the victims was Jessie from Australia.
Her case happened three years earlier.
She had written
the man's name and cell phone number
in her old notebook,
which she left in Australia.
The notebook arrived from Australia.
We asked her father
to send the notebook back to Japan so we can see it with our own eyes.
She got so mad that she scribbled over the number.
We held it up to the light to try to identify the digits.
His name was "Yuji Honda"
and his cell phone number ending in 3301 was written in the notebook.
So, we started checking on
the numbers that had been called from this phone.
The number was still in use.
We retrieved the phone records of the number.
We found ten or so phone numbers it called.
And one of those numbers…
belonged to Lucie.
The suspect created
many false identities, so that they could never be traced back to him.
We asked the cell phone company to do a location search
to find where the caller was.
At three o'clock,
we found a call that was picked up by an antenna near Tokyo Tower.
One minute or five minutes later,
the signal was picked up in a completely different direction.
Another five minutes later,
the antenna in the west was picking up a call.
Another five minutes later, an antenna in the east was picking up a call.
No car can go that fast from one location to another.
It was a mystery to me.
Then I thought,
if the calls were picked up by four antennas in the four directions,
there was a possibility that the caller
was calling in the intersectional area.
We showed our police badges to the manager.
On the sixth floor, two rooms were being used
by a company called Plant Orihara.
The manager said the owner was an unusual person.
He walked past the manager,
he never greeted,
and always looked down and didn't show his face.
He drives a lot of luxury foreign cars.
Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce…
All the cars mentioned in the testimonies were there.
I didn't know if P-Orihara was a foreigner’s name or a company name.
There was no information.
The name of the resident was not listed.
Among the hostesses who we spoke to,
a few women were willing to go on record.
One of them was Monica from England.
I think it was a man who called himself "Koji."
It was the 10th of October in 1997.
She met a "Koji" in Roppongi,
and they drove to a resort apartment building
with a view of the ocean.
She remembered a row of palm trees,
and Zushi Marina was the only place in the area
that had that.
She might remember more details,
so we went together to Zushi Marina.
Monica said this was it.
This resort apartment was the place I was taken to.
We drove around the premises,
and she thought it might have been Building 4 or 7,
but she couldn’t confirm which building it was.
I remember we went to a nearby restaurant
and showed Lucie’s photo to a waitress.
She told me that she was sure it was this woman
who came here on July 1.
LUCIE JANE BLACKMAN (AGE 21) 175CM TALL, MEDIUM BUILD
When I asked her if she was alone,
she said "No, she was with a man."
I wanted to get the residents' list of Zushi Marina.
I went and talked to the assistant manager.
I explained the urgency of the situation and he understood.
I had to rule them out one by one.
It's tricky and time-consuming work,
but if this person is alive, we need to free her as soon as possible.
As I went through them one by one, all of them turned up empty,
but I had a gut feeling that one of them was suspicious.
So, I searched for a man
who had a lot of luxury foreign cars.
A person called "Obara" came to the front.
When I heard that,
I remembered that…
at the Moto-Akasaka Towers,
there was a company named Plant Orihara.
PLANT ORIHARA
O BARA
The kanji characters for "Obara"…
ORI HARA
…can also be read as "Orihara."
I got goosebumps and felt a shiver all over my body.
A310 JOJI OBARA
We found out that Joji Obara…
had been previously arrested in Wakayama…
for disguising himself as a woman
and secretly filming in a women's restroom.
I talked to the officers who worked on that case at the time,
and I asked them what he was like.
They said "thoroughly resistant."
Upon his arrest,
he refused to take a mugshot.
He averted his face and wouldn't cooperate at all.
I asked for it to be faxed to me.
The fax machine back then had low quality, and the photo came out quite dark.
So, we put together about 100 photos of suspects
and showed them to the victims.
Monica and Jessie
both singled out Obara's picture without hesitation.
For the first time,
we had a real name to attach to all the pseudonyms.
We couldn't pin him with anything on Lucie,
but we thought we had enough to arrest him
based on other victims.
At six o'clock in the morning, we were already in position.
Investigators are nervous when they make an arrest in any case.
I was very nervous.
We placed two people by the emergency exit,
two people on the side of the window,
and one person by the door to keep a lookout.
I think there were about seven people in total.
I was told by radio that the suspect was awake and turned on the TV.
So, I continued to monitor the situation.
He always went out to buy the newspaper at about seven o'clock,
so I thought there was no need to barge in.
Obara didn’t look like a bad-tempered person.
I thought he wouldn't be violent.
But I was worried about him jumping out of the window.
That's all I was thinking about.
Just before seven o'clock, the door opened.
When I asked "Are you Obara?", his face suddenly dropped.
He said "Yes, I am."
I think he knew the arrest was imminent.
Please stand back.
I was in charge of the crime scene at Zushi Marina No. 4.
We found
a lot of drugs and alcohol.
What I remember vividly
was the metal fitting on the ceiling.
I remember wondering
what kind of metal fitting it was.
I was in charge of the search and seizure at Moto-Akasaka Towers.
The most memorable item was his notebook.
I don't know when he wrote it,
but one entry said he was going to become evil,
that he was going to devote himself to evil.
He rapidly changed his way of thinking to become thoroughly evil,
and transformed into a sort of monster.
We confiscated a lot of videotapes,
and I'm not talking about just two or three.
The videotapes were labeled with names, although not with full names.
What Obara did was recorded on videotapes.
I don't think it's something I should talk about again.
We learned that the metal fittings on the ceiling…
were used to lift the victims' legs.
He doesn't think of people as people,
but just as dolls.
I’d never seen a case…
I’d never seen anything so despicable.
I never thought there were people like him.
Our goal was to find Lucie.
So, I felt the pressure.
But with so much evidence against him, I thought we had a chance.
While I was talking to him,
I felt that he was a very warped individual.
He denied everything concerning his crimes.
Even when I showed him evidence,
he insisted that all of it was an act.
They were all paid.
He'd make excuses like that. But, that’s all he admitted.
When I saw the video evidence,
I thought this crime was completely comparable to a murder case.
For a woman, sexual crimes are as bad as murder.
I remember that we set up an analysis team in a large room.
It’s a room that could fit dozens of people.
We were short on staff,
so we had to send young officers from the riot police to help the team.
The victims would change,
but they saw the same crimes over and over again.
Several of those young officers
had mental breakdowns.
I went to some of the victims' houses
and interviewed them.
They woke up and weren’t aware of anything happening to them,
that’s what they all said.
But we had the evidence to prove to them that something had happened.
But showing them that was the hardest bit.
They were covering their eyes.
One person said, "Say it’s not me, was it me?"
Some said, "That was in the past and I don’t want to take it any further."
One victim had a nosebleed.
She must have been suffering.
I explained to them that we need to arrest this perpetrator and punish him
and in order to do that,
we desperately needed their help.
We didn’t want Obara to get away with it.
That's how we felt.
And that's what I tried to explain to the victims.
That was the only way.
He would take a towel and a brown bottle
and pour liquid from this bottle.
He then placed it on the victim's face.
There were always towels draped over everyone’s face.
Among the seized items were sleep-inducing drugs,
and there were large quantities of ether, chloroform,
and other illegal drugs
that have a sleep-inducing effect.
As I was looking at various footage of the victims,
I noticed one particular woman.
Suddenly,
her hands started shaking.
I wondered why she was doing these movements while unconscious.
Chloroform toxicity can lead to acute hepatitis
which can lead to hepatic encephalopathy.
And I found out that one of the symptoms is called flapping tremor.
As I researched the situation of the victim further,
I discovered that she was a 21-year-old woman named Carita,
and she had died.
We were still primarily focused on Lucie.
We had to analyze every piece of evidence
in order to rescue her.
Obara had a habit of collecting things,
and he kept a lot of receipts in his apartment.
The evidence analysis team examined them closely
and they created a timeline of Obara's actions.
According to our analysis, on July 1st, at around 3 p.m.,
Obara met Lucie and headed to Zushi.
On the way to Zushi,
Obara and Lucie stopped at a restaurant near the yacht harbor in Zushi Marina.
This was confirmed by Assistant Inspector Asano at the time.
Then in the evening, around 5 p.m.,
they went to Obara's apartment at Zushi Marina.
This was where Lucie's whereabouts became unknown.
Between the night of July 2nd and early morning of July 3rd,
Obara drove back to Tokyo.
On July 4th, Obara did a lot of shopping.
On July 5th, Obara visited the Blue Sea Aburatsubo apartment,
one of many properties that he owned.
The next day,
a resident complained to the manager about noise coming from Obara's apartment.
JULY 4TH, 2000 (TUE) CASH REGISTER 012
CHAINSAW - 35,800 YEN TENT - 4,200 YEN
Our analysis led us to the conclusion that…
Lucie lost her life on the night of July 1st.
Within the next few days,
her body was transported from Zushi Marina to Blue Sea Aburatsubo.
And there was a high probability she was dismembered there.
After analyzing various pieces of evidence,
we had no choice but to think so.
For the Lucie case,
we also wanted good evidence,
but we only had circumstantial evidence that he did it.
We needed hard evidence to build the case for Lucie…
but without a body,
we couldn’t try him for murder.
The prosecutor said it would be difficult
to make a case without a confession,
so we knew that we had to find the body no matter what.
We began to look for any spots
where a body might be buried in the area.
We had no idea where she could be.
It couldn’t be that far from the apartment in Aburatsubo.
Upper management proposed to give us one final week to search.
Once the week was up, they had to shut us down.
My stomach was in knots.
I told my men that this is our last chance.
I was dreading
what would happen if we didn’t find her.
We really need to nail this guy with solid jail time.
That was how I felt.
The spots we had to search,
the terrain was dangerous.
We did it over several days…
until we were filthy and foul-smelling.
We went to the coast at 8:15 in the morning.
There were a few caves.
I relied on my hunch.
The area was littered with things that have washed ashore.
So, I cleared everything inside the cave.
When I cleared it,
there was a bathtub.
I flipped it over.
"These are carnivorous bugs," I said.
I cleared that area and kept digging around it.
At first, it seemed like a big burlap sack.
And when I opened it,
I was certain it was Lucie.
I was standing on a rocky place near the cave
when my phone rang…
and I heard Nozoe's voice say "It’s here!"
I couldn’t figure out what he was saying.
So, I told him to wait there because I was coming over right now.
A huge flock of kites had gathered above the scene.
Squawking.
They caught the smell of death and started circling in the sky.
We can now indict him for Lucie's murder.
For the sake of the victims, he should be given the maximum penalty.
I was so disappointed.
I couldn’t believe he was found not guilty.
The investigators at that time were just angry more than surprised.
He had done such terrible things.
In 2010, I had a chance
to visit Lucie’s grave and pay my respects.
So, I went to England.
Jane treated us to afternoon tea,
which was a first experience for me.
I heard it’s a form of hospitality
and I was very much impressed by her warmth.
Lucie’s grave is in a churchyard.
Her name was written on the marker.
"A star lighting in our sky,"
the tombstone said.
The fact that Lucie came from a foreign country to work,
and then became a victim of such a crime
has left certain emotions in my heart.
Every year since, we go there to appease her spirit
and to pray that she rests in peace.
We’ve been going there for the last 20 years.
I think this is a rare occurrence.
Subtitle translation by: Ikuko Ohno