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The Setagaya Family Murders: Japan's Most Haunted Investigation · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Imagine, if you will, a family just you know, preparing
• 0:03
  for a quiet.
• 0:04
  Speaker 2: New Year's eave, right, setting the seeds.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. It's late December, the year two thousand in Tokyo.
• 0:10
  And I mean, if you've ever been to Tokyo, you
• 0:12
  know the hum of the city.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: Right, Oh, absolutely, it's incredibly dense.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's this tightly woven fabric of just millions of
• 0:18
  lives lived shoulder to shoulder. But I want you, the listener,
• 0:23
  to picture the exact opposite for this specific family.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: Right, their situation was completely different, it really was.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: They are inside their warm home, but outside, this sweeping
• 0:35
  machinery of urban gentrification has slowly methodically turned their once
• 0:41
  lively street into an isolated island.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: Like a ghost town in the middle of a metropolis.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: Exactly the protective buffer of neighbors, you know, the watchful
• 0:49
  eyes of a community. It's all been stripped away, demolished
• 0:52
  house by house as the city expands in nearby.
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: Park, leaving them incredibly vulnerable.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they are alone, and that profound man made up
• 1:00
  isolation is basically setting the stage for a crime that
• 1:03
  will well fundamentally alter Japanese history.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: What's fascinating here? Is that this deep dive isn't just
• 1:09
  about you know, constructing a timeline of a horrific crime.
• 1:14
  It's actually a masterclass in how information overload can literally
• 1:18
  paralyze an investigation.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: Which is so counterintuitive, right.
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: It is because what we are conditioned by modern true
• 1:24
  crime and forensic science to assume that more physical evidence
• 1:29
  inegibly equals a faster resolution.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Like the DNA age promised us that if a killer
• 1:34
  leaves a trace, they're.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: Caught, period exactly. But this case it shatters that assumption entirely.
• 1:41
  It proves that when evidence is overwhelmingly abundant but completely contradictory,
• 1:45
  it just creates a fog, a.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: Fog so thick that a perpetrator can simply vanish into it. Yeah, exactly,
• 1:51
  And that is exactly the mission of today's deep dive,
• 1:53
  which is tailored specifically for you, the listener.
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: We really want to bring you into the fold on
• 1:57
  this one.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: We do. We are going to plunge into the baffling,
• 2:01
  just horrifying web of the setagay A family.
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: Murder, a case built on an impossible paradox.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, a former Tokyo Metropolitan Police official literally
• 2:12
  called the crime scene a mountain.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: Of treasure, which is such a striking phrase.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Right, we are talking about DNA pristine fingerprints, the weapon,
• 2:20
  and the literal close off the killer's.
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: Back, everything you could possibly want.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Yet twenty four years later, that mountain of treasure
• 2:27
  has led to nothing but just agonizing dead ends.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: So to even begin penetrating this fog, we have to
• 2:35
  synthesize a massive amount of data today.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: A mountain of it really, yeah.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: Literally. We are pulling heavily from the comprehensive analysis in
• 2:43
  the documentary How Japan's Biggest Murder Investigation Changed the Country Forever.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: Great documentary, by the way.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: Incredible resource. We are also layering in the meticulous boots
• 2:54
  on the ground insights from investigative journalist Nicholas Abrigan's.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: Work, specifically his exceptional deep dive audio series Faceless.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: Yes, alongside the really complex structural theories presented in Fumi
• 3:06
  Ichihashi's extensive book on the subject.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's untack the setting first, because the environment isn't
• 3:12
  just a backdrop here, you.
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: Know, No, It's practically a character in the story, right.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: It operates as the primary catalyst for the entire tragedy.
• 3:19
  So the year's two thousand. The place is Kamesoshigaya, which
• 3:22
  is a district in Setegaya, Tokyo, and at the center
• 3:26
  of our story is Miazawa family. We have the father, Mikiyo,
• 3:30
  who was forty four, the mother Yasiko forty one, their
• 3:34
  eight year old daughter Nina, and their six year old
• 3:36
  son Ray.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: And by all accounts, I mean the Miyazawas were deeply
• 3:41
  embedded in the social fabric of their community before the
• 3:45
  changes began.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they're super active, right.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: Yasiko ran a cram school right out of her home.
• 3:51
  And because you the listener are probably familiar with the
• 3:54
  intensity of the Japanese education system, you know that a
• 3:57
  local cram school isn't just a business.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: It's like a neighborhoo hub exactly.
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: Parents are constantly coming going, children are always around. So
• 4:04
  historically this house was a bustling center of activity, and.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: The architecture of the house itself really reflects that interconnectedness.
• 4:11
  Like from the street, it looks like one massive structure,
• 4:13
  but it's.
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: Actually two attached homes sharing a central wall.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Right, the Miyazawa family lived in one half and the
• 4:19
  other half was occupied by Yasuko's extended.
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: Family, primarily her mother Haruko.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, with Yasuko's sister and brother in law staying there
• 4:27
  occasionally too. It's that classic, you know, multi generational living situation.
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: Which usually provides a formidable layer of passive security.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: You'd think so, right, But the security of that specific
• 4:38
  neighborhood was actively being dismantled by the municipal government.
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: Right as Tokyo geared up for the twenty first century,
• 4:45
  city planners designated the land around the Miyazawa home for
• 4:49
  a massive expansion of the adjacent Soshigaya Park.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: I always find this part so eerie, to.
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: Be honest, the gentrification.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because of this park expansion, the city was buying
• 5:00
  up the land through well basically eminent domain are really aggressive.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: Purchasing forcing people out.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Families who had lived on that street for generations
• 5:08
  were selling their properties and moving away.
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: And the city would just come in demolish the houses
• 5:13
  and clear the lots.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: So a street that used to be a vibrant, dense
• 5:17
  Tokyo neighborhood was slowly being silenced, just literally erased.
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: And by December of two thousand, the Miyazaua family was
• 5:25
  one of only four homes left in the entire immediate area,
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  just four homes. Imagine the psychological toll of that waking
• 5:32
  up every day to fewer neighbors, more empty lots.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: And the physical darkness of the park just encroaching closer
• 5:39
  to your property line.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: The bustling community had turned into a literal ghost town.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this with an analogy. It's like a
• 5:46
  game of musical chairs on a citywide scale.
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  Speaker 2: That's the way to put it.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: And the Miyazauas were left sitting alone while the protective
• 5:53
  buffer just vanished around them. But here is the heartbreaking part,
• 5:57
  and I want you, the listener, to really put yourself
• 6:00
  in their shoes for a second.
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: This is the part that always gets me.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: Right. They hadn't stubbornly refused to sell. They weren't holding
• 6:06
  out for more money or anything. They had actually already
• 6:09
  finalized the sale of their land to the city.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: The paperwork was signed, they were scheduled to move into
• 6:15
  a larger home in a new community.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: So they were ready to go.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: But Yasuko made the fateful, just tragic decision to delay
• 6:23
  the actual physical move until the very last possible moment.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: But why, I mean if the street is emptying out
• 6:31
  and the bulldozers are literally down the block, why stay well?
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: She stayed solely out of love and concern for their
• 6:37
  youngest child, six year old ray Ah. Ray was living
• 6:41
  with a developmental disorder, and as an educator who ran
• 6:44
  a school out of her home, also Go had a
• 6:47
  deep professional understanding of child psychology.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: She knew about the profound impact of environmental changes.
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: Precisely, she knew that uprooting Ray from the only physical
• 6:57
  space he had ever known, taking him away from his
• 6:59
  highly structured, familiar routines.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: It would be incredibly traumatic for him.
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: Exactly. She was prioritizing his neurological and emotional stability over
• 7:08
  the logistical convenience of moving early.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: She just wanted to give him maximum environmental stability for
• 7:14
  as long as the city legally allowed them to stay.
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: Think about how often we view isolation as a luxury,
• 7:19
  you know, Oh.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: All the time, people pay millions for it.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: Exactly, a house with no immediate neighbors, no one looking
• 7:25
  over your fence, a private sanctuary, and a chaotic world.
• 7:29
  We crave that kind of piece. But in an urban environment, yeah,
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  absolute isolation without the infrastructure of rural living can also
• 7:37
  mean a terrifying vulnerability.
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: Because if you scream in a neighborhood that the city
• 7:41
  has already emptied.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: Out, there is no one left to hear you.
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: It is the ultimate tragic irony of this case. The
• 7:48
  very decision a mother made to protect her son's psychological
• 7:51
  well being is exactly what left the entire family physically
• 7:55
  exposed to an unimaginable threat.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: They were sitting on the edge of a dark, unlit,
• 8:00
  expanding park, which.
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: Brings us to the day of December thirtieth, two thousand.
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  Speaker 1: The day before New Year's Eve.
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  Speaker 2: And from the outside, the timeline of this day is
• 8:09
  almost painfully mundane.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: Just a normal Saturday.
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  Speaker 2: Like millions of other families across Japan, the Miyazawas are
• 8:15
  out doing their final New Year's preparations. They go to
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  the shops near Chitosi Karaslyama station.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: They buy groceries, They have dinner together, they.
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: Watch some television in the living room. It's the absolute
• 8:25
  picture of domestic normalcy. As the year and the century winds.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: Down, eventually they start heading to bed.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: But outside, navigating the man made void the city had created,
• 8:35
  was a predator.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: Sometime after eleven point zero zero PM. The perpetrator approaches
• 8:40
  the Miyazawa home.
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  Speaker 2: And crucially, he doesn't walk up the front street.
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  Speaker 1: Now he uses the cover of Soshigaya Park. He approaches
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  the back of the house.
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  Speaker 2: Right, and the forensics team later finds broken branches and
• 8:52
  scuff marks indicating exactly how he got in.
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  Speaker 1: He uses the fence in the backyard to boost himself up,
• 8:58
  likely utilizing a tree to gain extra height, and.
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: He scales the exterior wall to the second floor.
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  Speaker 1: He targets the second floor bathroom window.
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  Speaker 2: He manages to reach it completely, removes the protective screen,
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  and slips inside the house.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: And this is where the sequence of the nightmare really begins. Yes,
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  because the first room he encounters upon leaving that second
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  floor bathroom is the bedroom of six year.
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  Speaker 2: Old Ray Rays, asleep in his bed.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: The killer approaches him and strangles him to death.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: Uh, I have to stop here because this entirely defies logic.
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: It really does.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to put myself in the mindset of an intruder.
• 9:34
  Why bypass the rest of the house and start by
• 9:36
  killing the least threatening person in the.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: Home, the most helpless person.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: Really exactly you have a sleeping six year old. And furthermore,
• 9:44
  why use a completely different.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: Method strangulation versus stabbing?
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  Speaker 1: Right, Strangulation is intimate, it's silent, it requires sustained physical effort.
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  The rest of the family, as we'll get into, suffered
• 9:56
  an entirely different kind of violence.
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  Speaker 2: From a purely tactical standpoint, it makes zero sense.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: None at all.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: If a violent intruder enters a home with multiple occupants,
• 10:05
  the standard operating procedure for a killer is to neutralize
• 10:09
  the greatest physical threat first.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: Which in this case would be the forty four year
• 10:13
  old father downstairs.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: Exactly taking out a sleeping child first is a massive
• 10:18
  strategic risk.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this. What's the psychological profile here? Did
• 10:22
  the kid wake up and startle him?
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: That's the terrifying part. There were no signs of a struggle.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: Oh w.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: The forensics strongly suggests Ray was strangled while he slept,
• 10:32
  which points away from a panicked reaction to a waking child.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: So it points towards something much darker.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: Yes, it suggests an act of horrific convenience. He was
• 10:42
  the first person the killer saw, and the killer possessed
• 10:44
  a chilling cold blooded intent to eradicate everyone in the
• 10:48
  structure from the very first second he stepped inside.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: Whatever the reason, the silence of that first attack didn't last, No,
• 10:55
  it didn't. The killer then turns his attention downstairs. The father, Mikia,
• 11:00
  is awake on the first floor finishing up some work.
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: And the forensic reconstruction gets a bit complex here due
• 11:06
  to the sheer volume of blood evidence, but the generally
• 11:09
  accepted narrative is that Mikio heard a commotion upstairs.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: He left his work and rushed up the stairs to investigate.
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: And as he rushes up, he comes face to face.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: With the killer, and this is where the primary weapon
• 11:20
  of the night is introduced. The killer pulls out a
• 11:22
  sashimi knife.
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: Right, and for listeners who might be familiar with standard
• 11:26
  kitchen knives but not specialized Japanese culinary tools, a sashimi knife,
• 11:32
  specifically a yana giba, is a very distinct weapon.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: How so.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: It has a long, incredibly thin, single edged blade. It
• 11:40
  is designed for slicing raw seafood with surgical precision, so
• 11:43
  it's sharp. It is literally razor sharp, but it is
• 11:46
  fundamentally delicate. It is not designed to hit bone. It
• 11:50
  is not designed for the chaotic physics of combat.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: But Mikio fights back. I mean he is a father
• 11:55
  protecting his home, of course, and he engages in a desperate, violent,
• 11:59
  hand to hand struggle with this intruder on the stairs.
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: The blood spatter analysis tells the story of an incredibly
• 12:06
  brutal fight. The killer stabs Michio multiple times.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: Mikio's body is ultimately found at the base.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: Of the stairs right yes, and the definitive physical evidence
• 12:15
  of the struggle's location is what of Mikio's slippers, found
• 12:18
  abandoned halfway up the staircase.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: He suffered horrific stab wounds. But the most shocking detail
• 12:23
  of this fight, the detail that really illustrates the raw,
• 12:26
  animalistic power of the attack, involves the weapon itself.
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: The killer used that delicate sashimi knife with such excessive, unhinged.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: Force that the steel blade actually snapped in half.
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: A significant fragment of that thin blade broke off during
• 12:40
  the struggle and was found deeply embedded in Mikio's skull.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: Embedded in his skull. Wow.
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: The biomechanics required to snap a high carbon steel blade
• 12:49
  inside a human skull tells investigators that this wasn't just
• 12:53
  a stabbing.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: It was an overpowering, frenzied assault driven by massive adrenaline
• 12:59
  and sheer physical power. Yes, and the nightmare is only
• 13:02
  half over. The killer, now standing in the dark holding
• 13:06
  a broken, bloody handle of a culinary knife, turns his
• 13:09
  attention to the rest of the house.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: Yasuko, the mother, and Nina, the eight year old daughter,
• 13:14
  are sleeping in the attic above the second floor.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: The forensic story of their final moments is just harrowing.
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: Bloodstains found on their futons in the attic confirmed that
• 13:23
  they were initially attacked while they were sleeping.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: But the killer has a broken weapon right.
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: Sometime during this part of the attack, he realizes the
• 13:31
  shattered sashimi knife is no longer.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: Effective, so he pauses.
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: He pauses, He leaves the bleeding mother and daughter in
• 13:37
  the attic, walks all the way down to the family's
• 13:39
  first floor kitchen, and discards the broken weapon.
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: He then opens the Miyazawa's kitchen drawers, selects a new
• 13:45
  weapon from their own home, a standard, heavier Western style
• 13:49
  kitchen knife.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: And walks back upstairs to finish the job.
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: While he is doing this, Yasuko and Nina, bleeding and terrified,
• 13:57
  are trying to escape.
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: The only way down from that attic space is a
• 14:02
  foldable ladder that connects to the second floor landing.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: The crime scene photographs of where they were found are well,
• 14:08
  they're devastating.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: Yahsuko and Nina were killed at the top of the
• 14:11
  stairs on the second floor, right near the base of
• 14:14
  that foldable ladder.
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: They were found hunched incredibly close together.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: The physical positioning strongly indicated a mother desperately trying to
• 14:23
  physically shield her child with her own body to the
• 14:26
  very end.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: But the violence inflicted upon them, particularly upon the women
• 14:30
  of the family, it wasn't just a means to an end.
• 14:32
  It was unimaginably extreme.
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: The forensic pathology confirmed that eight year old Nina was
• 14:37
  the last member of the family to die, and.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: The killer didn't just stab her.
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: No. The autopsy revealed that Nina was missing teeth.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: Wait really, yes.
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: Medical examiners concluded that she was brutally beaten, and crucially,
• 14:51
  the contusion pattern suggested that this beating continued even after
• 14:54
  she had succumbed to her stab wounds.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this because I want to pause on
• 14:58
  that that detail fundamentally changes the entire profile of the crime.
• 15:02
  Absolutely stabbing someone to eliminate a witness to a home
• 15:06
  invasion is one kind of terrible. Beating an eight year
• 15:09
  old child's face in after she is already dead points
• 15:12
  to a deeply personal, almost venomous level of rage.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: It's beyond comprehension.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: This isn't a burglary gone wrong. It's an annihilation.
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: In behavioral analysis, we call that extreme overkill. Overkill right
• 15:25
  Wohl investigators see post mortem mutilation or beatings especially directed
• 15:30
  at specific demographics within a crime scene, in this case
• 15:33
  the female victims. It heavily suggests a severe psychological.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: Pathology like it indicates deep seated hatred.
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: Hatred, a psychotic break, or a deeply personal vendetta. It
• 15:47
  moves the needle away from an opportunistic property crime and
• 15:50
  directly into the realm of severe emotional or psychological disturbance.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: Okay, so we have a family of four obliterated in
• 15:56
  their own home. It's the middle of the night. The
• 15:58
  logical next step for any criminal on earth, whether it's
• 16:02
  a cool blooded professional hit man or a panic amateur burglar.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: Is to run get out immediately.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: You get as far away from the carnage as fast
• 16:09
  as humanly possible.
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: Self preservation is the most basic human instinct. Following a massive,
• 16:16
  high adrenaline crime, the body's fight or flight response is
• 16:20
  screaming flight, right, You need to minimize your time at
• 16:23
  the scene, minimize the transfer of physical evidence, and maximize
• 16:27
  the geographic distance between yourself and the bodies before the
• 16:30
  sun comes up.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: But our killa does the exact opposite. He stares.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: He stays in the house for hours.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: And the actions he takes during those hours are so bizarre,
• 16:39
  so completely detached from the reality of the horror he
• 16:42
  just inflicted that investigators later dubbed this the Goldilocks murder.
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: It's a grotesque moniker, but from a behavioral standpoint, it
• 16:50
  fits the pattern perfectly. He treated this blood soaked crime
• 16:53
  scene like a macabre hotel.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: Let's walk through this timeline. Initially, based on computer logs,
• 17:00
  which we'll discuss in a moment, the police thought he
• 17:02
  might have stayed in the house for an astounding ten hours.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: That was the initial theory.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: Yes, later forensic analysis of stomach contents and rigor mortis
• 17:11
  revised that estimate down, but they conclusively confirmed he was
• 17:14
  in the house for a minimum of two.
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: Hours, likely leaving sometime between one point eighteen am and dawn, so.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: For at least two hours, he is just hanging out
• 17:25
  with four dead bodies.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: Yes, and his actions demonstrate an absolute chilling lack of panic.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: It's insane.
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: The bloody footprint show he calmly navigated the house, literally
• 17:37
  stepping over and bypassing the bodies of the people he
• 17:40
  had just slaughtered. And he makes his way into the kitchen.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: Because he's hungry, right he opens the family's refrigerator. He
• 17:45
  takes out multiple tubs of ice cream. He takes out
• 17:47
  a bottle of barley tea. Some sources indicate he even
• 17:50
  sliced the melon, and he just starts eating minutes after
• 17:53
  a quadruple homicide. He's having a midnight snack.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: But it's the specific mechanics of how he eats that
• 18:00
  provides so much crucial forensic evidence explain that he doesn't
• 18:04
  bother getting a spoon or a bowl. He opens the
• 18:06
  plastic tubs of ice cream, squeezes them from the bottom
• 18:09
  to push the ice cream to the top, and just
• 18:12
  bites into it directly.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: Squeezing it from the bottom like a tube of toothpaste.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: Exactly, leaving his saliva all over the rim, leaving his
• 18:20
  fingerprints pressed deeply into the plastic.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: While he's in the kitchen having this bizarre meal, he
• 18:26
  realizes his own hand is bleeding heavily.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: Right because the Enegiba knife lacks a crossguard, and when
• 18:32
  he stabbed Mikio with such force, his hand slid down
• 18:35
  the blade, resulting in a jeep laceration.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: So what does he do? He searches the house until
• 18:40
  he locates the Miazawa family's first aid kit.
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: He calmly bandages his own hand.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: And then, defying all logic of criminal evasion, he just
• 18:49
  leaves the bloodied wrappers and the used discarded bandages sitting
• 18:52
  right there on the counter.
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: He conveniently gives the police a massive, pristine, undeniable sample
• 18:58
  of his own blood in DNA.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: After tending to his wound, The bloody footprint trail shows
• 19:03
  him wandering into a storage room on the first floor.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: He starts rummaging through the family's personal documents.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: He pulls out whole drawers of paperwork, physically carries them
• 19:11
  upstairs to the second floor bathroom, and just dumps them
• 19:14
  into the bathtub.
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: I struggle to understand the mechanics of this. Was he
• 19:19
  looking for money, was he looking for a specific legal document.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: Or a deed, or was it just chaotic, senseless destruction.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: It's a massive point of debate among behavioral analysts. He
• 19:32
  did take some cash, which we'll discuss, but dumping documents
• 19:36
  in the tub seems highly performative orfirmative. Yeah, it feels
• 19:39
  mocking or perhaps indicative of an unorganized, manic state of mind.
• 19:45
  And while he's in that second floor bathroom, he decides
• 19:48
  to use the toilet.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: He defecates in the family's toilet, and he doesn't flush.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: No. He then wipes his hands on a bathroom towel,
• 19:55
  smearing more of his own blood on it, and walks away.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: He is leaving behind a trail of biological evidence that
• 20:00
  is practically unprecedented in modern criminal history.
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: There are even sources, though debated, that claim the indentation
• 20:07
  on the living room's sofa suggests he took a nap.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: Think about the psychology required to fall asleep in a
• 20:12
  house filled at the bodies of the people you just killed.
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: While the nap is disputed, the fact that investigators even
• 20:18
  consider it plausible based on his other behaviors is staggering,
• 20:22
  It really is. What is not disputed, however, are the
• 20:24
  computer logs. We know for an absolute fact that at
• 20:28
  one eighteen am he sat down at Mikio's desk and
• 20:32
  turned on the family computer.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: This is where the digital timeline gets established. At one
• 20:36
  eighteen am, the killer logs onto the computer. He creates
• 20:40
  a new, completely empty folder on the desktop, which is
• 20:43
  so odd, right, and then he opens the internet browser
• 20:46
  and visits the website of a local theater company.
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: He's surfing the web. After an hour of extreme physical violence,
• 20:52
  he is casually browsing a theater site.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: Now you mentioned earlier that police initially thought he stayed
• 20:58
  for ten hours. Yes, that was because as those same
• 21:00
  computer logs showed a second internet connection the next morning,
• 21:03
  right around ten zer am.
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: That second log in fundamentally through the initial investigation off track.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: It changed the whole timeline for days.
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: Police operated under the assumption that the killer casually spent
• 21:15
  the entire night and morning in the house, but a
• 21:18
  much deeper forensic investigation of the mouse hardware and the
• 21:22
  digital time stamps revealed a much more tragic reality.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: What happened at ten am.
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: That ten am log in was an accident. Oh man,
• 21:31
  it happened when Yasuko's mother, Haruko, the grandmother who lived
• 21:34
  in the attached house next door, came into the home
• 21:37
  and discovered the bodies. In her state of absolute shock
• 21:41
  and panic, stumbling through the crime scene, she accidentally bumped
• 21:45
  the computer desk.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: It's a slight bump.
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: That tiny movement jolted the computer mouse, waking the machine
• 21:51
  from sleep mode and registering a digital timestamp on the network.
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: Oh, that is just agonizing sensory experience of a grandmother
• 21:59
  walking into that horror.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: It's heartbreaking.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: So the killer likely left before dawn, escaping under the
• 22:03
  cover of darkness. But still, the hours he did spend
• 22:06
  in the house.
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: It's inexplicable.
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting to me. It's like
• 22:12
  the killer flipped a switch from being a brutal, high
• 22:15
  adrenaline predator to an indifferent, almost board house guest. Yes,
• 22:21
  it defies every single instinct of self preservation. It's not
• 22:24
  just brazen, it's practically alien.
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture of criminal psychology,
• 22:30
  this kind of post defense behavior points in one of
• 22:33
  two distinct directions. Okay, First, it could indicate an extraordinary,
• 22:37
  almost superhuman level of situational confidence. He knew he wouldn't
• 22:42
  be caught, he knew the neighborhood was a ghost town.
• 22:44
  He knew the police weren't coming.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: And the second option.
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: The second option points to a severe psychological detachment from reality,
• 22:52
  like psychosis. Exactly, Yeah, we were talking about extreme dissociation psychosis,
• 22:56
  or a psychopathic lack of empathy so profound that his
• 23:00
  brain literally did not process the human gravity of the
• 23:03
  scene around him.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: The four bodies didn't register as a threat, a tragedy,
• 23:08
  or a reason to fleet. They were just inanimate objects
• 23:10
  in a room while he ate his ice cream and
• 23:12
  browsed the internet.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: Let's move to the morning of December thirty. First, the
• 23:16
  sun eventually rises. It's about ten thirty in the morning. Haruko,
• 23:20
  the grandmother living next door, is trying to call her daughter's.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: House that the phone is just ringing out.
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: It's New Year's Eve day, they should be awake. She
• 23:28
  gets worried. She walks over, opens the door to check
• 23:30
  on them, and her entire world ends.
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: The first thing she sees is the body of her
• 23:36
  son in law, Mikio, lying at the bottom of the stairs.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: The trauma of that moment is unimaginable. After the initial
• 23:43
  paralyzing shock, she manages to contact the authorities.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: The Sajo Police, and shortly after the Tokyo Metropolitan Police
• 23:51
  descend on the scene.
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: Imagine the chaotic response of those first responders. They arrive
• 23:56
  at a quiet suburban home expecting maybe a domestic disturbance
• 24:00
  or medical emergency, and they walk into a slaughterhouse.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: But when the detectives walk through that door and start
• 24:05
  processing the scene, they are greeted by an environment that,
• 24:08
  at first glance, looks like the easiest open and shut
• 24:11
  case in the history of the department.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: You can entirely understand why they thought they would solve
• 24:15
  it in a week.
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely, crime scenes, especially premeditated ones, are usually relatively sterile.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: Right killers wear gloves, They clean up blood pools with bleach,
• 24:24
  They take their weapons with them, They dispose of their clothes.
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: This killer left everything everything. The forensics teams were finding
• 24:32
  perfectly preserved fingerprints on the ice cream tubs, on the
• 24:36
  kitchen drawers, on the door handles.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: They found massive uncontaminated amounts of DNA from the blood,
• 24:42
  on the bandages and the towels.
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: They had his saliva from the squeezed ice cream and
• 24:47
  the barley tea bottle.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: He even had his feces from the unflushed.
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: Toilet, which is incredible evidence.
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: Which amazingly allowed forensic pathologists to determine exactly what his
• 24:56
  last meal was before the murder.
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: By analyzing the undie digested matter, they knew he had
• 25:01
  eaten string beans and sesame seeds.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: The level of granular detail the police possessed within the
• 25:06
  first forty eight hours is insane, But the.
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: Treasure didn't stop at biology. At some point before he
• 25:12
  left the house in the early morning hours, the killer
• 25:14
  decided he was too hot, or his clothes were too
• 25:16
  blood soaked, or he wanted to drastically change his appearance
• 25:20
  for his escape.
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: So he took off almost his entire outfit, folded it,
• 25:25
  and left it neatly in the house. Yes, I want
• 25:27
  to hear the breakdown of this outfit because when I
• 25:29
  first read the source material, I couldn't believe how specific
• 25:32
  it was.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: It is incredibly specific. He left behind a gray crusher
• 25:36
  bucket hat, a baseball style shirt white with three quarter
• 25:40
  length purple sleeves, a cheap tagless plaid sparf, a dark
• 25:45
  unicuilo air tech jacket, a pair of black gloves, and
• 25:49
  a gray and black Fannie pack or hip bag.
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: And using the bloody footprints left all over the hardwood floors,
• 25:55
  the footprint analysts were even able to determine the exact make, model,
• 25:59
  and size of the shoe he was wearing.
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: They matched the tread patterns perfectly to slazenger sneakers size
• 26:04
  twenty seven point five centimeters.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: So let's summarize the police's hand. They have his blood
• 26:09
  type A, they have dozens of his fingerprints, they have
• 26:12
  a complete, flawless DNA profile.
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: They have a complete, highly detailed wardrobe that allows them
• 26:18
  to release a perfect composite photograph of what he was
• 26:22
  wearing to the public.
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: They know his exact shoe size. They even know what
• 26:25
  he had for dinner the night before. It's why if
• 26:27
  you wrote this into a crime novel, an editor would
• 26:29
  throw it back at you and tell you it's too unrealistic,
• 26:31
  because the killer is too stupid and the police are
• 26:34
  too lucky.
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: And yet here is the profound paradox of the Stegaya investigation.
• 26:40
  That Mountain of Treasure was utterly, entirely useless.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: It was worse than useful. It was a massive diversion
• 26:46
  of resources. Right, Okay, let's unpack this. Explain the mechanics
• 26:50
  of how a police force has that much evidence and
• 26:53
  gets nowhere Because.
• 26:54
  Speaker 2: Every single physical item left behind was aggressively, purposefully un remarkable.
• 27:00
  It's a phenomena of modern consumerism.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: Ah mass production.
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: Yes, the police had the exact Unilo air Tech jacket,
• 27:08
  but Uniilo is a massive, fast fashioned retailer. They'd sold
• 27:11
  hundreds of thousands of those exact jackets across Japan that season.
• 27:14
  The white and purple baseball shirt, it was mass produced
• 27:17
  and sold at countless discount stores. The plaid scarf was
• 27:21
  so cheap it didn't even have a manufacturer's brand.
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: Tag, so no paper trail exactly.
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: The bucket, hat, the gloves, all of it was low end,
• 27:30
  mass produced clothing that could be bought by anyone anywhere,
• 27:34
  entirely with cash, leaving absolutely no credit card receipt.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: It's like looking for a needle in a haystack, but
• 27:40
  the needle itself is made.
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: Of hay That's a perfect way to put it.
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: The mass produced nature of modern clothing provided him with
• 27:46
  perfect unintentional camouflage. You can't trace a cash purchase of
• 27:50
  a hat that ten thousand other people.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: Bought that week precisely, so the physical items hit a
• 27:55
  dead end. Then the investigators confidently turned to the biological.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: Evidence, right the DNA and prints.
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: They had perfect fingerprints. They digitize them and run them
• 28:04
  through the Japanese National Police Database zero matches.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: Which simply means the killer had no prior criminal record
• 28:11
  in Japan that required fingerprinting exactly. Okay, fine fingerprints rely
• 28:16
  on a prior arrest. But what about the DNA. They
• 28:19
  have his blood, his saliva, his hair. In the age
• 28:23
  of modern forensics, how do you have someone's complete genetic
• 28:26
  profile and still not know who they are?
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: This is where we run into a massive sociopolitical and
• 28:32
  legal roadblock that is highly specific to Japan. Okay, Japan
• 28:36
  has incredibly strict personal information protection laws. The Act on
• 28:40
  the Protection of Personal Information heavily restricts how government entities,
• 28:44
  including the police, can store and share an individual's biometric data.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: So they can't just share it.
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: They are legally restricted from sharing an individual's personal information,
• 28:53
  including a suspect's DNA profile, without explicit consent or incredibly
• 28:58
  specific legal workarounds.
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: Wait, I'm confused, even for a mass murderer. If you
• 29:02
  have the DNA of a guy who slaughtered for people,
• 29:05
  you can't just plug it into a global database.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: It sounds absurd to Western ears, but yes, even for
• 29:09
  a mass murderer. The DNA collected from the crime scene
• 29:12
  was analyzed by an internal forensic department of the Japanese police.
• 29:16
  They had the sequence, but officially, legally, because of privacy
• 29:20
  laws designed to prevent government overreach, they could not release
• 29:23
  those detailed results to the public. More importantly, they could
• 29:27
  not submit that DNA profile to international databases like Interpol
• 29:31
  or the FBI's code is system for broad international crowdsourcing.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: So if the government legally couldn't release it, how does
• 29:40
  the public know so much about the killer's DNA? Because
• 29:43
  the documentary is and articles talk about it extensively.
• 29:47
  Speaker 2: As investigative journalist Nicholas o'brigan found out during his research
• 29:51
  for Faceless, every single piece of DNA insight the public
• 29:55
  has was strategically leaked to the press by frustrated.
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: Investigators AAH, so they bypassed the law.
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: The detectives working the case knew the law was protecting
• 30:04
  a killer, so they illegally leaked the ancestry profiles to journalists,
• 30:08
  hoping a public tip would bypass the legal restrictions.
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: But because it was never officially legally submitted to global databases,
• 30:15
  they couldn't use it to run international familial DNA searches.
• 30:19
  They couldn't do what investigators in the US did to
• 30:22
  catch the Golden State killer, uploading the profile to commercial
• 30:26
  genealogy sites like twenty three and meters or ancestry to
• 30:29
  find third cousins.
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: The DNA was a perfect key, but the Japanese legal
• 30:34
  system prevented them from trying it in any doors.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: And that is how a killer leaves his literal DNA,
• 30:40
  perfectly preserved fingerprints and the close off his back, and
• 30:44
  still isn't in a single actionable database. Are we dealing
• 30:48
  with a ghost?
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: For a long time, it felt like the Tokyo police
• 30:51
  were chasing exactly that a ghost. They were releasing the
• 30:55
  composite photos of the clothing to the media. They even
• 30:58
  released a list of TV programs playing that night, begging
• 31:01
  the public for any memory, any tiny detail.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: And nothing came.
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: Event nothing.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: It wasn't until the forensic teams dug deeper into two
• 31:08
  very specific, easily overlooked items that the case suddenly ripped
• 31:12
  open and expanded globally. Let's talk about the shoes.
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: First, bloody footprints we mentioned earlier. Footprint analysts didn't just
• 31:19
  guess the shoe. By analyzing the exact millimeter measurements of
• 31:23
  the tread patterns, the distance between the ridges, and the
• 31:26
  wear patterns on the sole, they definitively identified them as
• 31:30
  Slazenger sneakers, specifically sized twenty seven point five centimeters.
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: When investigators contacted the Slazenger manufacturer to find out where
• 31:38
  these shoes were shipped, they got a massive shock.
• 31:41
  Speaker 2: They really did. The manufacturer's record showed that that specific
• 31:44
  size twenty seven point five centimeters of that specific model
• 31:48
  of Slazenger sneaker had never been.
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: Sold in Japan, not a single pair.
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: They were manufactured in a specific factory and exclusively distributed
• 31:57
  and sold in retail stores in South Korea.
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: Boom, Suddenly, this hyperlocal Tokyo investigation in a quiet suburb
• 32:03
  is an international incident.
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: Completely changes the scope.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: The killer had to have acquired those shoes in South Korea,
• 32:09
  which strongly implies he either lived there, had family there,
• 32:13
  or traveled there recently.
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: And for the detectives this seemed like the silver bullet
• 32:17
  they desperately.
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: Needed because of the databases.
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: Yes, because South Korea operates under a vastly different biometric
• 32:24
  legal framework than Japan. In South Korea, the law mandates
• 32:28
  that all citizens over the age of seventeen must provide
• 32:32
  their fingerprints to a national registry to receive their resident
• 32:36
  registration card.
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: So everyone is in the system.
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: Furthermore, all foreign visitors entering the country are fingerprinted at customs.
• 32:44
  It is a comprehensive nationwide biometric net.
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: So the Japanese police take their perfect fingerprints from the
• 32:51
  ice cream tubs, they navigate the diplomatic channels to hand
• 32:54
  them over to the South Korean government and they say,
• 32:56
  run this. If he bought those shoes in Korea, he
• 32:59
  has to be in your database.
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: The South Korean authorities ran the prints through their entire
• 33:04
  national database of citizens and visitors. The result zero matches.
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: Another completely dead end. The net was empty. I just
• 33:12
  don't understand the mechanics of this. How does someone buy
• 33:15
  shoes in a country that fingerprints everyone and leave no fingerprints.
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: It's baffling.
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: Did he buy the shoes secondhand on a black market?
• 33:22
  Did someone else buy them and smuggle them into Japan
• 33:24
  as a gift.
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: It is utterly maddening for an investigator. It's a clue.
• 33:28
  The points everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: But before the police could even process the failure of
• 33:34
  the South Korean fingerprint search, the second massive breakthrough hit
• 33:38
  and this one was found inside the gray and black
• 33:41
  fanny pack the killer left behind on the floor.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: The forensic team dumps out the contents of this hit bag.
• 33:46
  Inside they find three very disparate things. First, they find
• 33:50
  traces of grip tape, the rough sandpaper like adhesive tape
• 33:54
  you put on the top of a skateboard deck to
• 33:56
  keep your shoes from slipping. Second, they detect trace amount
• 34:00
  of a very specific, very popular men's cologne from the nineties, Trackcarnoore.
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: And Third, a forensic geologist examining the deepest seams of
• 34:09
  the bag finds a few microscopic grains.
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: Of sand, just a tiny, almost imperceptible dusting of sand
• 34:15
  at the very bottom.
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: They send this sand to a specialized geological lab.
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: How do they even test that, like it's just dirt?
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: Well, geologists use techniques like X ray, powdered diffraction, and
• 34:25
  scanning electron microscopy. They aren't just looking at the color
• 34:29
  of the sand. They are analyzing the exact mineral composition,
• 34:33
  the crystalline structure of the quartz, and the specific isotopic
• 34:37
  signatures of the trace elements. Oh wow, it basically creates
• 34:40
  a geological fingerprint. And the lab comes back and says,
• 34:43
  this sand is absolutely not from Japan.
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: It wasn't from Asia at all. The chemical composition of
• 34:47
  the sand perfectly matched the soil from the Mojave Desert
• 34:50
  in the United.
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: States, specifically an area just north of Los Angeles, California,
• 34:55
  right around the perimeter of the Edwards Air Force Base.
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: Let's pause and a appreciate the geographic whiplash this gave
• 35:02
  the Tokio Metropolitan Police.
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: This raises an important question, doesn't it.
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: It gives me vertigo just thinking about it. We have
• 35:08
  a horrific crime scene in an isolated, gentrifying Tokyo neighborhood.
• 35:13
  The killer is wearing mass produced fast fashion from Japan,
• 35:17
  but he's wearing shoes exclusively manufactured and sold in South Korea,
• 35:22
  and he's carrying a fanny pack containing grip tape, nineties
• 35:25
  cologne and sand from a United States military base in
• 35:28
  the California desert.
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: How does one human being navigate these three entirely separate
• 35:34
  geopolitical spheres Korean retail, American military terrain, and a Japanese
• 35:39
  suburb seamlessly, violently and while completely avoiding global biometric databases.
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: It's impossible.
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: It suggests an incredibly transient lifestyle or a level of
• 35:51
  international access that most common burglars simply do not have.
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: And as the lead detectives are trying to figure out
• 35:57
  this bizarre global puzzle, the local investigation is getting completely muddy.
• 36:02
  Because this was the biggest crime in the country. The
• 36:04
  police hotline was receiving over fifteen thousand tips.
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: From the public, which is overwhelming.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: But instead of clarifying things, these tips were creating discrepancies,
• 36:13
  phantom suspects, and red herrings. It's like walking into a
• 36:15
  hall of mirrors where every clue reflects the distorted version
• 36:18
  of the truth, blinding the police with too much light.
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: Let's look at the first distorted reflection, the taxi driver.
• 36:25
  Shortly after the mergers, a local Cokyo taxi driver came
• 36:30
  forward to the police with a highly credible specific report. Okay,
• 36:34
  he claimed he picked up three men in the immediate
• 36:36
  area near the Miyazawa home on the night of the attack,
• 36:40
  right around the time the killer was believed to have escaped.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: And these weren't just three random businessmen. They fit the
• 36:46
  general age and athletic build the police suspected based on
• 36:49
  the clothing sizes, yes, But the detail that made the
• 36:53
  detective's blood run cold. The driver reported that one of
• 36:57
  the men had a severe bleeding injury on his hand,
• 37:00
  and he actually left a physical blood stain on the
• 37:02
  back seat of the taxi.
• 37:04
  Speaker 2: It sounds like a perfect undeniable match, a hand injury
• 37:07
  perfectly consistent with the broken Yanigiba knife we discussed.
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: Earlier ray his hands slipped down the blade.
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: But the massive problem for investigators is that there were
• 37:14
  three of them. Every single piece of forensic evidence inside
• 37:18
  the house, the unified footprint trail, the eaton food, the
• 37:21
  singular DNA profile, the sheer logistics of moving through that
• 37:26
  tight space points definitively to a single, lone killer.
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: So who are these three men in the taxi? Were
• 37:33
  they accomplices who waited outside in the park or is
• 37:36
  it a complete bloody coincidence on New Year's Eve?
• 37:39
  Speaker 2: Then we have distorted reflection. Number two the medical center
• 37:42
  right the day after the murder, December thirty, first, nurses
• 37:46
  at a medical center in Tubunico Station, which is a
• 37:49
  couple hours north of Sedegaya by train, report a very
• 37:53
  strange patient.
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: A man in his mid thirties, walks into the clinic.
• 37:57
  He is alone. He has a severe bone deep laceration
• 38:01
  on his hand. The injury is serious enough to require
• 38:04
  professional medical amension and stitches.
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: Naturally, the medical staff ask him the standard triage question, sir,
• 38:10
  what happened? How did you sustain this injury?
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: And the man flat out refuses to answer. He won't
• 38:15
  give them a cover story, He won't speak, He just
• 38:16
  wants it stitched up.
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: His behavior was so erratic and suspicious that the medical
• 38:20
  staff immediately reported into the local police.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: Again, it fits the profile perfectly, a lone man the
• 38:26
  right approximate age, fleeing north on a train system seeking
• 38:30
  treatment for a catastrophic hand injury the morning after a
• 38:34
  brutal knife fight.
• 38:35
  Speaker 2: But despite this incredibly strong lead, the man vanishes into
• 38:39
  the transient population of the train system and the police
• 38:43
  can never track him down to conclusively link his blood
• 38:46
  to the set of guosine.
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: And finally, reflection number three, the handkerchiefs.
• 38:51
  Speaker 2: This is a weird one.
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: Among the pile of clothes the killer neatly folded and
• 38:55
  left behind, were two handkerchiefs. One was perfectly intact, but
• 38:59
  the the other one had a hole deliberately cut right
• 39:02
  through the dead center of the fabric.
• 39:04
  Speaker 2: This completely baffled the forensics team. They couldn't figure out
• 39:07
  its utility. They actually released photos of this modified handkerchief
• 39:10
  to the public, asking does anyone know why someone would
• 39:13
  alter a handkerchief like this?
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: The public responded with two main theories. The first theory
• 39:18
  came from the local fishing community. They told police it's
• 39:21
  a specific technique used by tuna fishermen or fishmongers. When
• 39:25
  you were getting a massive slippery fish. You cut a
• 39:29
  hole in a rag, slip it over the handle of
• 39:31
  your knife, and it acts as a makeshift crossguard. It
• 39:35
  gives you a rock solid grip so your blood slicked
• 39:38
  hand doesn't slide down onto the sharp blade.
• 39:41
  Speaker 2: Which is a fascinating theory because it implies a killer
• 39:44
  with professional, specialized knife skills.
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: A tuna fisherman grip suggests premeditation and a chilling level
• 39:50
  of practical blue collar violence. It aligns with the use
• 39:54
  of the sashimi knife.
• 39:55
  Speaker 2: But the second theory from the public suggests the handkerchief
• 39:58
  was used as a makeshift mask to cover his face,
• 40:01
  with the hole cut for an eye or for breathing.
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: But if he was wearing a mask to hide his identity,
• 40:06
  why did he take it off, leave it at the scene,
• 40:09
  and proceed to leave his unmasked saliva, sweat, and fingerprints
• 40:13
  on literally every surface in the house. It contributed the
• 40:16
  very idea of concealment.
• 40:18
  Speaker 2: You see the investigator's dilemma. The taxi driver implies a
• 40:22
  gang of accomplices, the medical station implies a lone panic escape.
• 40:26
  The handkerchief implies a professional fish cutter.
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: It's like having three different jigsaw puzzles dumped on the
• 40:31
  same table. The evidence is actively fighting itself, exactly with
• 40:35
  the evidence creating more fog than clarity. The police and
• 40:38
  amateur sleuths had to start building broader theories from the
• 40:41
  ground up, trying to find a narrative framework that could
• 40:44
  hold all these contradictory facts, and the first step in
• 40:47
  that process was systematically deconstructing the weaker theories.
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: Let's start with the most common assumption when police arrive
• 40:55
  at a dead family in a house a burglary gone wrong.
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: It's the defas false starting point for any detective. But
• 41:02
  in this specific case, the burglary theory falls apart almost
• 41:05
  immediately under basic behavioral scrutiny.
• 41:08
  Speaker 2: It just doesn't fit.
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: First, look at the timing. A professional burglar targets a
• 41:12
  home when it is empty, usually the middle of the day,
• 41:15
  when people are at work, or when a family is
• 41:17
  clearly out of town on vacation. Breaking into a home
• 41:20
  late in the evening on a major holiday weekend absolutely
• 41:23
  guarantees that the house is full of people.
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: Second, the execution of the trime. If your primary goal
• 41:29
  is to steal property and you accidentally encounter people, your
• 41:32
  priority is to demand the safe or the cash box.
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: You use the threat of violence to extract wealth.
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: You do not start your robbery by silently creeping into
• 41:41
  a six year old's room and spending the time and
• 41:44
  physical effort to strangle a sleeping child who poses zero
• 41:47
  threat to your theft.
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: Exactly, the risk to reward ratio is entirely inverted. And Third,
• 41:52
  the actual theft itself makes no sense. The money right
• 41:56
  he did rifle through their documents and He did take
• 41:59
  around one hundred fifty thousand yen, which is roughly fifteen
• 42:02
  hundred dollars, but he actively ignored and left behind nearly
• 42:06
  two thousand dollars in cash that was lying around the
• 42:08
  house and plane sight.
• 42:09
  Speaker 2: He dumped valuable paperwork in the bathtub.
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: A burglar takes the money and runs. They don't eat
• 42:14
  ice cream while leaving stacks of cash on the kitchen table.
• 42:17
  Speaker 2: So the classic burglary is out. What about a serial
• 42:20
  killer or a psychopath just a random, horrific act of
• 42:24
  senseless violence by someone entirely disconnected from the family.
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: This theory holds a lot more water psychologically. The absolute
• 42:31
  lack of remorse, the brazenness of staying in the house
• 42:33
  for hours, the extreme overkill. These are classic hallmarks of
• 42:37
  severe psychopathy and disorganized serial violence.
• 42:40
  Speaker 2: And particularly the violence directed at the women. As we
• 42:45
  discussed the post mortem beating of an eight year old
• 42:48
  girl knocking her.
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: Teeth out, That isn't just killing to silence a witness.
• 42:52
  That is a manifestation of deep, virulent rage or sadism.
• 42:57
  Speaker 2: It heavily suggests the killer wasn't there for their He
• 43:01
  was there for them. He wanted to enact violence for
• 43:04
  the sake of violence. But usually serial killers with this
• 43:09
  level of extreme pathology have a pattern. They have previous
• 43:12
  victims where they escalated their violence, or subsequent victims where
• 43:16
  they refine their technique.
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: They don't just stop.
• 43:19
  Speaker 2: This killer seems to have materialized out of thin air,
• 43:22
  committed the crime of the century with massive forensic sloppiness,
• 43:25
  and then vanished forever without ever striking again. That is
• 43:29
  incredibly rare in criminal profiling.
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: Which leads us to the most mundane yet heavily investigated
• 43:34
  theory of the early two thousands, the skater grudge.
• 43:37
  Speaker 2: Ah.
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: This theory stems entirely from a single documented incident just
• 43:41
  a few days before the.
• 43:42
  Speaker 2: Murders, as we established. Soshigaya Park right behind the house
• 43:45
  was expanding and the empty concrete areas had become a
• 43:49
  very popular unofficial hangout for local skateboarders.
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: They were loud, they were disruptive late at night, and
• 43:55
  Mikia Miyazawa, being a concerned father of a child with
• 43:58
  developmental sensitivities, went out and made a formal noise complaint
• 44:02
  against them.
• 44:03
  Speaker 2: He confronted them directly.
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: So the theory goes Mikiyo yells at the skaters, the
• 44:07
  skaters get irractionally angry, and they decide to retaliate. And surprisingly,
• 44:12
  some of the physical evidence actually aligns perfectly with this.
• 44:16
  The clothing, the clothing left behind, the crusher bucket hat,
• 44:19
  the three quarter sleeve baseball shirt, the unic Ulo jacket
• 44:23
  was the absolute uniform of Japanese skate culture in the
• 44:27
  year two thousand.
• 44:28
  Speaker 2: And don't forget the Fannie pack. Inside they found actual
• 44:31
  skateboard grip tape. Add to that, the taxi driver's report
• 44:34
  of three young men fleeing the area and suddenly a
• 44:37
  gang of vengeful, adrenaline fueled skaters sounds incredibly plausible.
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: If we actually evaluate the psychological profile of this theory,
• 44:45
  I feel like it completely falls apart.
• 44:47
  Speaker 2: It does. It requires a massive, almost absurd leap in
• 44:51
  behavioral logic. We're talking about a simple noise complaint a
• 44:54
  dad yelled at some kids to keep it down. Yeah,
• 44:57
  to suggest that a group of teenagers or young men
• 44:59
  in their early twenties escalated a mundane dispute over noise
• 45:03
  into the methodical brutal annihilation of an entire family, including
• 45:07
  strangling a six year old and the post mortem mutilation
• 45:10
  of a little girl is wildly disproportionate.
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: Teenagers might slash your tires, vanialize your car, or throw
• 45:17
  a rock through a window. They don't systematically slaughter for
• 45:20
  people with a culinary knife and then casually eat their groceries.
• 45:23
  Speaker 2: When police interviewed the local skaters, they found a lot
• 45:26
  of petty vandalism, but absolutely nothing to connect them to
• 45:29
  the profound level of sociopathic violence seen in that house.
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: So we dismantle the burglar. The serial killer lacks a pattern,
• 45:37
  and the sayer teenagers don't fit the psychological profile of
• 45:40
  a mass murderer. We are forced to look at the
• 45:42
  more complex, far fetched theories, the international ones, theories that
• 45:46
  try to explain the international anomalies, the Korean shoes and
• 45:50
  the California sand and this leads us to the leaked
• 45:53
  DNA ancestry profile.
• 45:55
  Speaker 2: This is where the investigation gets highly scientific and within Japan,
• 45:59
  deeply controversial. When the police forensics team analyzed the killer's DNA,
• 46:04
  they weren't just looking for a simple codis match. They
• 46:08
  look at the deep genetic markers to determine his biological ancestry.
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: And the results they leaked to the press were startling.
• 46:14
  Very explain how they do this. How do you extract
• 46:17
  ancestry from blood on a bandage?
• 46:19
  Speaker 2: They look at two specific things, mitochondrial DNA, which has
• 46:23
  passed down almost unchanged from the mother, and the Y chromosome,
• 46:26
  which has passed down from the father. By sequencing these,
• 46:29
  they identified specific happlogroups, genetic populations that share a common ancestor.
• 46:34
  They determined that the killer was definitively of mixed ethnicity.
• 46:38
  His maternal mitochondrial DNA indicated a mother of Southern European descent,
• 46:42
  likely from the Mediterranean region, but his.
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: Paternal DNA the Y chromosome indicated an East Asian.
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: Father correct, and the paternal markers were a specific applogroup
• 46:52
  that is widespread but statistically distinct. Those specific genetic markers
• 46:57
  are found in about one in thirteen Japanese people, one
• 47:00
  in ten Chinese people, and roughly one in four Korean people.
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this. We have a Southern European mother
• 47:06
  and an East Asian, statistically leaning Korean father. When you
• 47:10
  combine this mixed race profile with the forensic geology report
• 47:14
  of sand from the Edwards Air Force Base in California,
• 47:17
  a massive new theory emerges the military phantom.
• 47:21
  Speaker 2: The military theory posits that the killer was either a
• 47:23
  member of the United States military or the mixed race
• 47:26
  child of a military family. Edward's Air Force Base is
• 47:29
  a massive installation in the Mohave Desert. The sand the
• 47:32
  theory suggests the killer lived or served there, picking up
• 47:35
  the highly specific sand in the seams of his bag.
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: And how does a guy from California get to a
• 47:39
  suburb in Tokyo.
• 47:40
  Speaker 2: Well, just about an hour away from the Miyazawa home
• 47:43
  is the Yokota Air Base, a major US military installation
• 47:46
  in Japan. It neatly connects the geographic dots that otherwise
• 47:50
  make no sense if he was the mixed race child
• 47:53
  of a US soldier and a Japanese or Korean woman.
• 47:56
  It explains several critical anomalies in the case. What First,
• 48:01
  his physical capabilities scaling a second story exterior wall and
• 48:06
  brutally overpowering a grown man with enough force to snap
• 48:09
  a steel blade requires military level fitness, intense training, or
• 48:13
  sheer youthful strength.
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: Second, it explains the linguistic element. He clearly knew enough
• 48:19
  Japanese to sort through their personal documents deciding what to
• 48:22
  keep and what to dump in the tub right.
• 48:24
  Speaker 2: If he grew up with a Japanese or Korean parent
• 48:27
  on a base in Japan, he would be culturally fluent
• 48:30
  and comfortable navigating a Tokyo suburban night.
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: And crucially, it provides a very elegant answer for why
• 48:36
  his fingerprints in DNA aren't in standard Japanese or South
• 48:39
  Korean civilian databases.
• 48:40
  Speaker 2: If he was born on a military base or lived
• 48:42
  his entire life within the closed ecosystem of the US
• 48:45
  military infrastructure, his biometric data wouldn't necessarily be shared with
• 48:49
  local municipal police forces in Tokyo or Soul in the
• 48:52
  same way as standard citizens would be.
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: He exists in a parallel, untouchable system. It's an incredibly
• 48:59
  compelling theory. It ties the microscarpic sand, the extreme physical strength,
• 49:04
  the language skills, and the missing database records into one
• 49:07
  surprisingly neat package.
• 49:08
  Speaker 2: It really does.
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: But it's not the only theory that uses this specific
• 49:12
  international data formia Ichi Hashi, the journalist who wrote a
• 49:17
  highly detailed book on the case, proposed an even darker,
• 49:20
  more conspiratorial variation, the hit Man theory.
• 49:24
  Speaker 2: Ichihashi looks at the macroeconomics of the situation the delayed
• 49:27
  move of the Miyazawa family. The city of Tokyo is
• 49:30
  aggressively trying to expand Soshigaya Park.
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: Real estate developers, construction firms, and municipal bureaucrats are eager
• 49:37
  to move forward with a multi million yen project.
• 49:39
  Speaker 2: But Yasuko is holding out, legally delaying her move to
• 49:43
  protect her son's routine. They are literally the last house
• 49:46
  on the block standing in the way of progress.
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: Ichi Hashi theorizes that someone in that chain of development
• 49:51
  grew impatient. Time is money in Tokyo real estate, so
• 49:54
  to force the issue to literally clear the land and
• 49:57
  send a message, they hired a professional hit man.
• 50:00
  Speaker 2: And based on the DNA markers leaning heavily Korean and
• 50:04
  the Korean exclusive slazenger shoes, ichi Hayashi suggests they hired
• 50:08
  a South Korean ex military operative or a fixer from
• 50:11
  the criminal underworld.
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? Because I have to
• 50:15
  forcefully push back on Ichihashi's theory here. Fair enough, if
• 50:19
  you are a cold calculating ex military hit man hired
• 50:23
  by a corporate entity to speed up a municipal real
• 50:26
  estate deal, why on earth are you eating the family's
• 50:30
  ice cream with your bare hands.
• 50:31
  Speaker 2: The behaviors just don't align.
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: Why are you taking a nap on their sofa? Why
• 50:35
  are you browsing a local theater website on their computer
• 50:38
  for an hour? And most importantly, why are you leaving
• 50:40
  a literal mountain of your own blood, saliva, and feces
• 50:43
  at the scene.
• 50:44
  Speaker 2: Professional would never do that.
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: That is the exact opposite of a professional hit. A
• 50:47
  professional makes it look like an accident or a simple robbery,
• 50:50
  and they leave absolutely no trace. They do not leave
• 50:53
  a DNA buffet in their entire wardrobe behind.
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: Your pushback is entirely justified, and it's the main reason
• 50:59
  criminal profiler reject the hit man theory. It provides a
• 51:02
  very clean, logical mode of money in real estate, but
• 51:05
  it completely fails to account for the chaotic, deeply unprofessional,
• 51:09
  and psychologically disturbed behavior at the crime scene.
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: A hit man kills and leads.
• 51:14
  Speaker 2: This killer lingered, desecrated the space, and acted with bizarre,
• 51:19
  impulsive intimacy.
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to our final theory, and this one
• 51:23
  comes from Nicholas Obergon's deep dive investigation on the Faceless podcast.
• 51:28
  It's the most chilling and perhaps the most bizarre theory
• 51:31
  of all the two Chen prophecy and the miner.
• 51:34
  Speaker 2: To understand this theory, we have to take a detour
• 51:36
  into the dark corners of the early Internet. In the
• 51:39
  year two thousand, two Chan, which later evolved into the
• 51:42
  infamous five chan, was an anonymous Japanese text board.
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: It was a chaotic, unregulated digital wild west where people
• 51:49
  could post absolutely anything without consequence or identity verification.
• 51:53
  Speaker 2: During his research, Obergon uncovered a deeply disturbing, buried post
• 51:56
  on two chan. It was written by an anonymous user
• 51:59
  going by they handle mister Kormutu, who explicitly claimed to
• 52:02
  be a thirteen year old.
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: Boy, and the content was awful.
• 52:05
  Speaker 2: The post was part of a longer vile thread where
• 52:09
  anonymous users were graphically discussing their experiences with animal cruelty
• 52:13
  and mutilation.
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: In psychiatric evaluation, the McMillan triad, specifically the escalation from
• 52:19
  animal cruelty to violence against humans, is a well documented
• 52:23
  psychological pathway for future sociopaths.
• 52:26
  Speaker 2: But it's the specific content of mister Kormutsu's post that
• 52:29
  makes your blood run cold when you look at the dates.
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: I'm going to read the exact translation of the post.
• 52:34
  Listen to the specifics It says, Now, when I see
• 52:36
  the happy family next door, I want to do something
• 52:39
  like that Oita family murder case. The closing date is
• 52:42
  December thirty first, at eleven to fifty nine pm. I'm
• 52:45
  thinking about killing it off before the twenty first century arrives.
• 52:49
  Speaker 2: There is so much psychological and historical data to unpack
• 52:52
  in those three sentences. First, the specific reference to the
• 52:56
  Ouida family murder case. Remind us what that was for context,
• 52:59
  This was a real horrific event in Japan where a
• 53:02
  fifteen year old boy attacked an entire family in their
• 53:04
  home with a knife, killing three and critically injuring three others.
• 53:08
  It was a massive national news story that sparked a
• 53:11
  nationwide moral panic about juvenile crime and the youth of
• 53:15
  Japan losing their minds.
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: This anonymous poster, this self proclaimed thirteen year old, is
• 53:21
  actively idolizing that crime. He says he wants to recreate it,
• 53:24
  targeting the happy family next door, and he sets a
• 53:27
  rigid deadline December thirty first. He wants to do it
• 53:30
  before the twenty first century arrives.
• 53:33
  Speaker 2: And the timing is the most terrifying part. Of this
• 53:35
  entire theory. This is posted on the two chan message
• 53:37
  board on December twenty seven, two thousand, exactly three days
• 53:41
  before the Miazaua family was slaughtered.
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: Is it possible? I mean really, is it possible? Could
• 53:46
  the most brutal complex murder and modern Japanese history have
• 53:50
  been committed by a literal child, a thirteen year old
• 53:53
  boy acting out in internet fantasy.
• 53:55
  Speaker 2: From a purely investigative standpoint, the minor theory actually elegantly
• 53:58
  solves a few of our biggest logistical nightmares. Why wasn't
• 54:01
  his perfect fingerprint in the national database because he's a miner,
• 54:05
  He's never been arrested or fingerprinted for an ID card?
• 54:09
  Why did he squeeze the ice cream out of the
• 54:10
  bottom of the tub and eat it with his hands
• 54:12
  instead of using a bowl like an adult because he
• 54:15
  is a child.
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: Some investigators even pointed out that the forensic analysis of
• 54:19
  his last meal, the string beans and sesame seeds, supports
• 54:24
  this right. That is a very common, simple home cooked
• 54:27
  side dish that a Japanese mother would prepare for her
• 54:30
  kid's dinner. It implies he wasn't a drifter. He was
• 54:33
  still living at home, eating meals prepared by his parents
• 54:36
  just hours before he went out to kill.
• 54:38
  Speaker 2: However, just like every other theory, the contradictions are massive
• 54:41
  and arguably disqualifying. If he's a thirteen year old Japanese
• 54:45
  kid living with his mom, how did he acquire slazenger
• 54:48
  shoes that are only sold in South Korea?
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: How did he get trace amounts of sand from a
• 54:52
  US military base in California in his fanny pack?
• 54:55
  Speaker 2: And the physical reality of the crime itself, how does
• 54:58
  a thirteen year old boy have the brute physical strength
• 55:01
  to scale a second story exterior wall, break through a window,
• 55:05
  and overpower Michio Miazawa.
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: A forty four year old grown man fighting desperately for
• 55:10
  his family's.
• 55:10
  Speaker 2: Life with such overwhelming force that a steel knife blade
• 55:14
  snaps off inside a skull.
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: It strains credulity to the breaking point. A thirteen year
• 55:19
  old simply doesn't possess that kind of kinetic power.
• 55:22
  Speaker 2: Most seasoned investigators ultimately dismiss the two chan post as
• 55:26
  an incredibly dark, horrific coincidence, an edgy, disturbed teenager posting
• 55:31
  violent fantasies online that tragically mirrored a real world event
• 55:36
  just days later.
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: But because they have absolutely no other viable suspects. They
• 55:40
  can never fully close the door on it. The Internet
• 55:43
  post remains a ghost haunting the case file, and that.
• 55:46
  Speaker 2: Ultimately is the grand tragedy of the Setagaya case. Every
• 55:49
  single theory has a fatal flaw, Every piece of physical
• 55:52
  evidence contradicts.
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: Another, and so the investigation simply spirals outward, eating up
• 55:57
  massive amounts of municipal resources, manpower, or in time without
• 56:01
  ever moving forward.
• 56:02
  Speaker 2: Let's look at the sheer, staggering scale of the aftermath
• 56:05
  to understand how much this case broke the system. Over
• 56:09
  the last twenty four years, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police have collected, processed,
• 56:14
  and cataloged over sixteen thousand individual pieces of evidence related
• 56:19
  to this single house.
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: They have received and actively followed up on more than
• 56:23
  fifteen thousand tips from the public.
• 56:25
  Speaker 2: They have assigned at various points, and estimated two hundred
• 56:28
  and fifty thousand investigators to work on this case. A
• 56:31
  quarter of a million police officers have touched this file,
• 56:34
  read these reports, and walked away baffled.
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: The government even authorized a reward of twenty million yen,
• 56:40
  which is roughly one hundred and ninety thousand US dollars
• 56:43
  for any information leading to an arrest. It remains the
• 56:45
  largest reward ever offered by the Japanese police for a
• 56:48
  single crime.
• 56:49
  Speaker 2: And the impact of this case went far beyond the
• 56:51
  police Department's budget. It actually changed the legal fabric of
• 56:55
  the country.
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: The statute of limitations right yes.
• 56:58
  Speaker 2: For decades, like the Association of Crime Victims advocated for
• 57:03
  legal reform, pointing out the absurdity of letting a killer
• 57:06
  go free simply because the statutory clock ran out. In
• 57:10
  twenty ten, directly fueled by the relentless public outrage surrounding
• 57:14
  the impending statute of limitations on the Setagaya murders, the
• 57:17
  Japanese government amended the Code of Criminal Procedure. They officially
• 57:21
  abolished the statute of limitations for murder and other crimes
• 57:24
  resulting in death.
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: The legal shift means that if they find this guy
• 57:27
  tomorrow or ten years from now, he can still be
• 57:30
  put on trial and sent to jail. The clock has stopped.
• 57:33
  He is never safe.
• 57:34
  Speaker 2: But while the law evolved to keep hope alive, the
• 57:36
  human pain remains completely frozen in time.
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: It does, and the devastating human toll of this twenty
• 57:42
  four year wait is embodied by Setsuko Miyazawa. She is
• 57:45
  Mikiyo's mother. She is now ninety two years old, and
• 57:48
  she is still waiting for answers.
• 57:49
  Speaker 2: Despite her advanced age, despite the decades of crushing disappointment
• 57:53
  from false leads, she still regularly stands the entrance of
• 57:56
  the Kitosi Karchyama train station in Setagaya.
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: She hands out fit physical flyers to commuters, hoping that
• 58:02
  someone somewhere remembers a detail from twenty four years ago.
• 58:06
  Speaker 2: She is trapped in an unending loop of grief, unable
• 58:10
  to lay her son, her daughter in law, and her
• 58:12
  grandchildren to rest because justice hasn't been served.
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: And just as she is frozen in her grief, the
• 58:18
  physical house itself is frozen in time. The Miyazawa home
• 58:21
  still stands in Kamisoshigaya. It wasn't torn down for the
• 58:25
  park expansion.
• 58:26
  Speaker 2: Instead, it has become a MacB monument to the unsolved.
• 58:29
  A police officer from the Tokyo PD stands guard outside
• 58:33
  that house twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: The path leading up to it is blocked off by barriers.
• 58:39
  It is a terrifying time capsule, preserved exactly as it
• 58:42
  was at the bloody dawn of the new millennium.
• 58:44
  Speaker 2: It is a stark physical reminder in the middle of
• 58:47
  a modern metropolis that the past has never truly gone.
• 58:50
  It just sits there behind police tape, waiting for the
• 58:53
  one piece of evidence that will finally make sense of
• 58:55
  the madness.
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: As we wrap up this deep dive, I want to
• 58:57
  bring it back to you, the listener. We've talked to
• 58:59
  extensively about the contradictory evidence, the international theories, the complex
• 59:03
  DNA science, But I want to leave you with a
• 59:06
  thought based on that chilling two chan post, specifically its
• 59:09
  mention of the impending twenty first century.
• 59:12
  Speaker 2: The timing is incredible.
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: Think about the exact timing of this crime. It is
• 59:17
  the late hours of December thirtieth, bleeding into December thirty first,
• 59:20
  in the year two thousand. The killer is standing inside
• 59:23
  that house. He has just eradicated a family. He is
• 59:26
  eating their food, using their computer, browsing the web. He
• 59:29
  is literally straddling the exact chronological boundary line between a
• 59:33
  dying century and a brand new one.
• 59:35
  Speaker 2: A liminal space exactly.
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: The Miyazas were the last holdouts in a rapidly gentrifying,
• 59:40
  modernizing Tokyo neighborhood. They were the stubborn, physical remnants of
• 59:44
  an older, community focused way of life that the city
• 59:47
  was aggressively bulldozing to make way for the future. Was
• 59:51
  the obliteration of this specific family, this violent, thorough, intimate erasure,
• 59:57
  just a random act of a psychopath, or was it
• 59:59
  something dark, a twisted symbolic erasure of the past by
• 1:00:03
  someone who felt they had no place in the future.
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 2: It's a heavy thought to leve on.
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: We may never know his name, or why he wore
• 1:00:09
  Korean shoes, or how he acquired California sand, but his
• 1:00:12
  actions left a permanent bleeding scar on the psyche of
• 1:00:15
  a nation. It is a chilling, unforgettable reminder that sometimes
• 1:00:19
  the most profound darkness isn't found hiding in the shadows
• 1:00:22
  of a dark alley. Sometimes it is sitting right there,
• 1:00:25
  brightly lit, in a family kitchen, comfortably eating ice cream
• 1:00:28
  at the dawn of a new era.