It took 19 donkey years for Japan to hang one of its serial killers.
Tsutomu Miyazaki, apprehended on July 23, 1989 and only executed on June 17, 2008.
Tsutomu Miyazaki
Background information
Birth name: Tsutomu Miyazaki
Alias(es): Otaku Murderer, Little Girl Murderer, Yūko Imada
Born: August 21, 1962(1962-08-21)
Ōme, Tokyo
Died: June 17, 2008 (aged 45)
Cause of death: hanging
Penalty: death
Killings
Number of victims: 4
Span of killings: August 22, 1988 through July 6, 1989
Country: Japan
State(s): Saitama, Tokyo
Date apprehended: July 23, 1989
Tsutomu Miyazaki (宮﨑 勤, Miyazaki Tsutomu?, August 21, 1962–June 17, 2008), also known as The Otaku Murderer, The Little Girl Murderer, and Dracula, was a Japanese serial killer.
Background
Miyazaki's premature birth left him with deformed hands, which were permanently gnarled and fused directly to the wrists, necessitating him to move his entire forearm in order to rotate the hand. Due to his deformity, he was ostracized when he attended Itsukaichi Elementary School, and consequently kept to himself. Although he was originally a star student, his grades at Meidai Nakano High School dropped dramatically; he had a class rank of 40 out of 56 and did not receive the customary admission to Meiji University. Instead of studying English and becoming a teacher as he originally intended, he attended a local junior college, studying to become a photo-technician.
Life as a serial killer
Between 1988 and 1989, Miyazaki mutilated and killed four girls, ages four to seven; he then sexually molested their corpses. He drank the blood of one victim and ate her hand. The crimes—which, prior to Miyazaki's apprehension and trial were classified "The Little Girl Murders", and would become known as the Tokyo/Saitama Serial Kidnapping Murders of Little Girls (東京・埼玉連続幼女誘拐殺人事件, Tōkyō Saitaima renzoku yōjo yūkai satsujin jiken?)—shocked Saitama Prefecture, which had a long-standing record of low occurrences of crimes against children.
During the day, Miyazaki was a mild-mannered employee. In his own time, he selected children to kill randomly. He terrorized the families of his victims, sending them letters recalling in graphic detail what he had done to their children. To the family of victim Erika Nanba, Miyazaki sent a morbid postcard assembled using words cut out of magazines, spelling out: "Erika. Cold. Cough. Throat. Rest. Death."
He allowed the corpse of his first victim, Mari Konno, to decompose in the hills near his home, then chopped off the hands and feet, which he kept in his closet, and which were recovered upon his arrest. He charred the remaining bones in his furnace, ground them into powder, and sent them to her family in a box, along with several of her teeth, photos of her clothes, and a postcard reading: "Mari. Cremated. Bones. Investigate. Prove."
Police found that the families of the victims had something else in common: they had all been bothered by strange phone calls. The phone would ring, but when answered, the person on the other end (presumably Miyazaki) would say nothing; if they didn't pick it up, the phone would sometimes ring for upwards of 20 minutes.
Arrest
On July 23, 1989, Miyazaki, while attempting to insert a zoom lens into the vagina of a grade school-aged girl in a park near her home, was attacked by the girl's father. Miyazaki fled on foot, but returned to the park to retrieve his car, whereupon he was promptly arrested. A police search of his two-room bungalow turned up a collection of 5,763 videotapes, some containing pornographic anime and slasher films. Interspersed among them was video footage and pictures of his victims. He was also reported to be a fan of horror films and have an extensive collection from this genre. The centerpieces of his collection were the first five Guinea Pig films; he reportedly used the second film in the series, titled Flower of Flesh and Blood, as a template for one of his killings. Miyazaki, who retained a perpetually calm and collected demeanor during his trial, appeared indifferent to his capture.
In 1989, he became to be known as "The Otaku Murderer". His bizarre murders fueled a moral panic against otaku and anime in Japan. However, the reports of him were disputed. For example, Miyazaki was suspected to have many pornographic videos, but Eiji Otsuka suspected in his book that it was the forgery by a photographer, because people wanted to understand Miyazaki under their sense of values. On the other hand, Fumiya Icihashi suspected a part of stereotypes about Miyazaki as the information manipulation of the police because the police wanted to convict Miyazaki for the serial murders.
Following his son's arrest, Miyazaki's father, who had refused to pay for his legal defense, committed suicide in 1994.
Trial and execution
His trial began on March 30, 1990, during which Miyazaki often talked in a nonsensical manner. He blamed his atrocities on a "rat man" alter-ego of himself, a character which he often drew in cartoon-form for the court. Throughout the 1990s, Miyazaki remained incarcerated while Saitama Prefecture put him through a battery of psychiatric evaluations. Teams of psychiatrists from Tokyo University diagnosed Miyazaki as suffering from dissociative identity disorder or extreme schizophrenia. However, the Tokyo district court judged that he was still aware of the gravity and consequences of his crimes and he was therefore accountable for them, sentencing him to death by hanging on April 14, 1997. On June 28, 2001, the Tokyo High Court upheld his death sentence, and on January 17, 2006, the Supreme Court of Justice upheld the original death sentence.
He described his serial murders as "good job" and had never apologized. His crimes remained unforgettable. Child killer Kaoru Kobayashi described himself as "the next Tsutomu Miyazaki or Mamoru Takuma."
Kunio Hatoyama signed his death warrant and Miyazaki was executed by hanging on June 17, 2008. It was suspected that his execution was related with the Akihabara massacre. However, the Ministry of Justice said "We cannot answer."
