Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - The Monster With 21 Faces

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

In 1984, an anonymous group in Japan known as The Monster With 21 Faces tormented police, poisoned candy across the country and kidnapped a man. To this day, their identity and purpose remain one of Japan’s greatest unsolved mysteries. Subscribe on Patreon for bonus content and to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society. Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror. Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by Kaelyn Moore.  Music from Artlist Shownotes: www.heartstartspounding.com/episodes/monster21 

In Japan, it feels like you can't throw a stone without hitting a spirit. When I visited the country in April, I asked locals for ghost stories. And each time I asked, I would see their eyes light up with this mixture of excitement and terror. It seemed like spirits, both good and bad, were everywhere. I heard about demonic women that lived under bridges, about old cemeteries that got rerouted only for anything built on the old burial ground to be haunted.

I heard about a 1,000 year old samurai that won't stop lighting a bank in Tokyo on fire. Some of these spirits tried to earn your trust, some caused property damage. Some of them are more like monsters that can shapeshift. But one night, in a smoky basement bar that only played old vinyl, I heard a story about a different kind of monster. Over a $5 old fashioned that was definitely not made right, but was more importantly, $5.

A kind stranger told me about a 40-year-old story that still haunts Japan to this day. The story I wanna tell you remains one of Japan's greatest unsolved mysteries. It's referred to as the monster with 21 faces. Yet there is no face that we can put to this monster. There's no mugshot to tape up on the wall. Just a dark silhouette of the person.

Or people who shapeshifted like demons to evade police detection as they kidnapped CEOs, poisoned children's candy, and played cat and mouse with police chiefs and Just like the spirits of Japan that roam freely around the city This monster may still be out there As always listener discretion is advised It's that feeling

When the energy and the room shifts When the air gets sucked out of a moment, and everything starts to feel wrong, it's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's seeing, it's when your heart starts pounding. Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I'm your host, Kaelin Moore. This is our community of people who love to follow their dark curiosity wherever it leads them.

And boy oh boy, did this story scratch that part of my brain. If you'd like to dive further into the community, and I hope you do, you can follow the show on Instagram and TikTok at Hurtzarts Pounding for smaller bites of horror, or you can join me on Patreon, where you'll have access to some bonus content for just $3 a month. So, before we begin, I do want to make a correction. In last week's episode, I said that if you fell off the side of the Grand Canyon, you'd hit the ground at 300 miles an hour. My shoddy memory of high school physics failed me. You would actually hit the ground

at only a mere 150 miles an hour. Thank God I'm not taking the SATs anytime soon. Okay, I'm gonna shut up now because this story is so interesting and I want to dive straight into it. The night is March 18th, 1984, and the day is coming to an end for the Izaki family. The family lived in Hiyogo Prefecture just a short train ride away from Osaka, the second largest city in Japan next to Tokyo. A light drizzle falls on the multi-million dollar estate owned by Masahisa Izaki, CEO of the Glico Candy Company.

If you've ever heard of Paki, the slim cookie stick dipped in chocolate, then you know Glico, they're famous for creating the candy. That night, 42-year-old Masahisa Azaki sat soaking in his tub while his wife started putting their children to sleep. What Azaki didn't know was right outside his bathroom window. There were two masked assailants scaling the wall of his estate. Only two people had keys to Azaki's home. Azaki himself and his 70-year-old mother who lived in an in-law's suite behind

his house. The assailant swiftly got over the wall and broke into Izaki's mother's bungalow. They tied her up and told her to not make a sound so they could grab her key to Izaki's home. And then, they went to the front door of the family getting ready for bed, ready for bed, studied their weapons, and just let themselves in. But Azaki didn't hear anything. He didn't hear a sound as they descended upon his wife and eight-year-old daughter, tying them up and locking them inside of the bathroom. He didn't hear a sound as they crept up the stairs towards him, redding their ropes and guns for what was about to happen. He didn't hear a thing until his bathroom door was the own open with a loud bang.

There stood two mid-sized men wearing ski masks. They told him to get out of the bath right now and allowed him to go into his room and change into a towel. But what the assailants didn't realize was the Holmes alarm system registered that the phone lines to the house had been cut and had already alerted police. They pushed their guns into Azaki's chest and told him to hurry. But Azaki tried to fight back. He had been handcuffed by the assailants so in the scuffle he wasn't able to hold onto his towel. And in the end, he was no match for them.

and in the end, he was no match for them. At about 9.30pm, the two attackers hauled the fully-newed CEO out of his home as a red car pulled up from down the street. And just like that, they were off. Police arrived to the scene to find that Azaki's wife had gotten free. She actually hadn't even realized her husband had been carried away until she ran upstairs to find him. But just like the empty bathtub that was the ghost of the struggle, the rest of the house was unfortunately empty of any clues. The police had no leads. However, a few hours later, another glico executive gets a phone call waking him from his slumber. Another Glico executive gets a phone call, waking him from his slumber. When he picks up the receiver, he hears what sounds like a pre-recorded voice being played into the phone. It tells him to go to one specific phone booth in Tokyo.

There, he'd find an envelope with more instructions. And he just went? I shouted at the stranger telling me the story. By this point, I'm starting to feel that $5 old fashioned. Can you believe this, though? Maybe it's just me, but I would have locked every door in my home and hid in my closet with a baseball bat. But this man went, at 140 in the morning, through the light drizzle of early spring. And when he arrived at the phone booth,

Sandwiched in between the phone books was a brown parcel and inside was a note that read, Tell anything to the police, I will definitely kill the hostage. I have friends at the police and I will know immediately if you try to trace me. I won't negotiate. Just listen to what I say."

The note then asked for one billion yen, which is over $19 million in today's US currency. At the time, it was the most amount of money ever demanded in Aransom. By a lot, it was almost a cartoonish amount of money. By that point, hundreds of police officers were deployed to start searching for whoever was doing this. It was believed that the car carrying Azaki was heading east towards Osaka, but by the time they figured that out, it had been hours since Azaki was pushed into the car. That hunch was correct. In the Osaka prefecture, Azaki was getting

pulled from the car and pushed into an isolated warehouse. He was dressed in a large overcoat with a bag over his head. He was told that his eight-year-old daughter had also been kidnapped and was in another warehouse, even though that wasn't true. For the next 65 hours, he was tied to the inside of the structure and fed juice and crackers while the thieves waited for their ransom money. However, on the third day of his captivity, the CEO started to figure out that the guns that they had broken into his house with were fake. He knew he would have to test this theory if he was going to escape, so after they came in to feed him and retie his ropes, he wiggled his way out of the bindings, kicked down the door of the warehouse, and booked it.

He made it to a payphone to call his wife and tell her that he had escaped before any of the three men were able to catch him. No money had ever been delivered for his ransom. Izaki made it home safely but the entire country was shaken from this event. Crimes like this were not common at all in Japan. At the time that this occurred, Japan was an incredibly safe country, often referred to as a heaven for cops because there just wasn't much violent crime to respond to. Violent criminals were discouraged from committing crimes because of how high the Japanese police's solving rate was. Ninety-seven point-one percent of murders were solved in Japan compared to

just 73% in America at the same time. So now people were talking. They thought that maybe this was an inside job from Glico or the police or that maybe the owner of the warehouse had something to do with it. There was no way to know that though because the Japanese police still didn't have any leads as to who these men were, which was highly embarrassing at the time. Especially to officer Shouji Yamamoto, one of the head police officers assigned to the case. He was obsessed with the physical evidence of the case, rather than the leads being called

in, which was an old school way of solving crimes in Japan. He thought that hyper-analysing items like the coat that the kidnappers gave a zaki would turn up something, but all of the physical evidence that the police could find was either stolen or mass-produced. There was no way to trace any of it. The following month, April, proved to be worse for the police. A bottle of eye drops filled with hydrochloric acid and a letter demanding 60 million yen, which was quite the discount from 1 billion yen, arrived at a Zaki's home and days later, two fires were lit at the Glico headquarters.

Police arranged to hand off the money to the criminals on April 8th, but when they arrived at the designated time, no one was there to collect the money. They waited for another two hours before leaving. It seemed like if these criminals wanted money, they were not doing a very good job of getting it. Adding salt to the wound on April 8th, a letter addressing the police was sent to local papers. It read, to the Japanese police fools, are you stupid?

There's so many of you, what on earth are you doing? If you are a real pros, try catching me. I'll give you a hint. It's not as obvious relatives, it's not the Nishinomiya police. The car I used was gray. If you want new info, beg for it in the newspaper. After telling you all this, you should be able to catch me. If you don't, you are tax thieves. Shall I kidnap the head director of the prefectural police. This directly called out the police in a very embarrassing way, which went against proper

etiquette in Japan at the time. Officer Yamamoto knew they had to shut down the criminals before it got worse, and then on May 10th, his fears came true. Another letter addressed to the police arrived at local newspapers, but this one came with a serious threat. It read, To the poor policemen, Glico is annoying. So I injected two with .05 grams of hydrogen cyanide in the stores in the area between Nagoya and Okayama. It's not enough to kill, but the target will be hospitalized. After eating Glicco, let's go to the hospital, eat Glicco, and end up in the grave.

Signed, monster with 21 faces. Monster with 21 faces. Also sometimes translated to the mystery man with 21 faces. This was a reference to a children's detective story made popular in the 1950s, the fiend with 20 faces. I think the two of what they were referring to got lost in translation. But we can assume they mean glico products. They were saying that they had poisoned,

glico candy with cyanide and left it in stores for children to find. Cyanide is an incredibly deadly poison, famously used in the Jonestown massacre where 900 cult members ingested flavorade with cyanide in it. For reference of how poisonous cyanide is, cult members that put the liquid in their mouths with the intention to spit it out and run, still died from the poison. Just it touching the inside of their mouth was enough to kill. It's just that deadly. Gligostock plummeted the next day, and almost every Gligoproduct was purged from shelves, hurting the company financially.

Officer Yamamoto started getting the feeling that this was either a disgruntled former employee or a rival shareholder trying to tank the company's value. But both of those leads didn't turn up any suspects. Officer Yamamoto knew they had to act fast. The police still had no leads, they didn't even know if this was one person or multiple people. So he had his officers deployed to search 80,000 homes across Japan to search for anything. They asked residents if they knew any information about who was doing this. To many Japanese citizens, it kind of felt like the police were outsourcing the investigation to them.

No one they interviewed had any information as to who was responsible for the threats, but everyone was very aware of what was going on. They had read about how Yamamoto and other officers spent months chasing leads that turned up nothing, like still searching for where the coat Azaki was given was from, and laboring over what kind of typewriter the letters were being written on. Why wasn't more being done they wondered? Why were the tips being called in ignored? With every door Yamamoto went to, he could feel the pressure mounting. But things still got worse. On June 22nd, 1984, another letter arrived at another CEO's door.

This time, it was addressed to Takashi Haga, the CEO of Marudai Food. It read, well because of Glico's mishaps. You should give us some of the money you have due to their failures. Give us 50 million yen with used 10,000 yen bills, put 10 million yen in each white bag, and wait at Ota's house in Nichiyoshi Dai. Have a company's driver in a white car waiting at the front of the house. On Thursday, June 28th, at 8pm, I will call Ota's number. Say, it's Yamada, when you pick up the phone. I'll tell you where the letter is. If you don't listen to what we say in Obeyes, you'll fall into the same situation as Glico.

If you tell the police, we'll abduct your employees. We're stronger than the police. We have hydrochloric acid, potassium cyanide, dynamite, and guns. It's super easy to put potassium cyanide in things. Signed. Monster with 21 faces. Ota, the man they were referring to, was the managing director of Mauro Diffudes. He would be getting the phone call that would direct him to a letter that had further instructions. Upon receiving this letter,

Haga immediately called the Osaka police. To Haga, this was a mounting threat that could destroy his business. He saw how the threat of poisoning hurt Glico. But to the police, this was their chance to catch the criminals. They could be face-to-face with the monster posing as regular people. They decided they were going to go undercover to

deliver the money and make and arrest in the process. The night of June 28th, a company driver sat in a white corolla outside of Otis House. The Osaka police were standing by, waiting to carry out the mission once Oda got the phone call with instructions on where to find the letter. At 803 Ota's phone rings, he picks it up and says, it's Yamada. And then he hears the sound of a woman's voice. But it sounds like it's been pre-recorded and is being played into the receiver. She says, the back of the tourist information map at the City Bus Platform south of Mitsui Bank on Sabo's department store in Takatsuki. An undercover police officer dressed as Ota loads into the Karola and takes

off with the money towards Takatsuki. He had even shaved his head to look like the balding managing director. At 816, the undercover police officer seized a letter taped to the back of the map. In it, there was a train ticket and instructions to load onto the last car of the 819 train bound for Kyoto. He was to sit in a specific window seat until he saw a white flag be raised outside of the train along the track.

Then, he would lower the window and throw out the bags of money. The cop dressed as Ota, who I'll call Dikoio-ta, was accompanied by seven other undercover police officers. Together, they boarded the next train for Kyoto, trying to not look over their shoulders and give themselves away. The monster could be anywhere, watching them.

They had to keep their heads down and pretend to be the commuters they were dressed as. Once on the train, the officers were all instructed by their police captain to sit in the first car. Decoi Ota was specifically instructed to not sit in the seat that the thieves wanted him to sit in. Their hope was that the monster, if on the train, would look to his seat and see that he wasn't there. This would force the monster to get up and move about the train looking for Ota, revealing

himself. So when everyone was in their seats, they started looking around at the other people on the train to see if anyone looks suspicious. It was almost 9 pm on a Thursday, but the air was still hot and humid. There were some businessmen getting home late with their suit jackets off to try to combat the heat. There were also some teens running a muck. Other than that, it was pretty empty.

But investigators eyes widened when they saw a man about 30 years old operating a big radio with a long antenna Even in the 80s this was super uncommon the police wondered if he was maybe trying to match His radio signal to the police scanner, but there wasn't much else very sketchy about him then One of the cops noticed a man in the car behind them, someone who stuck out even more than the man with the radio. Standing one car down was a man, 35 to 45 years old, wearing a grey suit and clear rimmed glasses. He also had permed hair. On him, he had a black umbrella and a folded newspaper. He was the only man with a suit jacket on which was strange considering how hot it was.

His most defining feature, however, was his eyes. Through his glasses, investigators said that he had the eyes of a fox scanning anxiously through the cars of people. Once he seized the undercover cop with the bag of cash, he locks in on him like a predator and walks forward into the car with all of the investigators. If he had any idea, it's unclear, but he stands about six feet away from the decoy Ota in the bag of cash until the train stops in Kyoto. Though multiple police officers were watching the windows, no one saw a white flag

indicating it was time to dump the money, so they all exited the train at the end of the line, cash in hand. The man with the radio and the Foxide man also exited. Two officers stayed with the radio man after exiting, but they were informed to let him go when one of them called headquarters on a payphone. It didn't seem like he was a real suspect. The Foxide man, however, followed Dikoi Ota like a hawk, his eyes never leaving him. He watched as the Dikoi Ota walked down a flight of stairs to a lower platform. Once down there, Dikoi Ota ran into a restroom and the Foxide man stood behind a pillar, watching the restroom door with that predator glare.

One of the investigators found a pay phone and called their precinct. They wanted permission to stop the Foxide man. They had him right in their grips, but they were told to stand down. He's right there, why didn't they just get him? I shouted at the stranger inside of the bar. Okay, at this point I was on my third $5 old-fashioned, except this one was pink, so I had no idea what the bartender thought he was making me. But I was starting to get frustrated. And maybe I understood why the people of Japan were frustrated, too. All of these resources

were being poured into getting this guy, and he's right here, six feet in front of them, and they don't do anything. I threw down my Maraschino cherry and disbelief. But the stranger explained to me that's not really how it works. The police chief wanted them to wait until the Fox-eyed man had touched the duffel bag of cash before closing in on him.

They needed to be sure it was really him. And they thought that moment was coming. Dikoi Ota exited the restroom and sat on a bench holding the bag. The FoxI'd man started circling him like a vulture about to descend on a carcass, about nine feet away from him, but he still wasn't making a move. Maybe he was waiting for the exact right time. Or maybe he was catching onto the fact that this wasn't really the executive he thought he was meeting.

The train back to Takatsuki arrived and everyone. All the investigators, Dikoeyoto with the money and the Foxide man got onto the train. At Takatsuki, they all get off, but the Foxide man then gets back on a train to Kyoto. A few of the officers follow, but now, it feels like he knows they're on his tail. After arriving back in Kyoto, he then goes back to the platform to go back to Takatoki, but when the train comes, he

doesn't get back on. Instead, the Foxide man stands there for a moment, letting the car of people spill out around him. Then he slips away down a staircase. When the police go to follow him, they can't. He's gone. Disappeared into the night. Police sketches of the Fox-eyed man soon litter the city. With each flyer that was hung, the public lost more and more faith in the Osaka police

force. They had the 21-faced monster, or at least one of them right in front of their faces. This nightmare should be over. They shouldn't be fearing their kids buying candy. But just as the name suggests, a monster that can shift identities to fit any situation, the nature of the crimes started morphing as the humid summer faded into autumn. After the train incident, the monster went mostly quiet. Maybe they were afraid that the police were onto them,

or maybe they were just preparing for what was to come. Because up until that point, some of their more dangerous threats seemed empty. No kids had gotten poisoned, no more CEOs were kidnapped. But once October rolled around, the monster was ready to prove how serious he was. The afternoon of October 7, 1984, an employee at a convenience store in Osaka was standing behind the counter

when he hears a woman scream at a child. Put that down, don't touch that! The woman then furiously approaches the employee with a candy bar in her hand. Is this some kind of joke, she asks, thrusting the candy bar at him? It looks like a normal candy bar made by the company Morinaga. But upon second glance, he can see that there's a sticker on the bar, with a message typed out from a typewriter. This has poison in it. If you eat it, you will die. Monster with 21 faces. typed out from a typewriter. This has poison in it. If you eat it, you will die.

Monster with 21 faces. Multiple other convenience stores throughout Hiyogo, Kyoto and Osaka also alerted police that they had candy bars with the typed messages on them. Some of the bars went in for testing and it was confirmed. They all contained lethal doses of cyanide. The next day another typed letter was sent to newspapers, but this time it was addressed to the mothers in Japan. It read, Candy is great. When you think sweets, no matter what you say, it's more inaga, right? We added some special flavor to it.

The flavor of potassium cyanide is a little bitter. We placed 20 pieces between hakata and Tokyo. There are two flavors. Point two grams and point5 grams of acid. After 10 days, we will place 30 of them without any signs across Japan. We are preparing a lot more for later. Looking forward to it, signed, monster with 21 faces. 3500 stores throughout Japan immediately dumped all of their Morinaga inventory. It was devastating to the brand.

Police were back on the case immediately, hunting for clues throughout the convenience stores that had poison candy. But there was nothing, no leads. It was like the poison candy had materialized out of thin air, or worse, been packaged at the Morinaga facility. But then, the family mart and Nishinomia got a hit. They were skimming through their security footage when they found a video of a man placing candy on the shelves. The family mart had been using the same videotape for security footage for years, recording over old footage multiple times in the process, so the image they collected looked terrible.

But at 11.23 on Sunday, October 7th, there's a ghostly, distorted image of a man in his 20s or 30s wearing a baseball cap and metal-framed glasses. He also had permed hair. They could see in the video that the man came in, turned to the right, and started theming through magazines. He then started walking towards the candy aisle, looking for security cameras the whole way.

He then placed a square tin of Morinaga fruit drops on the shelf that were later confirmed to have 0.18 grams of sodium cyanide. Okay, the cops had an image. But who was this man? If it was the Foxide man, the public was going to freak. They all knew he should have been caught months ago. Morinaga was also furious. They had to lay off over 400 employees to cover the cost of the inventory. 400 people with lives to live, families to feed that were now out of a job, and many of them saw it as the police's fault. The reputation of the Japanese police force was tarnishing quicker than they could do anything about it.

By early November, an article titled, Police in Japan, badges have lost their sparkle, had been published in the New York Times. In the article, an expert on police matters in Japan, Takuro Suzuki, was interviewed. He said that the monster with 21 faces crime was, quote, a new type of crime for Japan. And the police are using old-style investigation techniques, so they're always

behind. This was a huge blow to a police force that was regarded as being one of the best in the world. Only one in seven applicants were accepted to the police academy after taking the rigid exam, and police served in their own neighborhoods, giving them intimate knowledge of the area and the people. But resentment for the police in Japan had been brewing longer than the monster had been terrorizing the country. Over the summer in Heo Go,

the same place where some of the poison candy was left and where Azaki was taken from his home, two officers had been arrested for robbing a bank in order to pay back loan sharks they owed money to. That was also around the same time that a former police sergeant confessed to killing another police officer and a loan company employee in Kyoto. I remember that almost spotless record for solving homicide cases. And remember that almost spotless record for solving homicide cases? Well, the general public wasn't buying it. Over the previous year, three men on death row had their sentences overturned.

After it was revealed that police got those confessions by force. It turns out, it was a well-known secret amongst the population in Japan that officers were getting confessions via force and torture, and many of these confessions were false. The autumn dragged on into winter, and changed into spring again, and the police still had no suspect in sight. And in that time, 31 food companies were extorted and intimidated with threats of poisoning. But no one had died from being poisoned, and of those 31 companies, no money had been collected.

At first, it seemed to the police like the monster may be overly cautious, coming to collect the money only to dodge at the last second for fear of being caught. But there were times it appeared no one came to collect the money. The police were still scrambling to meet the monsters to mans, however. They drove bags of money to various locations, left it in manholes, but the money was never collected. They ran through their list of potential suspects. Was this person a disgruntled employee? Well, now they had gone after 31 different companies, so probably not.

Was this person attacking families? They were poisoning candy after all, and writing letters to moms in Japan. But no one was ever poisoned. If they really wanted someone to die, wouldn't someone have already died by now? It seemed like the only way this was going to end was when the monster got what it wanted, but with every passing month and every missed ransom dropoff, Officer Yamamoto and the other

police started wondering, what exactly do they want? But the monster wasn't going to stop threatening local food manufacturers and taunting the police until they got what they wanted. And one day, it seemed like they did because something made them stop. On August 7th, 1985, over a year since Azaki's kidnapping, officer Yamamoto walked into his back yard, doused himself with kerosene, and lit himself on fire. When searching for a reason as to why he may have done this,

others in his post believe that he was embarrassed about an event that happened the previous autumn, where he and his subordinates saw the Foxide man in a car and let him slip away. The mounting pressure from the public and the mistakes being made by his team were too much for him to bear. Yamamoto was the only death to occur as a result of the monster's tauntings, and after his self-immolation, the monster was never heard from again. It had gotten what it wanted. The monster could still be out there in Japan. If they were in their 20s and 30s when this was happening, they'd only be in their 60s

and 70s. I paid my tab, $15, can you believe it? Said goodbye to the kind stranger and walked out into the warm, early summer air, chewing over the details of the story. Is the monster still out there? And if he is, what has he shifted into now? A grandfather, a member of his community, maybe even a kind stranger that sits at a bar

and tells a story to whoever will listen. And then, this has been Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Keelin Moore, music by Artlist. Special thanks to our new patrons, Emma Jamie Hilary Gabby, Vicki, Jody, Jessica, Andrea, Jen, Carrie, Catherine, Jennifer, Jennifer, Maddie, Jessica F, Jackie, Elise, and Samantha. Another special thanks to Travis Dunlop, Grace and Jurnigan, the team at WME and Ben Jaffy.

Have a heart pounding story you'd like to share or a case request? Check out HeartStartsPounding.com. Until next time, stay curious.