RedHanded - Episode 9 - The Beast with a Human Face

Episode Date: August 23, 2017

In 2002, missing hostess, Lucie Blackman was found dead. Her body had been dismembered and her head encased in concrete. She was found buried in a shallow grave under a bathtub in a cave on a secluded beach in Miura, Kanagawa - just South of Tokyo. Where this discovery would lead Japanese police shocked the world. Join us this week as we follow this disturbing case to understand the evil that stole Lucie, and ask how many victims truly fell prey to ‘The Beast with a Human Face’...   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I'm Struti. I'm Hannah. And welcome to Red Handed, where today we'll be talking about the beast with a human face. Yeah. The beast with a human face is a name that was given to the person who murdered Lucy Blackman, who was 21 and she was working as a hostess in Japan and one day just went missing this case hits home with me pretty hard because like because I have lived abroad and it's really it's scary if something if something goes wrong and you don't necessarily speak the language or you don't have a network of people that you can go to who do speak the language and also there's a lot of negative feelings surrounding foreigners in a lot of places so people don't really want to help you in my experience and then some people are great and lovely but especially with officials and stuff like that it's very difficult. Lucy was from Kent and was just 21 when she disappeared one afternoon and she was found months later murdered and dismembered in a cave under a bath

and her killer became known as the Beast with a Human Face. Which is just a truly horrifying... The images that run through my mind when you say that, it's truly horrifying. Because we were talking about the other day about shit names for serial killers. That's a very good one. I think this is the best one I've heard. Lucy was born in 1978

to Jane and Tim Blackman in Seven Oaks in Kent here in the UK and despite a pretty awful childhood illness, which we wanted to talk about a bit more here but there's a lot more relevant things to the case that we wanted to get on with so we're going to post a little bit of a mini story about that

because it is a bit paranormal. A bit paranormal. A bit weird. I got goosebumps when I read about it. It's strange. So we're going to post a little story about that on Instagram. So follow us at RedHandedThePod and keep your eyes peeled for that. But yeah, so even despite this awful childhood illness,

she lived a pretty happy life. It was an affluent one. But her parents did divorce, and Lucy and her sister Sophie and their brother Rupert moved into a small rented house that they hated with their mum. Its previous tenant had been an alcoholic, Diana Goldsmith, who one day didn't show up to pick up her kids from school, and years later was found buried in a nearby field when the family moved into the house the windows were still covered in the dust the police had used to search for fingerprints so that's not a nice environment when you want to live in with your kids they had they felt that they had this woman sort of hanging over them they've moved into what feels like a crime

scene well exactly the black men's used to joke that they hoped she wasn't hiding under the bath. Oh, fuck off. What is with all these people making jokes? I know. And... Turning out to be true. Oh my gosh. Yeah, and Lucy was found under a fucking bath. Spoiler. I already said it. I'd already spoiled it. So Lucy, straight after

school, started working in the city. Shall we do an explanation of what the city is? City of London? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like our equivalent of like wall street yes exactly it's like the banking sector exactly so if you're thinking wolf of wall street you're thinking banker wankers that's where they are they are yeah exactly dapper dapper wankers you do loads of coke exactly slick back hair oh tight trousers tweedy jackets for some reason. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know.

You know the deal. Red chinos. That's it. Any colour chino, any day of the week. This is where Lucy was working. And she, understandably, whilst running around with city boys on a comparatively low salary, ran up a bit of debt. Which, she was quite a worrying person, so this was constantly in the back of her mind. Like, how am I going to get rid of this debt that I've racked up lucy left the city life in search of adventure and probably a

little bit more money and began working as an air stewardess for british airways but in the year 2000 she jacked in all that to move to tokyo with her friend louise phillips louise is stunning classically beautiful lucy wasn't classically beautiful, but she had this incredible personality and that like attracted people to her. However, she writes in her diaries that she's very conscious of feeling like the ugly friend and her sister felt that Louise didn't really do anything to make her feel any better about that.

So she does feel quite insecure. Like they're very close and they've known each other for a long time, but Lucy is a little bit insecure in that relationship. The pair decided that they would work as hostesses and make some easy money and they both found work in the Roppongi district of Tokyo which is very popular with foreigners and the Japanese people that want to interact with them Roppongi is also called high touch town because after the war there were a lot of Americans living there and the Japanese people

would see them high-five each other and they didn't understand it so they mistranslated it and called it high touch and because there were so many westerners there it became known as high touch town which is quite sweet i think so what is a hostess it's very important to stress that they are not prostitutes these girls are they work in a bar and they're paid by the bar to sit with japanese businessmen and make their drinks and light their cigarettes and chat to them, it's all in English they are not expected to sleep with them. Is that not what an escort is? Yes.

I would say that an actual escort is exactly that. They're escorts. They're escorts. Yeah. But I feel like escorting in the UK, people mean prostitute when they say that. It's like when people were talking about Heather Mills being like I think call girl is a prostitute, sex worker. it's like when people were talking about um heather mills being like i think all girl is is a prostitute sex worker but i'd say an escort is still it's not guaranteed that you're sleeping together you probably are but i think it's very similar to

this i'd say this hostessing gig is is escort here so men pay to have a drink and talk to girls who are way out of their league essentially girls with blonde hair and blue eyes are a real commodity so Lucy was perfect for it. I've seen the hostess industry described as modern geisha which makes a lot of sense. It's entertaining. Yeah but I think again like there's a lot of resentment from the Japanese society towards the western world for

fetishising and romanticising what geisha culture was. Oh absolutely yeah. When a lot of those girls were sold into that. But I know what you mean, what we mean by this, which is like, they're escorts. But I think just so our Japanese listeners know that we're not fetishizing or appropriating the geisha culture. And this is very prevalent in Japan. I wasn't in Tokyo, I was in Osaka visiting my friend, and I was waiting outside the station and this old Japanese man so I was

just on my own obviously I don't speak Japanese hanging out waiting for my friend this like crusty old man comes up to me and tries to take my hand and tries to like walk me down the street and I'm like what the fuck are you doing get away from me and I was so like flustered by the whole thing and he did just sort of leave me alone after that because I just like strongly said no and that but there was nowhere else I could go and I was in like open daylight i wasn't like in an alley middle of the afternoon and i told my friend about it and he was like oh no no he wasn't trying to like do anything untoward he just wanted to take you for a drink and i was like i beg your fucking pardon that's not appropriate at all he's like no it's a thing like japanese men like to be seen drinking yeah

with western women also so hostess, when I started researching this case, I'd always just call them girl bars. Like, that's the people I know in Japan. That's what they refer to them as. So if I say girl bar, I mean hostess bar. So I was in a bar with my friend called Buzzjack in Nagawa, which was amazing. And there was this Japanese girl in there.

And she was talking to my friend like she knew him. And he was like, I have no fucking idea who that girl is. My friend speaks fluent Japanese. And he asked the barman, he was like, have no fucking idea who that girl is my friend speaks fluent japanese and he asked the barman he was like do i know that girl because he goes in there all the time it's like his local and the barman was like yeah yeah you do know her but she works in the girl bar across the road and she's got no makeup on so that's why you don't recognize her oh my god yeah so they're everywhere girl bars is very accepted thing and if clients want to take their experience out of the bar they can take one of the girls on a dohan,

which is essentially a paid date. They pay a lot of money to take these girls out for dinner and they buy them expensive gifts. Equally though, places like Club Casablanca did not exist in isolation. Club Casablanca is where the girls were working. If you wanted to find a prostitute, S&M dungeon, or just a happy ending,

you didn't need to look very far in the Roppongi district. Lucy described the hostess' life in an email to her friend as obviously not the job of my dreams, but it's so easy. Girls were encouraged to take the business cards of men they spoke to in the club and to email them, encouraging them to return to the club. That's some savvy businessry right there. At the Casabablanca they even had a leaderboard showing which girls were securing the most dohans it's sales sales 101 yeah ring a little bell have a little basketball hoop for every time a sale is made and one evening when she was working Lucy met a businessman who stood out from the rest he was a bit slicker than the other crusty salary men

he wore sunglasses and drove a fast car it reminds me of craig david's slicker than your average slicker than your average client at this at casablanca and lucy quickly arranged a dohan with this mystery man it would be her last apparently lucy was bottom of the leaderboard at this point so she's got the pressure from not feeling as pretty as louise from not doing as well as the other girls that work there. They'd only been there for two months at this point. She's very homesick, not having a great time. She's probably just like, oh my God, okay, finally, great. On the 1st of July, 2000, Lucy left her apartment that she shared with Louise

to meet this mystery man who had promised to give her a phone, which was like gold dust because it was very difficult to get a phone if you weren't a Japanese national. She later called Louise from this man's car to tell her that they were driving out of Tokyo for the afternoon but she would be back about 7pm in time for the night out they had previously planned. Later on Lucy rang again from a phone that the man had given her telling Louise she would be a bit late but she was about to leave and would be back home within the hour. Lucy never returned. Lucy was usually really good at keeping in touch with

people, not just Louise but her friends and family back home. She was constantly writing letters, constantly ringing from pay phones and doing all of that so it was very out of character for her to just not show up. Louise woke up on Saturday morning, realised that Lucy hadn't come home and started to get really really worried. The following Monday morning Louise went to the police station to report Lucy as a missing person but the Tokyo police just didn't really want to know. It's complicated because Louise and Lucy were on tourist visas. There's a bit of speculation about this, but I'm convinced that they were working on tourist visas, because why would you get a legitimate visa to do that? It's very easy to turn up and get a job, cash in hand. You wouldn't go

through the visa process to work in a hostess bar, in my opinion. It's very, it's very easy to turn up and get a job cash in hand you wouldn't go through the visa process to work in a hostess bar in my opinion it's very it's reasonably easy to get a working visa to japan if you're teaching english but it still is a it's a process that take you have to be recruited and you have to be sponsored and i don't feel like a bar is going to do that the tourist visa meant that they were only supposed to be in the country for three months and they absolutely shouldn't have been working understandably louise was a bit nervous about going to the police in the first place because the first thing they would ask for was her alien residency card which she didn't have. Japanese police rarely got involved with tourists feeling that it was a little bit of a waste of resources to deal with people on tourist

visas that in a couple of months time would be another country's problem anyway. The population of foreign people living in Japan is so small that it's it's quite it's quite a common attitude not really wanting to get involved with foreigners affairs so japan was my ethnographic area of study when i was at university and they have this this thing called nihon jinran which is taught in schools and it's very ingrained in their culture it roughly translates to the discourse of japanese-ness and it's essentially essentially about, you can't become Japanese. You are or you're not. You can't marry someone and become Japanese.

Even if you have, I mean, the more sort of hard line. Actually, no, there was one of the girls I met in Japan. I was living in Korea at the time. Born in Japan. Both of her parents born in Japan. She was talking to me about where I lived and I was living in Korea. And she was like, oh, like, don't tell anyone. But my granddad was Korean.

So I'm actually Korean. And it was so, it's very, like, prevalent. She didn't want me to tell anyone she was like it's a secret i'm only telling you because you're foreign that's crazy the other problem was that lucy was 21 which made her an adult under japanese law which essentially meant that she could disappear if she wanted to the police didn't register lucy as a missing person implying that lucy was probably on a bender and would show up in a few days time strap in guys because this is where things start to get mental so Louise received a call on Monday

afternoon from a man who spoke very good English who told her that he was with Lucy but that she didn't want to speak to her and that Lucy was to meet his guru and had decided that she was going to join a newly risen religion and that Louise was never going to join a newly risen religion and that Louise was never going to see her again.

Cult alert. So he's saying that over the course of one afternoon, she's just been like, sign me up. God, but still imagine getting that call as Louise. Your friend just goes off on this dohan and then doesn't come back for a couple of days and then you get a call from this random guy telling you she's joining a newly risen religion and you're never going to see her again. Gurus? What? But on Monday evening, Louise called Lucy's mum back in the UK

to tell her that Lucy had gone missing. And I genuinely cannot imagine having to make or receiving that call. I just imagine Louise sitting in her tiny flat and just sitting at her table being like, I'm going to have to call her mum. Jane, Lucy's mum, was obviously beside herself and tells the rest of the family. Lucy's sister Sophie flew to Tokyo the day after her mum got the phone call. She was accompanied by Jamie Gascoigne, who was Lucy's ex-boyfriend, which seems a little bit weird.

However, Gascoigne, as in football, as in football, but I'm sure he's not a footballer. He looks a bit like Chas Bono, if you watch the documentary. Who's Chaz Bono? Cher's daughter who's trans and is now a son. I didn't know that. You need to watch more Drag Race, my friend. So this Gascoigne guy hasn't got anything to do with the actual Gascoigne, of the footballing Gascoigne?

I don't think so. Oh, okay. I thought you said, was this guy Gascoigne, which is really weird. No. As if he was someone of note. No, it's weird that he was her ex-boyfriend. Oh, is it because he was going? Yeah. Oh, which is really weird. No. As if he was someone of notes. It's weird that he was her ex-boyfriend. Oh, is it because he was going? Yeah. Oh, right, I see.

It does seem a bit weird, but I definitely wouldn't want to go on my own, and I imagine there's quite a shortage of people in Seven Oaks who can just be like, yeah, sure, I'll drop everything to extract your sister from a cult, and we have no idea where we're going. In Japan. For an unspecified amount of time. Maybe he is part of the footballing gas coins

maybe maybe nothing else to do i think and jane lucy's mom is on record saying that she thought sophie had a bit of an image in her head that she was just going to get to japan and see a blonde girl walking down the street and just be able to go all right then lucy let's go home yeah because when you're back home that i can imagine that you don't understand the seriousness of it you'd just be these people don't know her they're not looking for her properly you'd even be like because sister said before louise was a bit of a shit friend not making lucy feel better you probably think she's there with her shit friend the police aren't looking for her i'll go find her and then surprise surprise when jamie and sophie got to tokyo they realized it was going to be far more difficult than they thought jamie in this

documentary is just like yeah it was just uh they far more difficult than they thought. Jamie in this documentary is just like, yeah, it was just, they've got roads that are 50 foot high and go over buildings and it was all just really foreign and busy. Oh my god. Brilliant. Do you ever watch that movie, The Forest? No. With Natalie Dormer. She's a

twin and then one of the twins, the twin goes off to Japan to like find herself but she gets lost in the japanese suicide forest and then her twin is like fuck and then she goes looking for her and when she gets there she meets this journalist and journalist is like i can get you into the japanese suicide forest but i want you to let me write a story about it and he's obviously like this young good-looking guy and she's like no but then he's the only way that she can get into the forest so she says and he could speak Japanese and they go into the forest together

and they're like on the hunt in this forest looking for her sister who's come there in her mind she thinks to commit suicide Oh my god I'm gonna watch the shit out of that I feel like Jamie and Sophie yeah, just like that, they got there and they realised that they didn't have a hope

they didn't speak Japanese, they didn't really have any contacts and I expect that the people at Club Casablanca who knew Lucy probably didn't really want to get involved because she's working there illegally and I expect that it's probably a bit of a everyone knows it's going on but everyone just sort of turns a blind eye Sophie was met with the same lack of help from the police that Louise had originally experienced, but she did eventually manage to get the police to file Lucy as a missing person. But this is literally writing her name on a piece of paper and putting it in a filing cabinet and shutting it in front of her sister. In fact, Sophie was a woman, didn't particularly help either. Oh yeah. I mean, in this society,

women are not in positions of respect or power. No. To put it bluntly. And desperate, Sophie called her dad, explaining that they were getting nowhere with the police and that she had been going to the police station every day, but still nothing was changing. Tim had got on a plane. So Tim is Sophie and Lucy's dad. He got on a plane and met Sophie in Tokyo.

At this point, they had a choice. To keep going with the police and stay away from journalists or to go to the press and put pressure on the investigation. Given the police attitude so far, we can totally understand what they did next. Tim called a press conference. Tim and Sophie devoted all their time to getting Lucy on the front page every single day, thinking they were much more likely to get a tip-off from the public before the police would come up with anything important or valuable.

It would have been very difficult for other hostesses to go to the police. And I think one of the big stymies that was met in this investigation is that it would have been very difficult for the other hostesses to go to the police with information because many of them were also working there illegally and would have been too afraid to get deported. The family were met with an enormous amount of support from Brits living in Tokyo. They were given office space and crucially helped to set up a hotline hoping that someone who knew something about Lucy's whereabouts would come forward, circumventing the police and calling straight through to them. Many women did ring the hotline saying that they'd gone on a dohan, ended up in a condominium where they had had dinner or drunk wine and passed out and

had no memory of what happened next. Some even reported seeing a red camera light in the dark and when they were woken up they were violently ill. All of these women reported their attacker to be a wealthy middle-aged Japanese man in his 40s. Obviously a lot of the people who were coming through to the hotline were not not pranks because that's not really a Japanese thing. It was either people who were trying to help and had got the wrong end of the stick or just weren't really helping but then they started to get these calls through from hostesses who were like, this has happened to me

but I just chalked it up to experience because I'm working illegally in a country and it happens. Oh my god. I don't know if I'd be able to just chalk that up to experience. I would go the fuck home is what I would do. Yes, exactly. I'd be like to just chalk that up to experience. I would go the fuck home is what I would do. Yes, exactly. I'd be like, oh, okay, chalk one for experience.

I'm now going to experience a plane ride home. Bye. Tim is like, at this point, superhero detective dad. Like he is like a hard-nosed businessman and he just gets there and he's like, all right, we'll just get her on telly every single fucking day until something happens. And he even managed to get Tony Blair involved, who is obviously well maybe not obviously to our international listeners former british prime minister but is also now a

massive fucking war criminal who should be dragged off to the hague to stand trial for that casual moving on casual insertion of that so yeah tony blair flew to tokyo met with the blackmans and agreed to put pressure on the japanese government even raising raising Lucy's case at the G8 summit in Okinawa. Oh, man. He's fucking stone cold psychopath. Sociopath. Psychopath. Psychopath.

Ugh. Sorry. All of them. He's both. And Jane, back in the UK, managed to get Richard Branson to fund and appear in a TV appeal that also ran in Japanese cinemas. This family, mate.

They are pulling it together. They know what they're doing, for sure. Full credit to them. Because what else are you supposed to do when the police are just being like, can't help you, she'll turn up, she's on a bender, she's foreign. So, understandably, under all of this domestic

and international pressure, the police agreed to assign 80 officers to Lucy's case. However, the police wouldn't tell the Blackmans anything. Because I think there's a lot of laws in japan of like what you can reveal and what you can't before it goes to trial but even to the family yeah so they would just not answer any questions and even if the family asked very specific questions like have you checked the phone records they'd be like we can't answer that question oh my god imagine how infuriating that would be the first real big twist in this case

and on the 1st of august 2000 so about a month after lucy was last seen the police received a letter in english and it read i am doing what i want so please leave me alone lucy it was not in lucy's handwriting and was obviously very fake the blackman family however were given a little bit of hope at least that luc Lucy was alive somewhere. But it seems to me that this is just a last-ditch attempt of a guilty mind. It's very childish. It is. I'm doing what I want, leave me alone.

And also, it's obviously, it's not written by Lucy. It's, like, written by somebody who's very juvenile. Yeah, exactly. In a sense. It's weird. And the Blackman family, at at this point thought it was most likely that lucy had been sold into a sex into sex slavery sex slave trade yeah possibly with a forced addiction to heroin though she so she could be easily controlled that doesn't seem

beyond the realms of possibility no i think that had been suggested to them by the police of like maybe you need to prepare yourself that when we find her she's going to be in a bit of a state yeah and they thought that they would find her as you said in a terrible state maybe in like a warehouse somewhere but at least they now they still felt hopeful that she was somewhere she was alive and jane kept asking the police that if they had followed up with the cctv and phone records she just kept being told that they couldn't answer that question so jane once again took matters into our own hands and hired a brit private detective, Di Davis, former Scotland Yard. What I don't understand is Club Casablanca must have known who she went on the Dohan with. They must get a cut in this. It must be on the books. So why wasn't a name put forward

right at the very beginning? Could Louise not just have asked them? Exactly, because even if he's giving a fake name that's a starting point yeah yeah why aren't the police interviewing people why isn't that happening cctv nothing like that i mean i'm guessing not inside the place but di davis thought exactly the same thing that we did and i'm just staggered that the police didn't it's a month into the investigation and they haven't even been to club casablanca they haven't even gone there. That's unbelievable. That's unbelievable.

So Di Davis is like, this bar is clearly the crux of this case. This is where we need to be looking for things. Davis interviewed all of the girls working there and got a description from another hostess at the Casablanca of the man who had taken Lucy on this Dohan. And he got his old photo imaging mates from Scotland Yard to mock up a likeness and he went from club to club in Roppongi asking if anyone recognised the suspect. Several Western hostesses and bar managers working in the district came forward either to Davis directly or they rang the hotline with more stories of girls being taken on a Dohan by

this man returning several days later being violently ill and having clearly undergone some kind of attack. It was established that at each bar this mystery man was giving fake names, but he was consistently well-dressed, flashed a lot of cash, spoke very good English. This was the break the case needed, and by October the police had a prime suspect. With the information from the hotline, the police arrested Joji Obara, 48, and charged him with the rape of five hostesses. He was a millionaire playboy with a large family fortune and his own money and properties. But his life, other than that, seemed a total mystery.

There was almost no photographs of him after he left school. In his house, they found a large number of VHS tapes that showed him administering chloroform and raping unconscious women while wearing a mask. I know. That's truly terrifying we haven't seen these videos but do we know what the mask he was wearing was like that's i think it's just like a black oh my god band that's so fucking disgusting and he's just got them lying around his house they're not buried they're not he's got them openly he's not afraid no but i think again it comes down to this kind of

he's obviously mentally ill surely in some form and also the machismo all of that there the arrogance you're a man you're a rich man wouldn't it just be the same if it was like i also think it would be a rich old white man because the crime rate in japan is very low comparatively to like us or the states but is it low because they don't prosecute a lot of their cases for example like stealing just isn't in their culture at all you can leave a laptop on like this happened to someone i know you can leave a laptop on a bus mention it'll just be there three days later i think is that something about kind of we were talking about before like in asian society particularly it's more about the society as a whole it's more about the group and the collective rather than about the individual

there's a saying there's something like the grain of rice on its own is worthless it's about the bowl of rice yeah it's more it's more poetically put in the actual saying this idea of it's not about the individual and maybe those crimes absolutely don't exist but i think the tendency towards violent crimes and things like that i think is high i think it's they don't prosecute them or want to make them visible that there is a heavy sense of repression and things in a country like japan and then mark it up as well with high incredibly high youth unemployment but incredible amounts of pressure put on their young that it's like we're talking about the Andrei Chikatilo case and Soviet Russia, where they had this serial killer, one of the most brutal serial killers, their body count, and they were just like, nah, that's a very Western problem.

It's a capitalist problem. It's a capitalist problem. You guys have that in America. You guys have that in the UK. We don't have serial killers here because communism works and we're fine. And that level of like denial stopped them finding it. And I think that Japan has a little bit of that as well. I wonder how much that led to him not even needing to hide these things. I think, yeah, I think you're right. I do think whatever the sort of societal thing around him may be, you've got to know it's wrong. Yeah.

But he wasn't afraid. He wasn't afraid of being caught. Then the other thing is that he's clearly got some sort of personality disorder as well. And he got away with it for a long ass time. Absolutely. He was hip hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sean Diddy Combs.

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went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows,

uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness. And inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Back to the video. The video suggests that he had raped anywhere between, and this is horrendous, 150 and 400 women over a 10-year period. They also found several bottles of chloroform in his apartment. Notebooks were also seized detailing his encounters

with multiple women over the years. It even contains names of women. Not all of them were even identified by the police. And in one entry, Obara has even written next to the name, too much chloroform. I mean, it's like an experiment for him. That's exactly it. So Obara was taken into custody and interviewed by the police, and in his initial interview, he said the only information he had on Lucy Blackman was what he had read in the news. He later released a statement that he had met her once, but denied any knowledge of anything that may have led to her disappearance. And desperate for another lead, tim launched an international campaign appealing to anyone who may have had a similar experience and had since left japan this is a very smart move from tim i think because as we were

saying if something like that happens to you you're very likely to just go home after hearing this appeal an australian man robert finnegan came forward his fiancee karita ridgeway had been working as a hostess in Tokyo in 1992. She had gone on a dohan with a man fitting a bar as description. The man Corita had been on this dohan with brought her to hospital and she is in a sorry state. She's unconscious, really, really ill. And he says she ate a raw oyster last night. She's not very well. I think she's got food poisoning. You look after her and he leaves carita never regained consciousness and she died in hospital a few days later of liver failure

that ain't no oyster i don't think no and they were just like yeah all right cool well i mean maybe maybe there are some like pretty gnarly oysters yeah at the time carita's death was not investigated and just put down to natural causes. However, when Finnegan came forward after Tim's international appeal, Tokyo police reopened Karita's case and found that one of the videos in Abara's possession showed Karita Ridgway, and it's clearly her, unconscious on Abara's bed. Ugh, that makes my stomach turn. And the too much chloroform entry in Abara's notebook was written under karita ridgway's name

so he's literally just been like oh too much next that one face exactly that one didn't quite work out as i thought it would cover up oyster this is what i mean it's just the stuff he comes up with and you see this in his trial too he just comes up with childish it's like the things he says like if a child was trying to think of a line so the police started to piece together a theory a bar would take girls that he meets in hostess bars back to his one of his properties where he would give them a fancy drink laced with sedatives he would there apparently he also told them it was like a filipino delicacy and you have to drink it in one shot or it's bad luck. And that's why it tasted weird because it was not Japanese. When this knocked them out, he would move them to his bedroom

and film him attacking them while using chloroform throughout to keep them sedated. So if they woke up a bit, he just straight away chloroformed them. That's horrendous. And although Corita had died in 1992 the hospital had preserved a sample of her liver which tested positive for chloroform and it was concluded that that was what had killed her the large doses of chloroform is toxic and completely capable of causing total liver failure obara was charged with the rape and murder of karita in addition to the eight other rapes but the police still didn't have any evidence connecting Obara to the disappearance of Lucy. With suspicions growing

around Obara's involvement with Lucy's disappearance, the police intensified their search around Obara's apartment. On February 9th, 2001, Lucy Blackman's dismembered body was found by the police, buried in a shallow grave under a bathtub in a seaside cave at Kanagawa, about 30 miles south of Tokyo, just a few hundred yards from Mubara's apartment. The body had been cut into eight pieces and put in bags. Her head had been shaved and encased in concrete. Again, the encasing in concrete. Do you remember when we were reading about Junko Furuta, the schoolgirl encased in concrete, like that it literally translates to from the Japanese name for the murder. What's with the encasing

in concrete? I don't know and I don't know why he just did her head. I think he probably just did her head and was like... Maybe it was because he didn't want her to be... Yeah. He didn't want her to be immediately identified when they uncovered her because to identify you're going to have to chip away at this concrete. That's absolutely disgusting.

Please explain. What? There's a bathtub in a cave? Well, this is what the police noticed. So yeah, it's literally just, it's not like a proper beach beach, it's like a rocky beach and there's like a little bit that goes in and there's a cave and there was a bath just in there. And I like fly tipping, whatever, but that's very rare in Japan. They're not really literate.

So that's what caught the police's eye and we're like, that's weird. Let's go and have a look. But then if you were burying this body in that cave, why are you putting a very distinguishing bath on top of it? Maybe he needed to remember where she was, I don't know. It is weird. I'd move the bath, because

it's like, yeah, someone's going to be like, why is there that bath in that cave? I also would be, if I was burying a body in a tidal cave, I would be worried that the sand would wash away and it would be exposed. Yeah, yeah. And you've encased her head in concrete. Why not encase the rest of it and just chuck it into the ocean? That's what I would have done. Not bury it under a very

obvious bath. A bath in a cave? That's really bizarre. That's so creepy. Imagine at night just seeing this bath in this weird cave with a body buried under it. Oh my god. Fucking hell. I'm gonna have nightmares tonight. The body was positively identified as Lucy Blackman using

her dental records. It was concluded by the forensics team that Lucy's body was dismembered using a chainsaw as the cross sections of the amputation were so jagged. After she was dead, right? Well they couldn't tell because she'd been there for such a long time. She'd been rotting there for seven months in damp sand so

they couldn't get anything there was no semen no dna nothing found on lucy's remain so in effect there's no smoking gut you can't find anything on her body to link her to anyone let alone your jio bar and it was impossible to test lucy's body because she just she was too decomposed it had no her body had no integrity left there was nothing they could test but why did it take the police so long to find her body because right at the beginning of the investigation the beach was searched with police dogs how did they miss a dead body surely the dogs was the body always there or did he have it somewhere else and move it there they could tell it had been there for seven months because of the rate of decomposition so it hadn't been moved could it be

possible that the police knew where lucy was all along and left her there because they they wanted abara to lead them to her they wanted him to confess so they could make a direct link because only how else would he know that she was there but if they did do that i think that's very misjudged and also if you'd have known that the body was there why not get it sooner because you don't know what sort of evidence would have led you back to abara it's like why wait for abara to lead you to lucy why not get lucy to lead you to abara and also the amount of evidence that they lost by leaving it that's what i mean yeah instead of like doing that they could have found evidence on lucy that would have led them to abara anyway they wouldn't have

needed him to show them where the body was yeah i, I think, we'll come on to it later, but confessions are very important in Japan. And as we know, confessions mean very little, really. But Obara was charged with the abduction and the murder of Lucy Blackman, the rape and murder of Corita Ridgway, and in addition to the eight other rapes. And the trial began on October 10th, 2002.

So let's have a look at the evidence. Police presented in court a digital camera seized from Obara's flat that had a picture of Lucy taken on the date of her disappearance. And it's on the beach. I mean, what else do you... Really, what else do you need? For me, I'd be like, convict him. Convict him.

Exactly. That's nuts. So they also found... But before I jump to my judge, jury and kill him explanation, they also found several blonde hairs in Obara's flat, which through DNA samples sent from Jane were confirmed as Lucy's. Police were also able to pinpoint Lucy's location using mobile phone records and concluded that she was still with Obara in his apartment

when she called Lucy for the second time at 7pm on the 1st of July. That's horrifying. But at this point, all they have is that she was in his apartment. They can't prove anything else. And a picture taken on his video camera on the day of her disappearance. On the beach. They can prove that she was there. They can't prove what happened to her at this point. I know. I'm with you. I'm just saying that this is like... But also it's this idea of like circumstantial evidence. He'd already been convicted of raping and killing other women.

So... No, but this is the thing. He hadn't been convicted. He was standing trial for the other one. So they can't use that. They can't use Corita Ridge Raid. They can't use all of these other rapes because he hadn't been convicted of them yet. But he has this video evidence of him raping Corita.

There's footage of that. Yeah, but he's standing trial for it, so they can't use it because it's separate. It's a separate case. I don't know about this. Here we go. And a couple provide eyewitness testimony that they had seen Obara with Lucy on the beach that afternoon. I'll take

circumstantial over eyewitness any day of the week. And this is the thing, I think, we were talking about it before briefly, is this like CSI effect that juries and people, we just want to hear like DNA evidence, show me the DNA, where's the fingerprints, where's this, where's that. But I think circumstantial evidence is evidence. It is evidence. And I think enough of circumstantial evidence, even without a body, in other cases, has been enough to put someone away. I mean, the eyewitness testimony of somebody saying they saw Abara and Lucy on the beach. But in court, given very little choice, Abara admitted to spending the day with Lucy because the photos on his camera of her at the beach, like, okay, fine, you've admitted to what we already know, but insisted that after

eating dinner at his home, she had left without him. Abara claimed that Lucy was high on illegal drugs and he had caused someone to drive her home. Lucy being on drugs was vehemently denied by her family or anyone who knew her. I'm sure she wasn't perfect, but I really hate the trope of like, oh, someone takes ecstasy on the weekends and therefore they're a terrible person and deserve to be murdered. I hate it. But also, Lucy kept pretty detailed diaries and they are very honest. She talks about thinking that

she's drinking too much and not feeling a bit homesick and feeling quite unhappy and thinking she's made a mistake so they're not censored really they're not like i'm having an amazing time and everything's lovely bye mom like a bar however this a bar is defense the only thing they had really was to try and change people's perception of lucy like i'm sure she wasn't completely perfect because who is? But they really hammered home the drug stuff. She was just this wayward girl who takes loads of drugs and was, like, into loads of devious

sexual stuff and, like... But the number one way to, like, discredit your victim who isn't there to defend themselves is to undermine their character. Exactly. Also, Abara, this is laughable. Abara said that he had accepted three ecstasy pills from lucy and that's why he didn't come forward to the police to say that he had seen

her that day because he was scared of being um convicted for possession of drugs drugs are a huge dill in pan you do get a lot of time in prison but less time time than life. So I don't, I don't buy that. Obara also named the person in court who he said he had rung, saying take this girl home, but this person couldn't stand trial, couldn't testify, because they had quite conveniently died before the trial. On the 3rd of July, this is two days after Lucy's gone missing, the caretaker of Obara's apartment block called the police, complaining of strange noises coming from Obara's apartment. called the police complaining of strange noises coming from Abara's apartment. So the police go up knock on his door

and Abara is angry he's sweating he's agitated and he will not let them in he will not speak to them. He threatens to call his lawyer and slams the door in his face. The police didn't force entry

because they didn't think they had probable cause and this is what the senior detective says in court. He says the sounds weren't sufficient enough to break the door down if it had been a woman screaming i would have been able to yeah but they just thought that's

a bit weird he seems like a weird guy let's leave it but it's the third of july and they had found that abara had also been googling or whatever the japanese 2000 equivalent was which is like well in china now it's like just a screenshot of Google on the screen. How to get rid of a dead body. Did you see that thing that somebody posted on the Facebook group for the last podcast on the left? Okay, so you're going on a blind date with somebody you've never met before, and the only thing you can talk about is the last thing you Googled. What was the last thing you Googled, Hannah? How to get rid of Echo on my personal laptop.

Oklahoma Girl Scout murders. Good, good. I could easily run a whole date just talking about that future episode watch out he had he had very recently just googled how to get rid of a dead body and phone records from abara's apartment on the 2nd of july reveal that he made several calls to local hospitals asking for advice on how to deal with a victim of a drug overdose it even proved it even been proven that he had bought a chainsaw two days after Lucy's disappearance. Again, we just see the circumstantial evidence just piling up and I will say it again and again, circumstantial evidence is evidence. It isn't discounted just

because it's not DNA or, you know, forensic evidence. Police were also able to prove that it was Obara who had made the cult phone call to Lucy and draft copies of the fake letter from Lucy telling people to leave her alone were found in his apartment. Circumstantial evidence. I'm sorry. Come on. But despite all of this, all they could prove was that he had interfered with the investigation. He was doing something weird in his apartment on the 2nd of July and he had form. So either he killed her in the same way he killed Corita Ridgway, but didn't manage to get her to the hospital in time, or Lucy died of a self-inflicted overdose and Yohji Obara disposed of the body. That's what his defence says.

His defence says she overdosed herself. And we think he killed her in the same way as Corita Ridgway. I don't think Lucy ever left his apartment. I don't think so either. The charges brought against Yohji Obara. Actually, what I should say before this is the conviction rate for serious crimes in Japan is over 99%. Because almost everyone

confesses. And this is what I was saying earlier about why the police wanted the confession, because that's just how things are done. How do they get these confessions though? Obara didn't confess. He pleaded not guilty to all of his charges, and this began a seven year legal battle.

The trial moved incredibly slowly as Obara was being charged with nine other rapes and the death of Karita Ridgway. But as the trial dragged on, fresh testimonies from hostesses who had been lured into Obara's house kept emerging. The Blackmans would return to Japan every six to 12 months to attend trial. Can you imagine?

Like, you just have to come back and relive it again and again and again country either after your daughter is killed there and also oh my god it's so much so much apparently it is not uncommon in japan for a person who is accused of a crime to give large sums of money to the alleged victim or their family. Jane received several phone calls to her house in the UK from Obara's lawyer, urging her to accept between £200,000 and £454,000. And the amount kept going up the more she said no.

This wasn't compensation, because Obara maintained that he'd done nothing wrong, but it was more like condolence money. It was an expression of sympathy, not of guilt. Yeah, right. You don't give somebody half a million out of sympathy or condolences. Exactly. And Jane was absolutely repulsed by profiting in any way from the murder of her daughter and refused the persistent offers

her lawyer also her japanese prosecutor said to her under no circumstances accept any money from yoji obara while the trial is still running tim on the other hand accepted 420 000 pounds from obara stating he saw it as damages he had lost tens of thousands of pounds on the search for Lucy, arguing that whether he took the money or not, it wouldn't change what happened to Lucy. Jane did not take the news well, and it turned the public against him as well. Yeah, it's pretty gross and cold-hearted,

but I also kind of get the idea of like, okay, this man has done the most horrendous thing to me. Let me take something from him. Do you know what I mean? I do know what you mean, but I... It's not going to undo what happened to Lucy, and let me take me take something from him do you know what i mean i do know what you mean it's not going to undo what happened to lucy and let me take this money away from him also do we even know what tim did with the money no exactly however my concern would be is this going to affect the trial 100 i would say i understand why people would be mad at him i would be furious

because i'd be like you are jeopardy yes it's not going to change what it did to lucy you taking this money but it would absolutely change whether she gets justice or not because you're you could fundamentally affect the outcome of this trial by taking that money which is why i think this was a stupid decision on tim tim's part so april 2007 sophie and tim flew to tokyo hear the verdict, almost seven years after Lucy went missing. And Jogio Ibarra was found not guilty of all charges related to Lucy Blackman. Unbelievable. The judge ruled that there was insufficient evidence that he had been involved in the killing of Lucy Blackman.

He was found guilty of nine rapes and the murder of Corita Ridgway, and the prosecution gave him his famous name, the Beast with a human face. Did the money impact the verdict? Jane argues that her lawyer told them repeatedly not to accept any money from Mabara but Tim seemed confident it would have no impact on the outcome. It has to, it just has to. Tim shouldn't have taken the money before the trial was over but what the judge said that this case was thrown out and he wasn't found guilty of lucy's murder because there was insufficient evidence to link him with the involvement and the killing of

lucy blackman whether tim took the money or not there wasn't concrete evidence that joe guillabarra was connected to the murder of lucy blackman i think i just get quite frustrated with it because it is in my mind so obviously him so that's why it's frustrating but you're absolutely right they don't they don't have the smoking gun they don't have it they don't and it is it's very very obviously him it's 100 he did this they found the letter they found like copies of the letter that he had been practicing of writing they proved the mobile phone triangulation proved that lucy had been at his house when he had made that he proved that the call was made from him his house to Louise all of this was able to be proven it was obviously him the videotapes the rapes the chloroform everything it was him the photo of her on the beach taken on

his camera absolutely it was him and I think given that I probably would have convicted him I would have but I think that for whatever reason he wasn't. So with Corita Ridgeway, they got him because they could prove she died from the chloroform. They couldn't test Lucy for anything. That super important link wasn't there. So, understandably, Lucy's defence immediately appealed the decision. And in December 2008, the verdict was announced of this appeal. And Ibarra was found guilty of the abduction dismembering and concealing lucy's body but it was upheld that there was insufficient evidence to convict him of her murder

why bother with convicting her him finding him guilty of those things because you're going to say that he kidnapped her he was guilty of kidnap guilty of dismemberment so you've lost eight hours basically there's eight hours you can't, and guilty of concealing her body. So he abducts her, he dismembers her, and then he conceals the body. But you're going to say that what happens in between those stages of him kidnapping her and then him having a body to dismember,

he's not guilty of whatever act was committed then. What the fuck? I know. I know. This is why this case is so frustrating. But it's like the jinx. It's like the jinx where we talked about Robert Dess In that like what second murder he commits And this isn't a major spoiler Like seriously if you haven't watched the jinx

You should sort your life out and go watch the jinx But he's found guilty of like denying a lawful burial And like inappropriate conduct with a dead body or something Because he dismembers this body of his neighbour But he was found not guilty of having killed them Then why does he have a body to dispose of his neighbour, but he was found not guilty of having killed them, then why does he have a body to dispose of inappropriately? It doesn't make any sense.

And it doesn't make any sense with this. Exactly. But the thing is, I was thinking about it. I was like, okay, if I was sitting on the jury of that, do I have reasonable doubt? No, I don't. I don't have any reasonable doubt. He did it. You're so right.

This isn't about whether there's DNA evidence, if there's enough circumstantial. Do you really? Would a reasonable, in law, would a reasonable person have sufficient cause to have reasonable doubt about this case no exactly he's guilty but his sentence wasn't changed after after this because he was already doing life he was already going to die in prison and what is interesting I did a bad thing I I read some YouTube comments. How far down did you scroll? Too far.

Oh no. One scroll is too many, my friend. I know. So I was looking at these YouTube comments about Yoji Obara, and this brings us quite neatly back to our Nihon Jinron discussion at the beginning. There are a lot of people on there, Japanese people, being like, this guy isn't Japanese, his dad was Korean, he's not Japanese. And then other people being like, well, Japanese passport, born in Japan, he's Japanese. And then they're just like, nope.

And then one guy even went as far as being like, well actually, most of the crimes, if not all of the crimes that are committed in Japan, are committed by Koreans or Chinese. Japanese people don't commit crime. That level of, like, ignorance, arrogance, elitism, and denial is so dangerous.

And we're guilty of it too. Like when we were talking about, when they thought Bible John was going to be Peter Sutcliffe and we were talking about the idea of like, oh, well, there can only be one British man. There can't be more than one who's like killing women. So everyone's guilty of it being like, oh no, there can't be more of these people who are like me.

That's like a human nature thing to be like, how many monsters could be running around this relatively small island versus it's an ethnic issue. Like, it couldn't be us because we're somehow superior. And I'm sure obviously not all Japanese people think that. But that elitism and that denial, again, it brings us back to the Andre Cicatillo thing that this couldn't possibly be happening.

And it's really unhelpful. We talked about the Japanese way of dealing with these violent crimes, like that japanese cannibal who killed and murdered that girl in france that is the only true crime documentary i've had to turn off it's so horrendous i didn't turn it off i watched it all the way through but it's the only true crime documentary that made me want to vomit while i was watching it it is one of the most disturbing, distressing things you can watch. And in that, he kills this girl in France. He cuts her up. He eats her. It's horrendous. And then France are like, fuck this and deport him to Japan with the request of you need to put this man on trial in your country and put him in prison. The Japanese are like, nah bruv, he's fine, he's free to go. This guy makes like a fucking picture book of the crime

and it's just out there. That poor murdered girl. That man is free in Japan right now. Not only is he free, he's profiting from his crime by being like, yep, did it, it was me, I'll show you, here's a picture. And sick fucks are buying that book as some sort of morbid souvenir.

It's got photographs of her dead body in it i enjoy receiving true crime books as presents but that one no thank you it's not it's more than it it's not a true crime book it's like a fetishist book of torture porn that's what it is and then the junco feruto case we've talked about it throughout this if you haven't heard about junco feruto i don't think we'll ever cover it it's too much i don't i don't think i have the strength i don't watch the documentaries on it i've talked about it and then i've like gotten very drunk and talked to my friends about it the face when i talked to them about like some other mysteries that we've covered they'll be like oh tell me more that's really interesting junko furuto it's like what the fuck is wrong

with you and i'm finished talking about it it is one of the worst crimes happened in japan i think the whole culture of like how women are viewed there, the stuff we were talking about, how people tend to lose their identities a little bit in that culture. And then violent crime seems to be some, like they have all those gangs. What are those gangs called? The motorbike gangs.

Oh yeah. They're like rockabilly. Like they're, but they're violent. It's like the young mafia. But that's what the guys who were involved with the Junko Furuto case were a part of that and that's why the police didn't touch him.

His parents were too scared to report him to the police because he had involvement with this. The torture that girl suffered. I think it's the worst murder I've ever heard about. Oh, it definitely is for me. Definitely. It's the worst thing I've ever heard about. And again, those kids got like six years, seven years? They they're free now they were 16 six years seven years they were out in their early

20s to lead a fully normal life they tortured her for six weeks before killing her let's not pretend that japan has incredibly violent crimes i think that's lucy black. And a little bit of a... And the beast with a human face. That is beast with a human face. So, thank you for listening to us. And follow us on the things at RedHatThePod. See you later. Bye. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudine Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come.

This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On the Media. To listen, subscribe to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me, and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy.

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