Little Girl Murderer

Tsutomu Miyazaki

+Little Girl Murderer+




"I felt all alone... whenever I saw a little girl playing on her own, it was almost like seeing myself." - Tsutomu Miyazaki

+Miyazaki's premature birth left him with deformed hands, which were permanently gnarled and fused directly to the wrists. Due to his deformity, he was ostracized when he attended Itsukaichi Elementary School, and consequently kept to himself. Although he has an IQ of 135 and was originally a star student, his grades at Meidai Nakano High School dropped dramatically. Instead of studying English and becoming a teacher as he originally intended, he attended a local junior college, studying to become a photo-technician.

+The deformation haunted him from early on. When he was five years old, a classmate teased him about his "funny hands." In family photos after that, Miyazaki never showed his hands, and his eyes were often closed.

+On August 22, 1988, four-year-old Mari Konno left her home in the Iruma Village apartment complex in Saitama to play at her friend's house. At 6:23 pm, after she failed to return, architect Shigeo Konno, struggling to quell his panic, called the police to report that his daughter was missing. About the same time as Konno's phone call, in a dark forest 50 km away, Mari was being slowly strangled to death.

+A few weeks after the abduction, a letter was sent to the Konno's and Asahi Shimbun, an Osaka newspaper. It contained a photograph of Mari and a confession.

"I put the cardboard box with Mari's remains in it in front of her home. "I did everything. From the start of the Mari incident to the finish. I saw the police press conference where they said the remains were not Mari's. On camera, her mother said the report gave her new hope that Mari might still be alive. I knew then that I had to write this confession so Mari's mother would not continue to hope in vain. I say again: the remains are Mari's." - Yuko Imada

+The Konnos returned home from the funeral to find another letter from "Yuko Imada." This one, labeled simply "Confession," chronicled the changes Miyazaki had observed in Mari's dead body:

"Before I knew it, the child's corpse had gone rigid. I wanted to cross her hands over her breast but they wouldn't budge. . . . Pretty soon, the body gets red spots all over it . . . . Big red spots. Like the Hinomaru flag. Or like you'd covered her whole body with red hanko seals. . . . After a while, the body is covered with stretch marks. It was so rigid before, but now it feels like its full of water. And it smells. How it smells. Like nothing you've ever smelled in this whole wide world."

+Oct. 3, 1988, he spotted Masami Yoshizawa, a seven-year-old first-grader, walking along the roadside. He coaxed her into his car, drove to the hills above Komine Pass--the scene of his first murder--and strangled her to death. Then he stripped her--quickly, before rigor mortis set in--and sexually abused the corpse.

+Third victim Erika Namba was returning from a friend's house when Miyazaki lured her into his sedan. He told Erika to undress in the back seat, then began to photograph her, the strobe flashing in the dark. Erika began sobbing and Miyazaki grabbed her by the throat and straddled her, holding her kicking body down with his weight as he strangled her. By 7 pm, his third victim was dead.

+In a nearby park, he found five-year-old Ayako Nomoto playing alone. Casually removing the lens cap from his camera, Miyazaki approached Ayako and asked her to pose for pictures. He then took several shots until Ayako got used to him. "Let's take some shots inside the car," he coaxed, leading her to his Langley.

+Ayako bounced in the back seat. As he handed her a stick of gum, the young girl commented on his deformed hands. Enraged, Miyazaki pulled on a pair of vinyl gloves. "Here's what happens to kids who say things like that," he growled, seizing her by the throat. "She kicked and kicked, but went limp in four or five minutes," he later confessed. He took the body home, carried the tiny corpse inside, where he stripped off the clothes and wiped it with a towel. He laid it on the low table, spread the legs and taped the vagina apart. He then took photographs and videos while he masturbated.

+Two days later, the odor of the decomposing corpse became unbearable. Miyazaki knew he had to dispose of the body. With a knife and a saw, he hacked off the cadaver's head, hands, and feet to hamper identification. Then he hid the torso near the public toilet at Hanno's Miyazawa-ko cemetery at midnight, four days after the murder. He roasted Ayako's hands in his back yard, ate some of her flesh, and tossed what remained, including the skull, into the woods of Mitakeyama.

+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 5763 videotapes, some containing pornographic anime and slasher films. Interspersed among them was video footage and pictures of his victims.

+When the police finally apprehended Miyazaki, they entered his home to find 6,000 videotapes of kiddy porn, splatter flicks, and cartoons. Among the grisly collection were videos and photos of his victims. It was evident that, for Miyazaki, his killing spree was little more than an extension of a lonely fantasy world. "It was like a game to him--a one-man play," said Akira Ishii, a law professor at Aoyama Gakuin University and psychotherapist who followed the case closely.

+Shortly thereafter, Miyazaki was sentenced to death by hanging.

He has remained on death row for many years.

On January 17, 2006, the Supreme Court of Justice upheld the original death sentence. The date of his execution has not been decided yet.