Between February and June 2005, three young people in western Japan who had written on an internet suicide site agreed to meet a man who said he wanted to die with them. Each had depression. Each was told that the two of them would end their lives together with burning charcoal. None of them came home. The man was Hiroshi Maeue, a 36-year-old temp agency worker from Sakai, in Osaka Prefecture, and he had no intention of dying.
Police arrested him on August 5, 2005, in the death of a 25-year-old woman, Michiko Nagamoto. Within hours he confessed, and he then wrote out confessions to two more killings that police did not yet know about: a 14-year-old boy from Kobe and a 21-year-old university student. The Osaka District Court convicted him of all three murders on March 28, 2007, and sentenced him to death. He withdrew his appeal, and he was hanged at the Osaka Detention Center on July 28, 2009.
The court's written judgment, which sets out his history, each count and the reasons for the sentence, is the main record of the case. The court found that he killed to satisfy a compulsion he had carried since childhood, and that no part of his motive deserved sympathy.
Maeue grew up in Osaka Prefecture, where he went through elementary, junior high and high school, according to the judgment. The court mentioned his parents and noted that by the time of the trial he was estranged from them. It also listed the environment in which he was raised among the factors that may have shaped him, without treating it as an excuse.
The judgment traces the compulsion that drove the killings to his childhood. The court found that a violent fixation took hold of him in primary school, after something he read, and that over the years it grew into a wish to kill.
In 1987 he enrolled in the information engineering department of a technical university in Ishikawa Prefecture. He did not finish. He withdrew after assaulting a classmate, the court recorded.
From April 1993 he worked at a post office, delivering mail. In February 1995 he assaulted a colleague and was dismissed. That attack did not lead to a prosecution, according to the judgment. From May 1995 he moved between jobs, among them work for a transport company and driving a taxi. From December 1999 until February 2005 he had a steady girlfriend, a woman he planned to marry.
The court recorded that he had been receiving psychiatric treatment since 1995 and had been diagnosed with a dissociative disorder. That treatment did not stop the attacks.
In March 2001 he attacked a woman walking on the street, and in June 2001 he attacked a girl who was passing by, in the same way. On November 27, 2001, the Sakai Branch of the Osaka District Court sentenced him to one year in prison for injury and assault, suspended for three years.
In April 2002, while still under that suspended sentence, he attacked a junior high school boy who was walking past. On August 9, 2002, the same court sentenced him to ten months in prison for causing injury. On December 26, 2002, the earlier suspension was revoked, so he had to serve the one-year term as well. He finished the ten-month term on May 28, 2003, and the one-year term on March 29, 2004.
A wire report written after his arrest in 2005 said he had been arrested many times for attacking passersby and had served ten months in prison in 2002.
After his release in March 2004 he tried, by the court's account, to keep his urges in check by lawful means. From April 2004 he saw a psychiatrist about every two weeks and took part in therapy sessions, and he kept up outpatient visits until July 2005, the month before his arrest. From May 2004 he worked through a staffing agency at a factory that made printing machines.
The court found that the urges did not go away. In about July 2004 he followed a worker at a fast food restaurant and thought about an attack. He did not, the judgment says, because he could not work out how he would get rid of a body. In October 2004 he told his doctor that he felt an urge to attack someone and had bought gloves, but he did not tell the doctor of any actual plan.
He then looked for another way. The court found that he researched possible targets and turned to the internet, where people who wanted to die were posting on suicide sites. In December 2004, after reading one post about a failed suicide attempt, he sent a message proposing that they die together using charcoal. That approach, a false offer of a joint suicide, became his method.
By the mid-2000s, Japanese suicide websites had drawn wide public concern. The Associated Press reported in 2007 that the sites hosted chat rooms and posts on how to end one's life, and that they appeared to attract young people dealing with bullying, breakups or abusive families. People who met on them often arranged to die together, typically from the fumes of charcoal stoves lit inside sealed cars. The National Police Agency began counting deaths in internet-linked suicide pacts in 2003, and the AP reported that a record 91 people died in 34 such pacts in 2005, nearly three times the 2003 figure.
Maeue used that practice as cover. In each case, the court found, he made his plans in advance, bought what he needed and reserved a rental car before meeting the person who had answered him.
Michiko Nagamoto was 25. The court described her as the elder of two children. She finished junior high school and went on to a part-time evening high school, which she left. From 1998 she worked part time at a pachinko parlor, living in, and she later developed depression, was in and out of the hospital, and lived at home with her mother. The judgment describes her as a young woman who was working hard to get her health back on an even footing. The Associated Press, citing police, described her as an office worker.
She and Maeue had exchanged more than 20 emails over several months before they met, according to a United Press International report based on Japanese press accounts. He had proposed that they die together. Japanese police sources said he never meant to kill himself.
On February 19, 2005, he took her by car to a parking lot in Kawachinagano, a city in the south of Osaka Prefecture. That night, the court found, he killed her by suffocation. He then hid her body, also in Kawachinagano, to keep her from being identified. She was found on February 23, 2005, four days after her death. The court noted that afterward he followed the news reports about the case.
Her mother told the court of her grief and of her anger at the man who had killed her daughter, and asked for the death penalty. Her brother described sleepless nights, and he too asked that Maeue be sentenced to death.
The second victim was a 14-year-old junior high school student from Kobe, in Hyogo Prefecture. The court's judgment does not give his name. He was his parents' only son, and the court said they loved him deeply. When his mother was ill, he looked after her. He hoped to become a lawyer or a computer programmer. In his third year of junior high school he developed depression, and he was seeing a psychiatrist.
Between May 14 and May 20, 2005, Maeue sent him messages from internet cafes in Sakai. He hid what he really meant to do and told the boy they would die together by charcoal. Contact between them began only about three days before they met. On May 21, 2005, he met the boy near a train station in the Tennoji ward of Osaka city and drove him south. The court found that this was the kidnapping of a minor. That afternoon, in Izumi, a city in southern Osaka Prefecture, he killed the boy by suffocation, and he left his body in Izumi soon after.
Eight days later he turned on the boy's family. On May 29, 2005, he called the boy's father, who was 38, twice from public telephones in Osaka Prefecture. The calls played a recording in a synthesized voice that claimed the boy had been kidnapped, demanded 3 million yen and gave instructions for a meeting. Maeue knew by then that the boy was dead. The court convicted him of intimidation for the calls. The judgment does not record that any money changed hands. In a later call, the court found, he blamed the father for going to the police.
The boy's father told the court of the agony of those calls and of the despair of identifying his son's remains. His mother said that nothing could replace her son. Both parents asked for the death penalty.
The third victim was a 21-year-old university student. The Japan Times reported that he was from Higashi-Osaka. The court described him as the eldest of four brothers, living on his own and paying his way with a scholarship and part-time work. After he was held back a year, he developed depression and social anxiety, and in January 2005 he began psychiatric treatment. His father had told him he could keep going with his studies, or leave if he wished.
Like the others, he had posted on a suicide site, and Maeue answered with the same offer. Their contact began only about five days before the killing. On June 10, 2005, Maeue took him to an empty lot in Kawachinagano under the pretext of a joint suicide and, the court found, killed him by suffocation that evening. He hid the body in Kawachinagano soon afterward.
His parents told the court that in some way they still felt their son was alive, and that it angered them that the man who killed him was the only person who knew his last moments. They asked for the death penalty.
Police in Osaka Prefecture traced Maeue through the death of Michiko Nagamoto. Emails and a rental car contract led investigators to him, United Press International reported in August 2005, citing Japanese press accounts. He was arrested on August 5, 2005. The Japan Times described him at the time as a 36-year-old temp agency employee from Sakai.
According to the court, he admitted the killing of Michiko Nagamoto within hours of questioning. He then prepared a written confession to the deaths of the boy and the student. Police had not yet linked those two cases to him, and the court later treated his account of them as a voluntary surrender, known in Japanese law as jishu, for those counts.
His statements led police to the other two victims. On August 6, 2005, they recovered remains believed to be the boy's in Izumi, at a place Maeue had described. On August 7 they found a body believed to be the student's in Kawachinagano, again on the basis of what he told them. The Japan Times reported that he had admitted to killing three people he met through a suicide website.
The case drew wide attention in Japan, which the court later counted among the harms the crimes had caused.
Maeue was tried before the 6th Criminal Division of the Osaka District Court. At a hearing in December, he pleaded guilty to the three murders and said he was prepared to receive a death sentence, The Japan Times reported. At his first hearing, according to the judgment, he said he would take responsibility and was ready for the death penalty, and he said he hoped his testimony might help treatment programs in prison. He described the crimes in detail in court.
The indictment, as summarized by The Japan Times, charged that in May 2005 he invited the 14-year-old from Kobe into a suicide pact, killed him and left his body in Izumi, and that between February and June 2005 he killed two Osaka residents, a 25-year-old woman and a 21-year-old man, in a similar way. On February 20, 2007, prosecutors asked the court to sentence him to death.
The defense made two main arguments. The first was that he was not fully responsible for his actions. His lawyers relied on his own description of a switch that seemed to flip in his head and of falling into what he called an "execution mode" he could not control. The second was that the death penalty itself breaks the Constitution of Japan, which forbids cruel punishment and protects life and due process.
The court rejected both. A forensic psychiatrist, identified in the judgment only as F, examined Maeue, reviewed the case file and his school and medical records, interviewed his parents, ran tests that included EEG recordings, a CT scan and psychological testing, and testified. F found no psychosis, no epilepsy, no schizophrenia and no dissociative identity disorder. F diagnosed antisocial personality disorder and two further disorders, and concluded that none of them took away his ability to tell right from wrong or to control what he did. The court agreed. It pointed to his planning, his efforts to hide evidence and his ordinary daily life between the killings. It accepted that he experienced his urges as overwhelming, but held that in law he kept "sufficient capacity to understand and control his conduct." On the constitutional point, it followed earlier rulings of the Supreme Court of Japan upholding the death penalty.
On March 28, 2007, the court found Maeue guilty on all eight counts: three of murder, three of abandoning a corpse, one of kidnapping a minor and one of intimidation. The presiding judge was Kazuo Mizushima, sitting with Judge Shuichi Hotta; a third judge, Ayako Nakagawa, had been transferred before the judgment was signed. The court imposed the death sentence on the murder of the university student, the count it treated as the most serious, and under the rules for multiple offenses it set no separate penalty for the others.
In explaining the sentence, the court found that his motive was wholly selfish and offered nothing in his favor. It stressed the planning: three killings over four months, each prepared with purchased equipment, a rented car and a deceptive approach online. It called the killings "cold and extraordinarily cruel." It noted that all three victims were young, that each was in a fragile state of mind when they wrote on the suicide site, and that each might have recovered. It set out the grief and anger of each family, all of whom asked for death, and the added harm to the boy's father from the ransom calls. It counted the hiding of the bodies against him, along with the public alarm the case had caused.
The court also looked at his past. It weighed his earlier convictions, the failure of treatment and of his earlier prison terms to change him, and the fact that he still dwelt on the killings. It concluded that his urges were deeply rooted and unlikely to improve.
On the other side, the court listed his surrender on the boy's and student's cases and his early confessions, the remorse he expressed at trial and his readiness to accept death, the view that his disorder was not of his own making, his troubled upbringing, and his attempts to manage his condition through treatment. It found that his remorse was not sufficient, given his conduct after the crimes, and that these factors, taken together, did not outweigh the gravity of what he had done. It concluded that "the ultimate penalty is unavoidable."
The Associated Press, which confirmed the sentence with a court official, reported that day that Maeue, then 38, had pleaded guilty to the three murders and, according to Kyodo News, had appealed the sentence.
The appeal did not go forward. Maeue withdrew his appeal to the High Court, Amnesty International reported in 2009, and as a result his death sentence became final without any review of the first ruling. Amnesty International Japan pointed to his case, and to that of Yukio Yamaji, who also dropped his appeal, when it argued that Japan should adopt the mandatory review of death sentences that the United Nations Human Rights Committee had called for.
In February 2009 Amnesty International issued an urgent appeal on behalf of Maeue and Yamaji, whom it judged to be at heightened risk of execution.
Maeue was hanged at the Osaka Detention Center on July 28, 2009. He was 40. Yukio Yamaji, 25, convicted of killing two sisters in Osaka in 2005, was hanged there the same day, and Chen Detong, 41, a Chinese national convicted of killing three fellow Chinese nationals in Kawasaki in 1999, was hanged in Tokyo. "Executions were carried out today on three inmates who had been sentenced to death," the Justice Ministry said, according to Agence France-Presse.
The three hangings brought Japan's total for 2009 to seven. They were the first since the country's new lay judge system, in which citizens sit with professional judges in serious criminal cases, had been introduced, United Press International reported. Japan had hanged 15 people the previous year, AFP noted.
The justice minister at the time was Eisuke Mori. Amnesty International Japan said in a statement the same day that Mori was all but certain to leave office with a general election due in August, and that carrying out executions at such a moment meant, in effect, executing people with no one left to answer for the decision. Makoto Teranaka of Amnesty's Japanese section called the hangings "a grave act that cannot be permitted amid international calls to suspend capital punishment," AFP reported. Amnesty International noted that Japanese executions were usually carried out in secret, with prisoners given a few hours' notice or none, and families told only afterward.
The Osaka District Court's judgment of March 28, 2007, is the only trial ruling in the case. It convicted Maeue of the murder of Michiko Nagamoto on February 19, 2005, and of abandoning her body; of kidnapping a 14-year-old boy and murdering him on May 21, 2005, and abandoning his body; of intimidating the boy's father on May 29, 2005; and of murdering a 21-year-old university student on June 10, 2005, and abandoning his body. The sentence was death. Because he withdrew his appeal, the judgment became final. His earlier record consisted of two convictions in the Sakai Branch of the Osaka District Court, in November 2001 and August 2002, for assaults on people passing in the street.
Several details that circulate about the case do not appear in the court's judgment or in contemporary reports.
The record does not give the exact date on which Maeue withdrew his appeal, or his date of birth. The nickname often attached to him in English does not appear in it either.
Press accounts differed on how the victims died. Early reports said he strangled or choked them. The court found that each died of suffocation.
Press accounts also differed on Michiko Nagamoto's work. The Associated Press called her an office worker, while the court described part-time work and a long illness.
1987: Enrolls at a technical university in Ishikawa Prefecture; later withdraws after assaulting a classmate.
April 1993: Begins work at a post office.
February 1995: Dismissed after assaulting a colleague; psychiatric treatment begins that year.
March and June 2001: Attacks a woman and a girl in the street.
November 27, 2001: Sentenced to one year, suspended for three years, for injury and assault.
April 2002: Attacks a junior high school boy in the street.
August 9, 2002: Sentenced to ten months for injury; the earlier suspension is revoked on December 26, 2002.
March 29, 2004: Completes his prison terms.
December 2004: Answers a post on a suicide site with an offer to die together.
February 19, 2005: Kills Michiko Nagamoto, 25, in Kawachinagano; she is found on February 23.
May 21, 2005: Kidnaps and kills a 14-year-old boy from Kobe in Izumi.
May 29, 2005: Phones the boy's father with a recorded ransom demand.
June 10, 2005: Kills a 21-year-old university student in Kawachinagano.
August 5, 2005: Arrested; confesses to all three killings.
August 6 and 7, 2005: Police recover the boy's and the student's bodies.
February 20, 2007: Prosecutors ask for the death penalty.
March 28, 2007: Osaka District Court convicts him and sentences him to death.
February 2009: Amnesty International issues an urgent appeal for him and Yukio Yamaji.
July 28, 2009: Hanged at the Osaka Detention Center.