On the evening of December 28, 2013, a woman in Muko, a small city on the southwestern edge of Kyoto, called emergency services. Her husband was unconscious, she said, and he had gone cold. Isao Kakehi was seventy-five. He had married her on November 1, less than two months earlier, after meeting her through a marriage agency that summer. He was carried out of the house on a stretcher and died in hospital about an hour after he collapsed.
In Japan, an elderly man who collapses at home is rarely autopsied. This time one was ordered, and it found cyanide in his stomach and blood. That finding, and the questions it raised about the men who had died around his widow over the previous twenty years, led to one of the longest lay-judge trials in Japanese history. The widow, Chisako Kakehi, was convicted of killing three men and trying to kill a fourth, and was sentenced to death. She was never executed. She died in her cell at the Osaka Detention House on December 26, 2024.
The most detailed account of her early life comes from Kazuteru Ono, a nonfiction writer who interviewed her more than twenty times in detention and published two books on the case. According to her own later account, as Ono reports it, she was born in November 1946 in Nagasaki City to an unmarried mother and was soon taken in by an adoptive family in Yahata, now part of Kitakyushu, in Fukuoka Prefecture. A notarized will that Ono obtained gives her date of birth as November 28, 1946. Her adoptive father was a salaried worker; she grew up as the family's eldest daughter, with an older brother, under the surname Yamashita. CNN, citing the Asahi, reported that she was born in Saga Prefecture, where Ono says her adoptive father came from. The two accounts differ.
A classmate told Ono she was very bright, though weak at sports. In April 1962 she entered Tochiku High School, an academic prefectural school, and after graduating she took a clerical job at the Kitakyushu branch of a major city bank in April 1965. In 1969, on a trip to Sakurajima in Kagoshima with colleagues from the bank, she met a man who worked in transport and lived in Kaizuka, south of Osaka. Both families opposed the match. She left the bank in March 1969 and married him that October.
Her husband's family grew mandarin oranges, and she worked in the orchard. A son was born in 1970 and a daughter in 1971. Neighbors told Ono she was strong-willed, spoke openly against the main branch of her husband's family, and had a reputation for spending; one said she "borrowed from everywhere and in the end had to give up the land." In 1987 her husband started a small garment-printing company, and she helped run it. Ono reports that from about 1990 she was trading futures and similar products, and that at times she owed tens of millions of yen.
Her husband was often ill and died in September 1994, at fifty-four. CNN, citing the Asahi, says he died of an illness after a twenty-five-year marriage. She used about 20 million yen of his life insurance to repay money she had borrowed from both families for the company, Ono writes. She kept the business going until it closed in 2001, and then left Kaizuka. No court has found anything criminal in the first husband's death, and she was never charged over it.
In court records and much of the press she later appears under the surname Kakehi, from her last marriage. During the 2000s she used her first husband's name, Yano, and the will Ono obtained names her as "common-law wife Yano Chisako."
By Ono's account, about four years after her first husband's death, around 1998, she began registering with marriage agencies, and in time she was signed up with several at once. Staff at agencies that served older clients told the women's weekly Shukan Josei that she was popular in that world. "Her weapon is her femininity," one said. "She's good at winning men's hearts." They described her at first meetings as demure: she told men she had been married only once and was lonely, praised them, took the wrapper off a straw for an iced coffee and helped a man into his coat. Wire reports said she asked the agencies for partners who were wealthy and childless.
A man in his eighties who met her through an agency told the same magazine that on their second date, a drive in her car, she asked, "So, do you have any assets?" He did not answer, and there was no third date. The police contacted him more than a year later.
Ono lists the men who died after relationships with her: a man in Osaka City in 2002; a man in Minamiawaji on Awaji Island, found collapsed in his cattle barn in March 2005, after which his family paid her part of the estate; a man in Nishinomiya, a retired pharmacist, whom she married in May 2006 and who died that August, after which she sold his land and building for about 94 million yen; a man in Nara City who died in March 2008, a week after making a will in her favor the previous December; and a man in Matsubara whom she married in April 2008 and who died in May 2008. Another partner, in Sakai, died in May 2013. These deaths were never charged. Most of the men were not autopsied, and the record holds no court finding about any of them.
Over the same years, Ono writes, she put about 300 million yen into a company that sold overseas futures and options to elderly customers, and lost most of what she had received.
Toshiaki Suehiro lived in Kobe. Ono, who uses other names for the men in his book but whose dates and places match the court cases, describes him as a native of what is now Minamiawaji who worked as a boiler technician for the Hyogo prefectural government, raised three children with his wife, and lost her in 1997. He looked after his health and had built up savings by investing in stocks. He met Kakehi through a marriage agency in the summer of 2005.
She borrowed from him to invest, in dozens of transfers, and by late 2007 she owed him about 40 million yen, by Ono's count; CNN put the figure at about 48 million. The repayment was due in December 2007. On that day, at a cafe in Chuo Ward, Kobe, in the early afternoon, she gave him a capsule, telling him it was good for his health. Ono writes that she first swallowed a capsule herself, one with no poison in it, so that he would trust her. Shortly after they left he collapsed on the street, and she called an ambulance. Ono dates the poisoning to December 10, 2007; CNN gives December 18 and says she checked him into the hospital under a false name.
He survived with brain damage from lack of oxygen, losing much of his sight and higher brain function, and needed full-time care. He died on May 5, 2009, aged seventy-nine, of a stomach lymphoma unrelated to the poisoning. No autopsy was done and no blood samples were kept. The case against her rested on his medical records and on several experts who testified that his symptoms were consistent with cyanide poisoning. Because the poisoning came on the day her debt fell due, prosecutors charged it as attempted robbery-murder, a charge Japanese law uses where a killing is aimed at escaping a debt.
Masanori Honda was seventy-one and lived in Kaizuka. Ono's account describes a man from Takehara in Hiroshima Prefecture who spent most of his working life at sea as a chief engineer on foreign routes and, after retiring, worked on a boat patrolling the waters around Kansai International Airport. He had married but had no children, and was divorced in 2008. He was healthy, CNN reported, with his diabetes under control, and he used a local sports center.
He met Kakehi through a marriage agency around October 2010. In about August 2011 he took her to his hometown and told his relatives he meant to marry her, and in late December 2011, before any marriage was registered, he made a notarized will leaving her everything he had. Evidence at trial showed that in January 2012 she had begun seeing other men.
On March 9, 2012, at about five in the afternoon, they met at a cafe in Kaizuka. Afterward he set off on his motorbike toward the gym, lost consciousness and fell on a road in neighboring Izumisano. He died in hospital less than two hours later. His death was first put down to heart disease. Cyanide was later found in his blood, and he is the former fiance whose motorcycle death the press linked to her in 2014.
At the wake, Ono writes, she raised the matter of the inheritance and produced the will. When Honda's brother mentioned a life insurance policy naming the siblings, she said the beneficiary had been changed to her. The family did not contest it. Ono puts what she received at nearly 20 million yen in insurance and property; CNN reported about 16 million.
Minoru Hioki was seventy-five and lived in Itami, in Hyogo Prefecture. In Ono's account he came from Kagoshima Prefecture, worked for an interior construction firm in Itami from 1981 as a site supervisor and salesman, and set up his own interior business at home in 1992. He was divorced in 2006, and his son and daughter had left home. His hobby was the board game go, and he went regularly to classes and clubs. He had survived lung cancer after radiation treatment. In August 2013, CNN reported, he wrote to Kakehi that he wanted to stay with her for good.
He met her through a marriage agency around October 2012. On September 2, 2013, he made a notarized will leaving her his whole estate. Eighteen days later, on September 20, after dinner at a restaurant in Itami, he complained of feeling ill in the parking lot and lost consciousness in her car. At the hospital she told the doctors she was his wife and his only family, although he had two children, and that he had terminal cancer and did not need life-prolonging treatment. He died about two hours later. The death was recorded as due to his lung cancer.
His family doubted that and asked the Itami police to look into it, Ono reports, but no autopsy was done. They had never heard of her until she appeared with the will and claimed his savings and shares. She received about 15 million yen. By then, Ono writes, she was deeply in debt to acquaintances and lenders and had almost no savings.
Isao Kakehi came from Nagahama in Shiga Prefecture and had been a manager at a large electronics company, supervising electrical work at sewage treatment plants. Ono describes him as a serious man whose hobby was walking. His wife died in 1994, he retired in 1998, and his only daughter died in 2001. After that he lived alone in his house in Muko.
He met Kakehi in June 2013 through a marriage agency in Kyoto Prefecture. They registered their marriage on November 1, 2013, and she moved in. In mid-December she went around the neighborhood with sweets to introduce herself as his new wife. Ono reports that when she married him she was carrying about 11 million yen in debt. Within a month of the wedding, CNN reported, she was seeing another man.
On December 28, at about nine in the evening, he took a capsule at home and collapsed. She called emergency services at 9:47 p.m. A neighbor told Ono that Kakehi had said he fell over at his computer, saying his head was spinning. When his brother arrived at the house that day, he found the New Year food already prepared. In the hearse on the way to the crematorium, Ono writes, she asked his siblings where his bankbook, seal and ring were, and told them she would search the house until she found them.
The autopsy on Isao Kakehi found lethal levels of cyanide in his heart, blood and stomach and erosion of the stomach lining. Within days, CNN reported, police found supplement pills and empty capsules in her home, which they believed she had refilled with powdered cyanide. Investigators ruled out suicide. With that finding, police went back over the deaths of the other men who had been close to her, most of which had been put down to illness. Honda's blood sample showed cyanide too.
The Kyoto Prefectural Police arrested her on November 19, 2014, on suspicion of murdering her husband. She was sixty-seven. A senior investigator told The Associated Press that she was one of the people around six men who had died over about twenty years, all in western Japan, and that investigators suspected insurance or inheritance money as the motive. TV Asahi reported that she denied the charge in questioning. The next day officers searched her house in Muko and then her apartment in Osaka, and took away capsules and the thin wafers used to wrap powdered medicine.
In early December 2014, AFP reported, citing Japanese media, that traces of cyanide had been found in soil from her potted plants. CNN, describing the evidence later accepted by the court, said investigators had found a plastic bag with traces of cyanide buried in a plant pot she had thrown away, a bag that appeared to have been in the soil for months, and a matching zip bag in her home. Wire reports also said police found traces of cyanide in her rubbish in Kyoto, and equipment for giving medicine, along with medical books, in an apartment she kept south of the city. According to CNN's account of the ruling, she had obtained the cyanide through her work at the printing factory.
Over months of questioning, CNN reported, she confessed to poisoning Honda, Hioki and Suehiro. After she was indicted she changed her position and denied the charges. Prosecutors charged her with three murders and the attempted robbery-murder of Suehiro. Police believed she was connected to four other deaths, NHK reported, but prosecutors did not charge them, citing insufficient evidence.
By the time the case came to court, she was in her seventies and her lawyers said she had dementia. In 2016, a court-ordered psychiatric assessment found mild, early-stage dementia, and the Kyoto District Court ruled that she was criminally responsible and fit to stand trial. The defense asked for proceedings to be suspended. That question followed the case to the Supreme Court.
The lay-judge trial opened at the Kyoto District Court on June 26, 2017, before presiding judge Ayako Nakagawa. Kakehi was seventy, her hair completely white, and she wore headphones because she was hard of hearing. Asked at the opening how she pleaded, she said, "I leave it to my lawyer." Her lawyers, led by Takashi Tsuji, argued that each man might have died of illness, suicide or accident, that there was no proof she had given anyone poison, and that her dementia meant she could neither be held responsible nor take part in a trial. They also argued that the death penalty was unconstitutional.
The plan was for her to remain silent. It did not hold. In July, during the hearings on her husband's death, she answered a prosecutor's question about her health and then told the court she had killed him. "I did it," she said, as Shukan Josei reported. "He gave the woman before me a lot of money, but he would not give me any. I was looked down on and I hated it." The Asahi quoted her as saying she had been waiting for the right moment because she wanted to kill him out of deep hatred, and AFP, citing Jiji Press, quoted her: "I killed him because he gave other women tens of millions of yen but did not give me even a penny." Days later, the Mainichi reported, she told the court she did not remember what she had said.
Her testimony moved back and forth. On one day she said, "I've killed more than one person, you know"; on another, "I didn't kill them," and "There's no benefit in killing them." Asked by the defense what she had eaten for lunch, she said she had not eaten anything memorable. When a prosecutor asked whether she had planned to kill from the first marriage meeting, she said angrily, "Do I look like such a frightening woman?" Asked when she had met Masanori Honda, she said she did not remember and asked the prosecutor whether he remembered his old girlfriends. When a female lay judge asked about remorse, she said, "I don't want to be lectured by a young person like you. It's rude." Asked by another whether she wanted to send an apology to the families, she answered, "This isn't a teen drama." She told the court she wanted the death sentence as soon as possible, and said, "Even if I were executed tomorrow, I would die smiling."
Isao Kakehi's brother and sister came to court. His brother described finding the New Year food in the house. "He must have been looking forward to New Year," he said. "What was he feeling when he died? Give her the maximum penalty." His sister also asked for the death penalty. "My brother trusted her completely," she said. "To kill him like an insect is unforgivable." She asked the press not to call the defendant by the family name Kakehi. The other victims' families did not attend; their statements were read for them.
On October 10, 2017, prosecutors asked for death, calling it "a rare, vicious and grave case" with no grounds to spare her. The hearings closed the next day.
More than 560 people lined up on November 7, 2017, for the fifty-one public seats. Kakehi, now seventy, asked the judge to speak up and then listened without visible reaction. Judge Nakagawa convicted her on all four counts. "The accused made the victims drink a cyanide compound with a murderous intention in all the four cases," she said, according to NHK as quoted by AFP. The crimes were well prepared, she said, "cunning and malicious," and she saw no choice but the ultimate penalty. As NHK reported, the court found that Kakehi had been present when each man was poisoned and had begun taking over his assets right after he died. The court rejected the dementia defense. The trial had run 135 days, the second-longest jury trial since lay judges came into Japanese courts in 2009. Her lawyers appealed the same day.
Two days later, at the Kyoto Detention House, Ono visited her. "I got a death sentence, didn't I?" she asked him. "When will it be carried out?" Then: "I'm seventy now, right? Will I live to seventy-five?"
On May 24, 2019, the Osaka High Court rejected her appeal. Kakehi was seventy-two. Her lawyers filed a final appeal, Jiji Press reported. The previous month, in an interview with Jiji at the Osaka Detention House, she had said, "I apologize with my death. Please hang me." CNN, citing the Yomiuri, quoted her in 2019 as saying, "Even if you reflect on it, your sins will not go away," and "It will not reach the dead."
Before the Supreme Court, her lawyers again argued that dementia left her unable to take part in a criminal trial, and, according to Kyodo, asked for another psychiatric evaluation on the ground that her condition had worsened. On June 29, 2021, the Third Petty Bench rejected the appeal. Presiding Justice Yuko Miyazaki said she had used a matchmaking agency to get to know elderly victims one after another and had given them cyanide after making them trust her as a life partner. "It is a ruthless crime based on a planned and strong murderous intention," the court said, according to NHK, and even taking her age and other factors into account, "the death penalty is unavoidable." Kyodo's summary said she had poisoned her husband and two common-law partners to inherit money and escape debt. The sentence became final in July 2021.
Ono saw her one last time on July 5, 2021, at the Osaka Detention House, just before the sentence became final and ordinary visits ended. He had expected her to refuse; she agreed to see him. In letters over the years she had written that being locked up made her long for company, that she wished she could erase her crime with an eraser, and that she lacked the courage to die. One letter ended, "Wherever I live, I'm a woman, after all. A woman, after all."
When Ono had pressed her on contradictions in her accounts, she grew angry, and their contact broke off after a meeting on March 6, 2018. Her stock answer to hard questions, he wrote, was that she did not remember. He also reported that in a December 2017 meeting she described herself as having amnesia and did not remember letters she had written to him.
In September 2022, after the sentence became final, she petitioned for a retrial over the death of a Hyogo Prefecture man who had been her common-law partner. The Kyoto District Court dismissed the petition in March 2024. She filed an immediate appeal to the Osaka High Court, which was still considering it when she died.
Chisako Kakehi was not executed. On December 26, 2024, she was found lying in her cell at the Osaka Detention House. "Her death was confirmed at a hospital on Thursday," a Justice Ministry official told AFP. She was seventy-eight. The ministry did not give a cause; Japanese media suggested an illness that was not disclosed. Bunshun reported that she died that morning. Her death ended the pending retrial appeal. A search for news of any later development, made for this page on October 14, 2026, found none; an April 2026 Bunshun excerpt from a book on Japanese death-row inmates also records that she died in 2024.
No execution date was ever announced. CNN noted in 2021 that Japanese law calls for execution within six months of a final sentence but that this rarely happens. Kanae Kijima, sentenced to death in 2012 for killing three men she met through online dating sites, was also called a Black Widow in the press.
The figures vary with the source. In 2014, citing Japanese media, CNN reported that she had received about 800 million yen in inheritance and insurance from at least five husbands and partners over twenty years. AFP repeatedly put the total at about one billion yen over ten years. CNN in 2021 cited the Asahi's estimate of about 500 million yen. Shukan Josei, at the trial, put what she received from three of the charged victims' estates and insurance at about 40 million yen. All the accounts agree that she lost most of the money in futures and similar trading, and that she was in debt when the last men died. The Supreme Court's ruling, as Kyodo summarized it, tied the killings to inheritance and debt. The district court, CNN reported, found that by 2013 her motive could not be explained by need alone, and that she showed no sincere reflection.
Writers in Japan connected the case with Hiroyuki Kurokawa's novel Gosaigyo (roughly, "the second-wife business"), published in August 2014, a few months before her arrest, about a woman who targets elderly men living alone for their estates. The press used the novel's title as a label for her.
Proven by final judgment: the murders of Masanori Honda, Minoru Hioki and Isao Kakehi, and the attempt on Toshiaki Suehiro, charged as attempted robbery-murder (foreign wire services reported it as attempted murder). Cyanide was found in the bodies of Isao Kakehi and Honda. The Hioki and Suehiro counts rested on circumstantial and medical evidence; neither man was autopsied for poison.
Confessed: she admitted killing her husband in open court in July 2017, and, by CNN's account, confessed to police over the other three, but she also denied the killings in court and said she did not remember. Her lawyers argued that her retractions and inconsistencies reflected dementia and pressure in questioning. The courts accepted the dementia diagnosis as mild and found her responsible.
Suspected only: the deaths of other men she married or lived with between 2002 and 2013, which Japanese media and Ono count at about eleven deaths in all including the charged cases. Police reportedly linked her to four more deaths; prosecutors did not charge them. Her first husband's death in 1994 has never been alleged to be a crime in any source used here. The press nickname Black Widow, and the claim that the total of victims exceeds ten, are journalistic labels and estimates, not court findings.
November 1946: born, by her own account in Nagasaki City (CNN, citing the Asahi, says Saga Prefecture); raised in Yahata, Kitakyushu.
April 1965: joins a city bank's Kitakyushu branch.
October 1969: marries and moves to Kaizuka, Osaka Prefecture.
1987: her husband founds a garment-printing company.
September 1994: first husband dies, aged 54.
About 1998: begins registering with marriage agencies.
2001: the printing business closes.
2002 to 2008: several partners and two later husbands die; none of these deaths is charged.
December 2007: Toshiaki Suehiro collapses in Kobe after taking a capsule from her.
May 5, 2009: Suehiro dies, aged 79, of an unrelated illness.
March 9, 2012: Masanori Honda, 71, dies after collapsing on his motorbike near Kaizuka.
September 20, 2013: Minoru Hioki, 75, dies in Itami, 18 days after making a will in her favor.
November 1, 2013: marries Isao Kakehi.
December 28, 2013: Isao Kakehi, 75, dies in Muko; autopsy finds cyanide.
November 19, 2014: arrested by Kyoto Prefectural Police.
2016: found fit to stand trial despite mild dementia.
June 26, 2017: lay-judge trial opens at the Kyoto District Court.
July 2017: admits in court that she killed her husband.
October 10, 2017: prosecutors seek the death penalty.
November 7, 2017: sentenced to death.
May 24, 2019: Osaka High Court rejects her appeal.
June 29, 2021: Supreme Court rejects her final appeal; sentence final in July 2021.
September 2022: files a petition for retrial.
March 2024: Kyoto District Court dismisses the petition; she appeals to the Osaka High Court.
December 26, 2024: dies at the Osaka Detention House, aged 78, without having been executed.