Between October 30 and December 12, 1965, eight men were robbed and killed across the Kinki and Kyushu regions of western Japan. They were in their fifties and sixties and every one of them lived alone. The killer did not know any of them. From the first, a fifty-seven-year-old man in Kaigandori in Kobe, he took five hundred yen, some watches and a pair of trousers, and the sums never grew much larger.
One man died in Fukuoka Prefecture, three in Hyogo, one in Osaka, one in Shiga and two in Kyoto. They were strangled, stabbed or beaten to death, and several of them died where they slept or worked, in junkyards and on building sites, rather than in houses. The killing that convinced the police they were looking for one man was that of a judo instructor in Kasuya District, Fukuoka, on November 22.
On December 9 the National Police Agency designated it Wide-Area Important Case No. 105. It was the first murder case the agency had ever designated that way, and it announced the killings as the worst in scale and reach in the post-war period. Hyogo prefectural police, writing their own history decades later, called it a series of random killings in which offender and victim had no acquaintance at all.
Detectives already had a face. Late in November a woman in Kotohirayama, in Kagawa Prefecture, had sent them a photograph of four people, and one of the four was Furutani Sokichi, fifty-one, a man with a previous conviction for robbery-murder. He was wanted for questioning.
Two days after the designation, two rag-and-bone men were found strangled in Fushimi, in Kyoto. Fingerprints at that scene were his, and on December 11 he was named as wanted nationwide. The accounts of the last day do not agree. One says that on December 12 he was walking the shore at Nishinomiya, that two salvagers aged fifty-one and sixty-nine were beaten to death with a hammer in a hut there, and that the officers who found the bodies found Furutani hiding in the shadows of the same hut. He ran. He was unarmed and fifty-one, and he could not outrun them.
He was born on February 16, 1914, on Tsushima, now part of Nagasaki Prefecture, the eldest of five children of a family that farmed part time and did well trading fish. His mother died when he was four. His father left for Korea to look for land, the household broke up, and the boy was sent to an uncle in Osaka and passed among relatives. At school he stole from other children and fought.
When he was ten his father came back and remarried, and Sokichi went to live with them. His stepmother beat him. He began living by theft, sleeping at night under the eaves of a temple. The family moved to Hiroshima Prefecture after he finished elementary school, and he was thrown out of junior high school for beating a teacher.
After that the record is almost continuous. He was held at the Iwakuni reformatory in Yamaguchi Prefecture for larceny and released in April 1933, arrested again in August for a theft committed that May, and given four years in Fukuoka Prison. In September 1937 he got three years for theft and fraud, and in April 1941 six more for theft.
On May 23, 1951, in the Hakata ward of Fukuoka, he and a nineteen-year-old named Sakamoto Noboru strangled a man and took 6,800 yen. On June 20 they strangled an old man who lived alone in Yahata, now part of Kitakyushu, and took 230 yen. Sakamoto was caught and told the police where to find Furutani. The Fukuoka District Court could not establish what part the older man had played. It sentenced Sakamoto to death, and he was hanged in 1953, saying he wanted Furutani executed sooner. Furutani argued he had taken no part in the killing itself, the court accepted enough of it, and he was given ten years.
He was paroled from Kumamoto prison on November 9, in 1963 by one account and 1964 by another. He worked in construction from a halfway house and was under supervision until June 1965. One account says that in May 1964, after reading a newspaper article, he decided to move to the Kansai region. The first of the eight men died in October 1965.
Asked later why he had done it, he gave a short answer. He had begged the men for a meal and a place to sleep, and he had killed the ones who refused. The police also attributed to him the killing of an old man in 1964 or 1965 but did not have the evidence to charge it, and in all the prosecution accused him of twelve murders.
The interrogations ran across prefectures. Officers came from Shiga, from Fukuoka, from Kyoto. He would cooperate and then stop, demanding to be taken to a particular force before he would talk about a particular killing. He told one set of detectives that the police had improved a great deal since his day and that the Hyogo men were sincere and decent, and the next day he was stalling again. In January 1966 he refused to leave his cell, and when he did he attacked two detectives and cut one of their hands.
His trial opened at Kobe District Court on June 29, 1966, before a presiding judge named Nagahisa. He accepted most of the indictment when it was read but denied that robbery had been the purpose. He sat calmly until the prosecutor began to describe one of the Kobe scenes, and then he stood up, shouted at the prosecutor and hit him. He went on to say that incompetent police had beaten him into confessing.
His defense was that a man named Oka had done it. The only killing he would own was the one in Nishinomiya, and there, he said, he had stopped to borrow some food and had killed the man only when he refused. The prosecution told the court that Oka did not exist, and that the name belonged to a Fukuoka police constable Furutani had once looked up to. They also told the court why he had invented him: in 1951 he had escaped a death sentence by arguing he had not been the one who killed, and he was trying it again.
The court found that the physical evidence, the work records and a thumbprint left no doubt. It said it felt sympathy for a boy who had lost his mother and been beaten by his stepmother, and that none of it justified killing eight people. It sentenced him to death. The date is given as April 1, 1971 in some accounts, February 16, 1971 in another, and April 1, 1974 in another. The Osaka High Court dismissed his appeal, and on November 28, 1978 the Supreme Court, with Takatsuji Masami presiding, rejected his final appeal. The sentence became final in January 1979.
Two things from the years he spent waiting are on the record. One is that a retired detective wrote to him and sent him parcels for six years, which a newspaper covered in 1977 under a headline about a killer who wept. The other is that on December 2, 1982 he attacked another condemned man, aged thirty-nine, with a pair of scissors he had kept hidden, and the wound took a week to heal. The motive was reported as jealousy. Until then, when an execution was carried out, the remaining condemned prisoners had been allowed to gather in the detention house Buddhist room to hold a service for the man who had died. After Furutani used one of those gatherings to settle his grudge, the practice was stopped.
He was hanged at the Osaka Detention House on May 31, 1985, on the order of Justice Minister Hitoshi Shimazaki. He was seventy-one, the oldest prisoner Japan had executed, and he held that distinction until December 25, 2006, when Yoshimitsu Akiyama, seventy-seven, and Yoshio Fujinami, seventy-five, were hanged together. An official told the Asahi Shimbun afterward that in his last years he swung between moods, calm as a Buddha one day and like a beast the next. He had no friends among the prisoners. The only letters he received came from the former Hyogo investigator.
He left a poem. It is about carrying a weight of kindness up the slope of old age and not being able to bear it.
A writer who went to his home village on Tsushima years later was told by an old woman who had known the family that his ashes were not in their temple. The priest who keeps the register confirmed it: nobody named Sokichi is recorded among the deaths there in 1985. He thought the family had refused to collect the remains, and that they would be in the Osaka Detention House grave.