Kurita was born in 1926 in Tochigi prefecture. In February 1948 he killed two former girlfriends. Over the following four years he killed six more people, women and children, in Chiba, Tochigi and Shizuoka, raping them and in several cases interfering with the bodies afterwards.
He was arrested on January 16, 1952 after the killing of a woman and her young daughter, and confessed. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.
He was hanged at Miyagi prison on October 14, 1959, seven and a half years after his arrest, a gap that reflects the ordinary length of capital appeal in Japan rather than anything particular to the case.
He is one of a group of Japanese cases from the immediate post-war years, alongside Yoshio Kodaira in this archive, in which men with records of violence moved between prefectures through a period of extreme social disruption and were caught only after several years. The accessible sourcing is Japanese-language summary material and is thin on the individual killings.