The first body could not be identified. When Hiroshima prefectural police set up a task force of 164 officers on May 8, 1996, they had a young woman's remains, a blood group, an appendix scar and dental work on four teeth, and they expected a long investigation. They asked the prefectural dental association to search its members' records, concentrating on patients born without a particular pair of premolars. By the time the case broke that September, three more women were dead.
All four had been picked up at night in the old pleasure quarter of Naka Ward, the streets of Nagarekawa, Shintenchi and Yagenbori, by a taxi driver named Hiroaki Hidaka. He was thirty-four, heavily in debt, and he killed them in the back of his cab, strangling them with a necktie and in one case a belt, and left their bodies in the hills. Investigators later noted that every site lay within about thirty-five kilometers of the city, and took it as the work of a professional driver who knew where no one would look.
The first was a girl of sixteen, who, according to later accounts, had been meeting men for money. She worked at a hairdresser's and attended the evening course at a high school in Kure, and she had last phoned home on April 17. Around eight the next evening Hidaka approached her near Shintenchi Park. According to Japanese accounts of his statements, they went to a love hotel, where she told him about her life in tears, and he gave her money and did nothing. Later that night he strangled her and took her money. He was back at the taxi company at about four in the morning, where he replaced the sheet on the rear seat with a clean one.
Nobody connected her death to him, and he drew the conclusion that women who sold sex could vanish without anyone raising the alarm. On August 13 he returned to Shintenchi, paid a woman thirty thousand yen, took her to a hotel and then up a mountain road, stopped the car and strangled her from behind with a necktie. He took fifty-two thousand yen from her purse. On September 7 he killed a forty-five-year-old hostess he already knew, strangling her with a belt during sex in the car and taking eighty-two thousand yen. By then, he told investigators, killing had become a pleasure in itself. A week later, on September 14, he killed a fourth woman he knew. From the four he took about 240,000 yen.
The last killing was witnessed closely enough to put him under suspicion. He tried to run, and he was arrested on September 21 and confessed. On December 4 he was rearrested for the robbery-murder of the girl in April, and ten days later he took investigators to the places where he had left the bodies.
His life had begun with every promise. Born on April 17, 1962 in Miyazaki Prefecture, the youngest of three children in a farming family, he went to the best high school in the district, won a marathon, had friends and a girlfriend, and meant to become a teacher. In his final year his homeroom teacher recommended him for the University of Tsukuba. He was rejected there and at the teacher-training university in Fukuoka, went instead to the law faculty of Fukuoka University, a private school, barely attended, borrowed money, drank, went to prostitutes, and dropped out. Back in Miyazaki he was arrested for drunk riding on a motorcycle, and in January 1986 for robbery. After prison an uncle helped him move to Hiroshima, and in April 1989 he started driving a taxi.
He married in 1991 and had a daughter in 1993, and his wife was later admitted to a psychiatric hospital. At the taxi company colleagues knew a quiet, conscientious driver who changed when he drank, lost his temper without reason and sometimes drove drunk with beer cans rolling across the floor. In his neighborhood he played on a local baseball team, took part in the residents' association and seemed mild.
The Hiroshima District Court sentenced him to death on February 9, 2000, treating the later killings as driven by an abnormal fixation on the act and weighing against him that the women had been trapped in a moving vehicle and their bodies discarded. He did not appeal, and the sentence became final without review by any higher court, a choice rare enough in Japan that the case is still cited as the example of it.
He was hanged on December 25, 2006, at forty-four, one of four prisoners executed that day. Afterward his lawyer, Shuichi Adachi, protested that prison authorities had unlawfully refused him access to his client. His age during the killings appears as thirty-seven in some Japanese summaries; the police and court record give thirty-four at arrest, which fits his birth in 1962. None of the four women has been reliably named in public, and the first of them was a minor.