In 2005 three people who had found each other through an online suicide club in Japan agreed, one at a time, to meet a man who suggested they die together, of carbon monoxide from a charcoal burner in a sealed car. After a brief conversation he strangled each of them instead: a boy of fourteen, a woman of twenty-five and a man of twenty-one. The man, Hiroshi Maeue, said later that the killings gave him sexual pleasure. He had a paraphilia in which he could not reach sexual release without strangling someone, and he said the desire had come from reading about similar events in a mystery novel as a child.
Maeue was born on August 8, 1968. At the Kanazawa Institute of Technology in 1988 he tried to strangle a male friend and dropped out. In 1995 he was arrested for beating and trying to asphyxiate a male colleague; the case was settled out of court and he lost his job. In 2001 he was arrested for trying to strangle two women and sentenced to a year in prison and three years suspended. Released early for good behavior, he was arrested again in 2002 for trying to strangle a junior high school boy and given twenty-two months. The suicide-site killings came soon after his release.
He was arrested in August 2005. At his trial prosecutors called him a lust murderer, and on March 28, 2007, the Osaka District Court sentenced him to death. His lawyers appealed, but he accepted the judgment, said he was willing to pay for his crimes with his life, and withdrew the appeal on July 5, 2007. He was hanged in Osaka on July 28, 2009, on the same day as another convicted killer, Yukio Yamaji, twenty-five.