On March 6, 2002, a seventeen-year-old girl escaped from an apartment in Kitakyushu and told the police she had been held captive there for years. When Futoshi Matsunaga and Junko Ogata came to take her back, officers arrested them. The girl's father, Kumio Toraya, was dead, and so, it emerged over the following months, were Ogata's father, mother, sister, brother-in-law, nephew and niece. Police never recovered any human remains and found no physical evidence of any of the deaths. The case against the couple was built from the testimony of the girl and of Ogata herself, who for about half a year after her arrest said almost nothing and whom investigators described as wearing an iron mask.
Ogata was born on February 25, 1962, in Kurume, in Fukuoka Prefecture, and grew up in a wealthy family. She and Matsunaga had been schoolmates in high school without knowing each other well. She was working at a preschool when she began seeing him in 1982, and those who knew her before described a gentle young woman. He beat her severely, accused her of seeing other men, and over the years cut her off from everyone else; she had two sons with him. He ran a fraudulent futon business, and he used her to reach her family's money.
The deaths ran from 1996 to 1998. The couple confined their victims, starved them, beat them and gave them electric shocks, and extracted money from them. Matsunaga made the captives abuse one another and made family members take part in killing each other and in dismembering and disposing of the bodies. Kumio Toraya, thirty-four, died first. Then came the Ogata family: her father Takashige, sixty-one; her mother Shizumi, fifty-eight; her sister Rieko, thirty-three; Rieko's husband Kazuya, thirty-eight; and their children, Yuki, five, and Aya, ten. Ogata took part in the killings. During the trial she came to suspect that Matsunaga had raped her mother.
The charges came one death at a time as the account was pieced together: Aya's murder on September 18, 2002, Takashige's on October 12, Shizumi's on December 6, Yuki's on January 11, 2003, Kumio Toraya's on February 3, Rieko's on February 25 and Kazuya's on May 30. Ogata confessed calmly to her part. Matsunaga said the women had made up their stories about him and admitted only to abusing the victims because he disliked their attitude.
On September 28, 2005, the Kokura branch of the Fukuoka District Court sentenced both to death. It found that they had conspired to kill six of the victims and that Takashige Ogata's death was manslaughter, a fatal assault without intent to kill. Presiding Judge Toshinobu Wakamiya called the crimes brutal and unprecedented, and described Matsunaga as the mastermind and Ogata as his willful executioner. The writer Masayoshi Toyoda took up her side and published a book that November questioning the trial. She appealed on October 11.
On September 26, 2007, the Fukuoka High Court upheld Matsunaga's death sentence and reduced hers to life imprisonment. Her lawyers had argued that she obeyed him as a victim of domestic and sexual violence, and the court accepted that his abuse and control had substantially reduced her responsibility. Prosecutors appealed, and in 2011 the Supreme Court upheld the life sentence by a narrow margin. Matsunaga remains on death row. The reduction is still argued over in Japan, where the case is known as the Kitakyushu serial murder incident.