Kijima was born in 1974. She advertised on marriage-seeking and dating sites, presenting herself as a well-off woman looking for a husband, and extracted money from a series of men, several million yen in some cases, for investments, debts and gifts. Japanese reporting called her the Konkatsu Killer, after konkatsu, the marriage-hunting sites she advertised on.
Between January and August 2009 three of them died: Hideki Maruyama, fifty-three; Keizo Ando, eighty; and Yoshiyuki Oide, forty-one. Each was found in a sealed room with a charcoal briquette burner, the standard method of suicide by carbon monoxide in Japan at the time, and each death was initially recorded as suicide. She had been with each of them shortly before, and had taken money from all three; sleeping drugs were found in the bodies.
She was arrested and tried in Saitama. The case was entirely circumstantial, there was no witness and no direct evidence of her administering anything, and rested on the pattern, the financial trail, the drugs, and her presence. She was convicted and sentenced to death on April 13, 2012. The Supreme Court confirmed it in 2017.
She has become one of the most followed prisoners in Japan. She has published books from prison, has married and divorced supporters twice while under sentence of death, and maintains her innocence. She remains on death row.
The entry records that the conviction is circumstantial. It is not in the same category as the cases in this archive where the physical evidence has been discredited, but the absence of direct evidence is a fact about the case and belongs in it.