On the evening of October 27, 1982, a man who gave his name as Kinoshita telephoned a police box in Nagoya's Chikusa ward and asked the officer to come and look at a blue Crown parked at the end of the street. The officer, a thirty-eight-year-old patrolman just back from his rounds, walked down and found the car empty. As he turned back he was hit by another car, a stolen Toyota Celica, and then beaten about the head with an iron bar. A passerby found him leaning against a telegraph pole, his head covered in blood, begging to be taken to the police box because he could not see. His New Nambu .38 revolver, loaded with five rounds, was gone. Four days later a hitchhiker who had forced his way into a van at the Otsu service area of the Meishin Expressway shot the driver, a twenty-seven-year-old welder, in Kusatsu, Shiga Prefecture; he died the next day. A few hours after that, at the Yoro service area in Gifu, the same gun was fired at a forty-six-year-old gas station attendant, who survived because the bullet struck a hundred-yen lighter in his breast pocket. The National Police Agency designated the series Wide-Area Major Case 113. The man with the gun was Kiyotaka Katsuta, and by then he had already killed seven people.
Katsuta was born in a farmhouse in Kyoto Prefecture on August 29, 1948. In July 1972 he was arrested by the Kyoto police for an assault. Two months later the killing began. From 1972 until 1980 he worked as a firefighter with the Soraku Chubu fire service in southern Kyoto Prefecture, and during those years he also appeared on national television, and would later be remembered for the awards he had won, which is part of why the case shocked Japan.
At about five in the morning of September 13, 1972, he broke into an apartment in Yamashina, Kyoto, and was discovered by the woman who lived there, a twenty-four-year-old club hostess, who shouted that she would call the police. He raped her, strangled her with a stocking and took a thousand yen. On July 6, 1975, he strangled a thirty-three-year-old club owner in the corridor of an apartment building in Suita, Osaka, when she resisted his attempt to snatch her bag, and took about a hundred thousand yen. On March 5, 1976, in Nagoya's Naka ward, he attacked a thirty-two-year-old hostess as she stepped out of a Chevrolet Camaro and strangled her when she screamed. On June 30, 1977, he broke into the home of a twenty-eight-year-old woman who worked part time at a mahjong parlor in Nagoya's Minami ward, met her as she came home, and strangled her. On August 12, 1977, he strangled a thirty-three-year-old beauty-school instructor in her apartment in Nagoya's Showa ward and took a diamond ring worth about 450,000 yen.
Six days after the June killing, on July 6, 1977, he and his wife took part in the recording of a television game show for married couples, Fufu de Donpisha!, for which the entry requirement was that the pair be enjoying a happy life together. They won eighty thousand yen in cash and a hundred thousand yen in gift vouchers. Asked by the host whether his wife would make the top ten of a hundred in a beauty contest, he said he liked slim women and that on figure alone she would pass. The episode was broadcast on August 20, 1977, eight days after the killing in Showa ward, and drew a rating of around twenty percent.
Then he turned to guns. On December 13, 1977, in a building corridor in Kobe, he shot dead a twenty-five-year-old employee of the Hyogo Labor Bank who was carrying cash, with a hunting rifle, and took 4.1 million yen. In February 1980 he robbed a Seto Shinkin Bank collector at gunpoint in Nagoya's Mizuho ward. On the night of July 30, 1980, he robbed a Matsuzakaya supermarket in Nagoya's Meito ward of more than 5.7 million yen in cash and vouchers, made the thirty-five-year-old night manager drive him into central Nagoya, and shot him dead in Sakae when he resisted.
None of it was connected to him, and for years none of it was connected to anything else. The crimes were spread over five prefectures and eight years, and many were first treated as separate cases. In November 1980 he was caught stealing a hostess's car and handbag in Osaka's Kita ward. A local paper ran his photograph under a three-column headline, "Fireman steals," and the fire service dismissed him on November 11; his parents came to apologize and collected his things. In January 1981 he received a ten-month sentence, suspended for three years. Because none of the seven robbery-murders had yet been traced to him, the police missed their chance to stop him. In August 1982, in Yamashina, he ran down a forty-five-year-old supermarket employee with a stolen car, breaking his ribs, in a failed attempt to take the day's takings. Two months later he went after the patrolman's gun.
On January 31, 1983, in the parking lot of the Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank's Gokiso branch in Nagoya, he pushed the stolen police revolver at a thirty-one-year-old trucking company president who had just withdrawn 1,023,000 yen. "This is a real police officer's gun," he told him. "You know about that case. Talk and I'll shoot." The man grabbed his hand, bank staff ran out, and in the struggle Katsuta fired twice and missed before they pinned him down and handed him to officers from the Showa police station. He was thirty-four. The revolver's registration number matched the patrolman's. Under questioning he confessed to the seven earlier killings. Police suspected him in twenty-two, and he would say he had killed twenty-two, but fourteen could not be corroborated and were never charged. Over roughly a decade he was held responsible for some three hundred thefts and robberies. The police also suspected that he had raped some of the women he killed but could not prove it.
The Nagoya District Court sentenced him on March 24, 1986, in two separate judgments, one for the crimes committed before his 1981 theft conviction and one for those after it, and imposed death in both. The court called his crimes bold, vicious and cruel and said that, whatever remorse he had shown since his arrest, he could atone only with his life. His lawyers argued that his voluntary confessions to seven killings amounted to surrender, that he had been mentally impaired, and that the Yoro shooting was an accidental discharge; the court accepted surrender for only one killing. The Nagoya High Court rejected his appeal on February 19, 1988, after refusing to hear defense witnesses on the constitutionality of the death penalty, among them Sachio Saito, a former death-row prisoner cleared at retrial. On January 17, 1994, the First Petty Bench of the Supreme Court dismissed his final appeal within seconds of opening; schoolchildren on a field trip were in the gallery. A motion to correct the judgment was rejected on February 3, and the sentences became final.
In prison he met a Christian woman who wrote under the name Yuko Kurusu, and on the day the Supreme Court ruled he was adopted by her mother and took the family name, becoming Kiyotaka Fujiwara. He wrote a memoir, published in 1987. On October 3, 1994, the Justice and Peace Committee of the Catholic diocese of Nagoya delivered a clemency petition to the Minister of Justice carrying 2,516 signatures, mostly from religious figures across Japan. In his last year he suffered from severe back pain and was mostly bedridden.
On the morning of November 30, 2000, at the Nagoya Detention House, he was told at about half past nine, after another prisoner's execution had been completed, that his own would follow. He was reluctant at first to write a will, then wrote two: one thanking his birth parents, the other asking his adoptive sister to have his remains and belongings burned at the prison. He smoked a cigarette and walked to the execution chamber with a Buddhist priest. After he was blindfolded he asked the guard, "Would you please take off my blindfold, as I wish to have a look once more at the face of my chaplain whom I revere?" It was removed. While the priest recited the Heart Sutra, Katsuta spoke the names of his victims one by one and said he was sorry. Then the blindfold went back on. He was fifty-two. A third man was hanged the same day in Fukuoka, and it was the last execution in Japan in the twentieth century. His adoptive sister, a Catholic, claimed his body and held a Christian wake, and his ashes were placed in her family's grave in Okayama Prefecture. A novelized account of the case was filmed in 1984 as Renzoku satsujinki: Reiketsu, with the killer renamed Kiyoshi Tatsuta.