Kiyotaka Katsuta was born on August 29, 1948, in Kyoto Prefecture. He served as a firefighter, and by the accounts of his service he was a good one: he trained hard at rescue work, was commended around twenty times, and placed in national competitions two years running. He later moved with his wife and two children to Joyo in Kyoto Prefecture and worked as a lorry driver. He also used the name Kiyotaka Fujiwara.
Between 1972 and 1983 he committed something in the order of three hundred thefts and robberies across the Tokai and Kinki regions of Japan, and killed in the course of them. The victims included bar hostesses and taxi drivers. Some were strangled, some were shot. The offences escalated over the decade: at one point he reported an illegally parked car to bring a police officer to the scene, ran the officer down with his own car, and took his pistol, which he then used.
He was not on any police list for more than ten years. Two things account for that. He staged the scenes and interfered with the bodies to disguise what had happened, and the offences were spread widely enough, over long enough, that they were treated as unrelated cases rather than one series.
There is a documented episode from the middle of the series that says more about him than any description would. In the summer of 1977 he appeared as a contestant on a national television quiz show, six days after strangling a woman in Nagoya, and won eighty thousand yen and a hundred thousand yen in store vouchers. The programme was broadcast in August of that year. He killed again in Nagoya that same month.
He was arrested on January 31, 1983. He confessed to twenty-two killings. Fourteen of those could not be corroborated and were never charged, so what stood was eight: the killings in the nationally designated case for which he had been arrested, together with earlier ones. Sources differ on how the eight divide between the two groups.
The Nagoya District Court sentenced him to death in March 1986. The sentence became final at the Supreme Court in 1994, on seven counts of robbery-murder and one of robbery causing injury.
On death row at Nagoya he did volunteer work translating books into braille. In January 1994 he was formally adopted by the parents of a supporter. That October the Catholic diocese of Nagoya delivered a clemency petition to the Minister of Justice carrying 2,516 signatures, largely from religious figures across Japan.
He was hanged at the Nagoya Detention House on November 30, 2000, aged fifty-two, alongside two other men executed the same day at Nagoya and Fukuoka. It was the last execution carried out in Japan in the twentieth century. Japan gives no advance notice of executions; the condemned man is told that morning and the family and lawyers afterwards. Accounts of his last minutes record that after being blindfolded he asked for it to be removed so that he could see the prison chaplain's face once more, and that he said the names of his victims and apologised.
The figure of twenty-two is his own confession and the number police suspected. Eight is what the courts established. The gap of fourteen is not a matter of dispute about whether he did them, but of what could be corroborated a decade later.