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 Toyota Celica stolen two days earlier from a parking lot in Nagoya's Shinsakae district, where its owner, a twenty-one-year-old Nagoya University student, had left it, 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. Both his eyes had been injured and for a time he was close to losing his sight; he recovered fully and was back at work by the time of the first verdict in 1986. Four days later, at the Otsu service area of the Meishin Expressway, a man talked his way into a parked van as a hitchhiker, pulled a gun on the driver, a twenty-seven-year-old welder from Ichihara in Chiba Prefecture, and ordered him toward Nagoya. Around half past nine that night, in the van on Route 1 in Kusatsu, Shiga Prefecture, he shot him; the welder 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. For years afterward, on night shifts, he caught himself checking over his shoulder. 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 on August 29, 1948, the eldest son and second child of a farming family in the hamlet of Kashiyama, in the town of Kizu in southern Kyoto Prefecture. The family was comfortably off. In high school he played in the brass band and, to keep up with bandmates who had more pocket money, stole meal tickets from the school cafeteria and treated his friends. It grew from there, into car theft, selling stolen goods, breaking into cars and kiosks, and in November 1965, when he was in his second year, following a woman home from a train station and knocking her down from behind with a bamboo pole to take her bag. He was caught for the purse snatching and sent to the Izumi reformatory in Osaka Prefecture. After his release he drifted between jobs and fell for a woman a year younger from the next town. Her parents would not let her marry a boy from reform school, and his own said her family was beneath theirs, so the two ran off to Osaka. He found work driving trucks for a haulage company in Nara Prefecture, both families eventually gave their consent, and the couple married and had two sons.
In 1972, at twenty-three and on his father's urging, he took the examination for the Soraku Chubu fire service in southern Kyoto Prefecture, passed it without mentioning his record, and started on April 1. His superiors learned of the reform school soon enough, but it did not cost him the job. Three months in, he was arrested after a fight; the accounts disagree on where, one placing the arrest with the Kyoto police and another describing a road-rage assault in Osaka, but either way he was not prosecuted and kept his place. Two months after that the killing began. He was, by every account, a good firefighter. He trained hard at rescue work, was commended some twenty times and placed at the national rescue competition two years running, and rose to fire sergeant, and his record helped keep suspicion away from him. Off duty he spent heavily on cars, drink and a mistress, and to cover his debts he took a side job hauling freight on long-distance runs. In 1974 he told his father he had lost two million yen gambling and let him pay it off, then ran the debts straight back up. During those years he also appeared on national television, 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. The man she lived with, twenty-five, came home to find her dead on the bed and called the police. 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 December 1979 he stole a hunting rifle in Nagoya, and on the afternoon of February 15, 1980, in Nagoya's Mizuho ward, he pointed it from the passenger seat of a parked brown Mazda Capella at a forty-four-year-old Seto Shinkin Bank collector heading back to his branch by motorbike, and took his bag with two checks worth 246,660 yen. The police went looking for a man of about thirty, short-haired and long-faced, in blue sunglasses and a light-colored jacket, who looked like a gangster. 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 the night of the Kusatsu killing he also tried and failed to rob a supermarket in Hamamatsu with it, and on November 28, 1982, four weeks after the expressway shooting, he used it to hold up the Epoch supermarket in Yamashina and escaped with 1,527,000 yen.
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. He had driven over from his apartment in Kyoto the night before and stolen a Toyota Corolla in Nagoya that morning to use. "This is a real police officer's gun," he told the man. "You know about that case. Talk and I'll shoot. Put the money on the back seat and drive." The man grabbed his hand, a branch employee hit the alarm, bank staff ran out, and in the struggle Katsuta punched three of them and fired twice and missed before they pinned him down and handed him to officers from the Showa police station. The man who had grabbed the gun was given a police cooperation award by the head of the National Police Agency. He was thirty-four. The revolver's registration number matched the patrolman's. Under questioning he confessed to the seven earlier killings. The investigation did not close until April 26, 1984; his 452 days in the cells of the Aichi police headquarters were the longest any prisoner had been held there, and only then was he moved to the Nagoya Detention House, where he would spend the rest of his life. 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, and in 1996 Kurusu published his letters as 113-go jiken: Katsuta Kiyotaka no shinjitsu (Case 113: The Truth of Kiyotaka Katsuta). 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.
August 29, 1948: born in the hamlet of Kashiyama, in the town of Kizu in southern Kyoto Prefecture.
November 1965: caught for a purse snatching and sent to the Izumi reformatory.
April 1, 1972: he starts with the Soraku Chubu fire service.
September 13, 1972: he rapes and strangles a twenty-four-year-old club hostess in Yamashina, Kyoto.
July 6, 1975: he strangles a club owner in Suita, Osaka.
March 5, 1976: he strangles a hostess in Nagoya's Naka ward.
June 30, 1977: he strangles a woman who worked at a mahjong parlor, in her home in Nagoya's Minami ward.
July 6, 1977: he and his wife record the television game show Fufu de Donpisha!
August 12, 1977: he strangles a beauty-school instructor in her apartment in Nagoya's Showa ward.
August 20, 1977: the game show episode is broadcast.
December 13, 1977: he shoots dead a Hyogo Labor Bank employee in Kobe and takes 4.1 million yen.
February 15, 1980: he robs a Seto Shinkin Bank collector at rifle point in Nagoya.
July 30, 1980: he robs a Matsuzakaya supermarket and shoots its night manager dead in Sakae.
November 11, 1980: the fire service dismisses him after he is caught stealing a hostess's car and handbag.
January 1981: he receives a ten-month sentence, suspended for three years.
October 27, 1982: he beats a Nagoya patrolman with an iron bar and takes his revolver.
1982: four days later he shoots a welder in a van in Kusatsu, Shiga Prefecture; the man dies the next day.
November 28, 1982: he holds up the Epoch supermarket in Yamashina.
January 31, 1983: caught after a failed robbery at a bank parking lot in Nagoya; he confesses to the seven earlier killings.
April 26, 1984: the investigation closes, and he is moved to the Nagoya Detention House.
March 24, 1986: the Nagoya District Court sentences him to death.
1987: his memoir is published.
February 19, 1988: the Nagoya High Court rejects his appeal.
January 17, 1994: the Supreme Court dismisses his final appeal; that day he is adopted and becomes Kiyotaka Fujiwara.
October 3, 1994: a clemency petition with 2,516 signatures is delivered to the Minister of Justice.
November 30, 2000: hanged at the Nagoya Detention House at fifty-two.