In November 2011 a woman who had been held captive in an apartment in Amagasaki, the industrial city between Osaka and Kobe, got away from her captors and went to the police. The woman who had confined her, Miyoko Sumida, sixty-three, was arrested on a charge of causing her injury. It was the thread that unraveled what the Japanese press called the Amagasaki serial mysterious deaths, in which ten or more people died or disappeared over some twenty-five years.
Sumida was born in Amagasaki on October 12, 1948, the eldest daughter of a man who ran a business supplying plasterers and a former geisha who worked in a restaurant that doubled as a brothel. When she was arrested she lived in the top-floor apartment of an eight-story building in the Nagasu-higashi district, whose balcony was screened by wooden fencing; one of the sheds she had built on it was used to confine her victims.
Her method was to attach herself to a family through some small connection, a relationship, a debt, a quarrel, and move into its life. Through violence and a skillful manipulation of its members she set them against one another, until they were informing on each other and abusing each other under her direction, in a state Japanese writers have compared to mind control. Money from the families, their savings, insurance and pensions, went to her and the circle of adopted and married-in relatives the press called the Sumida family.
The known deaths began at least as early as March 6, 2003, when the mother of one captive family died suddenly in Sumida's apartment after being denied food and beaten. Her body was buried under the floor of a farm shed beside a family house in Higashiueta, Takamatsu, and was found only in December 2012 on the information of those arrested. The charge of injury causing death in that case had expired under the statute of limitations and no one was prosecuted for it. The victims named in the investigation were Hisayoshi Sumida, fifty-one; Kazuko Oe, sixty-six; Jiro Hashimoto, fifty-four; Mitsue Ando, seventy-one; Mariko Nakashima, twenty-nine; and Takashi Tanimoto, sixty-eight. A thirty-seven-year-old man who escaped from confinement remained missing.
She was rearrested on murder charges in 2012 and said almost nothing of substance to investigators. At about 6:20 on the morning of December 12, 2012, an officer on patrol in the holding cells of the Hyogo Prefectural Police headquarters in Kobe found her motionless with a long-sleeved T-shirt wrapped around her neck. She was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead, aged sixty-four, and the police treated her death as suicide.
Because she died before trial, no court ever ruled on what she did. Seven members of the circle around her were tried for murder and other crimes and received sentences ranging from life imprisonment to fifteen years, and their trials are the record of the case.