Miyuki Ueda was a former bar hostess from the city of Tottori, in western Japan, who was sentenced to death for the murder and robbery of two men in 2009. Kazumi Yabe, 47, died in April 2009. Hideki Maruyama, 57, died in October 2009. Prosecutors argued that each man was killed so that she would not have to repay what she owed him, and a lay judge court agreed. She denied both killings from the first day of her trial to the last, and she never testified.
The case drew national attention in the autumn of 2009, when Japanese magazines and television reported that as many as six men in her circle had died in suspicious circumstances over five years. That number came from the press, not from the courts. Only two of the deaths were ever charged, and only those two were proved. The court record rests on circumstantial evidence: there was no confession, and the judges reasoned that only she could have been with the victims at the time.
Her sentence was upheld at each level, and the Supreme Court dismissed her appeal on July 27, 2017. She remained on death row in western Japan. On January 14, 2023, she choked on a meal at Hiroshima Detention House and died, so she was never executed.
Japanese reports give her name as Miyuki Ueda, and several English-language wire stories spell it Ueta. The Japan Innocence and Death Penalty Information Center lists her birth year as 1974. She lived in Tottori city and was the mother of five children. Little is on record about her childhood or schooling. Her children are private people.
For several years she worked as a hostess at a snack bar in the center of Tottori city. A magazine feature published after her death says she used a stage name there and stopped working there a few years before her arrest. The same account says that most of the men whose deaths were later examined had met her as customers or through people she met at work. Press accounts from 2009 also described her as a woman who lived in a crowded, cluttered apartment, and a writer who knew her during the trial recalled a home so full of rubbish that it became part of the story told about her. Those descriptions came from journalists, not from the court, and the judges did not rest any finding on them.
By the time the case became public she had been living for more than a year with a man who had been working in car sales in Tottori. According to the law review article that analyzed her trial, the two had met at a snack bar in December 2007, and he had lived with her from July 2008 until his arrest. He would become the most important witness against her.
Kazumi Yabe was 47. Reports describe him as her former partner, a man who had lent her money. The prosecution said she owed him about 2.7 million yen. In the account the court accepted, he died in April 2009, in the town of Hokuei on the coast of Tottori Prefecture. Bunshun Online, in a magazine feature, put the date at April 4, 2009. A tabloid account from November 2009 said he had borrowed money from consumer lenders and handed about 2 million yen of it to her, though that figure was a press report and not a finding of the court.
Hideki Maruyama was 57. He had sold her a number of household appliances. The prosecution said she owed him about 1.24 million yen for them. The court disagreed with that figure, and on the basis of his order log and sales ledger it found that the amount unpaid was 531,950 yen. He died in early October 2009 in Tottori city. Tottori prefectural police first treated his death as a suicide.
The two deaths took place in separate towns about six months apart, and the court treated them as separate events. They are the two killings for which she was convicted.
Her first arrest was for fraud. On November 2, 2009, Tottori prefectural police arrested her on suspicion of defrauding a woman of about 1.26 million yen, using a false story that the woman's son had borrowed money. The man she lived with was taken into custody at about the same time on a separate fraud allegation, and the two were later charged with further fraud on November 20. The Tokyo Reporter, summarizing weekly magazines, gave her age as 35 at the arrest.
In the weeks that followed, magazines and television programs reported that police were looking at the deaths of other men who had known her. The Tokyo Reporter's account of November 23, 2009 listed six men who had died between May 2004 and October 2009, among them Yabe and Maruyama. Bunshun Online, looking back, says the first four of the six deaths had been recorded at the time as a death by suicide, an accident or illness, because evidence was insufficient to treat them otherwise. These four are the deaths that remain suspected and not charged. No court has found that she caused any of them.
Her arrest also came days before another arrest that shaped how the Tottori case was reported. According to Bunshun Online, Kanae Kijima, who was suspected in a separate series of deaths of men in the Tokyo area, was arrested four days after Ueda. The two women were compared in the press for years afterward.
Police pursued the two deaths of 2009 while she was held on the fraud charges. According to the law review article by Hiromasa Hayashi, she was arrested on January 28, 2010 on suspicion of robbery-murder in the October 2009 case, and arrested again on March 3, 2010 in the Hokuei case. Prosecutors indicted her on two counts of robbery-murder, along with a series of fraud counts and a count of housebreaking and theft.
The fraud counts were the part of the case that she did not contest. The man she lived with was her co-defendant on seven of them, which together involved about 7.99 million yen, along with a housebreaking and theft charge in which cash and two wallets were taken. A separate fraud of about 1.26 million yen was charged against her alone. She admitted these counts. She denied the two robbery-murders from the start, and her answer when the charge was first put to her was reported as "I did not do it."
Pretrial proceedings in the court ran from January 18, 2010 until September 19, 2012, across 42 sessions. That is about two years and eight months of preparation before the trial opened.
The trial before a lay judge panel opened at the Tottori District Court on September 25, 2012. It was presided over by the professional judge Takushi Noguchi. The panel included six citizen judges, along with the professional judges, and four alternates; Hayashi describes the six lay judges as three men and three women. Of 79 people summoned for selection on September 21, 55 appeared, and 38 remained in the pool after excusals. Hearings were held on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. More than 1,100 people queued for the 48 public seats on the first day, and more than 1,200 for the day of the verdict.
The prosecution had no direct evidence. According to Hayashi, the case rested on circumstantial evidence only. The Supreme Court rule is that proof beyond reasonable doubt applies to circumstantial evidence as much as to direct evidence. Prosecutors argued that she was the last person known to have been with each man, and that she acted to avoid paying debts.
The key witness was the man who had lived with her. He had been sentenced to three years in prison for fraud and was on parole from July 5, 2012, shortly before he testified. He told the court that she used him as a driver and that he did not know what she was doing. The court regarded his testimony as significant, but it also noted that he had his own reasons to push blame away from himself, and it checked his account against objective facts. Among them was security footage that showed his car on the day of the October 2009 death. A police officer who had been watching the couple since June 2009 testified to seeing the car that day. A neighbor of the defendant also testified, and his credibility was questioned. A psychiatrist and a professor of forensic medicine appeared as expert witnesses.
The defense denied that she had any part in either death. It named the man she lived with as the person responsible, and said that he and a police officer had agreed to give false evidence. Asked at the start of the trial to answer the charges, she said she had not committed the killings. When the defense later planned to question her, it dropped the plan and she stayed silent. The Tokyo Reporter wrote that, when asked to provide reasonable evidence for her claims against the other man, she remained silent. Hayashi, writing in a law journal, criticized the strategy as contradictory and said the defense had not made up for the effect her silence could have on lay judges.
The court addressed whether the man she lived with could be treated as a joint principal in the killings and found that, on the evidence, that would be difficult to establish. The prosecution's position throughout was that she acted alone and that he, as a driver, had not known of the killings.
Prosecutors asked for a death sentence in their closing arguments in early November 2012 and said that "only the defendant had the opportunity to commit these murders". On December 4, 2012, at the 20th hearing, the court found her guilty of both robbery-murders and sentenced her to death. The presiding judge said that capital punishment was unavoidable. Kyodo News reported that the court found she had acted to avoid repaying debts of 2.7 million yen to Yabe and about 1.23 million yen to Maruyama for electrical appliances. Hayashi, who analyzed the written judgment, reports that the sum the court actually found unpaid was 531,950 yen, against the prosecution's claim of 1,235,800 yen.
It was the first death sentence from the Tottori District Court in 58 years, and the 15th handed down by a mixed panel of professional and lay judges, according to the Japan Innocence and Death Penalty Information Center. After the verdict, all ten lay and alternate judges attended a press conference. They described the weight of the decision, and one said that the panel had deliberated until everyone was satisfied. Hayashi reports, without confirmation, that some panel members opposed capital punishment and that a vote was taken on the sentence.
Her lawyers appealed, and the case moved to the Matsue branch of the Hiroshima High Court, which sits in Matsue. She was held at Matsue Prison during the appeal. Katayama Ken, a nonfiction writer who attended the Tottori trial and corresponded with her for about two years, later wrote that she kept insisting she had been wrongly convicted. A magazine writer who visited her in 2013 reported that she expected to win on appeal and told him she would be found not guilty and spend the New Year with her family. She also talked of publishing an autobiography to support her claim of innocence, and said she wanted it to show her "true self" rather than the violent image the press had created.
The High Court gave its ruling on March 20, 2014 and dismissed the appeal, leaving the death sentence in place. The conviction still rested mainly on circumstantial evidence.
She appealed to the Supreme Court. On July 27, 2017, its First Petty Bench, presided over by Hiroshi Koike, dismissed her appeal, which left the death sentence in place. The court said that the lower courts' judgments were correct. According to the Tokyo Reporter, which cited the Sankei Shimbun, the bench found that she was the last person to have been in contact with both men before they died and that she had committed the crimes to escape her debts. Koike called them planned and cruel crimes in which the intent to kill had been strong, and said the criminal responsibility was extremely heavy. The defense had argued that it would have been impossible for her to carry out the killings alone, and the court did not accept that argument.
Japan Today, in a copy carried by News On Japan, described the ruling as one that would make the death sentence final. According to Bunshun Online, the sentence became final on August 23, 2017, once a request to correct the Supreme Court's judgment had been rejected.
From that point she was a confirmed death-row inmate. She was moved from Matsue Prison to Hiroshima Detention House, where Bunshun Online says she received medication for high blood pressure and angina. She wrote a column for a monthly magazine under a title that referred to the detention house. Katayama wrote that her installments became irregular in her last years and that she began to insist again that she had been wrongly convicted.
In June 2017, shortly before the Supreme Court ruling, a reporter interviewed her at Matsue Prison. She was 43 and, he wrote, about 150 centimeters tall. She declined to speak about the facts of the case at every meeting, in the reporter's account, and said she wanted readers to know what she was really like. She told him that she was exhausted by more than eight years of proceedings and did not understand how she had arrived there. She also described seven months of questioning in custody at the start, with interviews almost daily and only about one or two days off around the New Year.
At their last meeting, two days after the Supreme Court decision, she appeared calm and smiled at times. As he left she told him that he should not eat ramen so often late at night, a remark he said came from knowing that he worked long hours.
Katayama wrote in January 2023 that she had been struggling mentally in her final months, partly out of fear of execution, and that she was dealing with several chronic illnesses. He said her death did not surprise him.
On January 10, 2023, Bunshun Online reports, she choked on food and was taken to a hospital by ambulance. On the evening of January 14, 2023, a Saturday, she choked again on a meal in her cell at Hiroshima Detention House. She was declared dead that evening. She was 49. The Justice Ministry announced her death the next day, and said that a doctor from outside the institution had examined her and confirmed the cause of death. Kyodo News and Jiji Press carried the announcement. Jiji gave the date of death as January 13 in one version, while Kyodo, Bunshun Online and Katayama give January 14.
After her death, the Jiji Press reported, 105 people remained under sentence of death in Japanese penal institutions. She had not been executed; she died in custody while still under sentence.
The record is narrower than the public story. Two killings were charged, tried and proved: the robbery-murder of Kazumi Yabe in April 2009 and the robbery-murder of Hideki Maruyama in October 2009. These were in different towns, about six months apart, and the courts treated them as separate events. They rest on circumstantial evidence and on the testimony of a witness who the court said had his own reasons to shift blame.
The press reported that six men in her circle died between 2004 and 2009. Bunshun Online lists the first four as deaths recorded at the time as a death by suicide, an accident or illness. Whether any of those men was harmed by her has never been the subject of a verdict, and she was never charged in connection with them. The Tokyo Reporter's 2009 account, which drew on weekly magazines, said police were building murder cases in at least three of the deaths and mentioned insurance policies; none of this led to a charge, and it is not a finding of any court.
She told reporters and wrote in a magazine column that she was innocent. The courts rejected that claim at every level. There was no confession, and in the interviews she gave she declined to discuss the facts of the case.
1974: Miyuki Ueda is born (birth year as listed by the Japan Innocence and Death Penalty Information Center).
May 2004 to 2009: six men in her circle die; the first four deaths are recorded as suicide, accident or illness and are never charged.
December 2007: she meets the man who later lives with her, at a snack bar in Tottori.
April 2009: Kazumi Yabe, 47, dies in Hokuei.
October 2009: Hideki Maruyama, 57, dies in Tottori city.
November 2, 2009: arrested on suspicion of fraud; the man she lives with is also taken into custody.
November 20, 2009: further fraud charges are filed against both.
January 28, 2010: arrested on suspicion of robbery-murder in the October 2009 case.
March 3, 2010: arrested again, in the April 2009 case.
September 25, 2012: lay judge trial opens at the Tottori District Court.
December 4, 2012: sentenced to death on two counts of robbery-murder.
March 20, 2014: the Hiroshima High Court Matsue branch dismisses her appeal.
July 27, 2017: the Supreme Court First Petty Bench dismisses her appeal.
August 23, 2017: the sentence becomes final, according to Bunshun Online.
January 14, 2023: dies at Hiroshima Detention House after choking on a meal.