On the morning of April 4, 2009, a 47-year-old truck driver named Kazumi Yabe drove west along the Sea of Japan coast of Tottori Prefecture with a woman in the passenger seat. Shortly before 11 a.m. she phoned her live-in partner and told him she was soaked and cold and needed to be picked up from a beach. When he got there, she was wet from head to foot and Yabe was gone. Seven days later a fisherman harvesting seaweed found Yabe's body in the sea, three and a half kilometers to the east.
Six months later, an appliance dealer named Hideki Maruyama, 57, went out to collect a debt and was found the next afternoon face down in a shallow river on the edge of Tottori City. Both men had the same unusual mix of sleeping pills and antipsychotic drugs in their bodies. Both had been with the same woman on the morning they died, and she owed both of them money.
Her name was Miyuki Ueta. She was convicted of both killings and sentenced to death in 2012, without any direct evidence and without ever saying in court what happened. By the time of her arrest, Japanese papers had counted four more men around her who had died and whose deaths had been closed as suicide, accident or illness. She was never charged over any of them. She died on death row in January 2023, still saying she was innocent.
Most of what is known about Ueta's early life comes from her own account, given to a writer, Kana Ando, who visited her in custody in 2013 and was asked to ghostwrite her autobiography. It cannot be checked against other sources.
By that account, she was born in 1973 in Kurayoshi, Tottori Prefecture, and grew up in Daiei, a watermelon-growing town that later merged into Hokuei, the town where Yabe would die. She described herself as a premature baby with asthma, raised by gentle parents alongside an older brother, a child who liked Japanese and social studies and won prizes for calligraphy. She went to high school in Yonago, left in her second year after trouble with older students, and took a live-in job at a cosmetics factory. She married at 20, had a son after a 36-hour labor and then a daughter, and moved to Osaka with her husband. She told Ando that conflict with her mother-in-law left her isolated, and the marriage ended when her husband would not move back to Tottori.
She returned to Tottori with two small children, worked in the office of a marriage information agency, had a second son with a man 14 years older, and married him; that marriage also ended. She had five children in all. After the fifth she worked in a snack bar in Tottori City and was recruited to another, called "J" in the press, where she sang popular ballads for customers who included, by her account, elderly men on welfare, city employees, police officers and members of the Self-Defense Forces. She denied press reports that she had sold sex. The trial court recorded her height as 149 centimeters.
In December 2007 she met, at a snack bar, a former car salesman who had sold cars in Tottori City after university. From July 2008 he lived with her and her children in an apartment in the Fukube district of Tottori City. He became her partner in a string of frauds, and later the prosecution's most important witness against her.
The trial court found that Ueta lived by deception. In November 2006, working alone, she invented a young woman, "Haruna," who phoned a young man every day for months, by the court's finding using Ueta's own disguised voice. "Haruna" never met him. Through her, Ueta persuaded him and his mother to hand over 1.26 million yen as repayment of a debt that did not exist. The court found he had already given her several million yen over the previous year and a half.
With her partner, from April to November 2009, she bought two tractors and a rice planter on credit with no intention of paying, telling the dealer she planned to farm with four employees. The pair took mowers, generators and snow blowers from hardware and farm-machinery stores, four light cars from a used-car dealer, and a plasma television, Blu-ray recorders, a refrigerator and a washing machine from an elderly woman's electrical shop, promising to pay with an insurance policy that was about to mature. In June 2009 they walked through the unlocked window of a house in Tottori City and took two wallets holding about 350,000 yen. The court put the total of her property crimes at more than 10 million yen and found that she had played the leading role. She admitted the frauds and the theft.
Kazumi Yabe was a truck driver. He had met Ueta through the bar, and at least on his side, the court found, the two were in a relationship. He had given her about 800,000 yen for living expenses, and money he had paid to a former girlfriend became tied up in a debt that Ueta was said to have guaranteed. On March 5, 2009, he had the debt written down: a loan certificate for 2.7 million yen, with Ueta as borrower and her live-in partner as joint guarantor, due March 31. On April 2, two days after the deadline, the three met at Tottori Municipal Hospital, and Ueta and her partner asked him to wait until April 10. He refused.
Two days later, on April 4, Ueta bought two rice balls, tea and instant miso soup at a convenience store in Tottori City at about 7:33 a.m. She met Yabe, who ate the food. At 8:16 the two stopped at another convenience store on National Route 9 in the Ketaka district and bought tissues, wet wipes, paper cups and canned coffee, then drove on west in Yabe's Daihatsu Mira, Yabe at the wheel. After 8:22 a.m., the court found, no one but Ueta and her partner had any contact with him again.
At 10:40 she called her partner and told him she was soaked and cold. He met her at 11:11 at a beach near a boat shed in Hokuei. By his account she was wet all over and Yabe was not there. At about 11:42 he bought five items of women's clothing at a Shimamura clothing store in Kurayoshi: underwear, a camisole, socks, a hooded top and trousers, sizes L and 3L. From 11:51 to 12:43 the couple were at a hotel in the Hawai hot-spring area, where she changed.
A passer-by saw Yabe's car parked on the sand that afternoon, about 30 meters from the water, and reported it when it was still there two days later. On April 11 a fisherman found Yabe's body, unclothed, in the sea off Hokuei. An autopsy by Professor Yoshito Irisawa of Tottori University found that he had drowned, with large amounts of sand in his throat and airways, and found the sleeping drugs and an antipsychotic in his blood and stomach. There was no alcohol, no illness and no sign of a struggle.
Hideki Maruyama ran a small electrical appliance business, Taihei Denki, in the Hamasaka district of Tottori City, and lived with his common-law wife. He had two grown sons. According to the trial court, he had known Ueta only slightly before he began doing business with her. In 2009 he supplied six appliances, including a washing machine, on the promise of later payment, worth 531,950 yen in all. Before his death he complained to his partner that a woman customer would not pay for her appliances. By mid-September, the court found, there had been talk of handing him the couple's car in place of payment, a sign of how hard he was pressing.
Ueta had already obtained the drugs. The trial court accepted the evidence of a neighbor, identified in court as "O," who lived in another apartment building on the same lot. He had insomnia and was taking a bedtime mixture prescribed by his psychiatrist: three sleeping drugs and an older antipsychotic, bromperidol, mixed into single packets. The psychiatrist testified that among more than a thousand patients he had never prescribed the same combination to anyone else. The neighbor testified that a packet had gone missing from his bedroom in late March, a week or so before Yabe died, and that on September 21 Ueta begged him for his medicine, saying a gang boss's girlfriend was trying to quit methamphetamine and could not sleep. He gave her two packets. On September 24, he said, she took his last one out of his hand.
On the morning of October 6, Maruyama got a call from Ueta at about 8:08. He did not eat the breakfast his partner had made, took cold medicine, told her he was going to collect money, and drove off in his Nissan March. Ueta was dropped off by an acquaintance after buying barley tea at a convenience store and met Maruyama near his office at about 8:30. His car's navigation system recorded the route: along Route 9 to Iwado harbor in Fukube, then inland on prefectural roads to a weir on the Mani River in the Kakuji district.
Her partner, by his account, was told to wait in a supermarket parking lot nearby. A police officer who had been watching the couple since June 2009 saw his car there, and the store's security camera recorded it from about 10:21 to 10:50. When the partner came to the river, he testified, Ueta was wet from the waist down and told him Maruyama had suddenly hit her and disappeared.
On October 7 at 2:36 p.m., an acquaintance of Maruyama found him floating face down in the river, about 16 meters upstream from where his car had been left by a bridge. The river there was 5.7 meters wide and 30 to 80 centimeters deep, with concrete banks. Professor Irisawa found that he had drowned. His body had some light bruises, none connected with his death, no injuries to his palms and no alcohol, and his blood, urine and stomach held the same mix of drugs as the neighbor's prescription. One of the cold medicines in his stomach was a brand kept in Ueta's home. The prescription had changed between April and September, and the drugs found in each man changed to match it.
Tottori Prefectural Police arrested Ueta on November 2, 2009, on a fraud charge; her partner was arrested for fraud the same month. Writers who covered the case, among them Kazumitsu Ono, have said it was understood as an arrest on a separate charge to open the way to an investigation of the deaths. Within days, reports spread that several men around her had died, among them a newspaper reporter and a police detective. She was compared with Kanae Kijima, arrested days later near Tokyo over a similar series of deaths, and the media labeled them the poisoners of the east and west.
On December 2, the neighbor told police he had never given Ueta any of his medicine, fearing a drug-law charge. The next morning, after talking with his wife, he called the police back and said he had. He was questioned for three days and was not prosecuted.
Ueta was arrested for robbery-murder over Maruyama's death on January 28, 2010, and indicted on February 18. She was re-arrested over Yabe's death on March 3, 2010, and indicted on March 24. She admitted the frauds. She denied both killings. Her partner was questioned on suspicion of aiding a robbery-murder but was charged only with fraud. He was sentenced to three years in prison and had been released on parole on July 5, 2012, when he testified against her.
Ueta told Ando that after her arrest her diabetes grew worse and she thought she would rather die, until a lawyer read her letters from her children. She spent seven months in a police station before being moved to the detention unit at Tottori Prison, and later to Matsue Prison in Shimane Prefecture.
The case was one of the longest and most closely followed trials under Japan's lay-judge system, which had begun in 2009. Pretrial arrangement proceedings ran to 42 sessions and ended on September 19, 2012. Six lay judges, three men and three women, and four alternates were chosen on September 21, and the trial opened on September 25. It ran 75 days from selection to verdict. More than 1,100 people lined up for about 22 public seats on the first day.
Asked for her plea, Ueta said: "I did not do the two robbery-murders. My lawyers will explain the details." Her three court-appointed lawyers, all from one office, did not simply attack the prosecution's case. They named her live-in partner in court and argued that he was the last person with both men, that he had given them the drugs and that the debts were his.
The prosecution built each killing from more than twenty circumstantial facts. Twelve witnesses were heard, among them the neighbor, his psychiatrist, the forensic pathologist, the police officer who had followed the couple and, over three days, the partner. Under questioning by the bench, the partner said he had been investigated on suspicion of aiding a robbery-murder. Near the end of the evidence, the defense canceled its own questioning of Ueta, citing her right to silence. When prosecutors questioned her on October 30 she declined to answer each of 61 questions. On November 1, the victims' families gave statements. On November 5, prosecutors asked for the death penalty. In her final statement on November 6 she said again that she had not committed the two robbery-murders. The defense said the partner and the police officer had lied together to save him and put the blame on her alone.
On December 4, 2012, the Tottori District Court found Ueta guilty on every count and sentenced her to death, as prosecutors had asked.
The judgment did not simply adopt the prosecution's story. The judges treated the partner's evidence with open suspicion, finding that he had a strong motive to shift blame and had likely lied deliberately about where Maruyama's car was stopped and about the seat position, perhaps to make Ueta look like the last driver. They cut the debt in the Maruyama case from the 1,235,800 yen in the indictment to 531,950 yen, finding that the other appliances were the partner's debt. They said it was hard to find him a co-principal in the killings and left open whether he had aided them.
On the facts, the court found that the drugs came from the neighbor's prescription and that Ueta had obtained them; that she had the chance to give each man the drugs and was the only person with him when he went into the water; and that she had a reason to want each man dead. For the Yabe case it relied on the clothing bought at Shimamura, whose sizes and items matched clothes later found in her car and home. Being wet all over on a beach in April, the court said, could not be explained except by her leading Yabe into the sea.
On sentence, the court found that she had decided "all too easily" to kill each man when pressed for payment, out of "a cold and selfish motive of seeking her own security by erasing from this world those who were inconvenient to her." It stressed that the killings were on separate occasions: having killed once, she went on to the second "as if she had acquired a taste for it." Both victims, it said, "worked hard and lived peaceful lives." It noted that she had no record except a traffic fine and said it could not help feeling sympathy for the future of the five children she would leave behind, but could not give that great weight.
All ten lay judges and alternates appeared at a press conference afterward, and all described the long trial and the death sentence as a heavy burden. In a law-review article published in 2013, Hiromasa Hayashi, a professor who had attended 11 of the 20 hearings as a broadcast commentator, criticized both the defense's strategy and the use of lay judges to decide a death sentence in a case resting only on circumstantial evidence and a defendant's silence.
Ueta appealed. At the Matsue Branch of the Hiroshima High Court she changed course and testified, saying she was innocent. On March 20, 2014, the High Court rejected the appeal, finding no error of fact in the first trial.
The Supreme Court heard argument on June 29, 2017. Her lawyers argued that there was no evidence the drugs had taken effect and that the killings were physically impossible for a woman of her size. Yabe's car had been left about 30 meters from the sea, across a step about 75 centimeters high; Yabe was about 173 centimeters tall. Every route from Maruyama's car to the river, they said, meant a drop of about 1.9 meters, a bridge lower than he was tall, or wading upstream over rocks. "Is it permissible to hand down a death sentence on the basis of such insufficient testing? Is it permissible to hand down a death sentence on such a fictional story? That is something that must never be done," her lawyer told the justices. Prosecutors said the defense's reenactments used people of different builds and that she could have led the men into the water alone.
On July 27, 2017, the First Petty Bench, with Justice Yu Koike presiding, rejected the appeal unanimously. The ruling held that her guilt was proved beyond reasonable doubt by three main facts taken together: she was the last person in contact with each man before he disappeared, and soon afterward was seen alone and wet by the man she lived with; she had obtained in advance, or could obtain, the distinctive combination of drugs found in the bodies; and she owed each man money and so had a motive. It found the partner's testimony credible because it fit the objective facts. It called the killings "planned and cold-blooded crimes based on a firm intent to kill," in which "the lives of two people who were in no way at fault were taken," and said her criminal responsibility could "only be called extremely grave." The death sentence, it said, was unavoidable. Her death sentence became final in 2017.
That evening, the families met reporters in Tottori City. Maruyama's elder son, Hiroyuki, 43, said he had expected the ruling and was relieved, and that he still kept his father's work tools. "There's no point in covering things up now," he said. "At the very end, there could at least have been an apology." His younger brother, Kenji, 42, who had attended the trial and lit incense for his father every day, said she had always looked unconcerned in court. "Today I can give him a good report," he said, and added that she should think about the value of life every day until her execution. Yabe's older brother, 59, said he had told Kazumi at the family altar and at his grave that the final ruling was coming. "I want her to face it properly and tell the whole truth," he said.
Four other men who died between 2004 and 2009 have been linked to Ueta in the press. She was never charged over any of them, the deaths were recorded at the time as suicide, accident or illness, and nothing about them was proved in court. The accounts below come from journalists' reporting, and the details differ slightly between them.
In May 2004, a 41- or 42-year-old reporter from the Tottori bureau of the Yomiuri Shimbun was hit by a train on the tracks in Tottori City. Kazumitsu Ono writes that he had been in a relationship with Ueta, had run up large debts giving her money, and left a scribbled note saying that meeting Miyuki had taught him true love. Police treated it as suicide.
In August 2007, a 27-year-old man, described as a security guard, who had been living with her, drowned off a swimming beach after she invited him to go shellfish gathering. He was rescued and pronounced dead. His relatives told Ono that she had beaten him while they lived together.
In February 2008, a detective of the Tottori Prefectural Police, reported as 41 or in his forties, married with children, was found hanged in the mountains of the prefecture. According to Ono, he had met Ueta at the snack bar while gathering information and become involved with her. His death was treated as suicide.
On October 27, 2009, three weeks after Maruyama died, a 58-year-old neighbor who lived alone in the apartment building next to hers died. Ono reports that in September he had a collision while driving a car he borrowed from her, that she and her partner paid the other driver's costs and he was repaying them from his welfare benefits, that his health had collapsed and she was bringing him meals, and that an acquaintance saw him in a coma the day before he died. Ono writes that the same sleeping-drug components found in Yabe and Maruyama were found in this man's body. That report has not been tested in any court.
Jiji Press, reporting her death in 2023, said she had been suspected of killing these four men and making their deaths look like suicide, accident or illness. Other writers have repeated stories from former bar colleagues of men who said they escaped being drugged. Those accounts are hearsay and are left out here.
After the trial Ueta corresponded with journalists, received supporters' letters and drew pictures of animals and flowers to send back. From Matsue Prison she wrote a column for the monthly magazine Kami no Bakudan, published by Rokusaisha, and continued it from the Hiroshima Detention House after the sentence became final. In May 2017, Masumi Hayashi, on death row for the 1998 Wakayama curry poisoning, sued her in the Tokyo District Court for 10 million yen, saying Ueta had written as though the two were close when they had never met. Ueta told the writer Mizuho Takagi she did not understand why she was being sued. The outcome of the suit is not reported in the sources consulted.
In custody she told visitors that she had committed fraud and regretted it, but had killed no one. She told the writer Ken Kataoka that Yabe had never lent her money and had simply helped with her children's living costs, and that she had already paid Maruyama about 400,000 yen. Kataoka checked those claims against the trial records and found the loan certificate, the unpaid deadline, and the car and convenience-store records that put her with each man on the day he died. To Ando she said: "I'm 149 centimeters, and I'm supposed to have killed a man who is 170. There's no way I could carry someone who can't stand 30 meters to a sea with a step in the way."
Kataoka noticed changes before her death. Her column was missing more often, and she had begun to write claims of innocence she had left out before. According to the Tetsujin editorial team's account, she was being treated for several conditions, including high blood pressure and angina.
On January 10, 2023, she lost consciousness during lunch at the Hiroshima Detention House and was taken to hospital, where tests found nothing clearly wrong. Staff watched her afterward, but because she was eating hard foods she had bought herself, such as peanuts and caramels, they judged that she could chew and left her meals unchanged. On January 14 at about 4:20 p.m., she choked and collapsed while eating dinner in her cell. Staff cleared food from her mouth, but she was unconscious. An ambulance arrived about 15 minutes later, and she was pronounced dead at an outside hospital at 6:57 p.m. She was 49. The Justice Ministry announced the death the next day and said the cause was asphyxiation, confirmed by an outside doctor. The detention house said there had been no problem with its response, called her death regrettable, and said it would keep taking the best measures it could.
Miyuki Ueta was never executed. She died in custody on January 14, 2023, five and a half years after her death sentence became final. With her death the criminal case ended. The sources consulted in this check, on October 14, 2026, report no retrial petition, no posthumous proceeding and no new charges over the four other deaths, which remain officially recorded as suicide, accident and illness.
Proven by final judgment: the robbery-murders of Kazumi Yabe and Hideki Maruyama, eight fraud cases, and one housebreaking and theft. The convictions rest entirely on circumstantial evidence. There was no confession, no witness to either killing, and no physical evidence of force.
Disputed: her guilt for the two killings, which she denied to the end; the role of her live-in partner, which the trial court itself left partly open; the exact amounts she owed, which the court cut in the Maruyama case; and the defense claim that a woman of her size could not have led either man into the water.
Suspected only: the deaths of the reporter, the 27-year-old, the detective and the neighbor. The press counted six deaths around her in all, but only two were ever charged.
1973: Born in Kurayoshi, Tottori Prefecture, by her own account.
May 2004 to February 2008: Three men linked to her by the press die: a newspaper reporter (May 2004), a 27-year-old man living with her (August 2007) and a police detective (February 2008). All are recorded as suicide or accident.
November 2006: Defrauds a young man and his mother of 1.26 million yen through an invented woman, "Haruna."
December 2007: Meets the former car salesman who becomes her live-in partner in July 2008.
March 5, 2009: Kazumi Yabe has a 2.7 million yen loan certificate drawn up, due March 31.
April 4, 2009: Yabe drowns off the beach at Hokuei. His body is found April 11.
April to November 2009: Frauds against farm-machinery, hardware, car and electrical dealers; a housebreaking and theft in June.
June 2009: Police begin watching Ueta and her partner, according to an officer's testimony.
September 21 and 24, 2009: She obtains three packets of a neighbor's prescription sleeping mixture.
October 6, 2009: Hideki Maruyama drowns in the Mani River, Tottori City. His body is found October 7.
October 27, 2009: A 58-year-old neighbor dies. The death is recorded as illness.
November 2, 2009: Ueta and her partner are arrested for fraud.
January 28, 2010: Arrested for robbery-murder of Maruyama (indicted February 18).
March 3, 2010: Re-arrested for robbery-murder of Yabe (indicted March 24).
September 25, 2012: Lay-judge trial opens at the Tottori District Court.
December 4, 2012: Sentenced to death.
March 20, 2014: Matsue Branch of the Hiroshima High Court rejects her appeal.
May 2017: Masumi Hayashi sues her in the Tokyo District Court.
July 27, 2017: Supreme Court rejects her final appeal; the death sentence becomes final.
January 10, 2023: Taken to hospital after losing consciousness at lunch.
January 14, 2023: Chokes on food and dies at the Hiroshima Detention House, aged 49.
October 14, 2026: No execution, retrial or other proceeding found (checked).