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Tottori Court Sentences Miyuki Ueta to Death for Murdering Two Men She Owed Money To in 2009

The lay-judge verdict rested on circumstantial evidence, and her lawyers argued she was innocent. Japan's Supreme Court upheld the death sentence in 2017.

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Illustration of people queuing in winter coats outside a plain concrete courthouse, with pine trees and snowy mountains behind. Not the actual court.

Two men to whom Miyuki Ueta owed money drowned in Tottori Prefecture in 2009. On December 4, 2012, the Tottori District Court sentenced the former snack-bar worker to death for their murders.

The court, sitting with lay judges, convicted Ueta of two robbery-murders, along with fraud, theft and trespassing charges. According to the trial and appeal rulings as reported by the Sankei Shimbun, truck driver Kazumi Yabe, 47, from whom she had borrowed 2.7 million yen, drowned in the sea, and electronics-store owner Hideki Maruyama, 57, drowned in a river, and she avoided paying about 530,000 yen she owed him for appliances. The courts found that she had drugged each man and drowned him to escape repaying her debts.

No direct evidence tied Ueta to the killings, and her lawyers argued she was innocent of both. The case rested on circumstantial evidence: she was the last person in contact with each man before he went missing, she had obtained or could obtain the combination of sleeping drugs found in their bodies, and she owed each of them money. An appeals court upheld the death sentence, and Japan's Supreme Court rejected her final appeal on July 27, 2017, calling the killings planned and cold-blooded.

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