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Japanese Police Arrest Takahiro Shiraishi After the Remains of Nine People Are Found in His Zama Apartment

Officers searching for a missing 23-year-old woman found cool boxes and storage cases holding the dismembered remains of eight women and one man.

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Illustration of a narrow Japanese suburban lane at dusk, barrier tape across the road and a low apartment block beyond. Not the actual building.

The police who climbed to a small studio apartment in Zama, a commuter city in Kanagawa Prefecture southwest of Tokyo, at the end of October 2017 were looking for one missing woman. She was 23. She had gone looking on social media for someone to die with her, her brother had asked the police to find her, and security cameras had caught her with a young man outside train stations near his home. What they found, according to Japanese media, began with two severed heads in cool boxes in the apartment's entryway. Searching further, they found the remains of seven more people.

On Tuesday, October 31, police announced the arrest of the man who lived there, Takahiro Shiraishi, 27. He had confessed, a police spokesman said, to cutting up the bodies and hiding them in cold-storage cases, some covered with cat litter. Kyodo News reported that he told police he dismembered them in his bathroom and put some of the remains out with the garbage. A toolbox and a saw found in the apartment may have been used, police said. Local media reported that the dead were eight women and one man, believed to have been killed between August and October.

Police were treating the case as planned serial murder and said further charges would follow once DNA tests on the remains were done. The missing woman was thought to be among the dead. They would not confirm how many bodies had been found. Neighbors told reporters they had noticed foul smells near the building; it was not clear why no one had raised the alarm. All day, in a country that prides itself on public safety, television showed the building cordoned with yellow tape, its balcony hung with blue plastic sheeting as investigators went in and out.

What this story covers. It draws on ABC News (Australia)'s report of October 31, 2017, compiled from wire services, which relies on Japanese media for much of what police had found; police themselves declined at the time to confirm the number of bodies. The victims are not named here. Shiraishi was later convicted of all nine murders and sentenced to death in December 2020, and was hanged on June 27, 2025.

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