Two countries, one language of punishment: the death sentence is written into the judgments of Japan and South Korea alike, and in both it has often been the last thing a case produced. Japan carries out executions, in numbers small enough that each one is news. South Korea has not carried out one since December 30, 1997, so the men and women it sentenced since then sit in the Seoul Detention Center in Uiwang, aging, with no date set. The twelve cases here run from a laborer’s trial in Maebashi in 1925 to a verdict in Kobe in 2016, and between them they show what each system took from the evidence, what the press added, and what the public asked afterward.
### Sataro Fukiage, 1906 to 1926
Sataro Fukiage was executed at Ichigaya Prison in Tokyo on the morning of September 28, 1926. The Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun, which reported it that day, gave his age as 36. In 1906 he had killed an 11-year-old girl in Kyoto and been sentenced to life imprisonment. Released in March 1922, he moved to Tokyo, and in the summer of 1924 he was arrested and charged with killing six girls in the prefectures around the capital and in Nagano. A court in Maebashi convicted him of three of the killings and sentenced him to death.
The case is a fixture of Japanese crime histories of the Taisho period. The writer Arata Koike, who went back over the newspapers, police histories and memoirs for Bunshun Online in 2022, concluded that the coverage at the time was quick to credit Fukiage with far more crimes than the record supports. Fukiage himself added to the confusion. In custody he gave numbers that rose and fell, confessed to killings for which other men had been arrested, and then withdrew those confessions in open court. In his cell he wrote an autobiography of more than a thousand manuscript pages, of which one volume was printed and then banned.
By his own account he was born in February 1889 in Kyoto, the son of a weaver in the Nishijin textile district. He drifted into pickpocketing and burglary and was held in police cells again and again. He served a year in a reformatory after an arrest for pickpocketing and later wrote that he preferred custody to the weaving shops: the meals, work, sleep and baths came at regular times, and he could study. When he returned to Nishijin his family had left on what was called a pilgrimage to Shikoku and was, Koike writes, a begging journey. By 1905, according to Gendai Business, he was 17 and living with a woman of 53, whom Koike describes as an older woman of some standing in the Kyoto underworld.
According to Shaba, his autobiography, the first killing came on September 24, 1906, the autumn equinox holiday; the victim was an 11-year-old girl from his old neighborhood. Koike points out that the account of what he intended was written long afterward, after he had been through police, prosecutors and judges, and that Fukiage claimed not to know his own motive at the time. Koike could not find a contemporary report of the killing. He came across a follow-up in the Hinode Shimbun, a forerunner of the Kyoto Shimbun, that named Fukiage and gave his age as 18; the item is dated September 7, 1906, which does not fit the date in the autobiography, and the discrepancy is unexplained. After the killing he went to the woman he had been living with and asked her for money to escape. She went to the police, and he was arrested.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, summing up his record in July 1924, said the sentence was passed by the Kyoto District Court; Gendai Business dates it to 1908, when he was 19. He spent more than 15 years at Miike Prison in Fukuoka Prefecture, where he was a difficult prisoner, put in punishment cells more than 40 times, and also a student. After his arrest in 1924 he told reporters that he had learned English in prison from a well-known school reader. Gendai Business describes him as a reader of Socrates and Aristotle and of religious texts. His life sentence was cut to 15 years by an imperial amnesty and by a review because he had been a minor at the time of the killing. He was released on March 18, 1922.
In Tokyo in 1923 he worked for a rice dealer in the Kanda district and left the job after an incident involving a 10-year-old girl in the household. Her father reported it to the local police station, but no formal complaint was filed, and the police took a statement from him under a false name and let the matter drop, according to the Metropolitan Police history of the period as Koike quotes it. In September 1923, when the Great Kanto Earthquake struck, he was working on a tunnel in Chiba Prefecture. He later said he had barely escaped with his life in a collapse.
The charges of 1924 named six killings of girls between the summer of 1923 and the spring of 1924. Three were tried. In the account Koike assembled, they included a 12-year-old girl in Gunma Prefecture at Numata and an 11-year-old girl in a Gunma village now part of Shibukawa, on August 23, 1923, with a 14-year-old girl killed in Nagano Prefecture on August 16, 1923, according to the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun’s 1924 summary of the charges. The others named were a 16-year-old in a Chiba village on September 21, 1923, a 16-year-old in a Saitama village in March 1924 and a 16-year-old in a Gunma village in April 1924. Little of this reached the public at the time. Koike located no newspaper reports of several of the cases. The earthquake of September 1, 1923, consumed the attention of the press and police, and it was followed that winter by the Toranomon Incident and other cases of treason and lese-majesty, and then by the crown prince’s wedding.
The police did connect the cases. Shortly before the arrest, detective chiefs of the Metropolitan Police and the Kanto prefectural forces met in Gunma to discuss the killings since the previous year and agreed to search for the suspect together on July 28 and 29, a coordinated effort Koike calls unusual for the time. What they had was a photograph. According to the Jomo Shimbun, a Gunma paper, the prefectural police brought to the meeting a picture taken in July 1923 at a party in Nagano Prefecture, where the photographer had posed the suspect with five geisha. Copies went to the Metropolitan Police and on to the stations. At one station detectives looking at the copy thought they had seen the man before. One recognized him as the rice dealer’s worker questioned the year before; he remembered that the man had started to sign his statement with a character from a different surname and had then corrected himself, and he concluded that the name the man had given was false and that his real name was Fukiage. A historian quoted by Koike put it simply: posing for a souvenir picture with women was his undoing.
The arrest came before the planned search, at about 6 p.m. on July 28, 1924, in Tokyo, where he was working as a laborer. The Tokyo Asahi Shimbun carried it in its evening edition the next day. It said he had confessed to killing more than 20 young girls from Hokkaido to Tokyo, and a follow-up said 17. The Yomiuri Shimbun reported on July 30 that he had killed 13. Koike doubts the larger figures and suggests that reporters of the day attributed unsolved cases to him freely. The indictment of August 9, 1924, counted offenses against 27 girls and six killings. Maebashi District Court sentenced him to death on May 7, 1925. The Tokyo Court of Appeal did so again on April 24, 1926, and his last appeal, filed on April 29, was dismissed on July 2, 1926.
### Yoshio Kodaira, 1945 to 1949
Yoshio Kodaira was arrested in Tokyo on August 20, 1946, three days after the death of a 17-year-old girl came to light in the Shiba district. He was a former navy petty officer and a worker at a United States Army facility, and he had already served prison time for a killing in 1932. Over the following weeks he confessed to a run of killings of women and girls that went back to May 1945, before Japan’s surrender. Prosecutors indicted him on ten counts. At trial he denied three, and the court acquitted him of those and convicted him of the other seven. He was sentenced to death at first instance on June 18, 1947; the Tokyo High Court upheld the sentence on February 27, 1948 and the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal on November 16, 1948. He was executed at Miyagi Prison in Sendai on October 5, 1949.
The case is remembered in Japan for the way it fed on hunger. The 1945 harvest failed, partly because of typhoon damage, and the food shortage reached its worst point in 1946, according to the Bunshun Online series by Koike. A history of the postwar years quoted there records that on November 2 and 3, 1945 alone, a million Tokyo residents went out to the neighboring prefectures to buy food. An Asahi Shimbun reporter who rode a so-called "white rice train" from Akita to Ueno in the summer of 1946 saw police with pistols ordering passengers off at Yamagata and confiscating rice, and reported that nine in ten passengers were breaking the rationing rules. Work was as scarce as food: a Ministry of Health and Welfare figure from November 1945 showed 4.13 million workers released from wartime conscripted labor as factories closed, and an Asahi report of September 1946 said only about 50 of 1,029 graduates at one Waseda University ceremony had confirmed jobs. Against that background, Koike argued, a stranger’s promise of rice or a job carried great weight. Kodaira himself later told investigators that after the war food was what moved women most.
Kodaira was born on January 28, 1905, in Nikko town, Tochigi Prefecture, the sixth child and third son of a family that had run an inn. He did poorly at school, finishing 21st of 23 pupils, and a psychiatric report prepared for his trial summarized his elementary records: teachers wrote of inattention, fighting and violence toward classmates. The report recorded what it described as a family history of psychiatric illness, especially among his father’s relatives and his own siblings, and said his father was usually mild but often violent when drunk. Kodaira told the examiners that he had been violent since elementary school. As a young man he moved between jobs, among them an apprentice at a steel company in Tokyo, a clerk in a food shop and a worker at the Furukawa refinery at the Ashio copper mine. In his police statement he also described acts of violence against civilians while serving in China, which he said he had committed against five or six people; these are his own statements, and no court tried him for anything he did in China.
On July 2, 1932, he broke into the house of his estranged wife’s parents in Higashi-Ashi village. The Asahi Shimbun reported the next day that eight people had been injured, including his wife, her parents, her brothers and sister, a 9-year-old grandchild and a guest, and that neighbors who ran to the house restrained him. The Mainichi Shimbun reported in August 1946 that her father, a Shinto priest, had died, and a 2020 series says Kodaira was convicted of murder for that death and held at Kosuge Prison. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison; two amnesties shortened the term, and he was released on parole in September 1940, a little more than eight years after the 1932 case. In February 1944 he married again without telling his new wife of his record. Their son was born in February 1945. The psychiatric report described the marriage as a good one, and his wife, in a statement recorded during the preliminary investigation, said she could not believe the crimes when they were reported.
The first killing in the series came on May 25, 1945, at the navy depot in Shinagawa, Tokyo, where he worked. The Asahi Shimbun reported in September 1946 that the victim was a 20-year-old student who had been staying at the depot dormitory. The military police investigated, but no one was charged. When the Shiba deaths were reported in August 1946, a professor of forensic medicine at Keio University told the investigation headquarters that he had once examined a similar case, and that tip led police to reexamine the depot case. Kodaira confessed to it. In the memoir he wrote in custody, as the Mainichi Shimbun summarized it, he said the first woman he killed was someone he knew.
On June 22, 1945, a 30-year-old woman whose husband had been called up for military service was killed near Tochigi, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported in September 1946. Nikko police came to suspect Kodaira because he traveled often on the line to Nikko at that time, and he confessed. A 22-year-old woman from Yokohama on July 12 and a 21-year-old woman from Oji Ward, Tokyo, on July 15 were also named in the series; the Bunshun Online accounts say he confessed to both. The victims of the series were mostly young women traveling to buy food or looking for work, in a city where those journeys were routine, and the court’s count of seven killings is the one that stands.
The case of Miyuki Ishikawa is a serial case of a different kind. Her victims were infants, and the court’s finding was not that anyone struck them but that they were let die. She was among the best-known midwives in Tokyo. Within days of January 12, 1948, when police in Shinjuku Ward questioned an undertaker about five infants who had died at her clinic, the police and the press had laid out what she and her husband, Takeshi, had been doing: taking in infants that mothers could not keep, collecting a fee for each, passing some of the children on to people who wanted them, and feeding the rest so little that most of them died. Newspapers of the time gave death tolls ranging from 85 to 169. The courts, working from the evidence they could test, convicted the couple of causing five of the deaths by omission. She lived until 1987.
The case is documented in records of the National Diet, an official Diet report on the history of Japan’s Eugenic Protection Law, an academic paper, an essay written in the week of the arrests, and two series published by Bunshun Online that reconstruct the case from the 1948 press and the official history of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. Those sources do not always agree. Ishikawa was born in 1897 in Miyazaki Prefecture and trained at the Tokyo Imperial University hospital. She practiced in Tokyo for more than 20 years, first in Nihonbashi and then in Ushigome. By early 1948 she held several posts in her profession and was presented in the 1947 women’s yearbook as one of the leading figures in Japanese midwifery. In April 1947 she stood for the first ward assembly of Shinjuku Ward and lost.
Her husband, Takeshi Ishikawa, born in 1894 in Ibaraki Prefecture, had volunteered for the army at 18 and been discharged as a sergeant in the military police. In 1919 he joined the Tokyo Metropolitan Police as a patrolman and left in 1926. The couple had no children of their own; their household of six included his son from an earlier marriage and three adopted children. To their neighbors they looked prosperous and respectable. The sources disagree on when the clinic opened: April 1942 in Bunshun Online’s 2026 account, April 1943 in the Diet’s 2023 report, 1944 for the adoption of infants in the account of Hitomi Yoshida, a historian of medical ethics.
What the clinic did is less in dispute. Besides delivering babies it took in children whose mothers could not raise them and handed them on to people who wanted a child. A child born outside marriage could ruin a woman’s prospects, and the Diet’s 2023 report lists the women who brought their children as unmarried women and war widows, among others. The Ishikawas drew their clients through short advertisements in newspapers and magazines. The fee for taking a child was 5,000 to 10,000 yen, according to the Diet report and Bunshun Online; the Asahi Shimbun in January 1948 gave it as 5,000 to 6,000 yen. Adoptive parents paid a second fee, which the Asahi reported as 400 to 500 yen. The number of children taken in grew each year; the Diet report says it reached 100 in 1947 and that the clinic took in 211 infants in all.
Neighbors had complained for months. The police box at Yanagicho told reporters after the arrests that since the previous August people living near the clinic had reported that the babies were never bathed, even in summer, and cried all day. Women who came there to give birth saw how the infants were treated and called Ishikawa the oni sanba, the demon midwife; according to the Asahi, some left before they had recovered. Most of the infants who died, died of malnutrition; in winter, some died of cold because they were not kept warm. A doctor wrote the death certificates, and Bunshun Online says the couple obtained close to 60 false ones. The doctor who signed them told the Asahi that by the time the children were brought to him they were beyond help, and that he had warned the couple repeatedly with no result.
Almost nothing is on record about the children as individuals. An editorial in the days after the arrests counted two or three mothers who came back to ask after their children. In the week the case broke, mothers went to the police and to the clinic, and at least one learned her infant was alive and took the child back. The undertaker, a man of 54, told police he was carrying the five infants for the clinic, and that the clinic had been asking him to handle its dead since August of the previous year. Bunshun Online says he told the officers he had handled more than 30 for the clinic. The chief of the Waseda station, Isamu Ide, thought five dead infants from one clinic in a single day, and more than 30 before them, was more than misfortune; he sent detectives to the undertaker and notified prosecutors. Autopsies, in the two versions the sources give, showed that three of the infants died of malnutrition and two of cold, and that none had any food in the stomach.
Ishikawa was arrested at the Waseda police station early on January 15, 1948, and indicted for murder on January 26 with her husband and an assistant midwife. Prosecutors told the court on September 3, 1948, that 84 infants had died at the clinic between April 1946 and January 1948. The Tokyo District Court on October 11, 1948, held the evidence insufficient on 22 of the 27 deaths the prosecution called clear, convicted the couple of causing five deaths by omission, and sentenced her to eight years; the prosecution had asked for 15. She was released on bail on August 20, 1948. The Tokyo High Court on April 28, 1952, set the first judgment aside and sentenced her to four years, and the Supreme Court upheld it. She died in May 1987, aged 90. Estimates of the total dead, never tried, run from 85 in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police history, as Koike cites it, to 103 in the Asahi Shimbun of January 1948 and 169 of 199 taken in in an early Asahi report that the paper later corrected. The Diet’s 2023 report says "more than 100."
The novelist Yuriko Miyamoto wrote an essay in the party paper Akahata on January 23, 1948, the week of the arrests, called "Do Not Take Away the 'Right to Be Born.'" The case was discussed in the Diet on February 2, 1948, in speeches by Michiko Yamazaki and the ministers of justice and of health and welfare, and again in committee that June.
Kiyoshi Okubo killed eight girls and young women in Gunma Prefecture, northwest of Tokyo, in the spring of 1971. He was 36, unemployed and newly paroled after a prison term for earlier offenses against women. With money from his parents he bought a new car, and over about six weeks he drove around the prefecture and approached young women, presenting himself as a painter or a teacher. By his own later account he spoke to more than a hundred women. The eight who died were between 16 and 21, and four of them were 17 or younger. He was arrested in Maebashi in May 1971, one source saying a civilian search party handed him to the police on the evening of the 13th, another giving the arrest date as May 14. He was tried at the Maebashi District Court, admitted all the charges, and was sentenced to death on February 22, 1973. He did not appeal. He was executed at the Tokyo Detention House on January 22, 1976, at 41.
The case was one of the most widely reported crimes in Japan in the early 1970s. It later became the subject of books, a prison memoir published under his name, and a 1983 television drama in which the comedian Beat Takeshi played him. Okubo was born in 1935 in Yawata, then a village and now part of Takasaki, the third son among eight children. His father was a locomotive engineer for Japanese National Railways. According to a 2026 Bunshun Online account drawn from a nonfiction collection on crimes of Japan’s high-growth era, his mother favored and indulged him, calling him by a pet name that she was still using when he was arrested at 36. The same account says she repeatedly excused his behavior toward girls from his childhood onward. After junior high school he helped on the family farm; in 1954 he enrolled in the evening course of a commercial high school in Takasaki but was expelled after six months. He later opened a radio repair shop in his native village. In May 1962 he married a 21-year-old woman from Shibukawa, and they had a son and a daughter. His criminal record began in 1955, when he was 20, and in February 1967 he was sentenced to four years and six months and sent to Fuchu Prison, near Tokyo. His wife and children moved to her parents' house in Shibukawa and did not return.
He came out in March 1971. According to his later statements, as reported by Bunshun Online, he drove an average of about 170 kilometers a day, and in about a month and a half before his arrest approached roughly 150 women, 127 of them confirmed by investigators; about 30 got into his car. The Gendai Business article gives the figures as 127 women approached and 35 who rode with him. Many of the women he killed had met him several times before. The Bunshun account says he came across as an articulate man with an impressive car and something to talk about, and that this lowered their guard. The cultural critic Yukio Akatsuka, quoted by Masataka Kondo in Gendai Business, compared the case with the Kodaira case of 1945 and 1946. He argued that in provincial cities, which felt the changes of the high-growth years later than Tokyo, young women saw a gap between the modern lives shown in the media and their own, and could be drawn by the promise of that newer life. Kondo connects the case with the arrival of mass car ownership in rural Japan.
According to the account built from his statements, the killings began on March 31, 1971, with a 17-year-old high school student who had told him that her brother was a prosecutor and demanded that they go to the police. A waitress of 17 was killed on April 6 after she told him that police would come. A 19-year-old temporary employee of the Gunma prefectural government, with whom he had used a false name and the story that he was a 29-year-old junior high school teacher, was killed on April 17 after she told him she knew his real name, that he had been in prison, that he had a wife and child, and that he was not a teacher. The Bunshun account says that five of the eight had told him a relative was a police officer or a prosecutor, and two others knew he had just come out of prison, and treats these remarks as the immediate trigger. The Gendai Business article puts it more generally: women who threatened to report him were killed.
The case turned on the persistence of a victim’s brother. The brother’s own inquiries, reported to the Fujioka police on May 10, 1971, led to a car and its number plate, which the prefectural traffic division traced to a Mazda, and so to Okubo. His confession followed. Beat Takeshi’s drama aired on TBS on August 29, 1983.
Between August 1988 and June 1989, four small girls were taken from their neighborhoods in Saitama Prefecture and Tokyo. They were 4, 7, 4 and 5 years old. Each was taken away in a car and killed. The man responsible wrote letters to the Asahi Shimbun and to the family of the first girl under the name of a woman who did not exist.
He was Tsutomu Miyazaki, a 26-year-old photo technician who lived with his family in the hills of western Tokyo. He was caught in July 1989, not by the large investigation hunting the killer, but by the father of a 6-year-old girl in a park in Hachioji. Under questioning he confessed. His trial lasted seven years, during which psychiatrists reached sharply different conclusions about his mind. The Tokyo District Court held him criminally responsible and sentenced him to death on April 14, 1997. The Tokyo High Court upheld the sentence on June 28, 2001. The Supreme Court, Third Petty Bench, under Presiding Justice Tokiyasu Fujita, dismissed his appeal on January 17, 2006. He was executed at the Tokyo Detention House on June 17, 2008, at 45, on the order of Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama.
A Fuji TV news team that retraced his routes in 2017 described him as living in the Okutama area of Tokyo, while the girls lived across the prefectural line in Saitama. His father ran a printing business, according to Bunshun Online. He had a disfiguring birth defect for which he was bullied as a child, Japan Today reported in 2008; the Spanish scholar Jorge Rodriguez Cruz, in a 2023 study of the otaku stereotype, writes that 1989 press coverage dwelt instead on his parents' supposed inattention and on the death of his grandfather. Miyazaki was very attached to that grandfather, who died three months before the first killing, according to the writers Takaaki Yagisawa and Mizuho Takagi in a 2024 book excerpted by Bunshun Online. A man living near the family told them he had never expected Miyazaki to do such a thing, but that he had been a slightly odd child who, unlike his sisters, never greeted the neighbors. Investigators who met him after his arrest were struck by how ordinary he seemed; a police sergeant at the arrest described a normal young man who spoke softly and talked readily.
What set the case apart in Japan was what Miyazaki did after the killings. In February 1989 the Tokyo head office of the Asahi Shimbun received a declaration of responsibility for the first girl’s death, and later a confession letter, both signed with the name Imada Yuko. Media coverage intensified after the letters. Japanese writers have since called the case a "theater-style crime" (gekijo-gata hanzai), a crime staged in part for public attention. The letters gave a return address in Tokorozawa, Saitama. Under questioning, Miyazaki said he had been preoccupied with making the culprit look like someone from Saitama, and that he had wanted the killer to appear to be a woman, according to the Fuji TV team, which heard the interrogation recordings. The wording of the letters led commentators of the time to speculate about the writer’s profile.
For about ten months after the first girl was taken, the investigation did not reach Miyazaki, Yagisawa and Takagi write. One reason, the Fuji TV team reported, was that the car he drove did not match the type witnesses had described, a discrepancy later put down to a witness’s mistake. A former investigator told the team that at first he had not thought Miyazaki was the culprit at all. "If he had not been caught then, there would probably have been a fifth and a sixth case," he said.
In July 1989 in Hachioji, western Tokyo, Miyazaki was arrested in the act by the father of a 6-year-old girl, on a single charge relating to that girl. Anime News Network, relying on the Mainichi Shimbun, gives the date as July 23, 1989. The girl survived; her name was not reported, and he was later convicted over her abduction as well, according to a 2008 report credited to the Associated Press and Kyodo. The arrest was on that one charge; nothing yet tied him to the four girls. On August 9, 1989, Yasuhiro Ohmine, a detective of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s First Investigation Division who later became its deputy director, questioned him at Hachioji Police Station. Writing in Bungeishunju in 2019 with the journalist Shinichiro Akaishi, Ohmine called the breakthrough a lucky accident. Miyazaki confessed to the death of the girl from Koto Ward, the Fuji TV team reported, and his confessions then brought the other cases to light.
The case changed a word. Police and press attention to his collection of videotapes led the press to call him the "otaku murderer," and writers and scholars have since described how that coverage attached the image of a child killer to fans of anime and manga for years afterward. The four girls' names were published by the Mainichi Shimbun, as relayed by Anime News Network at the time of the execution. Many Japanese outlets now refer to them only by age and town, and some, such as Bungeishunju in 2019, have used pseudonyms. Little has been reported about who the girls were. The execution on June 17, 2008, was carried out without notice to his lawyer, Maiko Tagusari told the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, and J-CAST News ran a report at the time asking whether the Akihabara case of that month had influenced the speed of the execution. Miyazaki had received psychiatric treatment in detention for more than ten years, according to Amnesty International Japan’s report on mental health and the death penalty.
Futoshi Matsunaga was sentenced to death in 2005 for a series of killings that Japanese prosecutors and reporters have treated as one of the worst crimes in the country’s postwar history. Between February 1996 and June 1998, in Kitakyushu, seven people died while living under his control. One was a man of 34. The other six were the parents, younger sister, brother-in-law, nephew and niece of his common-law wife, Junko Ogata. Reporters who followed the case say he avoided killing with his own hands. He kept the people around him confined, hungry and afraid, and then had them harm one another. In four of the seven deaths the court held that other captives carried out the killing under his and Ogata’s direction. The case came to light in March 2002 only because a 17-year-old girl who had lived with the couple since she was a young child escaped and went to the police with her grandfather. Matsunaga has always denied the killings.
The Fukuoka District Court, Kokura Branch, convicted him on September 28, 2005 (case Heisei 14 (wa) No. 227) of six murders, one injury resulting in death, two counts of confinement causing injury, fraud and robbery, and sentenced him to death. The Fukuoka High Court upheld the sentence on September 26, 2007, and the Supreme Court rejected his appeal on December 12, 2011. Ogata, held to have acted under his domination, had her death sentence reduced to life imprisonment on appeal. He was reported held at the Fukuoka Detention Center in 2024 and had not been executed as of news to September 2026.
The court’s published judgment identifies the victims by letters, and the writer Kazuteru Ono, who has reported on the case for Bunshun since 2002 and published a book-length account in 2023, states that every proper name in his work other than Matsunaga and Ogata is a pseudonym. No victim is named, because naming the girl’s father would identify the girl.
Matsunaga was born on April 28, 1961, in Kokura, now Kokurakita Ward, and grew up in Yanagawa, Fukuoka Prefecture. His defense lawyers told the court that he was bright, earned near-perfect marks with little study and was often class leader. Classmates and teachers quoted in a 2024 book excerpt published by Bunshun Online remembered him differently: as domineering toward weaker children and given to lies that made him seem important. He did not go to university. In May 1981 he took over his father’s business and set up a door-to-door futon sales company called World. The book excerpt says it sold futons costing about 30,000 yen for about 250,000 yen. It grew for a time, and in 1986 it was incorporated with Matsunaga as president. He married in January 1982, and a son was born in February 1983.
According to the same excerpt, he telephoned Ogata in the summer of 1980, saying he had come across her name in a school yearbook, and a relationship began around October 1982, while his wife was pregnant. When her parents learned of it in 1984, they hired a private investigator and asked him to end it. Instead he won them over. From then on he was violent toward Ogata, and in February 1985 she gave up her kindergarten job. A judicial reporter quoted by Ono in 2019 described long-term beatings and said Ogata came to believe the abuse was her own fault, a pattern common among victims of domestic violence. She tried to escape twice, the reporter said, and each time she was brought back and punished more severely. Those findings would decide her sentence many years later.
Prosecutors told the court that the couple turned on a company employee as their only remaining source of money and had his mother send large sums, which Ono’s 2021 report puts at about 130 million yen in all. In mid-January 1993 the employee escaped. Tadashi Makino, a former senior prosecutor who worked on the trial and the appeal, told Ono in 2024 that investigators could never trace where the money went. The couple lived modestly, owned no luxury cars or second houses, and seemed always short of cash. Ono estimates that Matsunaga had collected more than 100 million yen during the World years and concludes that most of it went on years of living in hiding, often renting several apartments at once.
In early 1993 Matsunaga renewed contact with a woman he had dated when she was about 20. Ono, quoting trial documents, writes that between January 19 and April 2, 1993, the couple took 2.4 million yen from her in four payments. From October 1993 to March 1994 she and one of her daughters lived with the couple. Both died: the girl, who was two, was reported to have died in an accident in October 1993, and the mother, who was 32, also died. The deaths were handled at the time as an accident and a suicide. Neither was ever charged. Ono has written that the mainstream press has largely left these two deaths out of its accounts of the case. They are not among the deaths for which Matsunaga was convicted.
The district court held that the defendants confined the 34-year-old man, denied him adequate food, bedding and warmth, and subjected him to violence and long periods of forced standing. He had a serious illness. The court held that they carried on knowing he might die, and he died on or about February 26, 1996. The court classed his death as murder. Matsunaga told the court it was an accident; Ogata argued it was injury resulting in death. His daughter stayed with the couple. A 2002 Shukan Bunshun report, written before the couple’s names were known, said she had been made to witness a killing and then kept silent and obedient for years through threats and violence.
The court also convicted Matsunaga of crimes against a second woman, who was 34 when he met her. Posing as a prospective husband, with Ogata presented as his sister, he took 3.6 million yen from her in three payments between July and September 1995, said to be for wedding preparations; some of it came from consumer loans she was induced to take out. She and her younger daughter, then three, came to live with the couple. Between December 29, 1996, and March 10, 1997, on seven occasions, the court held, the defendants used violence or threats of it to force her to get money from her mother and others, a total of 1,989,000 yen, which the court treated as robbery. From December 30, 1996, she was confined in a locked room. At about 3 a.m. on March 16, 1997, fearing more abuse, she got out; she was injured and spent about 133 days in hospital. Both the confinement and the injuries were counted against Matsunaga and Ogata.
The Ogata family was wealthy and strict, and in Ono’s account that is what made them vulnerable. When Junko Ogata got into trouble, the family preferred to settle things privately, without the police, and that need for secrecy drew them deeper under Matsunaga’s control. Ono has said that Matsunaga made family members write statements admitting their own part in wrongdoing, so that they felt unable to go to anyone. He also used the younger sister’s children as leverage, taking them away so that their parents had to travel from Kurume to Kitakyushu to see them. The six members of the family died in separate events before June 1998. The court held that the sister’s husband, a former police officer, died of an illness left untreated during his confinement, and that the other four deaths were carried out by other captives under the couple’s direction.
Miyoko Sumida was the head of a household in Amagasaki, an industrial city in Hyogo Prefecture between Osaka and Kobe, around which eight people died. She was arrested in November 2011, indicted in February 2012 over the death of a 66-year-old woman, and re-arrested on November 7, 2012, with several relatives on charges that included murder. On December 12, 2012, she died in custody in a holding cell at the Hyogo Prefectural Police headquarters in Kobe. She was 64. No court ever tried her.
What is known of her conduct comes mostly from the trials of seven people who lived with her: a sister-in-law, two sons, a common-law husband, a cousin by marriage, a daughter-in-law and a man who had married into the household. Between November 2014 and February 2016 the Kobe District Court convicted all seven, finding in every case that they had acted in conspiracy with her. The Kobe Shimbun covered those trials day by day. Its reports, the courts' findings as they quoted them, and later accounts by her own lawyer and by a journalist writing for Bunshun Online are the main record of the case. Hyogo police confirmed eight deaths around her household.
The Kobe Shimbun described the household as a pseudo-family. Over the years she brought unrelated young men and women into it by adoption or marriage. Christian Today, reporting the 2015 verdict against one of her relatives, said she had gathered people not related to her by blood and lived with them for about 25 years. Her lead defense lawyer, a member of the Hyogo bar who had known her for more than two decades, described the pattern to the Kobe Shimbun in 2022. She would step into a minor family problem, he said, and make the family hold meetings about it. When someone said something she disliked she used violence, and she pressed the family’s own members to do the same, telling them that it was not right for an outsider to be doing the hitting while relatives looked on. Families ended up abusing and blaming one another. At least four families broke apart, the paper reported.
Her adopted eldest son, then 33, told the court in May 2015 that she ruled people through fear and that anyone who angered her became a target of abuse. Her second son was in fact the biological child of her sister-in-law, who testified that Sumida had made her register the boy’s birth in Sumida’s name. The second son’s lawyers told the court that Sumida had raised him, beat him often, and did not let him go to elementary or junior high school. The adopted eldest son, who was born into another family, said that in his first year of high school Sumida confronted his family over a dispute, and relatives were made to live together for about a month in a condominium in Nishinomiya, holding meetings about how his father’s debts would be repaid. They fought constantly and could not go to work. One by one his father, his mother, his brother and other relatives fled, and a cousin died by suicide during the stay. He stayed behind, was adopted by Sumida and, he said, was told to discard the name his parents had given him.
Bunshun Online reported that a relative who had escaped went to police in January 2000 and confessed to thefts the group had carried out, and that Sumida and others were arrested in February 2000. Her lawyer told the Kobe Shimbun that in 2000 she was indicted with relatives for theft committed as a group. Investigators already knew of suicides and suspicious deaths around her, he said, but none of them was charged. The court rejected the prosecution’s argument that Sumida had led the group, accepted the defense case that she was an ordinary housewife, and gave her a suspended sentence. More than 20 years later he told the paper that the argument had turned out to be wrong.
The deaths that reached trial ran from 2005 to 2011. A man of 51, born into the Hashimoto family and later taking the household’s surname, died in July 2005 after a fall in Okinawa. Prosecutors charged the co-defendants with murder and fraud, arguing that the household had forced the death so that his life insurance would be paid. In May 2015 Sumida’s sister-in-law testified that the household had been short of money; prosecutors noted that she had written in her diary at the time that he had no guts. She said the insurance money went to pay debts. The defense argued that he had chosen to die to help the family and that the defendants were guilty at most of assisting a suicide. The courts disagreed: the 2016 judgment against the daughter-in-law called his death a murder for insurance money and "the most unforgivable" of the crimes.
A woman of 26 died in December 2008. Her younger sister was taken into the household at 17 in 2003 after their family broke down, and later married Sumida’s son. The older sister married a man who had lived with the household since 2006. In June 2008 the couple ran away together, and in July 2008, prosecutors said, both were confined at the household’s apartment in Amagasaki; the husband was released partway through. She was confined for about five months and abused, the court held, and died weakened by it. The Kobe District Court ruled that keeping her confined after she was already gravely weakened amounted to murder. In the judgment against the cousin by marriage, the presiding judge called it a cruel crime. A woman of 67 was confined in the household in 2008 and died afterward. The husband was convicted of confining her; no homicide charge over her death has been reported. The mother of the two sisters fell gravely ill in March 2008 and died in June 2009, at 59. The cousin by marriage was charged with injury resulting in death; he admitted a related abduction charge but denied the assault that prosecutors said caused her death. Jiro Hashimoto, brother of the man who died in Okinawa, was 53 when he died in July 2011 after being confined and abused in the household. The co-defendants were charged with his unlawful confinement and murder.
The case came to light in November 2011, when a woman who had been held escaped and went to the police. Sumida was arrested on suspicion of injuring her, according to the 2022 Bunshun Online account. The same month, the death of a 66-year-old woman in Amagasaki came to light, and in February 2012 Sumida was indicted with others on a charge of injury resulting in death over that death, Japan Today reported. Three of the dead woman’s daughters were also prosecuted in that case. In November 2012 AFP reported the arrest of four relatives. The final sentences were these: her cousin by marriage, life imprisonment (final in March 2018); her daughter-in-law, 23 years; her sister-in-law, her adopted eldest son and her common-law husband, 21 years each; her second son, 17 years; the husband of the 26-year-old, 15 years.
Between February and June 2005, three young people in western Japan who had written on an internet suicide site agreed to meet a man who said he wanted to die with them. Each had depression. None of them returned. The man was Hiroshi Maeue, a 36-year-old temp agency worker from Sakai, in Osaka Prefecture, and he had no intention of dying.
Police arrested him on August 5, 2005, in the death of a 25-year-old woman, Michiko Nagamoto. Within hours he confessed, and he then wrote out confessions to two more killings that police did not yet know about: a 14-year-old boy from Kobe and a 21-year-old university student. The Osaka District Court, 6th Criminal Division, presided over by Kazuo Mizushima, convicted him of all three murders on March 28, 2007, with other charges including the kidnapping of the boy and intimidation of the boy’s father, and sentenced him to death. He withdrew his appeal. He was executed at the Osaka Detention Center on July 28, 2009, the same day as Yukio Yamaji in Osaka and Chen Detong in Tokyo, under Justice Minister Eisuke Mori, AFP and United Press International reported, and Amnesty International protested the executions. The court’s written judgment, which sets out his history, each count and the reasons for the sentence, is the main record of the case. The court held that he killed to satisfy a compulsion he had carried since childhood, and that no part of his motive deserved sympathy.
Maeue grew up in Osaka Prefecture, according to the judgment, which noted that by the time of the trial he was estranged from his parents. The court traced the compulsion to his childhood, holding that a violent fixation took hold of him in primary school and grew over the years into a wish to kill. In 1987 he enrolled in the information engineering department of a technical university in Ishikawa Prefecture and withdrew without finishing. From April 1993 he worked at a post office; in February 1995 he was dismissed after an incident with a colleague that did not lead to a prosecution. He then moved between jobs, and from December 1999 until February 2005 he had a steady girlfriend, a woman he planned to marry. The court recorded that he had been receiving psychiatric treatment since 1995 and had been diagnosed with a dissociative disorder.
His record includes convictions for injury and assault: one year in prison, suspended for three years, on November 27, 2001, from the Sakai Branch of the Osaka District Court; ten months on August 9, 2002, for causing injury; and on December 26, 2002, the earlier suspension was revoked. He finished the ten-month term on May 28, 2003, and the one-year term on March 29, 2004. After release he saw a psychiatrist about every two weeks from April 2004 and kept up outpatient visits until July 2005, the month before his arrest. From May 2004 he worked through a staffing agency at a factory that made printing machines. The court held that the urges did not go away. In October 2004 he told his doctor that he felt an urge to harm someone, but he did not tell the doctor of any actual plan. He then turned to the internet, where people who wanted to die were posting on suicide sites. In December 2004, after reading one post about a failed attempt, he sent a message proposing that they die together. That approach, a false offer of a joint suicide, became his pattern, and in each case, the court held, he made his plans in advance before meeting the person who had answered him.
Michiko Nagamoto was 25. The court described her as the elder of two children, who left part-time evening high school and worked part time for years; she later developed depression, was in and out of the hospital, and lived with her mother. They had exchanged more than 20 emails over several months before they met, according to a United Press International report based on Japanese press accounts. Japanese police sources said he never meant to kill himself. On February 19, 2005, in Kawachinagano, a city in the south of Osaka Prefecture, he killed her. Her death came to light on February 23, 2005. Her mother told the court of her grief and her anger at the man who had killed her daughter, and asked for the death penalty. Her brother also asked that Maeue be sentenced to death.
The second victim was a 14-year-old junior high school student from Kobe, in Hyogo Prefecture. The court’s judgment does not give his name. He was his parents' only son; he hoped to become a lawyer or a computer programmer, and in his third year of junior high school he developed depression and was seeing a psychiatrist. Between May 14 and May 20, 2005, Maeue sent him messages from internet cafes in Sakai. Contact between them began only about three days before they met. On May 21, 2005, the boy was taken to Izumi, a city in southern Osaka Prefecture, and killed. The court held that this was the kidnapping of a minor. Eight days later, on May 29, 2005, Maeue called the boy’s father twice from public telephones in Osaka Prefecture. The calls played a recording in a synthesized voice that claimed the boy had been kidnapped and demanded 3 million yen. Maeue knew by then that the boy was dead. The court convicted him of intimidation for the calls. The judgment does not record that any money changed hands.
The third victim was a 21-year-old university student, killed on June 10, 2005. On March 28, 2007, the court passed the death sentence. Maeue used the suicide sites, which by then had drawn wide public concern, as cover.
Kanae Kijima was sentenced to death on April 13, 2012, by a lay judge panel at the Saitama District Court, north of Tokyo. The court convicted her of murdering three men she had met through internet marriage-hunting and dating sites in 2009, and of a series of lesser fraud and theft offenses. Prosecutors said she had taken money from the men on the promise of marriage and killed them so they could not ask for it back. The three were Takao Terada, 53, who died in January 2009 in the Ome area of Tokyo; Kenzo Ando, 80, in May 2009 in Chiba Prefecture; and Yoshiyuki Oide, 41, in August 2009 in Saitama Prefecture.
There was no confession, no witness to any of the deaths, and no direct physical link between Kijima and the act of killing. She has denied the murders from the start. The case rested on circumstantial evidence: the money that moved from the men to her and the fact that she was with each man shortly before he died. The trial lasted 100 days, the longest in Japan’s lay judge system up to that time, and heard 63 witnesses, AFP reported. More than 1,300 people lined up for the 49 seats open to the public on the day of the verdict. Philip Brasor described the general rule for a panel in The Asia-Pacific Journal: six lay judges and three professional judges, with a death sentence requiring a majority that includes at least one professional judge. The presiding judge was Kazuyuki Okuma. The Tokyo High Court dismissed her appeal on March 12, 2014, and the Supreme Court rejected her last appeal on April 14, 2017. She was held at the Tokyo Detention House as of November 2024, and no retrial request was listed by the Japan Innocence and Death Penalty Information Center.
The Japanese press called the case the "Konkatsu Killer" case, after konkatsu, the word for marriage hunting. Much of the coverage dwelt on her looks and her weight. Scholars and writers have since used the case to examine pretrial publicity, the burden of proof in lay judge trials, and the way Japanese media treat women accused of crimes; Asako Yuzuki’s novel Butter, published in 2017 and translated into English in 2024, drew on it, and The Conversation wrote about the media misogyny it exposed. From death row Kijima has written a blog, magazine essays and a novel.
She was born in 1974 in Hokkaido and grew up in Betsukai, a dairy farming town in the island’s far east, according to a 2021 Bunshun Online excerpt from the Bessatsu Takarajima book on death row prisoners. Her father worked as an administrative scrivener, and she was said to have been raised strictly. The journalist Taeko Ishii, who reconstructed her life in a long series for Weekly Bunshun in 2024 and 2025, wrote that she was one of four children. A former elementary school classmate told Ishii that Kijima would deny wrongdoing even when caught; others remembered a dreamy, distant look in her high school years, though Ishii noted that such impressions are often formed in hindsight. After high school she moved to Tokyo at about 18, enrolled at Toyo University and withdrew soon afterward over unpaid tuition. AFP, reporting her sentence, described her past as a paid mistress and said she had claimed to have worked as a nurse and a piano teacher. At 28 she was arrested for fraud involving internet auctions.
By 2009 she was presenting herself to men as a woman of means and refinement. Testimony at her trial described a false profile: she said her father was a professor at the University of Tokyo and that she was a piano teacher or a food coordinator. From 2008 into 2009 she used a marriage-hunting website to approach more than 20 single men with offers of marriage and to take their money. Other men connected with Kijima also died, and those deaths were never charged. The Takarajima account says that a 70-year-old man in Matsudo, Chiba Prefecture, who had given her more than 70 million yen, died in 2007. Japanese prosecutors were reported by AFP to suspect her in as many as five more deaths. None was ever charged. They are suspicions and not part of her convictions.
Oide’s death was the one that first drew police attention. The Saitama Prefectural Police looked into the woman he had been seeing and learned that other men who had known her had died. Kijima was arrested in Noda, Chiba Prefecture, in September 2009 on fraud charges; the Takarajima account gives the date as September 5, though it is reported differently elsewhere. While she was held on those charges, Japanese media linked her to several men she was said to have had relationships with, and some of that coverage, Brasor wrote, implied before any murder charge that she was responsible for their deaths. During interrogation she remained almost completely silent. On February 1, 2010, Saitama police re-arrested her, then 35, on suspicion of murdering Oide. J-CAST News reported that physical evidence was scarce and that test results, together with his own blog posts about the planned marriage and trip, led investigators to conclude that his death was not a suicide; his blog stayed online and drew more than 1,800 comments, most of them messages of mourning. Arrest warrants followed for the deaths of Terada and Ando, and she was indicted for three murders.
### Yoo Young-chul, 2003 and 2004
Yoo Young-chul was convicted of 20 murders committed in Seoul over about ten months in 2003 and 2004, at the time the largest number of victims attributed by a South Korean court to a single killer. He began with elderly and well-off residents in quiet districts, and then turned to young women. He was caught in July 2004 not by detectives working the case but, in the account Pressian gave, by the operators of businesses whose workers had stopped returning. On December 13, 2004, the Seoul Central District Court sentenced him to death. He did not appeal. He is still on death row, because South Korea has carried out no execution since December 30, 1997.
He confessed to more killings than he was convicted of, and his count changed repeatedly in custody. Later he put the figure at more than 30, including two in Busan. Police and later reporting judged most of these claims unsupported. One killing he confessed to, in Imun-dong in February 2004, ended in an acquittal that was upheld by South Korea’s Supreme Court in 2005.
Yoo was born on April 18, 1970, according to CBS NoCutNews. A profile in Weekly Kyunghyang in July 2004 said he was born in Seoul to parents who did manual labor, the third of four children. His father died of an illness when he was 14, and his mother raised the family. He and a brother were reported to have a seizure disorder, and he was treated for epilepsy in the 1990s. He left a technical high school after a theft case and was sent to a juvenile facility. By the time of his arrest, the profile said, he had been involved in at least 14 criminal cases, among them aggravated theft and sexual offenses, and had spent about 11 years of his adult life in prison. Reporters were told he had claimed IQ scores of 140 and 148 in middle school. In prison he learned to use computers and word processing, and he was caught forging a police identity card in 1997. According to Pressian, he married in 1991 and they had a son. His wife divorced him while he was in prison; Pressian dated the divorce to 2000, and Weekly Kyunghyang said she filed in 2002. He was released in June 2003.
Police and prosecutors later tied his crimes to two personal losses. His wife had divorced him, and Yonhap reported that he had considered killing her but gave up the plan for the sake of their child. After his release he began a relationship with a woman who worked at a phone room; police said she ended it when she learned of his criminal record, his epilepsy and his divorce. Police said his hostility toward wealthy people and toward women grew from these events and from a childhood in poverty. Yoo gave shifting accounts. Pressian reported in July 2004 that he denied hating the rich or women, but at his trial he told the court that the end of the relationship had made him hate women.
The first killings came on September 24, 2003, in Sinsa-dong, in Seoul’s Gangnam district, where a retired university professor emeritus, 73, and his wife, 68, were killed, according to police as reported by Yonhap. On October 9, 2003, three members of one family in Gugi-dong, in Seodaemun-gu, were killed: an 85-year-old woman, her 60-year-old daughter-in-law and a 35-year-old member of the family. Police reports at the time of his arrest put the toll from four sets of killings in 2003 at eight people. Yonhap reported that he left cash and valuables untouched, which made the cases hard to read as robberies, and police said they had treated them as separate crimes. In court in October 2004 he said he had left more than 100 million won in cash at wealthy victims' houses and that he never killed for money. After a case in Hyehwa-dong, police obtained security camera footage, and Yoo stopped targeting households, Yonhap reported. About four months passed before the next killings. Pressian reported a different explanation from Yoo himself: that he had stopped targeting the wealthy after the family of his first victims made a donation to a university.
On January 21, 2004, police caught Yoo in a theft at a bathhouse in the Sinchon area, Pressian reported, but released him two days later for lack of evidence. In December 2004 the court acquitted him of that theft, finding the witness testimony unreliable. From March 2004 the victims were young women, whom he contacted by telephone, and police said he posed as a police officer carrying out a crackdown, with a forged identity card and handcuffs. Police said 11 women were killed this way between March and July 2004. Few details were reported about most of them, and Korean reporting at the time used surnames only; Yonhap’s first report gave the age of only one of the 11, a woman surnamed Kim, 25. Pressian reported that three of the women had been reported to police, in March, June and late June 2004, and that the reports were handled as ordinary cases, with no link drawn to one another or to Yoo. In April 2004, Yoo told police, he killed a man in central Seoul; police considered this the most credible of the extra killings he confessed to after his arrest, but the 20 convicted counts have not been published one by one, so whether this killing was among them is unclear.
Yoo’s undoing was that he kept calling the same businesses. On July 14, 2004, according to Yonhap, police received a tip from one operator that workers had stopped returning after a call from a man in his 30s. The official account and the operators' account of what followed differ. Pressian reported on July 20, 2004, that the operators themselves caught him: they arranged a meeting at a spot in Sinchon in the early hours of July 15 and held him before police took him into custody. Police later announced that they had arrested him on a tip, a version Pressian disputed. One operator who was present told Pressian that officers from different units argued for more than an hour over who would take custody of him, and that the dispute ended only when a senior unit chief arrived and the units agreed to share the credit. Police announced the arrest on July 18, 2004.
He was indicted in August 2004 on murder charges covering 21 deaths, with offenses against the dead, impersonating a police officer and theft among the other charges reported. The Seoul Central District Court, Criminal Division 21, presiding judge Hwang Chan-hyeon, convicted him of 20 murders and acquitted him of the Imun-dong count. In September 2004 he told the court that his confession to that killing was false, saying police had promised to look after his son; Kyunghyang Shinmun reported on September 21 that he called the case fabricated, and Pressian reported on October 26 that he repeated the claim at the October 25 hearing. The sentence of December 13, 2004, became final when he did not appeal within seven days, and the Supreme Court’s First Division rejected the prosecution’s appeal on the acquitted count on June 9, 2005. After Jeong Nam-gyu’s arrest in 2006, police established that Jeong was the man responsible for the Imun-dong killing. Yoo was moved from a prison in Daegu to the Seoul Detention Center in Uiwang in September 2023, and was held there as of October 6, 2026, Yonhap reported.
A former police official said Yoo included a May 2004 killing of a 65-year-old woman in Wonnam-dong, Seoul, in a handwritten list; it was never charged and stays unsolved, CBS NoCutNews reported in 2016.
### Jeong Nam-gyu, 2004 to 2006
Jeong Nam-gyu was 37 when he was caught, in the early hours of April 22, 2006, inside a house in Yeongdeungpo-gu, in southwestern Seoul. He had broken in and injured a man in his twenties, and the man and his father held him for police. He was booked as a robber. Within days, investigators had tied him to a run of killings and assaults that had gone on across southwestern Seoul and the neighboring province of Gyeonggi for more than two years.
Korean press accounts give the total as 13 people killed and 20 seriously injured between January 2004 and April 2006. His victims were strangers: two schoolboys in Bucheon, women walking alone at night, and people asleep in their own houses. The Seoul Southern District Court, 11th Criminal Division, presiding judge Lee Tae-seop, sentenced him to death on September 21, 2006, and the sentence became final with the Supreme Court ruling of April 12, 2007. South Korea had stopped carrying out executions in 1997, and Jeong was still held at the Seoul Detention Center when he died by suicide in his cell in November 2009. He died in hospital at about 2:35 a.m. on November 22, 2009, aged 40.
Every recent Korean account of his early life tells a story of violence within his family and outside it. He was born in 1969, by one Korean account in Jangsu County, North Jeolla Province, in a farming family. His father beat him repeatedly; in high school he was bullied by groups of other students, and during his military service he was beaten and mistreated. None of the accounts suggests that any of his victims had anything to do with these experiences. By the time of the killings he was living in Incheon, west of Seoul. He had been in and out of prison for most of his adult life. According to The Sisa Law, a legal news outlet, his first conviction came in 1989, for aggravated robbery, and he received two years and six months, suspended for four years. In 1996 he was charged with robbery, with other charges; Money Today reported that his first trial ended in a suspended sentence and that on appeal he received two years and six months in prison. In 1999 he was convicted of theft, with other charges, and sentenced to two years. In 2002 he was convicted of car theft and served ten months.
The series began in Bucheon, a city in Gyeonggi Province between Seoul and Incheon, on January 14, 2004, with two boys aged 13 and 12. Their deaths came to light on January 30, 2004, and the investigation stalled; for more than two years nobody was charged. After his arrest in 2006, Jeong confessed to the killings during questioning, and prosecutors went back over the investigation files and indicted him on the strength of a detailed account that, they said, only the person responsible could have given. The offenses that followed were against adults, most of them women. On February 6, 2004, a 27-year-old woman surnamed Jeon was killed in Imun-dong, in Dongdaemun-gu. The Hankook Ilbo listed her killing first among the charges the court considered in 2006. Her death had already been claimed by another man. Yoo Young-chul had told investigators he killed a woman in Imun-dong; his first-instance court left that killing out of his convictions, and prosecutors appealed, unsuccessfully, to the Supreme Court in 2005, according to Weekly Kyunghyang. After Jeong’s arrest, police established that he was the man responsible, Money Today reported in 2009. Jeong was angry that Yoo had taken credit, according to the Seoul Economic Daily. He told investigators that Yoo was a step below him, and he claimed to be better at avoiding capture.
Over the following months he struck roughly once a month across Seoul and Gyeonggi, Money Today reported. Jeong planned around the cameras that had helped catch Yoo. He kept away from Gangnam and other areas with many closed-circuit cameras and chose neighborhoods where security was thin, Money Today reported. He also trained for it. He gave up drinking and smoking, according to the Seoul Economic Daily, and ran about ten kilometers a day; Money Today quoted him as saying he needed to stay healthy so that he could go on killing. The Sidae outlet wrote that he kept southern Seoul in fear for about two years. Because several of the offenses fell on rainy nights, the series became known in the press as the "rainy Thursday night" case, and newspapers compared it to the film Memories of Murder, based on the Hwaseong killings of the 1980s, according to Money Today. Korean reporting has published little about most of the people he killed beyond their ages, the districts where they lived and the dates. The court that sentenced him described them as women walking alone at night, people asleep in their own houses, and children who had been playing with friends.
The end came in the early morning of April 22, 2006. Jeong broke into a multi-unit house in Yeongdeungpo-gu, took 24,000 won and injured a man in his twenties, according to the Seoul Economic Daily. The man and his father subdued Jeong and handed him over to the police. Even then he nearly got away, the paper reported. At first the police treated him as an ordinary burglar who had injured someone in a robbery. On the way to the station he said that he should have killed a thousand people and that he had failed to commit the perfect crime, the Seoul Economic Daily and Money Today reported. Other accounts quote him as saying he was unhappy not to have reached his goal of a thousand, and that he still wanted to smell blood. He was indicted in custody on June 7, 2006.
The Hankook Ilbo reported on September 22, 2006, that the case covered 25 offenses in which 13 people were killed and 20 seriously injured, with charges including murder, robbery with injury and arson. Reuters reported his suicide on November 22, 2009, in a dispatch that spelled his name Chung Nam-kyu, and the Korea Times, spelling it Jeong Nam-kyu, asked in its report of November 23 what the death meant for the debate over the death penalty. Money Today reported the same week that 129 prisoners had died by suicide since 1998.
### Kang Ho-sun, 2005 to 2009
Kang Ho-sun was convicted in 2009 of murdering ten women in South Korea. Two of them were his fourth wife and her mother, who died in Ansan in October 2005. The other eight were women he did not know, killed between September 2006 and December 2008 in Jeongseon County in Gangwon Province and in the cities of southwestern Gyeonggi Province, south of Seoul. He admitted the eight killings after his arrest in late January 2009 but denied to the end that he had set the fire. The Ansan Branch of the Suwon District Court, Judge Lee Tae-soo, convicted him of all ten murders and sentenced him to death on April 22, 2009. On April 16, 2009, a civil judgment ordered 1.3 billion won paid to the families of six victims. The Seoul High Court upheld the sentence on July 23, 2009, and it became final when he filed no appeal to the Supreme Court in time. Media monitors reported that the main evening newscasts gave the case more weight than they had given the Yoo Young-chul killings of 2004, the Kyunghyang Shinmun reported in March 2009. It renewed arguments over whether police should show the faces of suspects, over traffic cameras and a national DNA database, and over the death penalty. In October 2026 he was still on death row at the Seoul Detention Center.
Kang was born in 1970 in a small farming village in Seocheon County, South Chungcheong Province, according to a cover story by Jeong Won-sik in Weekly Kyunghyang in February 2009. He was the second of five children. His father grew rice; his mother sold vegetables at a market. The village head told the magazine that the family was not poor by local standards. A childhood classmate remembered a bright boy with a strict father, an ordinary village child. The magazine noted that his early life showed none of the childhood abuse, poverty or social exclusion reported in the lives of men such as Yoo Young-chul and Jeong Nam-gyu. He finished high school in 1988 and settled in Ansan, an industrial city in Gyeonggi Province; the Korea JoongAng Daily, citing police, dated the move to 1989, and Weekly Kyunghyang dated it to 1992, when he worked as a truck driver. He tried a series of trades. He ran a restaurant, owned a small massage shop, and was working as a masseur at a sauna when he was caught. From 2006 he kept cattle and pigs on a farm in Suwon that he ran with his brother, of which he was the real owner. Coworkers and customers spoke well of him. Between November 2003 and February 2006 he also ran a dog farm with dozens of huskies, according to a 2025 retrospective in the Korea JoongAng Daily by Lee Soo-jung, which reported Kang as saying that because he had killed so many dogs, killing a person had felt like nothing. By the time of his arrest police said he had a criminal record of nine earlier offenses.
Money from insurance ran through his life in these years. Police told the Korea JoongAng Daily in January 2009 that he had collected 180 million won from insurers since 1999 for incidents including a car fire. Weekly Kyunghyang reported that his fourth wife’s family had been through eight fires and accidents for which he received payouts totaling about 660 million won. On October 30, 2005, fire broke out at the house of his mother-in-law in Ansan while she and Kang’s fourth wife were asleep. Both women died. Kang got out with his son. "My fourth wife died in a fire on Oct. 30, 2005 and I was devastated," he told police, according to the Korea JoongAng Daily. At the time the fire was not treated as a crime. Weeks before it, Kang had taken out several life insurance policies on his wife, and in 2007 he received 480 million won in compensation. Prosecutors later said they had obtained a recording of an automated telephone call he made to four insurance companies on November 4, 2005, to file claims, the Kyunghyang Shinmun reported. Kang’s explanation was that the fire started from mosquito coils he had lit in the living room. Prosecutors at the Suwon District Prosecutors' Office rejected that account. They said that mosquito coils were not needed at the end of October, when the temperature can fall to 3.7 degrees Celsius, and that no one slept in the living room. Fire experts concluded that the coils did not cause the fire. Kang denied setting it but admitted that he had gone back into the house after police had closed it, according to the prosecutor in charge, Park Jong-ki.
After the fire, he told police, "I wandered around the nation for a year, and then I began feeling the urge to kill whenever I saw a woman." In 2006 he spent time in Jeongseon and Taebaek, in the mountains of Gangwon Province, for beekeeping work, prosecutors said. Reports from 2009 give the eight women only by surname and age, and some only by age. Two of them were university students. The first was a 23-year-old woman surnamed Yoon (Yun in some English spellings) of Jeongseon County, killed in September 2006. Her mother told the JoongAng Ilbo in February 2009, "I had hoped my daughter was alive, even though we haven’t heard from her for a long time." Her case lay unsolved for more than two years, and her older brother joined the police in 2010, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported in 2025. The other seven women died in southwestern Gyeonggi Province, between December 13, 2006, and January 7, 2007, and then, after a gap of 22 months, in November and December 2008. The last victim, a 21-year-old university student in Gunpo, was killed on December 19, 2008, and her case led to his arrest. He later withdrew cash with some of the women’s bank cards, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported.
Investigators were puzzled by the long pause between January 2007 and November 2008. Kang told police he had stopped because of news reports and because the police inquiry had tightened. His neighbors told investigators that he went often to Gangwon Province in that period for his beekeeping. Criminologists interviewed by Weekly Kyunghyang called the gap unusually long. Heo Kyung-mi, a professor at Keimyung University, said it was too long to be explained by fatigue and urged police to reexamine unsolved cases from those months. Jang Seok-heon, president of the Korean Association of Criminal Psychology, said that serial offenders use such periods to look back on what they have done and plan. During the gap he also replaced the sport utility vehicle he had driven with a new black sedan, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported. Police and prosecutors also examined other unsolved cases and a 2004 fire in Seocheon, but no further charges were reported. Weekly Kyunghyang, in a companion cover story, listed the debates the case left behind.
Read in order, the twelve cases show three different ways a serial case ends. In some, the courts and the public close it, and the last thing anyone remembers is a date of execution: Fukiage in 1926, Kodaira in 1949, Okubo in 1976, Miyazaki in 2008, Maeue in 2009. In others, the sentence is passed and then held, as Matsunaga’s, Kijima’s, Yoo’s and Kang’s have been for years, with the Korean ones frozen by a halt on executions that has lasted since 1997. And in the last group the court never reaches the person at the center, as with Sumida, who died in custody before trial, or where the court narrows the record, as the Tokyo District Court did with Ishikawa’s 84 to 5.
Each case also left something in the public vocabulary. Miyazaki’s gave Japan the otaku murderer, a label the scholars have spent years taking apart. Kijima’s gave the language its "konkatsu killer" and a novel. Yoo’s and Kang’s produced the Korean debates over showing suspects' faces, traffic cameras and a DNA database. Jeong’s, which began as an Imun-dong killing that Yoo had already claimed, showed how one confession can stand in the way of another case. Ishikawa’s put a clinic into the Diet record. Sumida’s showed what a household could hide for more than a decade. What none of them settled is the number. Counts of the dead ran ahead of the charges in Ishikawa’s clinic, in Fukiage’s confessions, in Kijima’s suspicions and in Yoo’s custody statements, and the courts in every case convicted only of what they could test.
• 1906, September 24: an 11-year-old girl killed in Kyoto; Sataro Fukiage sentenced to life, released March 18, 1922.
• 1923 to 1924: the six killings of girls charged against Fukiage; arrested July 28, 1924; sentenced to death May 7, 1925; executed September 28, 1926.
• 1945, May 25, to 1946, August: the Kodaira series; arrested August 20, 1946; executed October 5, 1949.
• 1948, January 12 to October 11: the Kotobuki case comes to light, Miyuki Ishikawa is arrested January 15, and the Tokyo District Court sentences her on October 11.
• 1952, April 28: the Tokyo High Court sets Ishikawa’s sentence at four years.
• 1971, March 31 to May 10: Kiyoshi Okubo’s eight killings; sentenced February 22, 1973; executed January 22, 1976.
• 1988, August, to 1989, June: Tsutomu Miyazaki’s four killings; arrested July 1989; sentenced April 14, 1997; executed June 17, 2008.
• 1996, February, to 1998, June: the Matsunaga and Ogata killings in Kitakyushu; arrested March 7, 2002; sentenced September 28, 2005; final December 12, 2011.
• 1997, December 30: South Korea’s last execution.
• 2003, September to 2004, July: Yoo Young-chul’s killings; sentenced December 13, 2004.
• 2004, January, to 2006, April: Jeong Nam-gyu’s series; arrested April 22, 2006; sentenced September 21, 2006; died by suicide in custody November 22, 2009.
• 2005, February to June: Hiroshi Maeue’s three killings; arrested August 5, 2005; sentenced March 28, 2007; executed July 28, 2009.
• 2005 to 2011: the Amagasaki deaths; Miyoko Sumida arrested November 2011; died in custody December 12, 2012; last co-defendant sentenced February 2016.
• 2005, October, to 2008, December: Kang Ho-sun’s killings; sentenced April 22, 2009.
• 2009, January to August: the three deaths for which Kanae Kijima was convicted; sentenced April 13, 2012; final 2017.