On August 22, 1988, a little after three in the afternoon, four-year-old Mari Konno left her family's apartment complex in Iruma, Saitama Prefecture, to play at a friend's home. She never arrived. That evening her father called the police. On February 6, 1989, he found a cardboard box on the doorstep. Inside were burned bone fragments, several teeth, photographs of the clothes she had been wearing, and a note made up of cut-out characters that read: "Mari. Bones. Cremated. Investigate. Prove." Three weeks passed before the police confirmed that the remains were hers; two of the teeth matched her dental X-rays. The man who sent the box was Tsutomu Miyazaki, a twenty-six-year-old who lived with his parents in western Tokyo, and Mari was the first of four girls he killed in less than a year.
Saitama had known few crimes against children, and the disappearances became a national story, called at first the Little Girl Murders. The National Police Agency designated the series Wide-Area Important Case 117. On October 3, 1988, Masami Yoshizawa, seven, disappeared in Hannō after a man offered her a ride as she walked home along a rural road. Erika Namba, four, was taken in Kawagoe as she returned from a friend's house, on December 9, 1988, by the date Japanese accounts give (English-language accounts often say December 12). Her body was found in a wooded area soon afterward, her hands and feet tied, and on December 20 her family received a postcard of clipped words about a cold, a cough, a throat and death. On June 6, 1989, Ayako Nomoto, five, vanished after going to a park.
Miyazaki was born on August 21, 1962, in Itsukaichi, on the western edge of Tokyo, into a prosperous family; his father printed and published a local newspaper and was strict with him. He was born prematurely with congenital radioulnar synostosis, a fusion of the forearm bones that kept him from turning his hands upward, and he was mocked for it at school, although he was a good student. He grew isolated, and by adulthood he was on bad terms with most of his family. The one person he was close to was his grandfather, who died in May 1988. Three months later he killed Mari Konno.
His method was to lure a girl into his car, a black Nissan Langley, with an offer of a ride or a chance to be photographed, drive to an isolated spot, strangle her, and then abuse the body, photographing and filming it. He took the clothing with him. He left Mari Konno's body in the hills near his home, later returned to remove the hands and feet, burned the rest in his furnace and ground it to powder for the box. On February 11, 1989, days after it arrived, a three-page letter confessing to her killing appeared, signed with the name Yūko Imada and mocking the police and her parents' hope that she was alive. At her funeral on March 11, her father, Shigeo Konno, said that her hands and feet did not seem to be among the remains and pleaded for the rest of her to be returned. Ayako Nomoto's body Miyazaki took home, where he dismembered it and, by the prosecution's account, drank her blood and ate part of the remains, before scattering the parts around Tokyo.
He was caught by chance on July 23, 1989, in a park in Hachiōji. He had separated a small girl from her older sister and was photographing her undressed when their father arrived and struck him. Miyazaki ran, then came back for his car, and the police were waiting for him there. He was arrested for the attempted abduction. Seventeen days later he confessed to killing Ayako Nomoto, and her skull was found the next day in the hills of Okutama. Confessions to the killings of Erika Namba and Mari Konno followed. On September 6, 1989, Masami Yoshizawa's remains were found in a forest near Itsukaichi, and Mari Konno's hands and feet were found soon after.
The search of his room produced 5,763 videotapes, most of them anime and recordings of television and horror films, among them a handful of extreme gore films, along with footage he had made of his victims. Newspaper photographs of the room set off a moral panic about otaku, the obsessive fans of anime and manga, whom the press presented as a danger. The panic outlasted the case by years.
His trial opened in the Tokyo District Court on March 30, 1990, and ran for seven years. He showed no remorse, spent much of it drawing cartoons, and told the court that a "Rat Man" who appeared to him had done the killings. Court-appointed psychiatrists disagreed with one another: one team diagnosed a multiple personality disorder, another schizophrenia, and others found him responsible. His father, who refused to pay for his defense, threw himself into a river and drowned in 1994, and Miyazaki wrote to a publisher that the news left him feeling refreshed. The court concluded that he had understood what he was doing, pointing among other things to the care with which he had hidden evidence, and on April 14, 1997, sentenced him to death. He is reported to have described the killings as an act of benevolence, and he never apologized.
The Tokyo High Court upheld the sentence on June 28, 2001. On January 17, 2006, the Supreme Court found that he had an extreme character disorder but was fully competent when he killed, and dismissed his appeal; the sentence became final early the next month, sixteen years after his first trial began. A clinical psychologist, Hirokazu Hasegawa, who saw him that year, said Miyazaki believed his crimes would bring his grandfather back to life, and that the last thing he said was a request: "Please tell the world that I'm a gentle man."
Miyazaki was hanged at the Tokyo Detention House on June 17, 2008, at the age of forty-five, one of three prisoners executed that day under Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama, whose tally since taking office the previous August reached thirteen. The four girls he killed were Mari Konno, four; Masami Yoshizawa, seven; Erika Namba, four; and Ayako Nomoto, five.