On September 6, 1985 a letter postmarked in Sakai reached the Osaka police chief. It named the sushi restaurant where the writer had eaten with a young woman before killing her, listed which parts of her body he had cut off, and told the police to catch him if they could. It was signed The Monster with 22 Faces, which was the name used by the extortionists in the Glico Morinaga case, then the most notorious unsolved crime in Japan.
The details were right. When the Nara police traced the dead student's last day they found she had been seen at that restaurant with a middle-aged man. They concluded the killer had written the letter, and they had no idea who he was. He had already left for Tokyo on the Tokaido bullet train, having heard that an investigator had been asking after him at his usual snack bar, and stayed there until things went quiet.
It took ten years, and it was a theft that did it. On February 23, 1995 Yasutoshi Kamata was seen stealing clothes from a warehouse in Chuo-ku, Osaka, and he was arrested for it in April. He was already a plausible suspect: he knew the ground around the sushi restaurant, a rental car of his had been seen on the day the student died, he had known the last two victims through work, and the knives used where he worked resembled the tool that had cut up the bodies. His fingerprints were taken, and they matched the letter. On May 10 the Osaka and Nara prefectural police merged their inquiries.
Kamata was born in Ozu, in Ehime, on July 10, 1940, the son of an inn proprietor. He married a local woman, worked selling disposable chopsticks at a local inn, and in 1960, on finding that his wife had been unfaithful, took their two children and moved to Nishinari-ku in Osaka. He made his money selling stolen goods at high prices to women who worked in bars and restaurants. The people he did business with described him as soft-spoken, amiable and well liked, and also as a man given to sudden rages.
He had around twenty addresses across the city. He took women to them and strangled them there. The first three killings were at addresses in Nishinari-ku and the last two at a residence in Naniwa-ku.
The student was nineteen, and on April 16, 1985 she left her dormitory at about five in the evening; she worked at a dry cleaning job for a treatment facility in Tondabayashi. He had met her near the Tsutenkaku tower and took her to his condominium. When she asked him for ten thousand yen in pocket money he strangled her with his hands, then laid out carpets and vinyl sheeting, cut her up with a saw and a kitchen knife, boxed the remains, and dumped them from a rental car on a country road. Early the next morning the Miyoshi family found them near their farm in Koryo, Nara Prefecture.
Another woman was forty-six, a housewife from Higashisumiyoshi-ku, married with three children, who on May 14, 1985 went to a bar in Nishinari-ku under a false name. He met her there, bought her a meal and drinks with two other people, took her back to his condominium when she was drunk, and strangled her when she resisted his advances. Nobody found her until after his arrest ten years later, in woodland beside National Route 175 in Nishi-ku, Kobe. The official numbering of the case lists her as the first victim, although the dates given for the two deaths run the other way.
At about half past five on the afternoon of January 22, 1987 he stopped a nine-year-old girl walking home from school, asked her the way to the Sumiyoshi Grand Shrine and gave her two hundred yen. He took her to his home, meaning to sexually assault her. Her screaming frightened him off, so he strangled her and left her body in the mountains. Then he telephoned her school, Sumie Elementary, four or five times demanding thirty million yen for her return. She was found in a cypress forest near Toyono on May 4. He did not dismember her, and said later that he had not needed to, because she was small enough to fit in a box.
Soon afterward he was convicted of a series of thefts committed between October 1989 and August 1991 and was in prison until March 1993, and he started again almost as soon as he was out. He took to driving the forest road near Todoromi, which he used on his way to and from Fukuchiyama, and National Route 423. Around July 24, 1993 he paid a forty-five-year-old snack bar worker to come home with him, strangled her, cut her up with a saw and left the remains in the mountains outside Minoh. At the end of March 1994 he did the same to a thirty-eight-year-old restaurant clerk, left her along the same forest road, and sold her clothes at a good price. He was convicted of theft in both of those deaths as well as murder.
The bodies turned up in the wrong order. The clerk's remains were found on April 3, 1994 and identified that November 4. The next day an investigator from the Minoh police, searching the cypress forest, found a skeleton that turned out to be the bar worker, identified on July 24 by her dental work.
Once the joint inquiry began he admitted killing and dismembering the student and was charged two days later. He then admitted three more, and the housewife, whose death had not been connected to the others. At trial he took it all back. He said friends of his had done the killings and he had only helped dispose of the bodies, and that a police officer had beaten him into signing the confession. He also said he could not remember the day of the warehouse theft.
The trial opened at the Osaka District Court on March 13, 1996 under Judge Toshio Shima, and Kamata told the court the charges, the schoolgirl's above all, were rubbish. The ransom calls were the one thing he had never admitted, even in interrogation. The court had a recording, and at the defense's request it sent it to Matsumi Suzuki, director of the Japan Acoustic Research Institute, whose voiceprint test found the caller's voice almost identical to his. The court was still not satisfied, and he was acquitted of the ransom charge. He pointed to that acquittal as proof he was innocent of everything.
On March 24, 1999 Judge Nobuyuki Yokota sentenced him to death, two death sentences in all. The Osaka High Court heard his appeal before Judge Hiroshi Fukushima from October 3, 2000, and on March 27, 2001 acquitted him of the ransom again and upheld both sentences. The Supreme Court heard the case under Judge Hiroshi Fukuda on June 6, 2005 and confirmed the sentence on July 8.
He spent seventeen years under sentence and appealed to organizations opposed to the death penalty. In 2016 the Minister of Justice, Mitsuhide Iwaki, signed the warrant, and on the morning of March 25 he was hanged at the Osaka Detention House, aged seventy-five. Junko Yoshida, a former nurse, was hanged at Fukuoka the same morning. They were the first executions in Japan that year, and in Japan the prisoner is told on the day.
The case had a number rather than a name in the police files. It was Metropolitan Designated Case No. 122, and Osaka investigated it alongside the Glico Morinaga extortions, which is the case whose nickname he borrowed to taunt them.