The Mystery of The Setagaya Family Murders
One of my most terrifying fears is the idea that someone is watching me without me knowing about it. Or worse, that someone is inside my home watching me without me knowing about it. If that freaks you out as well, this might be a tough episode for you. Because today we are going to tell you about one of Japan’s most horrifying mysteries, but at its core was a family who got a really bad feeling that someone was watching them.
TW: Child D*ath, Animal Ab*se
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SOURCES
Faceless podcast (USG Audio) (2022-2024), hosted by Nicolás Obregón
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Why The Miyazawa Family Murders in Japan Continues to Baffle Police | Oxygen.com
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SETAGAYA FAMILY MURDER
Trio who bloodied cab sought in family slaying - The Japan Times
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Shirt may be linked to family's killer - The Japan Times
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20-year-old-setagaya-multiple-murder-case
The murder of the Setagaya family, the scene where time stopped, the bereaved family
was revealed for the first time / 世田谷一家殺害事件、時が止まった現場 遺族が初公開 |
NIKKEI
https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXMZO54573810Y0A110C2CR8000/
Police vow to solve 2000 murder of Tokyo family - The Mainichi
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A Cold Echo | Criminal
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Setagaya family murder: Age range narrowed to "men between 15 and 20 years old at the
time of crime" / 世田谷一家殺害 「犯行時15歳~20代男」年齢幅絞る | Mainichi (via Internet
Archive)
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299000c
The real culprit is "half European" | EX Digital (via Internet Archive)
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SETAGAYA FAMILY MURDER
Family's Killer May Have Left Home at Night | The Daily Yomiuri (12/13/2014) (via Internet
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Police are still looking for the killer! We NEED your INFORMATION! | Metropolitan Police
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412.pdf
[ 世田谷一家殺害20年]<上>照合した指紋は5000万件、今なお増える犯人資料 / 20 years
since the Setagaya family murder • 50 million fingerprints matched, information on the
perpetrator still growing | yomiuri
https://www.yomiuri.co.jp/national/20201212-OYT1T50102
Deceased Members | ASIFA-JAPAN [ Association Internationale du Film d'Animation -
Japan Branch ]
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Ex-detective in Setagaya family murders still supports mother | The Asahi Shimbun:
Breaking News, Japan News and Analysis
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‘Why can’t it be solved?’ Still no suspect in 2000 killing of family | The Asahi Shimbun:
Breaking News, Japan News and Analysis
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14073939
Mikio Miyazawa (1956-2000) - Find a Grave Memorial
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/228714828/mikio-miyazawa
Yasuko Miyazawa (1959-2000) - Find a Grave Memorial
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/228714849/yasuko_miyazawa
Top 50 things to do and attractions in Setagaya | Wanderlog
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The Scary, Strange Setagaya Family Murders - by Thorne | smol farm gazette
https://smol.news/p/the-scary-strange-setagaya-family
SETAGAYA FAMILY MURDER
The Setagaya Murders — Unresolved
https://unresolved.me/the-setagaya-murders
Murder in Setagaya: Disturbing Miyazawa Family Murders Unsolved for Over 20 Years -
HubPages
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rders-that-baffled-japan-for-over-20-years
Setagaya family murder - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setagaya_family_murder
Setagaya Family Murder Case / 世田谷一家殺害事件 - Japanese Wikipedia
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/世田谷一家殺害事件#帽子
Setagaya Murders: Possible Inaccuracies and Misinformation : r/UnresolvedMysteries
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/100ebra/setagaya_murders_possible_
inaccuracies_and/
TRANSCRIPT
It was New Year’s Eve in Japan, in the year 2000. in an isolated home on the Southwest corner of Tokyo, an elderly woman named Haruko picked up the phone and dialed her daughter, Yasuko. Haruko and her daughter spoke every day, especially around this time on Sunday mornings. But on this particular morning, the phone rang and rang without an answer. So, Haruku tried again. Still, nothing
Now, It was the day after New Years, and a Sunday. There was no reason Yasuko, her husband Mikio, and their two small children, the Miyazawa Family wouldn’t be home.
So Haruko, who actually lived in the attached home right next door, just figured she’d walk over and knock on the door. Maybe her daughter just couldn’t get to the phone, and she wanted to see her. But when she did that, there was still no answer, it was like no one was home. She started getting a little nervous so she grabbed the key to Yasuko’s front door, and let herself in to check on her daughter.
Almost instantly, the metallic smell of blood hit Haruko’s nose. But before she had time to really register what she was smelling, she looked down and saw something that made her gasp in horror. There on the floor was her son-in-law, Mikio. He was lying motionless at the foot of the staircase—with bloody wounds all over his body. But it wasn’t just Mikio, as Haruku ran throughout the house, calling out for her daughter, she saw that The entire family, Mikio, Yasuko, and their two young children, had been murdered, sometime in the dead of night, by an unknown assailant.
So Haruku did the only thing she could think of in her panicked state, she called the police. But when they arrived, they described the scene as nothing like they had ever seen before…. It seemed like, not only had a killer meticulously moved from room to room to attack the entire family, but he had spent hours in the home, both before and after the crime took place. He even put on Mikio’s clothes at some point, and used the family computer.
But who had done this, and why?
This is Heart Starts Pounding, I’m your host Kaelyn Moore, and today we’re going to talk about one of the most unsettling stories to ever come out of Japan, and it’s one of the country's longest standing mysteries.
It’s a story that, to me at least, is a good reminder that if you ever get the feeling that you’re being watched, if the hairs on the back of your neck ever stand up because you sense danger is near, even if you can’t see it, you might want to trust your gut. This story had me looking out of my windows at night. And the RDS is surrounded by woods and a graveyard so that wasn’t actually helpful
And before we dive in, I wanted to shout out a listener Tessa, who is training to be a crime scene investigator and just learned how to dust for fingerprints, which is something that’s going to come up a lot in this story. I love hearing about your darkly curious jobs and hobbies so please keep them coming, you can send submissions at heartstartspounding.com
Ok, now let’s get back to the story, but heads up, this episode deals with the deaths of children, and references animal abuse. If you ever want to double check an episode’s content warnings before diving in, you can check out the description.
The Miyazawa family was the very model of the modern middle-class Japanese family.
There was the father, Mikio, a business consultant who had creativity coursing through his veins. At work, Mikio helped design corporate logos, and in his spare time, he loved things like anime, he even worked on Manga comics and painted model planes.
Mikio’s wife was Yasuko, and she also worked full-time running a tutoring business that, in Japan, is known as a cram school. Yasuko ran the cram school out of their home, where they lived with their two children, Niina who was described as being energetic and academically gifted and Rei, their youngest son, the baby of the family. He was an adorable little boy who struggled in school and had been recently diagnosed with a developmental disability. Because of this, Yasuko was highly protective of him and his needs. She wanted the world to be kind to little Rei, and she wanted to see him grow into himself and find his confidence, like his big sister had.
Like many Japanese families, the family of four lived in a duplex, their home shared a wall with the home next door where Yasuko’s mother, sister, brother-in-law, and nephew all lived. And to protect the privacy of the families, Mikio actually built some soundproofing into their shared wall. Both families had young kids and it got pretty loud at times.
From the outside, they seemed like this tightly interwoven family, a dream for many people. but there was something weird happening in their neighborhood.
See, The family bought the duplex in 1990, and at the time, it was located in a well-populated suburban development in the neighborhood of Kami-soshigaya, in the Southwest Tokyo district of Setagaya. This house was one of about sixty houses in the immediate area, and many of those homes were also duplexes, so there were well over a hundred families in the neighborhood.
But then, in 1998, something unexpected happened
1998 was the year the Tokyo Government voted to expand a nearby park called Soshigaya Park, and that meant they needed to clear the land in the neighborhood where the Miyazawas lived.
So over the next two years, the City developers began slowly buying out everyone in the neighborhood and demolishing their houses to clear the way for the park’s expansion.
And, I mean, the government paid the families for their homes, so Most residents took the government’s deal and moved elsewhere. But the Miyazawas didn’t do this at first, they wanted to stay in the neighborhood as long as they could.
But by March of 2000, the neighborhood that was once sprawling and alive with people and children was now totally desolate, and the Miyazawas’ home was one of less than half a dozen that still remained in the area, which was honestly, pretty creepy. The neighborhood was dead silent at night. It was rare to see anyone in the neighborhood, and the Miyazawa home just stood amongst empty lots where homes used to be.
Eventually the Miyazawas, and Yasuko’s sister and her family, finally decided to accept the city government’s offer, and agreed to vacate the house in March of the following year.
And this felt like a weight off Yasuko’s shoulders, because she was starting to feel really nervous in this neighborhood. At night she would look out her window and just see empty blackness on all sides of the house.
But that wasn’t even the worst part. One morning, when she walked outside to grab the morning paper, she saw a dead cat on the side of the street. It didn’t look like it had died of natural causes, or even like it had been hit by a car. No, it seemed like it had been killed by someone wielding a knife.
And not long after that, Yasuko went out and grabbed the paper one morning, and she saw that there was actually an article about the cat in the paper. It turns out that the few people that still resided in the empty neighborhood had reported seeing these mutilated cats all over. Who could be doing this, Yasuko wondered as she stared out into the bottomless darkness outside of her window.
Maybe this was why Mikio started getting into it with some of the local skateboarders. There was a skate park a literal stone’s throw from the back of the Miyazawas’ home, with only a fence separating them. The noise was becoming a problem. With no one left in the neighborhood, the skater kids could be as rambunctious as they wanted with no consequences. and so mikio wondered if the skaters were responsible for the dead cats
On one occasion, Mikio had confronted some rowdy skateboarders and it led to a pretty ugly screaming match. After that, they didn’t really interact.
So, by December, the Miyazawas were incredibly ready to leave. In just three months, they’d be in their new home, and would no longer have to worry about any of this.
When the police arrived at the Miyazawas home, the scene was brutal.
Mikio was lying at the foot of the stairs, covered in deep thin knife wounds. A trail of blood led down the stairs, making police think there was some sort of struggle with the attacker starting on the second floor.
Up on the second floor, they found two more bodies. It was Yasuko, and—right next to her, with her back against her mother’s back was 8 year old Niina. Their bodies were bloody and riddled with the same kind of wounds that covered Mikio.
just a few feet away was a child’s bedroom, and the light was turned off, which was different from how Haruko found the rest of the house, with the lights on. The police braced themselves. They knew what was coming. Haruko, in her grief and panic, had bravely searched the whole house that morning and reported what she saw. So even though police weren’t surprised when they found the body of six year old Rei lying in his bed, they were still devastated.
But Rei hadn’t been killed like the rest of his family. And this was the first of many strange oddities about the scene that police would notice….
See police were starting to make note of the overwhelming amount of evidence that was left behind by the attacker.
First, Police found a broken sashimi knife on the second floor, It’s a long, thin, and very sharp knife, and this one didn’t belong to the family, meaning the attacker must have brought it. The remainder of the blade was eventually found still inside of Mikio.
There was another knife found at the scene, a santoku knife from the Miyazawa’s kitchen. Police assumed that the killer grabbed this knife to finish the attacks after the knife he brought broke while he was attacking Mikio.
Now, police also noticed that The window of the second-floor bathroom at the back of the house (near Rei’s bedroom)—one that faced the skate park—was open, with the window screen cut away and lying on the ground below the window. In the mud nearby were footprints that they matched to some found inside the residence. A tree branch near the fence behind the residence was broken.
Police theorized the killer scaled the back fence and climbed up the air conditioning to enter the house. He then strangled Rei in his bed, attacked Mikio, and then grabbed a new knife to finish attacking Yasuko and her daughter.
But the amount of blood at the scene showed that not only had the family fought back, but the intruder was most likely severely injured at some point. Analysis showed that his blood was all over the house, including the attic. One of the killers fingerprints was found on a band aid container in one of the bathrooms, and a bloody bandaid (with the killers blood on it) was found near the sofa in the living room. Based on just how much of the killers blood was found in the house, police assumed his wound was pretty significant.
But that was the evidence police found from the actual attack, the strangest thing in all of this was it seemed like the killer had spent a significant amount of time in the home AFTER the attack had taken place.
First of all, the house was completely ransacked. It looked like not only had the killer gone through multiple drawers that contained family documents, but he also carried one of the drawers up to the second story bathroom, filled the bathtub up halfway with water, and then dumped the papers into the bathtub and toilet. The documents were mostly related to Mikio and Yasuko’s jobs, but didn’t seem particularly important. He also cut up some advertising flyers with scissors and dumped them in as well. The parents wallets were empty and in the tub, but most of the contents were in the hallway outside. no one could figure out exactly why he had done this. Some police officers wondered if he had been going through the wallets to find their PIN numbers.
In that same bathroom, the killer also defecated in the toilet and didn’t flush. The police were able to collect that for forensic purposes.
The refrigerator was also a mess, and it looked like someone had scooped a melon insidewith his bare hands. Police were also able to put together that he most likely ate ham, and drank barley tea from a plastic bottle out of the fridge.
And then there were little ice cream cartons, five of them, that the killer had opened and eaten without a spoon, dropping the containers throughout the house.
It seemed like the killer had potentially taken a nap on the second story couch at some point.
But perhaps, one of the strangest parts of the scene, was the pile of clothes found neatly folded on the second story couch, that clearly did not belong to the family.
The clothes consisted of a crusher style gray hat, a dark plaid scarf, an air tech jacket sold at Uniqlo stores in Japan, a raglan style shirt, a fanny pack that was manufactured in Osaka, and blood soaked Edwin style gloves. DNA testing would later show that the blood was mostly the killers,
There were also Two dark-colored handkerchiefs — one believed to have been wrapped around the knife handle for better grip—and they could tell that because the handkerchief was bloodstained and featured a hole the size of a knife blade. The other was folded into a triangle with narrowed ends, indicating it may have been used as a face mask
And A pair of Slazenger-brand sports shoes left behind. Foreign footprints found inside and outside the house matched these shoes.
Now, these clothes were believed to belong to the killer, but that would have meant that at some point in the night, he stripped off his own clothes, and put on Mikio’s before he left. It was unclear to police why the killer would have done this.
Another strange detail, was that Mikio’s computer was found unplugged, which was really unusual. An analysis of this computer—showed that it was being used by Mikio up until 10:50pm, and then wasn’t used again until 1:18 am. Police believe that the family was most likely killed in that window, so if it was being used at 1:18am, it was by the killer.
Forensics revealed that it was connected to the Internet from 1:18am to 1:23am. During that time, an unsuccessful attempt was made to purchase tickets on the Shiki Theater Company website (which Mikio already had among his bookmarks). A new folder had also been created on the desktop (for reasons unknown).
But also, computer evidence showed that the last time the computer was used was at 10:05am the following morning, just 30 minutes before Haruko entered the home, meaning the killer was potentially in the house for around 11 hours. That time, it was used for a period of about five minutes, and the only page accessed was Mikio’s company website—after which the power cord was unplugged.
Now, some of the officers would later go on to say that this was probably due to Haruko as she ran around the house looking for all of the members of her daughter’s family. Perhaps her running around jostled the mouse, making it LOOK like someone was using the computer. Maybe she tripped over the cord and unplugged it.
Maybe they were trying to justify the computer's usage because for how disturbing this whole scene was, it was even more frightening to think that the killer was in the home for SO long after the crime had occurred.
But there was more than just the computer usage that backed up the fact that he was in the house this long.
Because the police started asking questions to people in the area. Did anyone notice anything that night? Did anything weird stand out. And they found that A newspaper deliveryman and a passerby both reported that lights appeared to be off inside the Miyazawa's residence in the early morning hours of Dec. 31st, 2000; however, when Haruko discovered the bodies around 10:30am, the lights inside the residence were on.
And even more chilling, it was also discovered a delivery truck had been backing up to the victim’s house around 10am that morning, and the driver remembered seeing a curtain over the window facing the road pull back back, as though someone was peering through the curtain.
So the police believed that the killer, in response to the truck’s presence, unplugged the computer and fled the house at this time.
Once Haruko had calmed down, she started remembering more details from the night.
She initially told the police that she heard nothing unusual, likely because of that soundproofing Mikio had installed years earlier.
But eventually, she went back to the police and said- wait- there is one thing I remember. It was after her side of the house had gone to bed—at around 11:30pm that night. a loud thud came from Yasuko and Mikio’s side of the duplex.
After much discussion, investigators would conclude that this sound was likely made by a retractable ladder that the killer used to get from the Miyazawa’s attic on the third floor down to the second floor.
There was something else, Haruko said. She didn’t know if it would be helpful, but she figured she’d tell the police anyways.
The week before, for christmas, the whole family gathered together at the Miyazawa house. Yasuko was going to be preparing a big meal for everyone.
But during the day, while she was preparing lunch, Yasuko kept noticing—as she looked out the kitchen window—something that bothered her. There was a car she’d never seen before, parked right in front of the house, as though an uninvited guest had shown up to join them. There were no other homes on the block that the car could belong to, and from a distance she could barely make out the outline of a person sitting in the front seat.
Yasuko left the kitchen at one point to use the bathroom, and when she returned, she saw that the car was no longer there. She shook it off and served lunch to her family, but by the time she got up to start cleaning, she noticed that the car had returned
And Throughout the entire afternoon, Yasuko kept noticing this car would leave and then come back to park right in the same spot. Eventually, she was uncomfortable enough that she mentioned it to her father in law. It looks like someone’s casing the house, she told him. he could see how worried this car was making her, with everything else that had been happening in the neighborhood, so he told he he’d go check it out.
But by the time he stepped out of the front door, the car had once again disappeared—never to return.
After learning this, police canvassed the neighborhood—or what was left of it, anyway—and learned from one of the Miyazawa’s nearest neighbors that, just three or so days before the murders, there was a suspicious man seen walking around the Miyazawas’ property and it looked as though he was examining their house. The eyewitness said that the man appeared to be in his thirties or forties, and they had never seen him in the neighborhood before and hadn’t seen him since.
The first day of the new millennium began ominously in Japan, as that day’s headlines were all about the murder and news of the horrific quadruple homicide spread across the country. The revelation that the killer spent so much time inside his victims’ house—ate their food, wore their clothes, slept in their bed—led to him being known as “The Goldilocks Killer.”
Meanwhile, investigators were hard at work trying to solve the crime.
The man in charge of the investigation was police chief Takeshi Tsuchida. And when he took inventory of the overwhelming amount of evidence his investigators had collected from the scene, he was optimistic the case would be solved fairly quickly.
He believed that whoever committed these murders had probably committed other crimes, and the killer’s fingerprints would almost certainly be in Japan’s national database.
So that’s one of the first things Takeshi did—he ran the bloody fingerprints through the criminal database, and he waited for a hit to come back.
And the end result of that search was shocking to Takeshi:
Zero hits.
No one in the country’s database of over ten million prints matched the fingerprints left behind at the scene.
So he decided to upload the killer's DNA. Now, Japan’s DNA database was much smaller, because of the country’s very strict privacy laws, and uploading the killer’s DNA profile into the national database also generated no hits.
It seemed like whoever did this had either never committed a crime before, or never been caught.
But that got Takeshi thinking, and he wondered what kind of person the killer might be. And there was one detail about the crime scene that really stuck out to him.
See, he wasn’t convinced that his investigators had reached the right conclusion about where the killer entered the home. The bathroom window that had been cut looked so small that he couldn’t imagine an adult male being able to squeeze through it. Was it possible the killer was a teenager? he wondered.
Based on some of the evidence left behind, it certainly seemed possible. For one, when the killer’s feces was analyzed in the crime lab, it was found that he had recently eaten a meal of string beans, spinach, pickled cucumber and sesame seeds. It’s the kind of mundane meal that, in Japan, is usually homemade. It’s the kind of meal a mother would make for her family. Could it be that the killer still lived at home?
And the clothing the killer left behind was something teens at the time were wearing. The crusher-style hat, the raglan sleeve sweatshirt, the fanny pack, the sports shoes. One officer even noted that it was the same style of clothing a skateboarder might wear, and that was before anyone knew about the issues the Miyazawa’s were having with the skaters.
When Takeshi learned about Mikio’s confrontations with the teens from the skate park behind his house, he made it his priority to track down every one of the kids who used that park and get fingerprints from each of them.
And eventually, Takeshi and his team managed to do just that. But… it was another dead end. Not one set of fingerprints from the skate park youths matched the killer’s, and all the kids Takeshi talked to seemed pretty spooked by what happened. Sure, they thought Mikio was lame for screaming at them, but they didn’t really think it was a huge deal, they were kind of used to getting yelled at by adults. And they genuinely seemed scared and sad when they heard the news.
Investigators talked it over and most were in agreement that the level of violence seemed personal. Like someone was out for revenge. But, if so… what was the motive?
They spent weeks probing the family’s social and professional circles. And at the other end of it, they were left still empty-handed. These people were universally loved. Yasuko was loved by her students. Milkio was loved by his coworkers. They got along with everyone in their orbit. little Niina was seen by her teachers as a kind-hearted girl who would instantly make friends with the new kids everyone else would ignore.
The team of investigators also looked into the family’s finances. Mikio, they discovered, kept meticulous logs and ledgers of every financial transaction.
And that’s when the detectives saw that only recently, the family received a large sum of money from the City for the recent sale of their house. Did the wrong person find out about this transfer and decide to burglarize their home in search of the funds?
By examining Mikio’s financial records, police were able to conclude that some money had been taken from the house the night of the attack. But, surprisingly, it wasn’t a lot. It was 150,000 yen, which was then equivalent to about 1,300 U.S. dollars. And yet, there was other money that was left behind, money that was left out in plain view—like an envelope with 1,000 yen on the study bookshelf, which was ignored by the killer.
As the months crawled by, police realized that, despite the mountain of evidence left behind, it seemed they were no closer to learning the identity of this elusive killer. It was also beginning to appear that the killer may have been a stranger to the family. But then, once again: what was the motive? Was it simple burglary? Mental illness? The thrill of the kill?
More and more of Tokyo’s police force was being mobilized to investigate the murders of the Miyazawas. And over time, the investigation would balloon into the largest and most expensive in Japanese history.
And because of this huge investment of resources, investigators were able to learn a great deal more about the killer.
I want to now go over what they were able to learn about the killer just based on the forensic evidence they collected from him.
The killer’s DNA profile was sent in for anthropological analysis, and the findings were that he likely had a mother who had Southern European, possibly Mediterranean, ancestry, and a father who was from Southeast Asia. The killer also had a specific genetic sequence that was found in one in thirteen Japanese people, one in ten Chinese people, and one in five Koreans
That last part really stood out to police, that the killer had a genetic sequence common in Koreans. Because of something else they had learned about him.
Investigators really looked at the clothes that the killer wore, and they realized that the shoes that he had left behind—particularly the model and his specific size—were not sold in stores anywhere in Japan. Only in South Korea.
And forensic analysis of the shirt he wore found that it had been laundered in hard water, rather than soft water. And while hard water can be found in some places in Japan, it’s not common. However, hard water, at least at the time, was REALLY common in South Korea. though
Investigators saw an advantage in this, because South Korea keeps a national fingerprint database of all its country’s citizens over the age of 17. They also fingerprint every individual over 17 traveling into their country. Not just criminals, not just those accused of crimes, EVERYONE. South Korea’s database contained roughly 50 million sets of fingerprints. If this man had even so much as stepped foot in the country, at least when he was over 17, then he was as good as caught.
Police held their breath as they waited for the results. Could it really be this easy? They were one database search away from figuring out who this monster was.
The results finally came back and…—not a single one of those matched the fingerprints of the Miyazawa family’s killer. Either the killer was not from, or had ever visited, South Korea, or he had still been under the age of 17 when he was last there.
But the police weren’t ready to give up on the clothes just yet, maybe there was another clue hidden amongst the killers wardrobe. And there was, in a place no one really expected.
See, inside of the killer’s fanny pack and in one of the pockets of the Uniqlo jacket he left behind were microscopic pieces of sand.
And that sand was forensically analyzed, and it was found to be a mix traced to two different places.
One of the places the sand was from was a beach 75 miles south of Tokyo—a beach, mind you, that’s known to be frequented by skateboarders.
And the other place that the sand was traced to was Edwards Air Force Base—which is 90 miles north of Los Angeles, California.
How could this be? Had the killer been to America? Had he lived there? Did the killer have some connection to the military?
It seemed possible. After all, the U.S. Forces Japan’s headquarters was just 40 miles away from the Miyazawas’ house. You could easily make the round trip in a few hours.
But without any hits on DNA or fingerprints, police were at a loss with where to start. I’m not sure if they were able to check the records at Edwards Air Force base, either they did and they didn’t get any leads, or they didn’t. It seemed like even with all of this physical evidence, they weren’t really able to get anywhere.
But maybe eye witness evidence could help them out. Because after all, a few more leads came in
Some were total duds, like One that came in just a few days after the murders. A Setagaya taxi-cab driver contacted police in early January 2001 to report a strange encounter he’d had around the time the Miyazawas were killed.
That night, the cabbie told police, he had been in the vicinity of the Miyazawas’ home when suddenly, three middle-aged men hailed him for a ride. After they entered the cab, the three men were completely silent throughout the ride, and this made the cabbie uncomfortable. And after he dropped them off, he noticed one of them had left bloodstains on his back seat.
The three men were never identified—but some reports suggest that the bloodstains were later analyzed and found to not even be blood, but rather, chocolate. Most likely these men had nothing to do with the crime and the cabbie was just being overly cautious in reporting them.
But then there was another incident, a more haunting one—haunting because it feels like this could have been the killer.
The incident occurred on the afternoon of December 31st, 2000—the day that Haruko discovered the bodies. But it wasn’t reported until much later.
It was at a railway station two and a half hours north of where the Miyazawas lived. Staff at the station observed a man, who appeared to be about 30 years old, the oldest age police estimated the killer would be, standing in a black down jacket and jeans. He was about 5’9”, or 170cm tall, the same height that the clothing he left behind suggested he was. What really stood out to the staff was that this man had a deep gash on his hand.
It was a wound so deep, in fact, that they could see the man’s bone. It was very gory- it almost made the staff sick- And yet, the man seemed totally unbothered. He sat calmly, almost nonchalant—and when approached, he refused to provide his name or discuss how he incurred this pretty significant injury.
Although station staff were suspicious, news of the murders hadn’t yet spread, so they had no reason to detain the man or summon police at that time. By the time they did actually report the incident, the man was long gone, And when police asked around the village where the railway station was located, no one in the area recalled seeing anyone fitting the man’s description, or anyone with an injury like the one the railway station staff described.
This is believed to be the only sighting of the killer after the attack took place. A chilling, brief glimpse of the man, who then disappeared.
Twenty-five years have now passed since the Miyazawas were slaughtered by a nameless, faceless intruder. Or rather, an intruder who certainly had a face and name—but, whose face and name continue to elude Japanese investigators.
As I mentioned earlier, Japan has stringent privacy laws around DNA, and those laws limit how DNA can be used. And so far, the country has not explored forensic genealogy, which has been so effective here in the West in resolving decades-old crimes. Since the Golden State Killer was identified this way in 2018, over 700 hundred cases have since been resolved using public genealogical databases.
But those kinds of databases aren’t widely used in the East, so… even if police in Tokyo were open to this tool, they’d still have a bumpy road to navigate.
Chief Takeshi Tsuchida retired in 2008, but the case never left his mind and still haunts him to this day..
And while Yasuko’s mother, Haruko, has since passed on, Mikio’s mother—Setsuko—is still alive and in her mid-90s. Setsuko maintains a shrine in her home, honoring her fallen family members, and in a cabinet in the same room, she has all her dead grandchildren’s toys on display.
Chief Takeshi has developed a friendship with Setsuko. He sometimes pays respects to the Miyazawas at Setsuko’s shrine, and in his spare time, he runs support groups for victims of violent crimes.
To date, over 300,000 Tokyo police officers have worked the Miyazawa murders. Over fifty million fingerprints, and over a million DNA profiles, have been compared to the killer’s without a match.
And since the September 11 attacks in 2001, Japan has taken to fingerprinting all individuals crossing into its borders, even if those individuals are Japanese citizens returning from abroad. And to date, none of those fingerprints have matched the killer’s.
Police established a 24-hour guard at the Miyazawa house in early 2001, and they have maintained that presence ever since.
See, even though the rest of the neighborhood was demolished, the Miyazawa house never was. Maybe police thought the killer would return, or that there was evidence left there that would one day be helpful.
And now, Every year, on the anniversary of the murders, police hold vigils at the residence.
And it could be that someone else is holding vigil too—in their own way.
In March 2006, an unknown party somehow slipped past police and placed a bouquet of flowers near the fence beneath the second-story window that the killer was believed to have entered. Police guards posted at the house never saw the person who placed it there.
But it reminded them of a previous discovery, five years earlier—in April 2001, four months after the murders. there was something they found along the river that ran beside the Miyazawas’ home. It was a small stone “Jizo” statue, with the number “6” carved into its base. The significance of the carving was unknown, but the “Jizo” is a benevolent Buddhist deity long believed to protect the souls of children who have died before their parents—as such children are not, according to Japanese belief, able to cross the river to the afterlife.
Police never found out who placed the statue there. Could it have been placed there by the killer, plagued by a guilty conscience?
If so, it would be the only time since the attack that police felt like they were even in the vicinity of the killer. He has remained a total ghost, and the people of Japan have really had to wrestle with the scary fact that he could be out there still. And he’s never been caught, so either that was his only crime ever committed, or he has continued to float away from crime scenes as a nameless, faceless ghost.
I’ve read a few different theories about what could have happened to him. One theory is that he’s dead. That his hand wound was so bad he just went into the woods somewhere and bled out. After all, no man, matching the killers description, with a severe hand wound, was ever reported at any hospital in the weeks after the attack.
So either he had the wherewithal to not go to the hospital, even though he had left so much other evidence behind, or he never made it
Another theory claims that he slipped away to another country. Perhaps he was in the military, or perhaps his parents were in the military, and he was still just a teen. I imagine he continued to commit his crimes if that was the case
Or, there’s the thought, that he’s still in Japan. Potentially A 35 to 50 year old man who blends into society. Maybe he’s married. Maybe he has a child or two. Maybe his neighbors think he’s an odd guy, but nothing too out of the ordinary, as so many serial killer stories go. But it begs the question.
One day, will someone who knows this story look down at the man's hands and see a deep, purple red scar. One that the man covers quickly when he sees them notice. And will that person remember a headline from the early 2000s. And if they do, will they doubt themselves. Will they Think that, no this man is too nice, or that was too long ago, or that they’re overreacting? Or will they, just to be careful, call the tipline?
It’s one of so many questions that still remain unanswered. But if you are able to help answer any of those questions, the Seijo Police Station’s special task force wants to hear from you.
The Task Force is still offering a reward of up to 20 million yen—which is equal to about 140,000 US dollars—for information leading to the identity of the Miyazawa family’s killer.