From left to right, three of the victims of The Saga Serial Murders: Yoshino Tatsu, Kiyomi Nakajima, and Sumiko Fujise.
Between 1975 and 1989, Japan’s Saga Prefecture was the site of seven unsolved murders. All seven murder victims were females, ranging from the ages of 11 to 50. Five of the victims were strangled, while six of them disappeared on a Wednesday.
The first victim in this string of killings was Tomiko Yamazaki, a 12-year-old junior high school student who lived with her divorced mother in the town of Kigata. On August 27, 1975, Tomiko invited a friend to come over while her mother was at work. The friend left around 7 PM, and this was the last time anybody would see Tomiko alive. When her mother returned home that night, she found that Tomiko was gone. Wherever it was she had gone, Tomiko left her shoes behind and left the TV on. The authorities suspected that she had been abducted.
Five years later, on April 12, 1980, 20-year-old Ritsuko Hyakutake disappeared from her home in the small city of Shiroishi. Like Tomiko, Ritsuko was also home alone during the time. Her father and mother were at the hospital, while her brother was at work and her sister was sleeping at a friend’s house. Ritsuko had earlier tried to commit suicide two times, but there was suspicion that she had run into foul play after her family received a strange phone call four days after she disappeared. The caller, an unidentified man, told Ritsuko’s father not to look for his daughter.
Two months would pass before a health company worker found Ritsuko’s naked body hidden in a septic tank in a Shiroishi elementary school. Three days later, on June 27, investigators found Tomiko’s body in the same tank. After the two disappearances had been connected, suspicion fell on a 29-year-old unemployed man who lived in Shiroishi. The man had dated Ritsuko before, and planned to marry her sister at one time. He also frequently went to the club where Tomiko’s mother worked. His alibi the day Ritsuko went missing was weak. Ritsuko was last seen when she left her job at a coffee shop at 11:30 PM. The suspect left a bar at 11:00 and apparently didn’t come home until the morning.
On September 8, the suspect was arrested for a sexual assault he had allegedly committed three years earlier. While he admitted to the sexual assault, he denied killing Ritsuko or Tomiko. The man was arrested again in November. This time, police compared his handwriting to a threatening letter Ritsuko’s family had received. Although the suspect’s handwriting was similar, the authorities let him go and dropped the case due to a lack of evidence.
The third victim, 27-year-old Chizuko Ikegami, went missing after leaving her job at a garments factory on October 7, 1981. Her body was discovered in a vacant lot three weeks later. Chizuko had been strangled to death with an electrical cord that was found around her neck.
The fourth victim, Kumi Nishiyama, was an 11-year-old girl who disappeared on February 17, 1982. Kumi left school with some friends, but never made it home. Her body, partially naked, was found in a bag in a grove near her school the next morning. It was estimated that she had been strangled to death ten minutes after she had split from her friends.
The same day Kumi was murdered, a middle-aged man in a white car was seen near her school. The man tried pressuring a woman at a bus station to get into his car, but the woman refused and threatened to call the police. Later, the man was seen talking to some junior high school girls. His car was also seen near Kumi’s school around the time she was murdered.
The next murder would not happen for another five years. On July 8, 1987, 48-year-old Sumiko Fujise got out of work early and went out with some co-workers. After an hour, the women left and invited Sumiko to come with them. Sumiko declined the invitation and left the store by herself. She never made it home and her family reported her missing.
On December 7, 1988, 50-year-old Kiyomi Nakajima disappeared after leaving her house to go practice volleyball at a sports center that was less than a mile away. 2 weeks into her disappearance, her husband received a phone call from a man who claimed that Kiyomi had been found. The man would not specify where Kiyomi was or how he knew her location. Kiyomi’s husband noted that the caller was middle-aged and spoke with a Kansai accent. (Saga is located on the island of Kyushu, while the Kansai region is on Honshu.) Although Kiyomi’s husband recorded the man’s call, investigators were never able to locate him.
The seventh and final victim was 37-year-old Yoshino Tatsu, a separated mother who lived with her parents and son. On January 25, 1989, Yoshino talked to an unidentified person on the phone. After she finished her conversation and hung up, she told her mother that she was leaving to go pick up a friend. Her car was found abandoned in the parking lot of a near-by bowling alley later that day.
Two days after Yoshino disappeared, 55-year-old Noriko Kuri and her husband stopped their car at a road near some mountains in Kitagata so that Noriko could pick some flowers. As Noriko was walking around and plucking flowers, she found the body of a dead woman near a cliff. When police arrived and searched the area, they found two more bodies. Shirts, sweaters, and some underwear were found scattered among the trees. The three bodies were later identified as Sumiko, Kiyomi, and Yoshino. According to their autopsies, Yoshino and Kiyomi died after being strangled. Since Sumiko’s body was little more than a skeleton at that point, her cause of death couldn’t be determined.
Interestingly, there were some connections between six of the victims in the serial murders:
1. Chizuko Ikegami and Yoshino Tatsu both worked at the same garments factory.
2. Fujise Sumiko’s niece was related to Kiyomi Nakajima.
3. Tomiko Yamazaki’s mother and Ritsuko Hyakutake’s mother worked at the same club, although during different shifts.
4. Tomiko’s mother and Sumiko were classmates in elementary school.
Some have suggested that all seven of the victims were killed by the same person. After all, the victims all lived within seven miles of each other, and five of them were strangled. The causes of death for the other two, Tomiko Yamazaki and Sumiko Fujise, couldn’t be determined because their bodies were too decomposed by the time they were found. There’s also the strange coincidence that everybody except Ritsuko Hyakutake had disappeared on a Wednesday. (Ritsuko went missing on a Saturday.)
On the other hand, there are multiple possibilities about the killers here:
1. Due to the location of their bodies, Tomiko Yamazaki and Ritsuko Hyakutake were killed by the same person.
2. Due to the location of their bodies, Yoshino Tatsu, Sumiko Fujise, and Kiyomi Nakajima were killed by the same person. These three women were much older than the earlier four victims, meaning that they might have had a different murderer since serial killers typically prefer a certain age range. These three murders are also known as “The Northern Incident.”
3. The person who killed Tomiko Yamazaki and Ritsuko Hyakutake also killed Chizuko Ikegami and Kumi Nishiyama.
4. Kumi Nishiyama was the victim of a lone pedophile.
5. Chizuko Ikegami was murdered by an unrelated killer. At 27 years of age, she might have been too old for Tomiko’s and Ritsuko’s killer, as well as Kumi’s killer.
6. The person who killed Tomiko Yamazaki also killed Kumi Nishiyama. At the time of their murders, Tomiko and Kumi were in the same age bracket. (Tomiko was 12 and Kumi was 11.)
Not much happened in the investigations of the murders until June 2002, when a 39-year-old burglar named Teruhiko Matsue was arrested for the murder of Yoshino Tatsu. (Conveniently, he was already in jail when the warrant was issued.) Teruhiko was arrested two more times in July for the murders of Sumiko Fujise and Kiyomi Nakajima. Although there was a DNA match between Matsuo and some saliva found on Yoshino’s body, this piece of evidence was thrown out as insufficient. After a trial lasting more than four years, Matsuo was acquitted of the three murders and compensated with 580 million yen for the damages he suffered.
Nearly a decade after Teruhiko Matsue was acquitted, the seven cases of the Saga Serial Murders have remained unsolved.
