Inside dad's hunt for playboy killer who stashed daughter Lucie Blackman’s head in concrete & filmed 400 sex crime tapes | The Sun

It also details how hardened police suffered breakdowns after watching 400 videotapes recovered from Obara's apartment showing him commiting horrific sex crimes.

Lucie, Tim’s eldest child with ex-wife Jane Steare, became an air hostess with British Airways after leaving school.

In May 2000, she and fellow crew member Louise Phillips flew to Tokyo on a 90-day visa.

She got a job at the Casablanca, a club in the city’s Roppongi region popular with rich bankers and businessmen.

Hostesses worked up to six hours a night earning £40 an hour, and were given bonuses for drinking alcohol with clients – but there was no expectation of sex. 

However, girls were encouraged to go on 'Dohan' dates – a dinner with a client before bringing him to the club.

On the night of July 1, Lucie went on a date with a customer but never returned. Two days later Tim was in his garden when her pal Louise called saying Lucie had gone missing.

“I thought there must be some rational explanation," he recalls.

“But there were three or four more calls and I knew something had gone wrong. That feeling of complete blind panic just crashes in on you.”

'No investigation'

Tim flew out to Japan with daughter Sophie, then 20, to find Lucie, but was told that as a foreign worker, not a Japanese national, her case had not been taken seriously and there wouldn’t be a proper investigation.

Determined Tim then held a press conference and Lucie’s picture was plastered all over the city on 30,000 missing person posters.

Global headlines suggested she’d joined a mysterious cult or had been kidnapped over a million yen (£6,000) debt – claims rubbished by Tim.

In the documentary one officer admits they didn’t treat it as a criminal case initially because “lots of people worked illegally or overstayed on visas and went missing”.

I thought there must be some rational explanation. But there were three or four more calls and I knew something had gone wrong. That feeling of complete blind panic just crashes in on you

But under pressure, two weeks after Lucie’s disappearance the Tokyo Metropolitan Police assigned a new 100-strong team to the case – and spotted a previously dismissed vital clue.

Sergeant Junchiro Kuku discovered a report from the Roppongi area where a foreign hostess working at a club had been invited by a regular client to drive to the seaside,

“At some point, she fell unconscious and slept for many hours," he says. “When she woke up her head was hurting badly and she suspected she had been drugged.

"[Detectives] said the manager of the club who came up with the report was an unreliable guy. No one should rely on what he said.

"We thought that was ridiculous. A person like this might provide a legitimate clue.”

Suspect

Investigators began to question club workers – many of whom were wary of police after regular raids to round up illegal workers.

Eventually several women came forward and reported being drugged and raped by a wealthy businessman.

Each one said the man drove a flash car, often a Porsche or Mercedes, and invited them to dinner overlooking the ocean.

The perpetrator had given many different names to the girls but an Australian victim, Jessie, had scribbled down a phone number. Records showed the same number had called Lucie.

Police tracked its location to a luxury apartment block, Moto-Akasaka Towers, where two flats were being used by a company called Plant Orihara.

The building manager said the owner was an odd man who hid his face and drove a lot of high end vehicles.

An English victim, Monica, reported being driven to a palm-lined ocean front which police identified as Zuchi Marina, an hour from the city centre.

A waitress at a nearby restaurant recognised Lucie from a picture and confirmed she’d been there on July 1 with a man. 

Police worked around the clock to sift through data on residents and discovered a businessman with a fleet of luxury cars, called Juji Obara, owned an apartment there.

In the Japanese script Kanji, Obara and Orihara – the name of the company – have similar symbols.

They discovered Obara had previously been arrested for dressing as a woman to secretly film in a women’s toilet.

Monica and Jessie picked him out from a line-up of 100 mugshots. 

By now Lucie had been missing for 103 days.

Millionaire loner

Obara had inherited a £30million fortune from his father and owned a string of luxury properties. Neighbours described him as a “loner”.

After police arrested him in October 2000, raids at his Zuchi Marina apartment uncovered a hoard of drugs and alcohol, and metal fittings on the ceiling, similar to a bracket used to hang a punch bag. 

Meanwhile police searching Obara's Moto-Akasaka apartment found a chilling notebook in which he'd written about devoting himself to becoming evil.

He also wrote women were “only good for sex” and described his attacks on women as “conquest play”.

Over 400 video tapes were recovered, each labelled with a woman’s name and showing his victims apparently comatose while he assaulted them. The metal fittings were used to lift their legs.

“I’d never seen anything so despicable,” Assistant Inspector Tokie Maruyama recalls. “I never thought there were people like him.” 

Officers painstakingly went through the tapes to identify victims – but Lucie did not feature. 

"Several of those young officers had mental breakdowns,” Sergeant Mitsujo Yamaguchi says. “They had to watch the same crimes over and over.

Several of those young officers had mental breakdowns… They had to watch the same crimes over and over

Sergeant Yamaguchi says the hardest part was showing the tapes to victims who had no idea what had happened to them.

“They were covering their eyes. One was saying, 'Say it’s not me’ and some said, ‘That’s in the past and I don’t want to take it any further'," she says.

"One victim had a nosebleed… I explained we had to arrest this perpetrator and punish him and we desperately needed their help.”

One victim, 21-year-old Australian model Carita Ridgeway, had died after an attack in 1992.

Dropped off at a Tokyo hospital by a man who claimed she had “food poisoning”, her death had never been investigated – but the tape showed her unconscious and violently shakingas she was molested. 

Forensic experts recognised this as “flapping tremors” – a side effect of acute hepatitis which can be caused by the administration of knockout drug chloroform.

Analysis of her liver found the drug present in her body, and a stash was found among Obara’s belongings.

Sinister purchases

Obara denied abduction and rape, claiming sex was consensual, but admitted to meeting Lucie in the Casablanca a week before her disappearance. He denied being with her on July 1. 

Receipts seized from his apartment enabled police to track his movements, showing he'd likely met Lucie on the day she vanished at 3pm, travelled to the Marina, stopped at the restaurant where the waitress remembered her, and went to his apartment at 5pm.

In the ensuing days Obara returned to Tokyo where he bought a chainsaw, cement and a portable tent.

On July 5 he drove to Aburatsubo, a seaside resort an hour away where he owned another luxury flat.

That evening a resident complained to the manager about the noise coming from inside. 

Suspecting he had disposed of the body there, police launched a search party. 

On February 8 2002, 223 days after she disappeared, Officer Yuji Nozoe found a sack containing Lucie’s dismembered body underneath an upturned bath in a tiny cave.

Her head had been shaved and encased in concrete.

Tim heard the news from journalist Jake Adelstein, who had been helping the family.

“I remember precisely where I was when I got the call,” says Tim. “I was standing in a back street and… Jake said, ‘They’ve found her.’

"I was hopeful all the time, right through to that moment. Twenty minutes later the Japanese interpreter rang me and said they’d had dental records back and it's definitely Lucie.

"I just stood in the street and yelled. That was the first time that I actually decided Lucie could be dead.”

Charged

Obara was charged with abduction, rape resulting in the death and the disposal of Lucie’s body, and the rape resulting in the death of Carita Ridgeway. 

There was only sufficient evidence to charge Obara on another eight counts out of his 400 estimated victims.

In April 2007 he was convicted of multiple cases of rape, and the manslaughter of Carita Ridgway, and jailed for life.

Incredibly he was found not guilty for all charges relating to Lucie due to lack of forensic evidence.

After an appeal by the family, the Tokyo High Court found Obara guilty on the counts of abduction, dismemberment and disposal of Lucie’s body in December 2008. 

“We put absolutely every ounce of blood sweat and tears into it that we had,” said Tim at the time.

“Today justice has prevailed not only for Lucie but for all victims of violent sexual crime.”

The case had a lasting effect on many of the police officers, some of whom visit a shrine at the cave where she was found every year. 

Read More on The Sun

I took my kid to the best indoor water park – but everyone says the same thing

Catfish has no front teeth but looks like Mariah Carey with makeup on

“The fact that Lucie came from a foreign country to work and was the victim of such an evil crime has left certain emotions in my heart,” says Superintendent Katsuyoshi Abe, who led the search.

“Every year since we go there to appease her spirit. And pray that she rests in peace.”

Source: Read Full Article