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[phone ringing]
[gloomy music]
[Tim] I was sitting in the garden at home,
and I got a telephone call
to say that my… my daughter Lucie had gone missing.
My first reaction was, well, "How do you know she's gone missing?"
Well, we've not heard from her for a couple of days.
She's not answering her phone and we haven't had the emails.
She was out working in Japan.
I was immediately thinking, well, there must be some rational explanation,
there must be some reason why she's not being able to get in touch.
[reporter 1] Police in Japan have made a public appeal for help
in tracing a 21-year-old British woman.
Lucie Blackman hasn't been seen
since leaving the bar where she worked as a hostess.
[Tim] There were three or four more calls.
And I knew there was something that had gone wrong.
That feeling of complete blind panic
just crashes in on you.
[reporter 2] Tokyo, the world's biggest metropolis.
An alluring place for many, a nightmare for one.
[reporter 3] More than a week has gone by since British citizen, Lucie Blackman,
was reported missing.
[reporter 4] Every year,
hundreds and hundreds of bright-eyed young girls
head for the bright lights of Tokyo.
[reporter 5] The police have been looking into potential links
between Blackman and a local religious cult.
[reporter 6] The Japanese authority is now on the hunt for a sexual predator
who has been lurking on the streets of Tokyo for decades.
[enigmatic music]
[slow techno music]
[Tim] When Lucie came to leaving school,
she wanted to go out into the world,
like many young people to travel.
It is a fantastic experience.
But I remember Lucie saying,
"Well, I'd like to, uh, to travel to Japan.
I'm fascinated by the culture out there,
and it would be an interesting experience."
Japan has this image of being squeaky-clean, right?
The country where everyone is polite.
You know? There's no crime.
You lose your wallet on the subway and it comes back to you.
[Jake] Tokyo in 2000s was an exciting place to be.
And there were a lot of foreigners coming here to do work.
There was money to be made and good times to be had.
Yes, like the rest of channel 4, I'm in Japan.
[TV host] This is the country that's most popular cultural export
at the moment is Pokémon.
Konnichiwa and welcome to Japanorama.
[Jake] The image of safe, polite Japan was so overpowering.
Nobody suspected that there could be this sort of darker underbelly.
[foreboding music]
A friend of mine who manages a guest house contacted me,
and said that he was very concerned about a 21-year-old girl
named Lucie who lived there.
[Ryutaro] She'd gone missing,
and he was unable to get in touch with her.
It was the first time my friend had experienced anything like this,
and he was quite upset.
From the tensed look on his face,
I realized that the situation must have been serious.
[somber music]
Things were whispered in the Japanese media.
BRITISH STEWARDESS KIDNAPPED BY A CULT
[Jake] But the very beginning, you know, when nobody was aware… There maybe…
There were some… a small group of foreigners who knew
that there'd been someone who disappeared.
I was a crime reporter in Japan.
My boss reached out to me and he said like, "Hey, Gaijin,"
which is like the term for "foreigners".
He was like, "We need you." You know? This is a case that involves Gaijin.
My initial impression, she probably went up to Thailand
but just forgot to tell anyone, probably nothing to it.
I went to the Metropolitan Police Department headquarters.
They briefed me on everything.
[tense music]
[Mitsuzane] As a superintendent,
I was placed in charge of the Blackman case.
First, we had to rule out that she hadn't simply run away,
so we needed to speak in depth with her family
to see if they were aware of any reasons that might have led her to do so.
[Soejima] At the time, a lot of foreigners would overstay their visas,
or would work illegally and secretly.
And those people would often try to disappear to avoid detection.
So when I first heard about Lucie Blackman,
I was skeptical that it was actually a criminal case.
[thrilling music]
[reporter 7] Lucie's father, Timothy Blackman, touched down in Tokyo
as police said they feared she may have been kidnapped.
I spoke to her about three weeks ago.
Just a normal, uh, daughter called her father saying,
"Hi, Dad. I'm having a good time in Japan."
[reporter 8] Did she say anything, any concerns about her life in Japan?
She was saying she's enjoying herself and it's such a nice city.
[Tim] Something had happened, um, and we needed to get her back.
Any concerns you might have about, um, not having any experience
of talking to a camera or something,
you just get on with it because you're trying to find your child.
[dramatic music]
[Jake] When Tim came, there's massive throngs
of reporters and people,
suddenly that story becomes so much bigger
and then very quickly, everyone was talking about it.
You know, what happened to Lucie Blackman.
[reporter 9] The former British Airways stewardess
went missing on July the first.
Japanese police have made a public appeal for information
about a 21-year-old British woman who went missing in Tokyo 11 days ago.
[foreboding music]
[Dave] But Tokyo is a massive city
with an estimated 27 and a half million people living here.
It's truly like looking for a needle in a haystack.
[Jake] I met Tim Blackman and Sophie, Lucie's younger sister.
I got the impression that he was incredibly concerned,
but that Tim was also a very flamboyant showman
and that he would use his charisma to stir up things
so that something got done.
He is going to make sure that
everybody gets their ass in gear and really looks for Lucie.
[Tim] Jake certainly understood the Japanese systems,
and of course, bilingual, so that was another great asset.
[Tim] I think he had some contacts in the police as well
from the work he did.
If you have any information, please contact us.
[Jake] Even before he came, the police were looking for information.
They were definitely actively soliciting information.
[reporter 10] Thirty thousand posters of Lucie Blackman are put up in Tokyo.
The police are following up on calls made by the public,
but they are unsure if the sightings are credible.
[Tim] Hello.
Hello.
[Tim] Lucie was our firstborn child.
And she completely transformed our lives.
She was very special in the family.
She was very quick-witted.
She influenced many people around her.
I think everybody who knew her when she was growing up as a girl,
orbited around her light, like,
she was very much the center of things.
She decided that a good way of traveling was to join an airline.
That was a really big deal.
But she was missing, in peril.
The task in hand now was to find Lucie.
[Mitsuzane] I met with Tim on behalf of the police
to tell him what we knew.
At that point in my life, I was not particularly knowledgeable
about the unique ways of life
and practices of countries that weren't Japan,
and that definitely led to me being surprised or confused
by some of the questions that he asked.
He asked me whether I have properly checked
all the security cameras.
I explained to him that security cameras were in limited use in Japan at that time,
because of privacy concerns.
He said, "Mitsuzane, is this a joke? You can't be serious.
In London, there are cameras on every single street,
and they're all made here in Japan."
[tense music]
The police reacted as you would expect, they were the height of politeness.
[Tim] But somebody came forward to me.
An English guy who was married to a Japanese lady,
and he said,
"Because Lucie is not a Japanese national, you won't get a police investigation."
And that really sunk home in me.
With those alarm bells ringing,
I thought, "Well, I've got to really think about some way
of making an investigation take place."
So I thought, well, the first thing we need to do is get it into the media.
[camera shutters clicking]
We came away from the police yesterday afternoon
with the impression that
they are following all lines of investigation,
they are taking a broader view
and looking at all possibilities at this stage.
[Tim] We've set up a press conference to try and raise the profile in Tokyo.
They had to move the press conference to their largest auditorium
because the entire Japanese media wanted to come.
I looked at all these people and I said to Sophie,
"This is how we're gonna find Lucie, Sophie.
These people are going to find Lucie for us."
In regards to how I feel at the moment, um…
I'm sure you all appreciate. This is my sister who's missing.
And, um, and I just want her to come home.
And so, in any way, which anyone can help,
I'll be very grateful if they would come forward.
There's great interest from the British press.
[Jake] The Japanese media tends to avoid speculation,
while the British media was quickly running off,
you know, with various theories
and finding any live body they could to sort of speak on the subject.
Whether they knew anything about Japan or not,
whatever made for a good headline.
[thrilling music]
[Tim] Well, we heard that Lucie was alive,
and I was told she'd been put on a ship to Hong Kong.
That she was being trafficked for sex.
That she'd been taken in by a cult.
Lucie is a very skeptical young lady.
The idea that somehow she had suddenly become interested
in a religious cult of some sort,
just didn't ring true at all.
We thought that was ridiculous.
[ominous music]
[Jake] He brought so much attention on this case
that the Japanese government
and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police had to devote huge manpower to it.
Usually in a missing persons case,
you're gonna have maybe four or five cops on it.
-[sirens wailing] -But 100 people? That's not normal.
[sirens wailing]
[Jake] Police start to hone in on Roppongi, the place where Lucie worked.
And Roppongi was kind of like, lots of bars,
lots of hostess clubs.
Um, a pretty interesting nightlife.
Lots of foreigners, a lot of money.
You had, you know, Goldman Sachs,
Lehman Brothers, and all those finance people.
It was like a party, money was flowing.
Roppongi was starting to see that.
There were people who were willing to spend
a huge amount of cash in an evening.
-[champagne cork pops] -[guest shouts]
[background chatter]
[Suzy] I worked at Casablanca,
which is the same hostess club that Lucie Blackman worked in.
It was just a small, very unremarkable hostess club, really.
Hostessing is very hard to explain because there isn't a Western equivalent.
You go to this nightclub and it's full of older men,
and you talk to the older men, and you serve them drinks.
But there's no sex. It's not like that.
It didn't feel particularly sleazy or difficult.
It really was what I would be doing for free,
which is in my twenties,
which was going out to bars and meeting people.
You could make a lot of money working as a hostess.
The pay was around about 50 US dollars an hour.
Then you've got bonuses if you drank lots of alcohol.
And you only had to work five, six hours, maybe.
It could really be a… a simple, innocent job if you wanted it to be.
I think working as a hostess in Japan,
it really attracted girls who are out to have an interesting experience,
who are out to really live life.
There were so many amazing independent girls
who were looking to travel.
Just meeting people who were kind of that brave
and had that bigger vision of life
was… was really amazing actually.
[light music]
"Dohan" is probably the part of hostessing that's the most dodgy.
So a "dohan" specifically means you have a dinner before you go to work,
and then you take the customer with you into the club,
and then in the club,
they pay the bonus for the dinner and then they buy you drinks.
And all these things are kind of added to their bill.
[Suzy] I think there was a blurring of lines,
because obviously, going outside of the hostess club
with a customer on your own, in your free time,
there's gonna be customers that are gonna assume
more of that situation.
I felt definitely under pressure to bring in more customers
or to have dohan dates,
but I never felt…
Personally, um, I never felt in danger at the clubs.
I think maybe some of the things that were dangerous,
maybe happened outside the clubs.
[Clare] I was working as a journalist in London
for a woman's magazine,
and the magazine was very interested in the concept of hostessing.
So I went out to Japan
to look at the whole culture of hostessing and to try and find out more about it.
-[man laughing] -[indistinct chatter]
[Clare] I felt that money
was a big factor and power play between the men and the women.
That the men had all the money and… and the women didn't,
and so therefore, the men were dominant.
So you could see sexual politics in play in the clubs as you watched.
[somber music]
[Yamashiro] Captain Teramae's investigation team had been involved
with the Lucie Blackman case from the very beginning.
They told our team that they had found a potential suspect.
The suspect was a Japanese man who frequented hostess clubs
in the Roppongi district, like Casablanca.
We had been ordered to find the suspect
then to bring them into custody,
and see if they were involved with the case.
We had to proceed with caution.
Because if the suspect figured out we were onto him,
he might kill Lucie to cover his tracks.
We approached his car before he went to work,
and asked if he would come in voluntarily for questioning.
He agreed to come with us willingly,
so we brought him to the nearest police station,
so we could sit him down and ask him our questions.
[ominous music]
[Soejima] The suspect had an alibi, which we were able to corroborate.
Once his alibi checked out, it was clear to us
that this suspect could not have been the person who kidnapped Lucie.
Which unfortunately meant we have to go back to the drawing board.
[suspenseful music]
[Dave] Having spent a week with Tim Blackman,
it's clear he's a loving and dedicated father
who believes his daughter is alive somewhere in this city,
but he needs to find her sooner rather than later.
Dave Russell in Tokyo for Meridian Tonight.
It became very clear that Tim had a plan.
If you stop pushing the story out,
they'll find… The media will find something else to look at,
and then suddenly, the focus is off Lucie.
So he had to bring the focus back onto Lucie as soon as possible.
[Dave] Out on the streets, putting posters up,
he wanted to get those posters on the TV, and everyone would know her face.
Tim and the police in Japan had a clash of cultures.
[inaudible chatter]
-You can't put signs up on poles here. -[woman] Ah.
Well, I'm not taking any down.
Arrest me.
[indistinct chatter]
[Tim] Lucie needed to be found,
and any parent would be trying to make the absolute best thing happen
to try and sort the problem out.
I wasn't going to be, um, shrugged off or… or boxed up.
[tense music]
[Jake] Tim had been completely cut out of the loop.
The way he was doing things, which made the cops look incompetent,
made them very angry.
I think in his anxiety
and his distrust of the Japanese police who are very poor communicators,
um, he felt that, uh, the more heat he could turn on them,
the better the results would be.
[foreboding music]
[Tim] I'd realized it was going to be the G7,
and I knew Tony Blair would be traveling out there,
and I knew that there was a huge media interest in the UK.
So we took advantage of that situation.
[reporter 11] Prime Minister Blair stopped off in Tokyo
to put his weight behind the case
of the missing British hostess Lucie Blackman.
Working closely with Japanese authorities here,
obviously we appeal to people in Japan
who may know about the case to come forward
and give us some leads that we can follow up,
because it is a tragic case
and obviously, the family, they're at their wit's end.
-[indistinct chatter] -[camera shutters clicking]
[Soejima] The Japanese Prime Minister made a guarantee.
"The Japanese police will apprehend the suspect."
It was easy for him to say that,
but that didn't mean that it was easy for us to do.
And the pressure of his statements and the situation began to weigh on us.
[Yamashiro] There were definitely some people in the department
that felt that the original investigation was moving too slowly.
So, some of my cops took matters into their own hands.
I call them "softshell turtle detectives."
Detectives who don't let go of a lead.
We thought it would be better to start the investigation over from the beginning
instead of wasting time chasing down red herrings.
[Yamashiro] Kuku was one of those cops, a tenacious and persistent police officer.
Once he bites, he never lets go, like a softshell turtle.
[Kuku] We started our process by spending our nights going through
and pulling relevant information out of the reports that the main unit
had filed since day one of the investigation.
We poured over every last detail to see if anything was missed.
While I was checking the reports
to understand how the investigation had been conducted,
I came across a report that caught my eye.
It was from the Roppongi area, which had lots of clubs.
The report was about a foreign hostess
who had been working at a club in Roppongi.
She was invited by a male regular to go on a drive to the seaside.
At some point, she passed out.
She was unconscious for hours.
When she woke up, her head hurt badly
and she felt like she might have been drugged.
The report was skeptical.
It said the source, a club manager, was an unreliable guy.
And that what he said should not be taken seriously.
But after reading the report, we thought that was ridiculous.
A person in that position could potentially know something important.
This definitely seemed to tie into the Lucie Blackman case.
So, they start going through these old reports
and digging up these cases to see if they can connect the dots.
Except that the police at the local level never took those reports seriously.
So although there might have been a complaint,
there was never an investigation.
[ominous music]
[Maruyama] We would find club owners saying,
"Oh, I remember a girl
who worked here three years ago and had the same type of experience."
Stories like these would pop up here and there.
[Maruyama] So we decided to talk to every single employee from every club
to see if a similar event had happened to them.
In the beginning, they would say things like,
"I don't know anything. I have nothing to do with it."
[Suzy] Every three months, the police would come
and all the hostesses who didn't have visas
would have to go out the back door,
that felt like a very vulnerable situation for those girls.
[Jake] Foreign hostesses, if they suffered,
they were at huge risk if they went to the police,
because it was very likely that the police would arrest them
for violating their visa.
There is no upside to go into the police if you've been victimized as a hostess.
[Maruyama] We couldn't talk to them at work,
so we'd stop them on the streets when they happen to be walking by.
That was the first thing I did.
But eventually, several women came forward,
because they wanted to help us find Lucie.
In the end, we discovered that
all of these women had experiences that were very similar.
[Jake] These were consistent reports of hostesses
um, who have been drugged and possibly raped
by a Japanese man of some wealth.
[tense music]
When investigating, you often find that criminals have certain patterns
of repeated behavior.
The same way that thieves have their own methods
of breaking and entering.
They develop the series of noticeable habits.
[Soejima] And those habits don't change.
He preferred luxury cars.
Cars like a Porsche or Mercedes Benz.
Cars on the fancier side.
He always invited his victims to come see the ocean before go to dinner.
[ominous music]
[Soejima] And he used drugs.
The victims said they had symptoms of being drugged.
[Maruyama] The next morning, they would wake up
with a sense of discomfort all over their body.
Some of them reported throwing up.
Some indicated that they felt that kind of burning sensation.
I felt very sorry for them.
[tense music]
[Jake] So, with scores of other testimonies
from Japanese hostesses and foreign hostesses,
they discovered that there has been a sexual predator active
in Roppongi for years, and he has never been caught.
He has never been brought to justice.
[camera shutter clicks]
And the family, uh, has decided to offer a reward of, um,
one and a half million yen for new information
which leads to finding Lucie.
[Tim] From our point of view,
it was yet another moment to bring the case up on the screen again.
People thought that I was doing it because I love being interviewed.
I just wanted the attention to continue to find Lucie,
and the only way of doing it was to, to… to feed the animal.
[Mitsuzane] Tim was always surrounded by members of the press.
We were concerned he might accidentally disclose information.
That could hurt our investigation.
We're finding after seven to eight weeks
that this is becoming a very stressful situation.
[Tim] The fact is that I still am not given, um,
information by the police as to their progress
as they still consider this case to be extremely sensitive.
[Mitsuzane] And I would always say
the investigation is progressing steadily.
I can't tell you any of the details just yet.
[speaking Japanese]
[Tim] The Japanese thought I was a bit rude,
which is probably how it came over because I wasn't,
I didn't have the time or the mental capacity
to really indulge in their protocols.
I was in a pretty ragged mental state.
[Dave] It was a bank holiday weekend,
and there was a big firework display going on,
and we just stood there and watched the fireworks and, you know,
everyone's celebrating around and really enjoying themselves,
but obviously, Tim wasn't.
[fireworks crackling]
I originally started as a journalist, you know, just a man following him around.
Putting a camera in his nose and him telling me to go away.
As time went on, Tim started beginning to trust me,
because we're both in a foreign country,
um, trying to work out what we can do to find Lucie.
[Dave] I was getting phone calls at 4:00 in the morning.
[Dave chuckles]
"Do you fancy going for a walk, because I can't sleep?"
But he was tired, clearly.
[Dave] It takes its toll. It really did take its toll on him.
And I'm starting to feel rather worn down and tired.
As the days went into weeks, and, you know, carried on and carried on,
and a feeling of hopelessness comes on…
You're really on the edge of wondering, "Well, what can we do now?"
[indistinct chatter]
[Tim] Thank you. Okay.
[indistinct chatter continues]
[Tim] And I am the father of Lucie Blackman,
the young British girl who has gone missing in Japan.
[Tim] The idea had come up to start a specific telephone number
so that the European or Western girls who were out there
were able to talk to us direct.
The chances of them having some information were quite high.
The Tokyo Police sort of didn't really quite understand.
A, why? Or B, what we expected to get from it?
They were very anti the idea that we were going to be getting
any information by putting up a hotline, but they couldn't stop us doing it.
[background chatter]
[reporter 12] The message from her mother and brother was simple.
"Happy birthday, Lucie."
As a thousand balloons were released into the sky
to mark the missing former air hostess's 22nd birthday.
[Jane] It's just so that Lucie remembers
that we haven't forgotten her birthday because she'll be 22 today,
and she's always loved her birthday, always had to make a big fuss.
And I just want her to know that, you know,
wherever she is, that we haven't forgotten.
[applause]
[enigmatic music]
At this point, we had found multiple reports
of a man who would take hostesses out for a drive, drug them,
and attempt to sexually assault them.
One of the victims was a girl named Jessie from Australia.
Her case happened three years earlier.
She had written the man's name and cell phone number
in her old notebook.
I asked her where it was,
and she said it was in her home in Australia.
[investigator] The notebook just arrived, sir.
[Soejima] We reached out to her father
and asked if he would send the notebook to Japan
so we could examine it ourselves.
[paper rustling]
She had gotten so mad that she scribbled all over the number.
But when we held it up to the light we could identify the digits.
[thrilling music]
[Asano] The man's name was Yuji Honda,
and his cell phone number, ending in 3301,
had been written down in the notebook.
So we started checking all the calls that had been made from this phone.
[Soejima] The phone number was still in use.
We were able to access the phone records
and find that there were about ten numbers that this person had called.
We then searched these numbers against our files
to see if there were any matches.
Lucie Blackman's number came up as an exact match.
[Jake] That's a very solid lead. It's a huge step forward.
This is the first time they ever showed that
the person they suspect, um, has kidnapped Lucie Blackman
is actually connected to her, that they have had some contact.
[Kuku] The suspect was clever.
He created many false identities
so that they could never be traced back to him.
We asked the cell phone company to do a location search to help locate
where the calls were coming from.
At exactly three o'clock, the call was picked up
by an antenna near Tokyo Tower.
Somewhere between one minute and five minutes later,
the signal was picked up by an antenna in a completely different position.
Another five minutes later, an antenna in the west picked up a call.
Another five minutes later, an antenna in the east picked up a call.
There's not a car in the world that can travel that fast
in just one minute.
I was baffled.
Then I thought, if the calls are being picked up
by four antennas in four different directions,
there was a possibility that the caller's signal
was in intersectional area.
[Jake] You know, we're talking the year 2000.
It's not like the movies
where you can locate exactly where the phone call came from.
You can kind of connect it to a general area.
So, they're able to trace the call to a very high-end area known as Akasaka.
It looks like the phone call came from a place called Moto-Akasaka Towers,
which is a very expensive residential building
with security cameras and all those things.
You can't just walk in there. It's hard to access.
[Kuku] We showed the manager our badges, and they let us in.
He told us that two rooms on the sixth floor
were being rented by a man who worked for a company called P-Orihara.
The manager said the renter was an unusual guy.
He would walk right past the manager,
he never stopped to say hello,
and he would always look down so he could hide his face.
The manager said that person drives a lot of luxury foreign cars,
then took us to the parking lot.
Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce.
All the cars mentioned in the testimonies were there.
I didn't know if P-Orihara was a foreigner's name
or the name of a company.
But there was no information on that particular room.
The name of the owner or employer wasn't listed.
And they're thinking, "This is our suspect."
But they don't have enough evidence for a warrant.
They're just going on assumptions, and so the investigation stops there.
They can't go any further.
[tense music]
[Yamashiro] There were a number of foreign hostesses in Roppongi
whom we were able to speak with.
And fortunately, there were a few of the women
who were willing to go on the record.
One of them was Monica from England.
She said, "I think the man's name was Koji."
[suspenseful music]
[Asano] It was the 10th of October in 1997.
She told us that she met up with a customer name Koji
in Roppongi that day.
She said that he drove her to a resort apartment building
that had a view of the ocean.
She told us how she remembered seeing a long row of palm trees
near the apartment building,
and we immediately thought of Zushi Marina,
because it was the only place we knew of in the area that had palm trees.
I thought Monica might remember more details
if we were there in person, so we went together to Zushi Marina.
[tense music]
[Jake] Zushi Marina is about an hour half away from Tokyo,
where it's just a luxury resort condominium,
and it's in a very expensive area for the… for the rich and the wealthy.
[Asano] Monica said, "This is it.
This is the resort where that customer took me."
She was quite certain of it.
We drove around the entire property,
but she wasn't able to confirm which building it was.
All she knew was that it might be number four or number seven.
I remember we went to a restaurant in the area,
and we showed the waitress a picture of Lucie,
and she told us instantly that she was sure
that the woman in the photo had been there on July 1st.
HEIGHT 175CM, MEDIUM BUILD, OVAL-FACED
[Asano] I asked her if she had come alone.
She said a man was there too.
[Hatashita] First, I went in and talk to the assistant manager.
I wanted to get a list of the residents staying at Zushi Marina.
I had to rule them out one by one.
I knew it would be tricky work and quite time-consuming.
But if this person was still alive, we needed to rescue him or her
as soon as possible.
As I went through them one name at a time, we couldn't find the possible suspect.
One person was suspicious and I had a gut feeling about them.
So I had an idea,
to search for a man who had a lot of luxury foreign cars.
Obara emerged as a potential suspect.
When I heard that, I thought, "Wait a minute, could that be…"
[Kuku] When we visited Moto-Akasaka Towers,
the name on the rental listing was P-Orihara.
[Kuku] The Kanji character's "Obara"…
ORI HARA
…can also be read as "Orihara."
I got goosebumps all over my body.
So this is a huge moment for the investigation,
because this is the first time that they're able to connect the dots.
A310 JOJI OBARA
[Jake] The police finally have a name.
We learned something new about Joji Obara.
He had been previously arrested in Wakayama
after he had been caught dressing up as a woman,
so he could sneak inside a woman's restroom
and film people who used it.
[Soejima] I talked to some of the officers who worked on the case during that time,
and I asked them what he was like.
They said completely resistant.
Upon his arrest, he refused to take a mugshot.
He would turn his face, and he wouldn't let them take his picture.
Completely uncooperative.
I asked for the mugshot to be faxed to me.
[whirring]
[Hatashita] The fax machines back then had low quality,
and the photo came out quite dark.
So we put together about 100 photos, including one of the suspects,
and showed them to the victims.
[Asano] Monica and Jessie were both able to immediately single out Obara's picture
without hesitation whatsoever.
After all this time
working with pseudonyms and aliases, we finally had a real name.
[suspenseful music]
[Jake] So now they have a face to the suspect,
and they realize that if he is holding Lucie Blackman hostage,
they don't have time and they really need to hurry.
[siren blaring]
We didn't have anything yet that directly tied him to Lucie,
but we still felt we could arrest him based on his other victims,
based on the other victims.
[Naito] At six o'clock in the morning, we were already in position.
[tense music]
Investigators are always nervous when they make an arrest,
no matter the case.
I'm sure that I was very nervous as well.
[Naito] We positioned two people by the emergency exit
and two people next to the window,
and one person by the door to keep a lookout.
There were about seven people in total.
I was informed over the radio that the suspect was awake
because the TV was turned on.
So I continued to monitor the situation.
He always went out to buy a newspaper at about seven o'clock,
so I thought there was no need to storm in.
From what we knew, Obara didn't look like a bad-tempered person.
Which is why I figured he wouldn't be violent.
However, I was a bit worried about him jumping out of the window.
That was my biggest concern.
Just before seven o'clock, the door opened.
When I asked, "Are you Obara?", his face suddenly dropped.
He said, "Yes, I am."
I think he knew his arrest was imminent.
[reporter 13] Jo Obara, the president of a property management firm
was arrested early this morning.
Police say Obara was often seen in the area
where 22-year-old Lucie from Kent had been working.
[Tim] We heard there was a suspect,
and then not terribly long after, we heard that somebody had been arrested.
It was big news.
This was the man who maybe knew where Lucie was.
[ominous music]
Joji Obara was a playboy who'd inherited a large amount of money.
He was a very wealthy man, from his father,
but was known by all reports of neighbors that he was a loner.
[Clare] He owned a number of properties,
and the police began to search all the properties that he owned.
-Please stand back. -[camera shutter clicks]
[Asano] I was in charge of the crime scene at Zushi Marina building number four.
When we went inside, what we found was
a lot of drug related items as well as a large quantity of alcohol.
What I remember vividly as an inspector was the metal fitting on the ceiling.
I remember thinking to myself
what the purpose of that metal fitting was.
[foreboding music]
[Soejima] I was in charge of the search and seizure at Moto-Akasaka Towers.
The most memorable item was his notebook.
I don't know when he wrote it, but there was one entry,
he wrote that he was going to become evil,
that he devote himself to evil.
He very quickly took his own writing to heart,
and he turned himself into a sort of monster.
[Jake] So after Joji Obara was arrested,
the police raided several of his properties in Tokyo,
because he was a kind of a real estate magnate,
including the seaside condominium at the Zushi Marina,
where he lured many of his victims.
[Hatashita] We confiscated a lot of videotapes,
and I'm not talking about just two or three.
-[man shouting indistinctly] -[truck beeping]
[people murmuring]
[Hatashita] The videotapes were labeled with names, not full names though.
What Obara did to these women, it was recorded on videotapes.
But I don't think it's something that I should be talking about
in detail here.
[Clare] The police found
over 400 VHS tapes of women,
apparently comatose,
lying on beds, and him assaulting them.
[static]
It's the stuff of horror films. [inhales deeply]
That's how we learned the purpose of the metal fittings on the ceiling.
They were used to lift the victim's legs off the ground.
He doesn't consider them to be people,
but rather dolls.
I never dreamed…
there could be anyone that would do something like that.
I've never seen anything so despicable.
[Jake] There were so many,
and the detectives had to go through them one by one by one.
But among those tapes, there was not a single one
of Lucie Blackman.
[ominous music]
[Yamashiro] Our immediate goal was to find Lucie.
So the pressure was high.
But with all the evidence we had, I thought we could make him confess.
Just from talking to him, I quickly realized that I was dealing
with a person who had an extremely warped view of reality.
When it came to the case, Obara denied everything.
Even when I showed him evidence,
he insisted that everything that happened was consensual.
He said that they all were paid for their services.
He stuck to that excuse, continuously.
[suspenseful music]
[Jake] Obara denies any knowledge of Lucie.
He denies ever meeting her, he denies having any contact with her all.
The focus of the investigation now
has to be based on the evidence that they have.
Obara is claiming that all the sex on these videotapes is consensual.
So now, they need to identify some of the victims who will come forward
and verify the fact that this was not consensual,
that they were victims
so that they can build a criminal case against him.
[tense music]
[Yamaguchi] When I saw the videos, I thought this man's crimes
are completely comparable to a murder case.
To a woman, sex crimes can be as horrifying as murder.
I remember that we set up a video analysis unit in a large room.
It was a big room, big enough for dozens of people.
[Yamaguchi] We didn't have enough staff,
so we had to take some younger officers from the riot police,
and temporarily reassign them to help.
The victims in the videos would change, but the footage showed
the same horrible crimes over and over again.
A few of those officers couldn't handle the trauma of seeing the videos.
Several had to recuse themselves
because they were having mental breakdowns.
[eerie music]
[Yamaguchi] I ended up going to some of the victims' homes
and interviewed them.
They were sure they went there, they woke up
and didn't know what was done to them.
I had to tell them we have the video evidence.
It was very hard for me to show them.
They all reacted to it in different ways.
Some would cover their eyes, or they would deny it was them.
One victim actually got a nosebleed during the interview.
She must have been so affected by it.
[Maruyama] I told them that we had to make sure
that this criminal pay the price for what he had done
and that they were the key.
I couldn't let Obara…
get away with it, that's why.
And I explained this very carefully to the victims.
That was the only way.
[foreboding music]
So the police need to show that the sex was not consensual.
Obviously, if someone is drugged, they cannot consent to sexual intercourse,
um, which in Japan is called "Quasi-Rape."
[Jake] And they're pretty convinced
that he's used chloroform on one of his victims.
So, they have a forensic investigator look at all those videotapes.
[thrilling music]
[Harafuji] He would take a towel and pick up a brown bottle
from a side table,
and then pour liquid from this bottle onto the towel.
Then he'd place the liquid-soaked towel back onto the victim's face.
[Harafuji] Towels were always draped over the victims' faces.
Among the seized items, there were sleep-inducing drugs.
There was ether, chloroform,
and a large number of other illegal drugs that have a sleep-inducing effect.
As I was looking at various footage of the victims,
I noticed one woman in particular.
Suddenly, her hands started trembling,
shaking in small movements.
I was very curious as to why her hands were moving like this
even though she was unconscious.
Chloroform toxicity can lead to fulminant hepatitis,
which can lead to hepatic encephalopathy.
It has a very characteristic symptom known as flapping tremors.
As I researched the situation of this victim further,
I found out she was a 21-year-old victim named Carita,
and that she had indeed passed away.
[somber music]
[Clare] Carita Ridgway, who was the same age, 21, as Lucie,
disappeared eight years earlier in 1992.
I met Carita's old sister, Samantha.
Both of them had been traveling in Japan and Australia before.
They were both quite adventurous.
And then Sam herself went to teach English in Tokyo.
Her sister Carita flew out to join her, but she couldn't find a job.
So she decided to find work temporarily as a hostess.
One day, Carita was dropped off at a hospital
by a man who said that she'd got food poisoning.
[machine beeping]
[Clare] The doctors couldn't understand really what was happening to her.
Her body was going into organ failure.
After a week in the hospital,
they had to turn off the life support machine.
[flatlines]
[Clare] But the police didn't want to do anything at that stage
because they said, well, she died of food poisoning
and they didn't suspect that there'd been a crime.
There was no autopsy.
But fortunately, they did keep a sample of Carita's liver.
Following Obara's arrest, the police put two and two together,
and they did an examination of the liver sample,
and they found chloroform.
And… And then they could arrest Joji Obara for the abduction
and… and manslaughter of Carita Ridgway.
But the mystery remained as to what he'd done with Lucie,
and… and he was… he, he had evidently destroyed
whatever tape he had of whatever he did to Lucie.
So it was still hard to pin the abduction and attack on Lucie Blackman on him.
[reporter 14] Tim Blackman and his daughter, Sophie,
still uncertain what's happened to Lucie.
The 22-year-old vanished in Tokyo in July while working as a bar hostess.
In a statement, Joji Obara, a businessman, arrested a month ago,
has revealed more information,
but still denies any involvement in her disappearance.
It's now transpired that he's admitting that he met Lucie in the Casablanca club.
Now, we know that to have been probably about a week before she went missing.
He's got a history as long as your arm for abducting Western blonde girls,
and lo and behold, a week later, Lucie goes missing.
The hope that the arrest of Obara
was actually going to bring Lucie back to us was fairly short-lived
because it did start to look pretty grimy after that.
You're so beaten down that you can't distinguish between…
joy or relief or depression or anxiety or…
deep, deep upset.
It's all just in one massive of emotion.
[enigmatic music]
[Naito] Our number one focus was still finding Lucie.
We had to thoroughly explore every last piece of evidence.
They could save her life.
[foreboding music]
[Yamashiro] Obara had a habit of collecting things,
and he kept a lot of receipts in his apartment.
The evidence team catalogued and analyzed each individual receipt.
From that, they created a timeline of Obara's actions.
[Jake] He has a receipt for everything.
And they're able to reconstruct
from the receipts that he's had where he was moving through the day.
[Yamashiro] The analysis team assumed that on July 1st, around 3:00 p.m.,
Obara met Lucie and headed to Zushi.
On the way to Zushi,
Obara and Lucie stopped at a restaurant near the yacht harbor in Hayama.
This was confirmed by Assistant Inspector Asano at the time.
Then in the evening, around 5:00 p.m.,
they went to Obara's apartment at Zushi Marina.
It was at this point that Lucie's whereabouts became unknown.
Between the night of July 2nd and early morning of July 3rd,
Obara drove back to Tokyo.
On July 4th, Obara did a lot of shopping.
On July 5th, Obara visited an apartment at the Blue Sea Aburatsubo.
The Blue Sea Aburatsubo was one of the many properties that Obara owned.
The next day,
a resident complained to the manager about noise coming from Obara's apartment.
[Jake] And among the receipts, they find this very curious purchase
for a chainsaw, cement, and a portable tent.
And they're beginning to figure out
that probably these were used to cover up the crime.
[Yamashiro] This is pure speculation.
The conclusion of the analysis team was that Lucie lost her life
on the night of July 1st.
Within a few days,
her body was transported from Zushi Marina to Blue Sea Aburatsubo.
And she was most likely dismembered there.
[Yamashiro] After analyzing various pieces of evidence,
we had no choice but to make this conclusion.
For Lucie's case, we lacked evidence.
And much of what we did have was purely circumstantial.
[Kuku] We needed hard evidence to connect Obara to Lucie
because without finding Lucie's body and confirming her death,
we couldn't try him for her presumed murder.
[suspenseful music]
We thought that if we couldn't prove it was murder,
this case would never be resolved.
So we knew that we had to find the body.
This was the most important thing.
We started by looking to see if there were any spots
where a body might be hidden in the area.
We had no idea where she could be.
[Soejima] But we figured it couldn't be that far from the apartment in Aburatsubo.
Upper management told us they would give us
one final week to search.
After a week, they'd shut us down.
My stomach was in knots.
I told my men that this was our last chance.
I was dreading what would happen if we didn't find her.
We really needed to nail this guy with serious jail time.
I felt very strongly about it.
[Nozoe] We went to various spots on the hill where there were crop fields.
The path to the crop fields was terrible.
We searched there for a number of days
until we were completely filthy and stinking.
[birds cawing]
[Nozoe] We went to the coast at 8:15 in the morning.
There were two or three caves there.
I thought I'd just try relying on my hunch.
The area was littered with stuff that had washed ashore.
So we cleared away everything outside and inside of the cave.
After clearing it,
we saw a bathtub.
I flipped it over.
"These are carnivorous bugs," I said.
I cleared the area and kept digging around it.
At first, it looked like a big burlap sack.
And when I opened it, I saw it, there was a foot.
I was certain it was Lucie.
[Abe] I was standing in a rocky area near the cave
and my phone rang.
I heard Nozoe's voice say, "It's here. It's here."
His words were so garbled that I couldn't make out
what he was saying.
So I told him, "Wait there. I'm coming over to you right now."
A huge flock of kites had gathered above the scene.
Squawking loudly.
They caught the smell of death and started circling in the sky.
[somber music]
[Jake] Early in the morning of the day that they found the body,
I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna have to call Tim."
I'd update him because the Tokyo Police Department wasn't.
I just remember, uh, this…
this long, long pause when I told him and…
[sighs]
You know, that phone call really stays in my head.
I can remember precisely where I was. I was standing in a backstreet.
[Tim] It was a drizzly day, and…
it was Jake, he said, um, well, you know, they found her.
I was hopeful all the time,
um, right through to that moment, really, when…
and then I think 20 minutes later, the Japanese interpreter rang me,
and said they have the dental records back,
it's definitely Lucie.
Um, I just sort of stood in the street and yelled.
Um, then that was the first time that I actually decided
that Lucie could be dead.
[somber music]
[indistinct chatter]
[camera shutters clicking]
I love Lucie so much
for the wonderful and beautiful person she was.
[sniffles]
Both on the inside and on the outside.
She never said an unkind word about anyone
and always made people feel very special.
[sniffles]
She was loved by so many people.
How could anyone do something so horrific… [sniffles]
…so inhuman and so evil?
When Lucie's killer is convicted of this crime,
for me, justice demands, that he spends the rest of his natural life in prison,
contemplating the enormity of his crimes.
[Soejima] We finally have enough to indict him for Lucie's murder.
I think… for the sake of the victims, he should be given the maximum penalty.
I can't really make any judgments on how the trial will eventually unfold.
Though if it is him who killed Lucie,
I hope he never sees another day of sunlight or takes another breath.
[background chatter]
[gloomy music]
[Tim] We were sitting in the courtroom and Obara was over there,
and it just felt really surreal.
I didn't have it, anything left to get emotional about.
If I pinned my entire life's hope on him being found guilty,
then, you know, then I'm just setting myself up for another disaster.
[camera shutters clicking]
The verdict in the court today has shown that…
[clicks tongue]
…Lucie's life was not in vain.
Lucie brought justice to, uh, Carita Ridgway,
and the eight other rape victims
who bravely came forward to support the case.
But unfortunately, today we've not received justice for Lucie.
[camera shutters clicking]
[Maruyama] I was so disappointed.
Not guilty. I thought, "No way!"
The investigators at that time were more angry than surprised.
Obara had done such terrible things.
Yes?
Could you just confirm what you plan to do as the next step?
We've made our position extremely clear that we believe
that our family deserves to get proper justice for Lucie
and that they should give strong consideration to an appeal.
[camera shutters clicking]
The police had all these disparate threads,
but they hadn't put it into a strong enough case,
and what they subsequently did when the Blackman's appealed
was to make the case stronger, really.
[tense music]
[Tim] We put absolutely every ounce of blood, sweat, and tears
into it that we had.
We'd… done what we needed to do.
Today, truth, honor, and justice… justice have prevailed,
not only for Lucie, but for all victims of violent sexual crime.
He's got life sentence and, you know, I think… I think justice has been done.
[camera shutters clicking]
-[bell tolling] -[dog barking in distance]
[Mitsuzane] In 2010,
I actually had a chance to visit Lucie's grave.
I had a chance to pay my respect.
So, I flew over to England.
When I got there, I went to see Jane,
and she treated me to afternoon tea with homemade snacks.
She was very hospitable towards me,
and I was touched by her warm welcome.
[somber music]
[Mitsuzane] Lucie's tomb is in a churchyard.
On her gravestone was her full name, nickname,
and how her family wanted her remembered.
"A star lighting our sky," the tombstone said.
[somber music continues]
[Abe] The fact that Lucie came from a foreign country to work
and then became a victim of such a crime in our country
has left a certain emotions in my heart, which is still there.
[dramatic music]
Every year since, we go there…
to appease her spirit and to pray that she rests in peace.
We've been going there for the last 20 years,
and it's the only case we do it for.
[Tim] In some strange way…
[soft chuckle] …Lucie has given us an experience of life
however ghastly it's been and beastly it's been,
um, you know, it's something that a legacy which Lucie has left for me,
in my heart and in my soul.
And they… they…
Those feelings are very pure and untainted
by hatred and anger and all the rest of it,
because I've kept that out of Lucie's memory.
[somber music]
[waves crashing]
[soft music]