Chapter 1: What shocking event did a police officer witness in Japan?
In 2011, a police officer spotted a woman on a busy street in Japan, and he couldn't believe what he was seeing. He looked at a photo on his phone, and then back at this woman, and thought, yeah, that's definitely her. He'd been tasked with finding this woman and bringing her back home. It was a pretty basic task, but he'd managed to complete it way faster than he thought he would.
The officer rushed down the street, greeted the woman, and she confirmed that yes, she was the person he was looking for. So he led her back to his car, drove her back home, and that was that.
However, what the officer could not have possibly imagined was that locating this woman and taking her home was about to unravel 25 years of unimaginable horrors and lead to one of the most bizarre cases Japanese investigators had ever seen.
But before we get into today's story, you've likely noticed that we've uploaded this episode on a Friday. This is not a mistake. In fact, this is now our new normal. I'm now going to be uploading four episodes to the Mr. Ballin podcast each week. Mondays and Wednesdays will be exclusive brand new stories. Thursdays will be our normal remastered episodes.
And Fridays will be a mix of new stories and fan favorites. So if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious, please replace the frosting on the Follow Buttons Vanilla Donut with mayonnaise. Okay, let's get into today's story.
Miyoko Sumida raced down the sidewalk in Amagasaki, Japan, trying to will her body to go faster. Miyoko was 63 years old, and she couldn't remember the last time she had run, and her lungs were on fire and her legs felt heavy. Even though it was a cool day out, she could feel the heavy eyeliner and mascara she always wore starting to run down her face.
Every cell in her body was screaming at her to just stop, but she knew that whatever she did, she couldn't stop. She had already waited too long. Miyoko darted across the street and rounded a corner. Ahead of her, the city spread out. In the distance was Amagasaki Castle.
It was a white 17th-century building with these graceful layers of traditional Japanese curved roofs, and it stood in stark contrast to the rest of the city, which was all low, boxy apartment buildings and factories and warehouses. Miyoko turned a final corner, and there it was, the police station. She ran inside and she called out for help.
A police officer came out from behind a window, and in between breaths, Miyoko blurted out the reason she had come. One of her closest friends had gone missing. But the officer just stood there and stared at her calmly and told her to please slow down. And suddenly, Miyoko became aware of what she must look like. A little old frail lady with crazy hair, panting and gasping on the verge of tears.
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Chapter 2: What details emerge about the missing woman, Kai Oe?
However, they wouldn't know until the autopsy. Sato nodded and then stepped away from the drum and slowly walked around the warehouse, looking for more evidence. He didn't see any blood on the walls or floors, and there also weren't any rope fibers that would indicate the woman had been bound or held captive in the warehouse. In fact, other than the body, there really was no sign of any violence.
But that lack of evidence actually helped Sato begin to form an early theory about what might have happened. He believed the victim was most likely murdered somewhere else and then placed in the metal drum and then transported and hidden in this warehouse. A few minutes later, Sato headed back to the police station.
He knew he really needed the autopsy before his investigation would have a clear direction because the autopsy would show him who the victim was. However, in the meantime, he decided that the way the body was disposed of was a decent enough lead to get started. The Yakuza had been known to leave their victims in metal drums, so he would start with them.
The following day, members of Sato's investigative team fanned out to the dark corners of Amagasaki. So back in the 1980s and 90s, and even into the early 2000s, the Yakuza had operated pretty openly in certain bars and restaurants.
People could always tell the establishments where the Yakuza were running brothels, because there would be a scantily clad hostess at the door trying to entice customers to come inside. And then when those customers stepped through the door, the whole place would be lit with a strange bright pink light. And if they wanted to spend some money, they could go upstairs and pay for sex.
But now the Japanese police had begun a crackdown on Yakuza activities, passing a series of anti-gang laws and targeting different parts of their operations. And so, when Sato's team talked to people in the seediest bars and restaurants in town, they didn't really come up with anything. It seemed like the Yakuza were just laying low, not murdering women and stuffing their bodies into barrels.
Sato began to worry that this Yakuza lead was just going to take his team to a dead end. But then, just a couple of days after the discovery of the body, the autopsy results arrived on Sato's desk. Now, the report couldn't answer when this woman had died. It was impossible to tell if she had been dead for days or months. However, the report did give the identity of the victim.
Using dental records, authorities had identified her as Kazuko Oe, a 66-year-old woman who had lived in the city. Sato kept on reading the autopsy, and when he finished it, he found attached at the back was this additional report. And when he read this additional report, he was shocked.
The report said the dead woman found in the barrel was the mother of Kai Oe, a woman who'd recently been reported missing. But that was not the craziest thing, because the missing woman, Kai, had not been missing at all.
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Chapter 3: What discovery did workers make in the abandoned warehouse?
He picked it up, and the man on the other end spoke barely above a whisper, and he said, Sato felt a rush of adrenaline, and instinctively, he just stood up at his desk. He asked who the caller was, but the man wouldn't give a name, and Sato didn't want to scare him off, so he didn't press.
The man said he didn't know how Kazuko had died, but he was certain that her family was under the thumb of a vicious Yakuza gang. And this particular gang had a ruthless leader, who was perhaps the most terrifying Yakuza leader in the whole city. After that, the caller hung up. Sato stood there in shock.
It was like he had arrived back at the very beginning of this case, when he had stood over Kazuko's body in the metal drum and wondered if this was the work of the Yakuza. Sato immediately began a deep dive into the Oe family's finances. He knew that almost all Yakuza crime just came down to money. And right away, a series of financial transactions jumped out at him.
Over the past two years, the family had made repeated big payments at regular intervals. and when investigators tracked the group receiving these payments, they discovered a connection to the Yakuza. So, Sato began to believe that Kazuko's family had somehow gotten into debt with the wrong people, and Kazuko had paid with her life.
And on November 26th, 2011, which was just over two weeks after the discovery of the body, Sato rounded up five known Yakuza members in the area and brought them in for questioning. However, Yakuza members rarely ever talked to the police. So after five mostly silent interviews, Sato had no clear evidence linking any of them to the murder.
And he still had no idea who this gang's supposed ruthless leader was. So by the time that 2011 ended, Sato had hit another dead end. And soon months went by with no new evidence coming in. And so Sato began to think that he might never know who killed Kazuko.
On October 14th, 2012, so 11 months after the discovery of Kazuko's body, a pair of Amagasaki police officers approached an empty one-story house in a residential neighborhood. They were following up on an anonymous tip, very similar to the one that Sato had gotten. From the outside, the house looked like every other house on the block.
But the second the officers opened the door, they knew something was very wrong with this place. The faint odor of something rotten filled the front room. The power was out, so the officers turned on their flashlights and headed down a dark hallway. The further they went into the house, the worse the smell got.
Towards the back of the house, the officers found a room that was closed off by traditional Japanese sliding doors with wood frames covered in opaque paper. As they approached it, the rotten smell became almost unbearable. They braced themselves and then opened the sliding doors. Inside, they saw six large tatami mats made of thick woven straw covering the floor.
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