The Setagaya Family Murders

Welcome back passengers! Tonight we dive deep… too deep.. Into our bread and butter… we are diving back into unsolved murders. Hold on to your skivvies and make sure you have a drink and a magnifying glass because we are gonna talk about the Setagaya Murders. Bum bum buuuuuuummmmmmmmmm!!!!!!

 

Typically, New Year's Eve is a happy occasion. It indicates that things are changing and making room for something new. It's a time to rejoice in a brand-new beginning, typically with your family and close friends.

 

This day, known in Japan as Omisoka, is regarded as one of the most significant ones of the year. There are traditions and conventions connected, which are often observed. In Japan, New Year's is regarded as the most prestigious celebration, unlike in America where it is frequently associated with revelry and midnight kisses.

 

The holiday season, however, was permanently tarnished by a tragic occurrence that happened around the turn of the century. For almost 20 years, what happened on this night in the Tokyo neighborhood of Setagaya has baffled detectives to no end.

 

In contrast to other cultures, Japan celebrates a century's conclusion. Japan rang in the new millennium a full year after we did in America with the opening of 2001, while most of us did so with the notorious Y2K fear.

 

By most accounts, the Miyazawa family was a normal Japanese household.

 

The father, Mikio Miyazawa, age 44, was employed by the London-based marketing company Interbrand. It is unknown what type of work Mikio performed for the company, but it was a sizable one with locations in more than twenty nations and experience working on significant marketing campaigns for organizations like Microsoft, Nissan, Xerox, and many more. In fact, Interbrand was the organization in charge of branding the phrase "Wi-fi" the year prior, in 1999.

 

Interbrand coworkers characterized Mikio as "congenial." They said he was "the kind of man that got along with everyone - definitely not the kind to create enemies."

 

The family's mother and wife, Yasuko Miyazawa, was forty-one years old and similar to her husband. She was a teacher who spent a lot of time with the couple's two children, Rei, 6, and Niina, 8, and was universally regarded as sensitive and gentle.

 

The daughter, Niina, was in second grade and appeared to be your average young lady: she was lively, she was fun, and she loved ballet and soccer, two activities in which she was actively involved.

 

Rei, the family's youngest member, had recently been experiencing a problem: His speech handicap had been causing the family quite a bit of worry. It appears that they had begun to look for expert assistance, but it was still quite concerning to them.

I 

In 1990, Mikio and Yasuki Miyazawa moved into their house in Setagaya. It was a growing neighborhood with over 200 households at the time, and it seemed like a pleasant enough place to raise a family.

 

The second biggest of Tokyo's twenty-three districts, Setagaya is situated immediately southwest of the central city. Setagaya is a fairly residential-looking neighborhood that sticks out from its hectic, crowded surroundings and is within a short distance from Tokyo Bay.

 

Even by itself, the Miyazawa family house was intriguing.

 

The house was a two-story, communal structure. On the exterior, it appeared to be a single house, but in reality, it was more like a duplex. It made it possible for the Miyazawas to be neighbors with Yasuko's family, mostly her mother but also her sister and brother-in-law who were also living with her at the time.

 

Seven family members may now reside in this joint home, even though there was no interior link between the two homes. You must exit the building and enter through a different entrance to get from one side to the other.

 

The park directly back the house, however, was the feature that had the greatest impact. Although the park had been present for some time, the city had planned to enlarge it. This indicated that the majority of the Miyazawa's neighbors had been vacating their properties recently to make room for this growth.

 

The neighborhood, which had formerly been home to more than 200 people, had now been reduced to just four: the Miyazawas, their cousins who lived next door, two other families who resided on their block. Aside from that, the neighborhood was a ghost town.

 

The skate park directly behind the Miyazawa family house was where the majority of local activity was taking place. The Miyazawa family had some difficulties because this was the busiest area of the rapidly developing park. See, the only thing separating the skate park and the home was a fence.

 

Mikio had addressed some rowdy and annoying teens at the skate park the week before New Year's Eve for making too much of a ruckus. A witness claimed to have seen him encounter a group of teenage rebels who belonged to the Bosozoku, a form of Japanese motorcycle gang, at about the same time.

 

The Miyazawas were among the last households to begin making arrangements to move because of the park's growing foot traffic and the city's intentions to expand it further. In only a few months, they would be relocating to another house in the neighborhood, and it was December 2000. Therefore, all they had to do to stop worrying about it was rough out the skate park hooligans for a few months.

 

Sadly, they would never have the opportunity.

 

In addition to Mikio's run-ins with hooligans throughout the week leading up to New Year's Eve, the Miyazawa family will also encounter some other peculiar events.

 

The locals had reportedly begun to see some of the area's animals being physically abused over the summer. There are claims that neighborhood cats, most of which are stray, had been tortured and that rats had been discovered dead. One witness remembered witnessing a nice stray suddenly emerge one day without a tail. 

 

Yasuko informed her father-in-law that a strange automobile had parked in front of their home on Christmas Day, December 25. Despite the fact that there was alternate parking nearby that wouldn't need the person parked to hop over a fence to enter the park, this has occurred more than once.

 

An eyewitness saw a guy who was thought to be in his forties going near the Miyazawa family home two days later, on the 27th. A apparently benign item that, in hindsight, appears suspicious. The neighboring park assures that people will be in the neighborhood for a number of reasons.

 

A guy was sighted in the adjacent Seijogakuenmae Station on December 29, just a few days before the start of the new century, not far from where the Miyazawa family was residing. Due to the weather, one eyewitness remembered this man's "skater"-style clothing as being peculiar and believed the man, who was also sporting a rucksack, appeared to be significantly underdressed.

 

Police suspect a guy fitting this general description bought a sashimi knife from the same retail center on this day, the 29th. It was quite simple to track down because it was the only one bought at this grocery on this particular day.

 

A man matching that description was sighted on December 30 about a mile from the Miyazawas' home, in the vicinity of Sengawa Station. This unsub, who was described as being between 35 and 40 years old, was moving steadily toward the Setagaya residence of the Miyazawa family.

 

Unbeknownst to them, the Miyazawa family's final day would be on Saturday, December 30.

 

They carried on with their usual activities while getting ready for the next holiday. Due to the approaching New Year and the fresh start of a new century, there was a celebratory mood in the air.

 

The family reportedly went shopping around about 6:00 PM in the early evening. Although we can't be certain if all four of the family members attended, a bystander remembered seeing them in a local mall around that time. This tale has credibility because a neighbor who was driving by their house that evening remembered seeing the family automobile disappearing at about 6:30 PM.

 

Yasuko contacted her mother who lived next door at approximately 7:00 that evening. The families spoke to one another over the phone frequently since they considered one another to be neighbors. The topic of the discussion was probably something unimportant, most likely Yasuko asking her mother if she wanted to see her granddaughter.

 

Niina walking next door to watch a taped TV show till 9:30 PM or so confirms this. Everything for the Miyazawa family had been quite routine up until this point in the night.

 

An accessible email that was viewed at roughly 10:38 that evening is the final activity we have of the Miyazawa family. It was Mikio reading a business email that was password-protected, indicating that he was most likely the one who opened it.

 

At least one member of the Miyazawa family was last known to be alive at this time. And their residence, which was often peaceful and calm, was about to turn into a house of horrors.

 

A witness heard what sounded like an altercation inside the Miyazawa house that evening at approximately ten o'clock while walking along the park trail behind the home. They couldn't recall any especially ear-shattering shouts or loud physical noises, but they claimed it just sounded like a couple arguing.

 

A neighbor of Yasuko's family would notice a loud pounding sound coming from the Miyazawa side of the building around an hour and a half later. They didn't know the precise time, but they were able to estimate it later using the current television programming schedule.

 

This happened at the same time that a witness or maybe a neighbor reported seeing a guy rushing along the sidewalk near to the family's home.

 

These were the only three indications that something wasn't right in Setagaya that evening. It would take hours before anybody realized how terrifying the Miyazawa house had become.

 

Three passengers were being picked up by a taxi driver not far from the Miyazawa residence. All three of these passengers, who will stay unnamed for this story due to the cab driver's oversight, were middle-aged males who kept to themselves the entire time.

 

It was far after midnight when the three guys were being dropped off at a neighboring station, something the taxi driver remembered as being quite unusual for the time.

 

A bloodstain from one of the individuals who appeared to have a wound was seen on the backseat of the taxi.

 

Yasuko's mother attempted to contact her daughter's family the next morning on New Year's Eve to arrange preparations for later that day. Unexpectedly, her call wouldn't even connect, much less ring.

 

She was unaware that someone had cut and purposely unplugged the phone lines in the Miyazawa family home hours earlier.

 

She went outside and made her way to the house where her daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren lived. When the doorbell went unanswered, she used her set of keys to allow herself in, according to the police report she would later submit.

 

There was no sound to be heard within the home itself. The moment Yasuko's mother walked inside the house, she would have realized something was wrong. As she entered the family's home, she quickly realized the reality as she came face to face with Mikio Miyazawa's body at the foot of the stairs.

 

The family's father, who was 44 years old, was found dead at the bottom of the stairway leading to the second storey after having been stabbed several times.

 

Yasuko's mother remembers trying to find out what had happened to the rest of her family by walking upstairs to the second storey. The remains of her granddaughter Niina and daughter Yasuko, who had both been viciously stabbed hundreds of times, would be waiting for her at the top of the stairs. Their suffering far surpassed that of Mikio's body.

 

Yasuko's mother recalls placing her hands on the corpses of her daughter and granddaughter in an effort to check for signs of life, either out of grief or even hope.

 

Her granddaughter Niina, with whom she had just finished watching a television show, and Yasuko, her daughter, with whom she had reared and been close for more than forty years. They were both now dead and icy, loved ones turned into corpses by an unidentified murderer.

 

The last catastrophe would be revealed to Yasuko's mother in an adjacent bedroom: six-year-old Rei, who had been struggling with a speech impediment in an effort to satisfy his parents, was still in bed. He had been strangled to death, which led detectives to believe that he was the family's first victim.

 

It goes without saying that Yasuko's mother—this devastated grandmother—would call the police. However, what she had witnessed was irreversible, and nothing could replace the family she had just lost.

 

When the event occurred, Tokyo Police were as appalled by the crime scene as Yasuko's mother had been. They were aware that this case would shock everyone in the neighborhood: witnessing a whole family being murdered by an unidentified intruder in the middle of the night is arguably the most terrifying scenario one could conceive.

 

Police started investigating the incident and piecing it together at the spot. Yasuko's mother, sister, and brother-in-law, who were all there when the crime took place next door, remembered anything peculiar or unusual that may have transpired that evening.

 

The only thing that sprang to mind for them was the loud thud that had happened at about 11:30 that evening; the timing was supported by a TV schedule that showed the thud happened during the broadcast of a certain program. When Mikio, the father, approached the alleged murderer, the police instantly assumed that the thud may have happened then. They assumed that he had fought with the person who had attacked Yasuko's family based on the injuries on his body, and that the loud thud Yasuko's family had heard could have been him being thrown to the bottom of the steps.

 

Mikio had been stabbed several times, with the majority of the wounds being to his neck. They would deduce that the sashimi knife that had been abandoned in the family's kitchen was what had caused the stab wounds. But the knife had somehow broken when Mikio was being attacked.

 

Investigators instantly hypothesized that the broken knife had been merely one of two murder weapons based on the evidence they had at the site. The killer also used a knife he had discovered in Mikio and Yasuko's very own kitchen to murder the two ladies upstairs.

 

The fact that Mikio's body was still in his day clothes—business-casual dress that he would typically wear out and about—was what was most peculiar about its discovery. 

 

As for the bodies of Yasuko and Niina, however, the home was constructed so that a ladder leading to a third-story loft was located at the top of the stairs going to the second level. Many people have speculated that because the third-story loft contained a bed and a TV, Yasuko and Niina were both there when the killings took place, maybe in bed or watching TV.

 

Both Yasuko and Niina's bodies, which had been repeatedly stabbed, were discovered at the bottom of the ladder leading to the third-floor loft. Investigators determined that both individuals had been stabbed well past the point of death because of the excessive number of knife wounds. This gave rise to several speculations suggesting that the murderer had some type of hatred for women or at the very least had some anger toward them. Sadly, this is not an attitude that is particularly unusual in these homicides, but it would become important in the investigation that followed.

 

Rei, the family's son, was discovered murdered in bed. When police started to piece together the facts, they realized that Rei was the first member of the family to be slain, which explained why he had avoided a horrific stabbing death like the rest of his family. 

 

About six hours after the deaths were found that afternoon, a young guy was brought into a hospital in Tobu Nikko Station. The Miyazawa family's neighborhood in Tokyo, Setagaya, is a few hours north of Tobu Nikko Station, and there are several connecting trains that run between the two.

 

This individual, whose age was given as thirty, was accepted without disclosing his identity or the nature of his injuries. A hand wound that was allegedly serious enough to have revealed bone was the actual damage. Staff members at the scene were astonished by how casually the man was treating the wound and thought him to be fairly suspect, which is why they had a good memory of the specifics.

 

This man was dressed in a black down jacket and pants and appeared to be well into his forties. The medical personnel had no idea what had transpired just hours earlier, yet the man was treated and then released despite not providing any information about himself.

 

The crime scene was completely covered with evidence of what had occurred in the early morning hours of December 31st, much to the investigator's amazement.

 

First and foremost, by locating the murder weapons right away, the authorities had found the key to any inquiry. Both knives were quickly discovered there, still covered in blood.

 

In contrast to many police investigations that falter in the absence of a murder weapon, the police in this case found two within the first few minutes of their inquiry.

 

But in addition to the blades, the Miyazawa family house turned out to be a gold mine of information that helped the police put together what had transpired that night.

 

The family's first aid box had been unlocked, perhaps by Yasuko and Niina, at some point during the actual assault, they would discover. Blood from eight-year-old Niina was discovered on several of the first aid kit's bandages.

 

Disgustingly, authorities would uncover unflushed excrement in the upper bathroom. This was reportedly left by the murderer, who was either too proud of his ability to get away with it or too ignorant of DNA testing. Investigators would find traces of a meal with string beans and sesame spinach that had presumably been consumed somewhere else.

 

Since then, internet websleuths have described this dish as relatively "boring," similar to what a mother might serve her kid. This has become a popular hypothesis about a man who continued to live at home with his mother.

 

The footprints of the presumed intruder were all over the home, strewn around in blood and mud. It will soon be generally recognized that these shoe patterns belonged to a particular kind of Slazenger footwear. At this time, Slazenger shoes were accessible all throughout Japan, but the shoeprint they left behind was for a very particular size that wasn't available there. Many ideas concerning the killer's ethnicity were sparked by the fact that this shoe size was a Korean shoe size and the shoe would have most likely only been found for sale in South Korea.

 

In addition to the bandages from the first aid kit used by Niina; towels and women's sanitary towels were also discovered with unidentified amounts of blood on them. This was a surprising discovery for the police since it supported the theory that Mikio had engaged the attacker on the steps, presumably injuring him and forcing him to seek immediate medical assistance.

 

Police would have to send the blood samples for testing, which is a process that will take some time to complete. They would have to continue looking for evidence until then, which the murderer had purposefully left behind.

 

The most shocking evidence found throughout the inquiry was a range of apparel and belongings that the killer (or killers) brought before leaving them behind. It appeared as though the murderer intentionally left the garments behind or at the very least paid no attention to doing so.

 

The attire that the murderer had most likely worn to the crime site was described as being suitable for a skater. The goods included a black AirTech jacket, a white and purple long sleeve shirt (which has alternately been referred to as a hoodie and a long sleeve shirt), black Edwin gloves, a multicolored scarf with no tags that is almost unrecognizable, and a black handkerchief.

 

The blood stains found on the long-sleeved shirt made it the most notable of the pieces. Even if it wasn't the proper size, the clothes weren't in the same style as anything the family members would have worn. Only Marufuru stores, a retail chain that also offered the style of gloves and hat discovered at the crime site, carried the white shirt with purple sleeves.

 

The handkerchief was also notable in its own right because the police learned that it had been ironed before use. Simply said, very few individuals would go to the trouble of ironing a handkerchief, thus this was strange. Internet theorists have said that the handkerchief being ironed is another more indication that the suspected killer lived at home with a mother figure because the thought of a young skater using a handkerchief is already a peculiar one.

 

Forensic experts would find traces of the male perfume Drakkar Noir on the handkerchief. 

 

It was discovered that every piece of clothing had been cleaned in hard water, which meant that the water used to clean the clothes was rich in minerals and vitamins that aren't often present in water that naturally occurs. Japan has traditionally employed a soft water system, which simply means that the water is water with some sodium added. Given that Korea has a hard water system and that the clothing were cleaned the manner they were discovered, this would be a point in the killer's favor if they were identified as having Korean ancestry.

 

However, in addition to the clothing, the murderer also left behind further evidence in the form of personal possessions. A "hip-bag," which resembled a cross between a messenger bag, a tiny backpack, and a fanny pack, was the first and prominent of these accessories. 

 

Although the hip-bag itself had a relatively innocent appearance, it did include certain bits of information that would help detectives approach the case in the future. A piece of grip tape used on skateboards served as the first piece of proof. The second was the Drakkar Noir fragrance traces that were discovered on the handkerchief. The most surprising discovery was sand, which was the final item removed from the hip-bag.

 

The location of the sand, which pointed to the Southwestern United States, allowed the identification of the material contained in that hip-bag. Specifically, the vicinity of Edwards Air Force Base, a military facility located roughly 100 miles north of Los Angeles.

 

This shocking piece of information, which may connect the murderer to a military facility hundreds of miles away, has probably thrown the entire investigation into a loop. Many people have interpreted this as evidence that the murderer was maybe an airman stationed in Tokyo or a certain category of contractor who conducted business internationally. Some have even attempted to connect this information to the handkerchief that has been ironed as a symbol of military bearing as the military does encourage ironing as a component of its standard behavior.

 

Despite the fact that there was a ton of evidence on the scene, the investigation was far from over. There would still be new information to emerge in the investigation, and there was still no strong indication of a suspect.

 

Days started to transform into weeks, which eventually changed into months. Police made a plea for anyone with information about the apparel while presenting the public with the evidence they had. Several pieces of clothes could be traced back to their owners, but the majority of the goods the murderer left behind at the Miyazawa home were ordinary. It was impossible to find every owner of the apparel because thousands of each had been sold in Japan in the few months before the deaths.

 

About a hundred days after the killings, at the beginning of April, authorities made an intriguing discovery. They had found a little Buddhist statue that was first brought in as evidence not more than a mile from the Miyazawa residence.

 

Jizo is a Buddhist god who guards children in the afterlife, and that statue was made in his likeness. Jizo, an embodiment of Buddhism in Eastern Asia, is thought to guard children who pass away before their parents in the afterlife from demons as they ascend to the spirit realm.

 

When the police first brought this in as evidence, they reasoned that possibly the murderer had left it behind as a token of regret or guilt.

 

Regardless of who put it there, it serves as a sorrowful reminder of the atrocities against the Miyazawas in the Setagaya province adjacent to the family home.

 

Police had outlined a sequence of events that led to the family's murder as they continued to piece together the evidence and test the forensics against their expanding database, which at the time of the family's murder in 2000 was still fairly recent in the world of crime-fighting.

 

The killer most likely entered the house through the second-story bathroom window, which was just above a fence separating the home from the park and was accessible from the rear of the house. This would be a somewhat physically demanding act that would need for the murderer to have at least a modicum of upper body strength.

 

They believed that after entering the house, the attacker had targeted the unfortunate six-year-old Rei first, going into his bedroom and strangling him while he was still asleep.

 

From there, the course of events slightly fragments, with investigators having doubts regarding the killer's future moves. They believe that as Mikio was working on his computer in the study below, the disturbance coming from above diverted his attention, and when he walked up the stairs, he came across the murderer. A fight broke out there, and Mikio fell to the ground, where he would be discovered hours later.

 

According to this sequence of events, Yasuko and Niina were the next to be approached by the assailant, who either assaulted them upstairs in the third-floor loft or at the bottom of the ladder leading to it. Niina used the first aid kit at some point to try to bind some of her own wounds, thus it's likely that the murderer attacked them with his broken sashimi knife, realized it couldn't be used, and fled to the kitchen to grab another. Yasuko and Niina attempted to obtain her medical treatment during this lull since they thought the murderer had abandoned them forever.

 

If this scenario is correct, the killer then returned with his new weapon to kill the family off, murdering the two at the foot of the ladder leading up to the loft.

 

Possibly around this point, Mikio heard a scuffle upstairs and hurried up there in an effort to distract the murderer from his family, not realizing that Rei had already been killed. The murderer managed to inflict Mikio's fatal wounds there, but not before breaking his murder weapon and becoming hurt himself. Their fight had brought them to the stairs.

 

The murderer, who was now not far from the family's kitchen, went inside to get his new murder weapon, then returned upstairs to kill Yasuko and Niina, who were attempting to treat Niina's wound with bandages from the first aid kit. Perhaps they were moving toward the loft in an effort to elude the murderer, expecting that the ladder would be lowered behind them.

 

However, police would find out during their reenactment of the incident that the murderer had remained after killing the four members of the family. He would eventually spend hours inside the house of the family.

 

Police concluded based on evidence that the murderer chose to remain in the home as an uninvited house guest rather than leave right after killing the Miyazawa family. He hadn't even bothered to cover the remains of the four family members when he made the decision to settle down for the evening.

 

One of the more peculiar events in the narrative itself was that the unsub had allegedly taken a nap on the family's sofa in the living room. Typically, suspects leave the scene as quickly as they can since each minute increases the likelihood that they will be found, but this killer seems to have relished the closeness of spending the night at his victim's house.

 

The murderer of the Miyazawa family treated himself to ice cream from the refrigerator. Police would soon find four ice cream wrappers with the alleged killer's prints on them; they were also known as popsicle wrappers in certain accounts. These fingerprints matched those that were left all around the house by people who weren't members of the family in attendance.

 

The family's PC was in the downstairs study and this unsub had also utilized it. A few hours or so after the family was probably killed, on December 31st, around 1:18 AM, they noticed that the computer had been accessed. The unsub had gone to the Shiki Theater Company's website, which Mikio had already bookmarked. Because theater was a love of Mikio's, you see, so one has to question if this was some kind of twisted joke on the part of the perpetrator, or if the family was indeed slain hours after many people thought they were.

The odds are still very much in favor of the murderer doing it since someone had visited that website at 1:18 in the morning and attempted to purchase performance tickets online.

 

Hours later, at around 10:05 in the morning, the murderer reportedly allegedly signed on to examine the websites of Mikio's business, Interbrand, and the university Yasuko taught at. Interestingly, the murderer only visited websites that the family had bookmarked, maybe in an effort to enjoy the closeness of their home.

 

The murderer had only used the computer for 10 minutes total before unplugging it from the wall.

 

The killer had amassed the family's credit and ID cards throughout the course of the evening; they were all discovered organized in the family's living room, next to the sofa where the unsub had slept. Many people have argued that this was an extremely peculiar attempt by the killer—or killers—to try and guess the PIN numbers required to use the cards. He left them behind since he knew he wouldn't try to keep them guessing and risk being found out.

 

A strange assortment of the family's possessions and trash were also gathered by the unsub before departing and dumped in the bathtub for some reason. The majority of these items were trash, like ice cream wrappers or torn-up flyers, but they also included some of Mikio's work receipts, Yasuko's school records, and even feminine hygiene products stained with the murderer's blood. Many have speculated as to why the murderer would leave such a strange collection of trash in the bathtub, but have come to the conclusion that he may have intended to use them for anything and simply forgot. Unaware that he had left boats worth of evidence behind, he may have intended to let the goods soak before being discovered.

 

Police believed the murderer had stolen the family's money, around 125k yen, after he had been sleeping at the Miyazawa house for a few hours. That basically translates to more than a grand in American dollars. However, the fact that the killer had been eating ice cream and using the computer in the family's study where extra money was quickly discovered led the detectives to believe that this wasn't a straightforward heist.

 

Additionally, if this had been a robbery, the murderer may have taken some expensive items, but it appeared that the family's possessions had all been left behind. The only thing that was thought to be missing was a worn-out jacket that had belonged to Mikio.

 

The entrance door was locked when Yasuko's mother entered the crime scene, according to her memory. Police speculated that the killer may have returned through the second-story bathroom window he had used to enter because of this. The door was shut when Yasuko's mother arrived, but over time she has grown unsure of this fact, and it has never been made crystal clear how the murderer fled the scene of these horrible acts.

 

By 2006, forensic science had advanced to the point that sleuths could resurrect this monster. Or, at the very least, extract him from the Setagaya neighborhood's mid-2000s zeitgeist and turn him back into a mortal man with flesh and bone.

 

DNA genome testing was used to determine the precise characteristics of the murderer using the blood found on towels and feminine items at the site. The results were shocking.

 

Police found that the Miyazawa family's suspected murderer was of mixed ethnicity and probably not a citizen of Japan. One of the unsub's parents was of Southern European ancestry, while the other belonged to two distinct cultures, one of which was Eastern Asian.

 

According to a police source who spoke to the publication "Japan Today," the murderer was a guy of Asian descent.  “His DNA carried a marker from his father that occurs in one out of every 13 Japanese; one out of about 10 Chinese, and one in every 5 or so Koreans. Based on mitochondrial DNA, his mother had an ancestor originating from the southern Mediterranean area, probably around the Adriatic.”

 

But in addition to the probable DNA, we also have some additional information about the murderer. By comparing the clothing he left at the crime site, they were able to determine that he is approximately 175 cm tall, or five feet seven inches. His shoes were a Korean size, measuring little about eleven inches, or 27.5 cm, in length. He had blood type A since the blood found at the site did not match that of the victims.

 

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