/jp/ - Otaku Culture

On Sunday, July 23, 1989, two sisters were playing near a public washstand in Hachioji, when a young man stopped his car and got out. "You stay here," he told the elder nine-year-old, cajoling the younger child toward a nearby river. But the older sister ran home for her father, who sprinted back to find his daughter naked, with a young man focusing a camera between her legs. He grabbed him and knocked him down. The man twisted away and ran to the swampy edge of the river to escape. Then, incredibly, he returned to his car where the Hachioji police, who had already been called, apprehended Tsutomu Miyazaki on the charge of "forcing a minor to commit indecent acts."

The police clearly believed they had found their serial killer. One Saitama housewife remembers how house-to-house police questioning in her apartment complex ended abruptly on the day the news broke, though nothing was officially revealed of the suspect's involvement in other crimes. "Even then, television reports were saying he was the serial killer," she recalled. The news media were so convinced that Miyazaki was the man that they beat the police to the Miyazaki home, where they filmed Tsutomu's room.