Speaker 1: Thinking Sideways is not brought to you by Watch Retards
Speaker 1: distributing swords. Instead, it's brought to you by Universal Pictures,
Speaker 1: which is coming up with a new movie called The Snowman,
Speaker 1: which hits the theaters on October. The Snowman is based
Speaker 1: on the book by Joe Nezbo. It's a Norwegian book,
Speaker 1: but apparently it's in English too, and the movie is
Speaker 1: going to be in English. And it's about a psycho
Speaker 1: killer who murders his victims during the first snowfall of
Speaker 1: every winter. Again, The Snowman opens October seen I'll expect
Speaker 1: to see you there. It's also brought to you by
Speaker 1: ourselves and our little get together this weekend, this weekend
Speaker 1: being October fourteenth, two thousand seventeen, six thirty pm at
Speaker 1: the Lucky Labrador Pub on killings Worth in Portland. So
Speaker 1: again we're gonna be there, hopefully at least unless we
Speaker 1: get in the car wreckt And we'll see you all
Speaker 1: there right, So again October four Lucky lab Killingsworths, see
Speaker 1: you there, Thank you well, Hey there, and welcome again
Speaker 1: to another episode of Thinking Sideways. I am Steve, of course,
Speaker 1: joined by Joe, and once again we have a creepy
Speaker 1: story for you, creepy Halloween mystery for you, even because
Speaker 1: not boo, it's week two, not week boo. Serious, Joe,
Speaker 1: I didn't mean bood a week too. I just meant boo.
Speaker 1: I was trying to scare our listeners. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: a ghostly joke. I get it. I get it. Well,
Speaker 1: this is week too, So just like last week, we're
Speaker 1: going to bring you a creepy, scary story. What we
Speaker 1: think is creepy and scary. Yeah creep Yeah, So there
Speaker 1: is there is a little bit here that I'd say
Speaker 1: maybe could qualify as a little ear warning, So use
Speaker 1: your discretion. Yeah, if you have little ears, don't listen. Yeah. Okay,
Speaker 1: So now that Joe's done with that, let's start this
Speaker 1: week's story, which is the discussion of the Miyazawa family murders,
Speaker 1: which you will also see in some places referred to
Speaker 1: as the set of Gaya murders. And this is a
Speaker 1: set of murders that happened in Tokyo, Japan in two thousand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: quite a while back, and we got a lot of
Speaker 1: suggestions for this. I looked at the list and we
Speaker 1: had it suggested by Ali Barry Hannah and Morgan. And
Speaker 1: then I also want to send out a big thanks
Speaker 1: to experts Adrian. She helped me out a lot with pronunciation,
Speaker 1: as did Morgan because he sent me a bunch of
Speaker 1: stuff to help out, which was phenomenal because otherwise I'd
Speaker 1: have butchered some things we have, Margan. It also set
Speaker 1: us a bunch of pictures. Yeah, yeah, to the neighborhood
Speaker 1: and took pictures of the house and everything on site investigation.
Speaker 1: It's taken at the next expert level. So let's get
Speaker 1: on with it, shall we. Yeah, all right, So our
Speaker 1: story takes place on December two thousand, as I said before,
Speaker 1: in a place known as Setagaya, which is a ward
Speaker 1: of Tokyo, Japan. It's roughly six to ten miles, or
Speaker 1: if you convert that, it's ten to fifteen kilometers southwest
Speaker 1: of Tokyo. The home of our victims is in what
Speaker 1: is today known as Kami Soci Gaya Park, which is
Speaker 1: a small park in a kind of suburban neighborhood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: along the Sun River. Yeah. And originally this community where
Speaker 1: this home was, it was about two homes, but there
Speaker 1: were some changes in the neighborhood and the homes will,
Speaker 1: as you'll find out, we're being removed to expand the park,
Speaker 1: which is always so weird in such a in a
Speaker 1: place that's so crunched for a living space as the
Speaker 1: areas around Tokyo. I wonder I was. I was sort
Speaker 1: of wondering about that too. I was wondering if maybe
Speaker 1: they discovered that the houses were in a floodplain so
Speaker 1: they figured out, screw it, will make it a park.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I saw in quite a lot of
Speaker 1: places where they're like, this is very unusual, because the
Speaker 1: local governance was buying the homes from these people to
Speaker 1: expand this once rather it was like a baseball diamond
Speaker 1: and then another small green space and it just kept
Speaker 1: expanding south along the river set and just I mean,
Speaker 1: they decided to take all the homes out. But it
Speaker 1: is unusual, although you know, as we live in a
Speaker 1: place where public parks are like a huge thing, and
Speaker 1: I can understand why you would want more of those.
Speaker 1: Plus the river sun is the reason that we have
Speaker 1: spirited away. So yes, true that. But what's weird about
Speaker 1: the park too is that this the actual from because
Speaker 1: I've gone and looked at it on the street and
Speaker 1: actually I don't believe it or not. The actually they're
Speaker 1: making kind of a half hearted the tip because the
Speaker 1: original subdivision, there's a street that goes through it and
Speaker 1: then parallel to the river essentially, and there's a lot
Speaker 1: of little short streets dead ends that stub out from
Speaker 1: that towards the river, and there are houses lining in
Speaker 1: those little streets. Whether those stub streets are still there,
Speaker 1: think they tear those out and put grass or something
Speaker 1: in there. Yeah, it is. It is strange that they
Speaker 1: tore out all the homes, but then they didn't actually
Speaker 1: follow through on the actual development of it. And you know,
Speaker 1: I always go on Google Earth, and so I looked
Speaker 1: through the satellite images in time sequence, and you can
Speaker 1: see the homes disappear and then really not much of
Speaker 1: anything happened. So it's it's weird. It's like something stalled.
Speaker 1: Maybe that well, maybe it's that last house. There's that
Speaker 1: there's that one guy in the in the neighborhood that
Speaker 1: just won't sell and just won't move out, and the
Speaker 1: whole project is held up by him. But as we
Speaker 1: will discover in our story, there is at least one
Speaker 1: house left. But let's not get ahead ahead of ourselves here. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: as we've been talking about, there's this push to get
Speaker 1: all the homes in that neighborhood out because they wanted
Speaker 1: development as the park. At the time of our story,
Speaker 1: from what I can tell from reporting an imagery, it
Speaker 1: was about a dozen homes left, not all of them
Speaker 1: were occupied. People have been selling their homes for you know,
Speaker 1: a decent amount of money and finding new homes somewhere else,
Speaker 1: but of course they hadn't got around to bulldozing them all.
Speaker 1: So the family and question here though, the Miyazawa's, they
Speaker 1: had been in their home for about ten years at
Speaker 1: this point, but like all the rest of their neighbors,
Speaker 1: they were intending to sell. The reporting says that their
Speaker 1: plan was to be out of the house by March
Speaker 1: of two thousand one, so they were already planning to
Speaker 1: get out sales in the process. So it wasn't as
Speaker 1: if they were a holdout and within a couple of months. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was just a couple of months away. I mean,
Speaker 1: I feel that's reasonable rate. I mean, you need to
Speaker 1: buy another house, the logistics of moving all your stuff,
Speaker 1: and it sounds like they had family that lived right
Speaker 1: next door right, correct, So probably it's a double logistics
Speaker 1: at that point. Right. Yeah, And and we'll talk about
Speaker 1: the house. But where their house was on as Joe
Speaker 1: would describe it, a little stub street, there were actually
Speaker 1: four residences side by side in a row. And so
Speaker 1: the houses town houses, No, they were actually independent homes.
Speaker 1: They no, not all of them shared walls. They look
Speaker 1: like townhouses, they're tall and skinny. But yeah, there was not.
Speaker 1: The Miazawa's house had a shared wall within itself, which
Speaker 1: we'll talk about. But the other two on the other side,
Speaker 1: or two or three, they were separate. They weren't all
Speaker 1: joined up. Okay, Okay. So the family in our story,
Speaker 1: who we've talked about a little bit but we're actually
Speaker 1: going to meet now, it's a family of four. We
Speaker 1: have the parents at forty four year old Mikio Miyazawa,
Speaker 1: his wife forty one year old Yasco. They had two children,
Speaker 1: eight year old Nina and six six year old boy Ray. Technically,
Speaker 1: this is where we were just getting at it. Like
Speaker 1: I said, there was a shared wall. Their home was
Speaker 1: actually more of what we in the U S would
Speaker 1: call a duplex. There were it was, It wasn't there
Speaker 1: were no internal doorway between one home and the other.
Speaker 1: There was unique or separate front entrances to the two homes,
Speaker 1: and they shared a dividing wall here in the States,
Speaker 1: yeah exactly, but but there was between the folks. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot like that as well. And this will this
Speaker 1: will come to play later on in our story because
Speaker 1: the folks that live next door our family and will
Speaker 1: well yeah, yeah, they they are family. It was Yasco's mother,
Speaker 1: her sister, and her brother in law. So Yasco's sister
Speaker 1: and then Yasco's brother in law were the ones that
Speaker 1: lived in that home next door, right right, And Yasco's
Speaker 1: mother yes Japanese, Yes, the elders of your family. So
Speaker 1: it's traditionally. It makes total sense. Okay, I'm stumbling a
Speaker 1: little bit here because we're about to dive into a
Speaker 1: lot of the case and there are a lot of
Speaker 1: details because the Japanese c s I apparently you're the
Speaker 1: best in the world, and they gather amazing amounts of details.
Speaker 1: But that makes his story a little hard to follow
Speaker 1: because there are so many details. And we're going to
Speaker 1: do our best to keep this as straight as possible.
Speaker 1: But you know, if you're doing something else and you're
Speaker 1: not paying attention, Be careful because you may miss something
Speaker 1: and then be dropped and lost about what's going on
Speaker 1: in this stuff. And unique about this guy too, is
Speaker 1: he made the murderer, made no attempt at my giving
Speaker 1: anything way by the same murderer. No, no, we've already
Speaker 1: said it's the family murder, so no, no playing there.
Speaker 1: He made no attempt to cover his tracks whatsoever. It
Speaker 1: seems like he left a huge amount of evidence, physical
Speaker 1: evidence behind somehow and somehow we don't know who he is.
Speaker 1: And still, yeah, it's funny. But if you're driving or
Speaker 1: you know, I know a lot of you guys like
Speaker 1: listen while you work. I listen to you know stuff
Speaker 1: while I work. You prepared to hit the back button, Yeah,
Speaker 1: to rewind a little bit, especially if you fall asleep
Speaker 1: to Joe's soothing voice. You say, that's going to be
Speaker 1: mostly Steve talking. My voice is not soothing. It's got
Speaker 1: that kind of high, nasially pitched and everybody loves everybody
Speaker 1: loves it. Yeah, yeah, okay, Well, let's let's talk about
Speaker 1: this story. Let's there there. You will see this story
Speaker 1: ordered in a number of different ways across the Internet.
Speaker 1: I however, am going to start on the most important date,
Speaker 1: which is the December two thousand. It was a dark
Speaker 1: and stormy night. No, actually it was kind of a
Speaker 1: nice day in Japan in December. No, throw him off.
Speaker 1: Japan and December is kind of like Portland. It's like
Speaker 1: rainy and cold usually Soti December. It's you know, it's
Speaker 1: the day before the celebration of the new Millennium in Japan,
Speaker 1: because they celebrated it between two thousand and two thousand one,
Speaker 1: unlike us here in the States, which was but for
Speaker 1: the family, it was just another day. They were going
Speaker 1: about their business. Uh. They went to the market for
Speaker 1: a while. They then came home. I think they got
Speaker 1: home at about like six thirty in the evening. Around
Speaker 1: seven o'clock that night, Yasco called her mother next door
Speaker 1: to see if Nina could come over, because Nina wanted
Speaker 1: to watch a television show that had been recorded on
Speaker 1: the on grandma's computer. So Nina goes over, watches the
Speaker 1: TV show and is home by it's reported about nine
Speaker 1: forty at night. Didn't stay later. Huh, oh, you know what,
Speaker 1: I think she would have had to say much much
Speaker 1: later to to avoid what's going to happen here? Yeah,
Speaker 1: we know that that evening, Mikio, the father, he was
Speaker 1: working on his computer, which was in the first floor
Speaker 1: of the house. We know that he was working because
Speaker 1: an email was received by the computer that required a
Speaker 1: password to open. And that's you know that that leads
Speaker 1: everybody down the path of well, it must have been
Speaker 1: from his job, probably because Mikio he worked for a
Speaker 1: company called Interbrand, which is a multinational branding company, really
Speaker 1: creatively named branding company. But they are actually a creative company.
Speaker 1: I mean they actually I didn't know Interbrand, but I
Speaker 1: didn't know this until I did all the research on this.
Speaker 1: Do you know who came up and branded the term WiFi? Them? Interbrand?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, they changed the world. But you know,
Speaker 1: it's actually it's yeah, it's a pretty successful company to
Speaker 1: be in multiple countries like that and have that kind
Speaker 1: of thing happened. Call them in that has I've been
Speaker 1: thinking about our brand. I think we need to, like,
Speaker 1: you know, make it better somehow. Okay, we should name
Speaker 1: it WiFi WiFi the podcast. But it's also not unheard of,
Speaker 1: I mean Japanese that that's like a very stereotypical Japanese
Speaker 1: thing that like men tend to work absurdly longer, I mean,
Speaker 1: like very often they were, they have at a different
Speaker 1: apartment in the city. They work just crazy hours. They
Speaker 1: work themselves to death often. Um. And so the fact
Speaker 1: that he would have been working at ten pm on
Speaker 1: like on a holiday not surprising at all. And he
Speaker 1: nothing that I have read indicates that he was some
Speaker 1: high powered exam creative. I get the feeling that he
Speaker 1: was just another cog, just a middleman who just worked
Speaker 1: all the time, and that that is the typical thing, right,
Speaker 1: is that like the guys who are super super high up,
Speaker 1: they don't seem to work. I mean just the same
Speaker 1: in America, right, Like they don't seem to work that much.
Speaker 1: But the guys who are kind of at all they were,
Speaker 1: they're the ones who work themselves to death and the
Speaker 1: ones who just go crazy. Yeah. I don't think he
Speaker 1: was the tiniest of cox in the corporation though, because
Speaker 1: but he wasn't. He wasn't he was not a big wig.
Speaker 1: But but if you look at their house, they lived
Speaker 1: in the suburbs. Yeah, oh I guess that's true. Okay,
Speaker 1: well forget it. Yeah, he was in town. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter. The point here is is that Mikio
Speaker 1: is working and he was alive at because assuming the
Speaker 1: killer didn't kill him beforehand and didn't happen to like,
Speaker 1: you know, torture, now, we're pretty sure that that none
Speaker 1: of that, Joe, We're pretty sure that the times that
Speaker 1: things took. So I appreciate the excitement there, but no. Okay,
Speaker 1: So Mikio is on the first floor, he's on the computer,
Speaker 1: his son Ray is asleep, and the second floor in
Speaker 1: one of the bunk beds or one of the beds
Speaker 1: in the bunk bed I don't I don't know what
Speaker 1: they're correct. Burbage use for that have bunk beds too, Yeah, cool,
Speaker 1: everybody has bunk beds. It's an efficient use of space.
Speaker 1: It is. It's believed that Yasco and Nino we're up
Speaker 1: in the third story bedroom, which, to be honest, that
Speaker 1: third story bedroom really is just a converted attic space
Speaker 1: that has a bed and a TV in it, and
Speaker 1: it's a weird access point. But we'll talk about Yeah. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: you climb up a ladder to get to it. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: So at some point after the email, so this is
Speaker 1: where the family is is and then at some point
Speaker 1: after that email came in a spoiler alert, somebody came
Speaker 1: in and murdered the entire family. That's why we call
Speaker 1: it a massacre. Remember I told you that the park
Speaker 1: was expanding around the home, well directly behind the home.
Speaker 1: This and this is based on the police investigation. This
Speaker 1: is how they think this might have happened. But there's
Speaker 1: a rather tall chain link fence abutting the back of
Speaker 1: the house, and what they think happened is our killer
Speaker 1: climbed the fence, then hopped the short distance from the
Speaker 1: fence to the home and either caught a hold of
Speaker 1: an electrical conduit, you know, kind of one of those
Speaker 1: bigger tubes of electrical wires it goes up the side
Speaker 1: of the house, or maybe there's an a C unit
Speaker 1: is there as well. Might have got from one to
Speaker 1: the other and then from there and then how how
Speaker 1: far was his leap from the fence to the wall
Speaker 1: of the house. Really it's maybe it's not a huge distance.
Speaker 1: I'm not thinking about being able to I'm just thinking
Speaker 1: about doing it without making a huge noise. Could very
Speaker 1: you know what, I could very easily see. Let's say
Speaker 1: it's about four foot I could see somebody's kind of
Speaker 1: standing ish on the top pole of the chain link
Speaker 1: fence and then slowly leaning forward with their hands forward
Speaker 1: to then take the cushion of the impact and pull
Speaker 1: them back and then pull themselves up. It would be possible. Plus,
Speaker 1: there's some people listening to the TV. Stuff like that
Speaker 1: was kind of small or stealthy. Let's say they're stealthy,
Speaker 1: some ninja type. Maybe. Actually, if they if they did
Speaker 1: get in this way, and it's kind of ninja, it
Speaker 1: is kind of ninja. Yeah, So go Jimmy's up the
Speaker 1: pipe across the A C unit and the second story
Speaker 1: bathroom window was open. So where a bad guy goes
Speaker 1: through that window into the second story bathroom, This is
Speaker 1: where the story will kind of diverge and will bring
Speaker 1: it together. But according to the official version, what happens
Speaker 1: here is the killer comes out of the bathroom, turns,
Speaker 1: walks across the landing at the top of the second
Speaker 1: story stairs into the bedroom where Ray is at and
Speaker 1: smothers him six year old six year old Ray. At
Speaker 1: some point in the process of smothering Ray must have
Speaker 1: made some kind of strange noises, probably Ray struggling because
Speaker 1: he's being smothered. Uh yeah, well, I mean at this point,
Speaker 1: Mikio apparently must have heard something because he gets up
Speaker 1: from the computer and he walks up to the walks
Speaker 1: up the stairs, at which point he finds the killer. Now,
Speaker 1: the killer has with him a sashimi knife, which is
Speaker 1: a thinner, long blade, single sided bladed knife. It sounds
Speaker 1: like in this particular instance, it was a bamboo handled knife. Question. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how do they know they brought the killer brought it
Speaker 1: with them because it was in the home after the
Speaker 1: fact and it wasn't one of their belongings. How that
Speaker 1: I'm guessing that the family said that's not their knife.
Speaker 1: That doesn't match any of the knives that they have
Speaker 1: in the home. Question. Yes, we're at Joe's house once
Speaker 1: a week. We're not Joe's family. But okay, but do
Speaker 1: you think you could say like that that's not Joe's
Speaker 1: for reasons of plausible deniability, I never looked through Joe's
Speaker 1: knife drawer. I'm just saying, in our house right, like,
Speaker 1: we have a knife block that has a full set
Speaker 1: of knives, and then we have a we have like
Speaker 1: duplicates of knives that we've gone to you. You guys know,
Speaker 1: foodb on, So like we go and buy knives, they're
Speaker 1: like honestly once every six months. Because once the knife
Speaker 1: that we buy, it's like five bucks this knife, right,
Speaker 1: and it's great for six months, but it's like way
Speaker 1: cheaper to just it's really not, you know, and I
Speaker 1: we have a number of knives that are like that that. Frankly,
Speaker 1: I don't even I don't think anybody in this world
Speaker 1: could say, like other than the two of us could
Speaker 1: say that is or is not part of this collection.
Speaker 1: There is. But but the investigators will link that knife
Speaker 1: to a store not far away, and it appears to
Speaker 1: have been recently purchased. Sure, but I'm just saying, like
Speaker 1: I understand what the market that day, maybe they bought
Speaker 1: a new knife for their market. But the thing is
Speaker 1: also if indeed, okay, if in this version of the
Speaker 1: beginning of our story, the killer did not bring the
Speaker 1: knife with them and so smothers Ray and then Mikio
Speaker 1: comes upstairs, well that means Mikio must have brought the
Speaker 1: knife upstairs, which is a little weird. Why because he's
Speaker 1: in the he's in his own home, and he hears
Speaker 1: a weird noise and he has a family. Not many
Speaker 1: normal family men come stalking up the stairs when they
Speaker 1: hear a weird house in their family full of people,
Speaker 1: unless they hear somebody, as Joe said, going die die.
Speaker 1: I mean, because we don't know everybody that was a
Speaker 1: witness to this crime is dead. Okay, I'm sorry, I
Speaker 1: just I'm trying to do the understanding King well. And also,
Speaker 1: you don't you don't even know that he attacked Mikio
Speaker 1: at the top of the stairs with a knife. He
Speaker 1: might have just jumped him, knocked him down the stairs
Speaker 1: and then got it ruin and gotten a knife and
Speaker 1: then come back. And I thought there was blood down
Speaker 1: the stairs. There's there's blood. There's bloody Okay. So now
Speaker 1: I wanted to stipulate that he brought the NiFe. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's for now. And he was also, by the way,
Speaker 1: it was incompetent in his choice of knife. Not a
Speaker 1: good assassin, Okay, So bad guy, bad assassin shows up
Speaker 1: with the Sashimi knife, which is just a bad tool.
Speaker 1: But but he kills Ray. And according to this this narrative,
Speaker 1: Mikio comes upstairs, at which point encounters the killer. The
Speaker 1: killer then slashes at Mikio and apparently caught him several
Speaker 1: times on the shoulders and the neck. Mikio then falls
Speaker 1: down the stairs, and when his body is found, he's
Speaker 1: dead at the bottom of the stairs. There's an alternate
Speaker 1: version of this portion of the story, which is it
Speaker 1: is possible that and this kind of goes towards maybe
Speaker 1: what you were heading for, Devon, is that our killer
Speaker 1: came in through the first floor or through the front door,
Speaker 1: and chased Mikio up the stairs, apparently along the way,
Speaker 1: grabbing the knife that was in their home, and then
Speaker 1: ols him and knocks him down the stairs. Now in
Speaker 1: a way that to me almost makes a little more sense,
Speaker 1: because what's weird is that if the guy came into
Speaker 1: the house with a knife, why would he go to
Speaker 1: the bother of smothering Ray rather than just cutting his
Speaker 1: throat and being done with it fast. If you know
Speaker 1: what I'm getting at here, I think that actually smothering
Speaker 1: him makes sense. I mean, because you cover his mouth
Speaker 1: with a pellow and everything. He can't yell out or
Speaker 1: anything like that, and he's only six years old. He
Speaker 1: can't really you know, fight back to any hughes degree,
Speaker 1: I would think it would be fairly actually quieter potentially
Speaker 1: than slitting us throat also leaves less evidence. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: and the thing is, I don't remember anything about there
Speaker 1: actually being blood on Mikio or the sheets around him,
Speaker 1: So this version probably might what I think is probably
Speaker 1: he's your version is probably wrong, you know. I frankly,
Speaker 1: I am not willing to rule out the fact that
Speaker 1: Miko came up the stairs with a knife. I I've
Speaker 1: lived in places, and maybe this is just because I
Speaker 1: do this podcast. I don't know, right, But no, I
Speaker 1: don't always. But you know, every once in a while,
Speaker 1: I've definitely heard sounds in my own house when my
Speaker 1: significant other is not there, where I've thought I'm gonna
Speaker 1: I'm taking that gun that we have in our bedroom,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to go investigate what that sound is,
Speaker 1: whether or not it's you know, he got home early,
Speaker 1: it's the wind, like whatever. There have definitely been times
Speaker 1: in my life where I've thought I'm just gonna take
Speaker 1: a weapon with me, just sometimes fondly as nine to no.
Speaker 1: But I mean, like, I I don't know if that's
Speaker 1: just unique to like me being a paranoid female or
Speaker 1: like or if there are other people in this world
Speaker 1: I know you, but I think I do think that
Speaker 1: there are people in this world who, like you know
Speaker 1: the normal sounds, you even know, the normal sounds of
Speaker 1: your six year old having a night hare versus something's wrong.
Speaker 1: So maybe you grab the seshimi knife, you know. I
Speaker 1: So I'm not willing to necessarily discount that he brought
Speaker 1: it up and it got wrestled out of his hand
Speaker 1: and then he got killed with it, which is why
Speaker 1: they always say don't take your gun because you'll get
Speaker 1: shot with it. Yeah, okay, Well, here's here's one thing
Speaker 1: that you need to know about. And this, by the way,
Speaker 1: is where the two versions of the story kind of coalesced,
Speaker 1: because everything that happens from here forward seems to be
Speaker 1: pretty well figured out. But during the struggle with miki O,
Speaker 1: that seshimi knife was broken in some fashion. From what
Speaker 1: I understand, it was a bamboo handled knife, so I'm
Speaker 1: guessing that where the bamboo and the blade came together
Speaker 1: probably snapped right around there, which makes it really bad
Speaker 1: for going slash slash just right. So there's no there's
Speaker 1: no um, what do they kind thing? No, No, that
Speaker 1: the part of the medal goes through the handle. Oh, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that long shaft, the tail, the tang, Yeah, that
Speaker 1: bit that. Yeah, it didn't have a long when that
Speaker 1: apparently ran through, or maybe it did and it was
Speaker 1: just hard to hold on too. I don't know, but
Speaker 1: it's everywhere says the knife was broken. That'll make that
Speaker 1: will be important here in just a minute. The yeah,
Speaker 1: and and some some knives, the cheaper ones, you know,
Speaker 1: the tang kind of tapers and it's just the handle
Speaker 1: is just basically glued on. I've also seen somewhere the
Speaker 1: tang is like an inch or two long and in there,
Speaker 1: and I think that might actually be more likely what
Speaker 1: we find in this situation. Yeah, so apparently killer found
Speaker 1: that the knife was not nearly as strong as he
Speaker 1: thought it was. He bought a budget knife. Okay, So
Speaker 1: whichever version happens with with the deaths of Ray and
Speaker 1: Mikio happened at this point Yasco and Nina are upstairs
Speaker 1: and our killer makes his way up to them. Now,
Speaker 1: the layout of their house. H We've have talked about
Speaker 1: this little bit already, but it's a little confusing. And
Speaker 1: by the way, if you need to go on the internet,
Speaker 1: because there's reconstructions of their home and there's photos taken
Speaker 1: of the home. It's a scale model that is disassembled.
Speaker 1: I'll warn you now though, that the jerk that took
Speaker 1: the models didn't think about the fact that they were
Speaker 1: rotating the pieces of hundred eighty degrees back and forth
Speaker 1: of the model. Yeah. Yeah, so you you have to
Speaker 1: stop and stare and figure out where one piece actually connects.
Speaker 1: But it'll it'll help make this make a lot more sense.
Speaker 1: So he finds Jasco and Nina and he tries to
Speaker 1: attack them, but of course, lo and behold, he's got
Speaker 1: that broken knife, so he needs to go get a replacement.
Speaker 1: So he goes to the kitchen and he found them
Speaker 1: third floor. It's believed that they were in the third floor.
Speaker 1: And to get to the third floor, it's up the ladder,
Speaker 1: up the ladder from the second floor landing where Mikio
Speaker 1: and our killer have their struggle, right, So he he
Speaker 1: like comes up the ladder and he's like, dang it, right,
Speaker 1: it doesn't work, okay, so he goes back down the
Speaker 1: ladder and it goes downstairs and goes down the stairs again,
Speaker 1: and would would at least the daughter, right, and Nina
Speaker 1: had kind of like slashed at her. Well, we don't
Speaker 1: know how. It's so both women were caught extensively and badly,
Speaker 1: so we don't know exactly which wounds were the initial ones,
Speaker 1: at least in the reading. But what Joe is getting
Speaker 1: out here is that Nina was caught and Yasco and
Speaker 1: Nina went and grabbed a first aid kit care that
Speaker 1: came down the ladder to the second floor. They must
Speaker 1: have come downtair the ladder to go to the bathroom
Speaker 1: to get that, and I think they went back up
Speaker 1: the ladder because it's easier to barricade or keep a
Speaker 1: bad guy from quote unquote breaking in when it comes
Speaker 1: up the lad before you pull the ladder up. It
Speaker 1: was a ladder was built in. But this is one
Speaker 1: of the things about this story that I've always found
Speaker 1: kind of head scratching. It's like, you know, they the
Speaker 1: mad slashers in your home. He's just left you long
Speaker 1: enough to go get another weapon, and what do you do, quick, quick, quick,
Speaker 1: at the first aid kit, get some bad aids what
Speaker 1: I would be doing. But the thing is is that,
Speaker 1: you know what, maybe they tried to get the phones
Speaker 1: and and call out for help, but it would be
Speaker 1: found later that the phone lines were unplugged, so they
Speaker 1: couldn't actually have called for help, and they may have
Speaker 1: in their panics to be like, oh my god, oh
Speaker 1: my god, the phone's not working. Go hide quick, go hide,
Speaker 1: go hide, And by the time they maybe would have realized,
Speaker 1: oh wait, let's bang on the walls to get our
Speaker 1: family next door to figure it out. Maybe you pick
Speaker 1: up something heavy that clock the killer over the head
Speaker 1: with you know what comes up, dragged the bed across.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's there's a whole bunch of things that
Speaker 1: a us. After the facts seteen years on, we're gonna like,
Speaker 1: see that would have been easy. And here's what I'll
Speaker 1: say also about the first aid kid, is that since
Speaker 1: we don't know which of the injuries were inflicted, it
Speaker 1: is possible right that maybe he like slashed the jugular
Speaker 1: or whatever. It was one of those situations where like
Speaker 1: a mother of a child had to say, like, wow, right,
Speaker 1: it's not like you have a little cut on, let's
Speaker 1: put a band aid on it. It might have been
Speaker 1: like you were going to bleed out if I don't
Speaker 1: get some kind of pressure with some kind of pack
Speaker 1: on this. So let's go here, like and you consider
Speaker 1: the end results that they would have been better off
Speaker 1: looking for weapons. But that's but Devin. Devin's got a
Speaker 1: good point, because here's the thing. The details of exactly
Speaker 1: what went down at this point were so sketchy. All
Speaker 1: we know is that the women were killed with a
Speaker 1: knife that was procured in their own home. They were
Speaker 1: stabbed repeatedly and excessive blee. Now there's that whole uh well,
Speaker 1: the two women, I don't know of the two who
Speaker 1: received the staffs everybody in the family who got stabbed
Speaker 1: the most one of the two, I don't know which
Speaker 1: of the two women. The husband did not get nearly
Speaker 1: as many wounds as the two women did, as Nina
Speaker 1: and Yasco did. So it appears to be that, you know,
Speaker 1: there's that whole well, they angered him, and maybe they did.
Speaker 1: I mean, it could be that they were at the
Speaker 1: base of the ladder and you know, Jasco is trying
Speaker 1: to give first aid, at which point our lovely jerk
Speaker 1: face comes back up the stairs with his new knife
Speaker 1: and takes it for a test drive. Well, and he was.
Speaker 1: He didn't come out unscathed eeter either, right, So it's
Speaker 1: certainly possible that they inflicted some of the wounds on him,
Speaker 1: and so he was like, oh my god, you dumb
Speaker 1: whatever bleeps right, I cannot believe that you have the audacity,
Speaker 1: especially if he's like he or she. I mean, again,
Speaker 1: we don't know if it could have been a woman,
Speaker 1: but I'm going to continue with that. Yeah, I agree,
Speaker 1: But you know, it's possible that we've seen instances like
Speaker 1: this before, right where it's like the man who's attacking
Speaker 1: these women is like okay, but like I have I
Speaker 1: have so much power over you, Like what how dare
Speaker 1: you offend me? In other cultures that exists even more
Speaker 1: and I know, having been close to Japanese culture for
Speaker 1: a while for reasons I will not explain here. Um,
Speaker 1: that's true, that like that is, that's a big thing.
Speaker 1: That subserviance of women to men is a big thing.
Speaker 1: And for women to fight back, even young girls to
Speaker 1: fight back, even if it's to save their lives, that
Speaker 1: could have been a huge I don't like offense. It
Speaker 1: could have been, but also maybe not. Yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't know. What we do know is that at
Speaker 1: the base of the first floor stairs is Mikio's body.
Speaker 1: At the top of that flight of stairs is the
Speaker 1: bodies of both Yasco and Nina. Uh so that's where
Speaker 1: that's where their bodies are. Of course, Ray is still
Speaker 1: in the bunk bed where he was smuggler. Yes, we
Speaker 1: know with pretty good certainty that the family died around
Speaker 1: eleven thirty at night. There's a couple of things that
Speaker 1: pinned that down for us. One would be the contents
Speaker 1: of their stomachs. The other would be that the family
Speaker 1: that lived on the other side of the house, on
Speaker 1: the other side of that shared wall, heard at least
Speaker 1: one or two banging noises. And then later on we're
Speaker 1: able to the sisters and brother in law and mother
Speaker 1: of Jasco, and they were able to pin down the
Speaker 1: time based on a TV show that they were Oh
Speaker 1: it was during whatever whatever. But what did they think? Well,
Speaker 1: they don't know, but you know what I mean, We've
Speaker 1: all lived in apartments where there was suddenly a bang
Speaker 1: and like, what the hell was that? Realistically, every time,
Speaker 1: I like, I haven't really cared about the people who
Speaker 1: were loving next. I frankly, I've definitely been a number
Speaker 1: of apartments where I thought, Wow, that didn't sound good,
Speaker 1: but am I gonna go check it out now? I
Speaker 1: don't care about that person but I have no think
Speaker 1: I've ever been in a situation where I've heard of
Speaker 1: sound like that, where I thought it might be somebody
Speaker 1: I cared about, where I was like, I remember, it's
Speaker 1: a home with two young children, and children can be
Speaker 1: rambunctious and things you have dropped and round. So it's
Speaker 1: it's very hard again, seventeen years on, it's easy to
Speaker 1: cast that Yeah, yeah, maybe yeah, maybe they were a
Speaker 1: noisy bunch. Maybe they made that kind of noise all
Speaker 1: the time. They might have Well let's let's so, so
Speaker 1: this is, this is what happens in the murder. Now
Speaker 1: there's more going on here, and yeah, and Devin loves
Speaker 1: this part because I had to resort to not only bullets,
Speaker 1: but sub bullets for all of the stuff that we're
Speaker 1: I did, but that's because I copied it off of
Speaker 1: the inter So our bad guy during the struggle, Devon
Speaker 1: alluded to this a little bit earlier, was hurt during
Speaker 1: the attack. We believe that's during the attack of Yasco
Speaker 1: and Nina accidentally slashed himself. He kind of hand in
Speaker 1: some way and bandaged himself with the bandages that were
Speaker 1: found in the home. He would then eventually go on
Speaker 1: and uh, it's always funny to me. Um, they call
Speaker 1: him what do they call him when they see it?
Speaker 1: It's the feminine hygiene pads. I mean it's it's it's pads.
Speaker 1: He's using pads to try and staunch the bleeding. Now,
Speaker 1: you would think that this guy, having caught himself at
Speaker 1: this point, he's probably just gonna do a quick look
Speaker 1: around the house and try and grab some stuff and
Speaker 1: get the hell out. And if that's what you think,
Speaker 1: you're gonna get really freaked out, because that is not
Speaker 1: what he did in any way, shape or flour. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when I'm murder people, this is what I like to
Speaker 1: do to like to hang out. I mean, that's a warm,
Speaker 1: nice spot with talking to them, talk to the corpses. Yeah, alright,
Speaker 1: so here's here's what goes on. So, yeah, our killer
Speaker 1: did look for money. He did. It's possible. It's it's
Speaker 1: listed as possibly stole a hundred and fifty thousand yen,
Speaker 1: which is at the time, well it's about twelve American
Speaker 1: dollars a lot. It's it's money, but it's not a
Speaker 1: huge sum of money. But then he didn't leave. He
Speaker 1: lingered in the home hinter kai going he pulled the
Speaker 1: hinter Kai efect and stayed for somewhere between ten to
Speaker 1: eleven hours. What did he do while he was there,
Speaker 1: because it's all the things I would have done, okay,
Speaker 1: well some of them, some of them because I'm a lady,
Speaker 1: so I don't. Okay. So he ate some melon out
Speaker 1: of the fridge. Do you want to get it? Before
Speaker 1: I went bad? He made some tea and drank it.
Speaker 1: A herbal team, as we said before, tried to bandage
Speaker 1: the wound on his hand first from the first aid
Speaker 1: kit and then used feminine pads or sanitary napkins. They
Speaker 1: are made to inscore blood. They are men soka blood
Speaker 1: makes total sense. By the way he left those, those
Speaker 1: bandages and the sanitary napkins in the home. He didn't care,
Speaker 1: just left him around. He ate several ice cream cups.
Speaker 1: They're They're referred to as popsicles in some places and
Speaker 1: ice cream cups in other places. But he ate four
Speaker 1: of those and left the rappers to those four in
Speaker 1: two different trash cans in the hall. At one o'clock
Speaker 1: in the morning, he went onto the family computer and
Speaker 1: he browsed the Chiky Theater's company's website. Tried to buy
Speaker 1: tickets for an upcoming show. By the way, you mean
Speaker 1: what a play? Yeah, it was a play, And so
Speaker 1: he didn't enter credit card information. Well no, see that's
Speaker 1: the thing is the link for that theater company's website
Speaker 1: was already on the browser, so he basically pulled up
Speaker 1: a saved link and then tried to buy the ticket.
Speaker 1: I did not enter any payment information, so it was
Speaker 1: not successful. I kind of feel like maybe he thought
Speaker 1: it was saved in the browser, wouldn't be in Chrome. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Like, don't do this ever. But if you
Speaker 1: guys ever were to get to my computer, my Chrome
Speaker 1: has all of my credit card information, so you just
Speaker 1: have to type in the first four digits. So you
Speaker 1: have to know the first four digits of my card information.
Speaker 1: But yep, that's it, first four that's what my bank
Speaker 1: issued the card to me. Yeah, but I mean, I
Speaker 1: have it saved because I don't like to remember how
Speaker 1: that stuff. But I don't think in two um oh,
Speaker 1: and by the way, so going to the theater website,
Speaker 1: that browsing session lasted for a total of five minutes.
Speaker 1: In eighteen seconds. In the process of using the mouse,
Speaker 1: our killer would leave behind at least one, if not
Speaker 1: too bloody fingerprints, so readable fingerprints, not smudgy things. At
Speaker 1: some point later in the morning, the killer would get
Speaker 1: back on the computer again we don't I don't have
Speaker 1: a timestamp for this, uh, and then would go to
Speaker 1: the site of both Mikio's employer and then raise school
Speaker 1: that browsing session would last only four minutes in sixteen seconds,
Speaker 1: so not very long. And then after that the killer
Speaker 1: would unplug the computer from the wall, and I got
Speaker 1: the impression that not only did he pull the cord
Speaker 1: from the wall, he pulled the cord out of the
Speaker 1: back of the machine as well, which I heard of
Speaker 1: one place at least said he actually took the card
Speaker 1: with because I don't know it was there, it was there.
Speaker 1: That was a translation issue, because I know the post
Speaker 1: you're talking about, and then there's updates saying, oh, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it was totally there. It's just like there's talk about
Speaker 1: the fact that because it's the New Year, the family
Speaker 1: had what we would equate to Christmas or New Year's
Speaker 1: cards in their home, and some sites will say and
Speaker 1: those cards were taken by the killer. Now they were
Speaker 1: actually taken by the police to confirm do you actually
Speaker 1: know these people? When did you? You know, it's kind
Speaker 1: of part of the investigative process that it was returned
Speaker 1: to the evidence of the home, so that that's one
Speaker 1: of those little, uh, little bits of misdirection that's unfortunately
Speaker 1: from translation. Frankly, that like browsing the the school and
Speaker 1: the workplace, to me a little bit feels like that
Speaker 1: person trying to figure out if they can delay any
Speaker 1: alarms going up, trying to see if like I don't know,
Speaker 1: but like to do that investigation of like, well, can
Speaker 1: I call the school and say, oh, my kid is six,
Speaker 1: so they're not coming in, and can I call this
Speaker 1: person's employer and saying, oh, hey, I am so and
Speaker 1: so and I'm I'm sick to extend the time that
Speaker 1: people would not realize that they were exactly and because
Speaker 1: they stayed for a long time, whoever it was that
Speaker 1: wasn't they stayed pretty much until we'll talk about this,
Speaker 1: it seems until they realized I'm busted, and so I
Speaker 1: wonder if there was a bit of that sort of Okay, well,
Speaker 1: you know, this person had a job and this kid
Speaker 1: was going to school because the other kid wasn't old
Speaker 1: enough to be in school yet, right, thing, I thought
Speaker 1: six was the oldest one. No, it was eight. Nina
Speaker 1: was eight, the girls eight. Ray was six. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: and I think Ray had started school because like there's
Speaker 1: a whole bunch to talk about the fact that Ray
Speaker 1: had a bit of a speech impediment, so they were
Speaker 1: he was getting help with that, so he was definitely
Speaker 1: he was in. Maybe those were just the two first ones. Then,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I mean a little bit. It feels
Speaker 1: like somebody trying to figure out, can I find the
Speaker 1: boss at the company, Can I find the teacher or
Speaker 1: whoever I'm supposed to call the school? Can I figure
Speaker 1: out can I figure out how to extend my stay
Speaker 1: here longer? Or maybe? But also maybe it's just like
Speaker 1: extra creepy. Yeah, was bored, and just you know, I
Speaker 1: didn't want to actually do any web searches because those
Speaker 1: might be a little incriminating. Actually web searches at those
Speaker 1: times we're pretty clunky. Remember this is still two thousand.
Speaker 1: It's really hard to do web searches. Yeah, very true,
Speaker 1: So clicking I saved lengths might be the easiest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, I was just gonna say. It's also totally possible.
Speaker 1: Those were just the same links right then. That was
Speaker 1: like most recent browsing history. That like the father had
Speaker 1: been like, oh yeah, I'm gonna check out my son's school,
Speaker 1: you know, well, um in Japan, and he's the thirtieth
Speaker 1: obviously it's thirty first next day as New Year's Eve,
Speaker 1: and you most people have New Year's Eve off in schools?
Speaker 1: Is it off? But yeah, it's a it's a holiday.
Speaker 1: As far as I could tell, it was a holiday.
Speaker 1: The whole thing was a holiday time. It wasn't as
Speaker 1: if they were supposed to be at school the next day.
Speaker 1: I don't. I mean, I think Devin might have hit
Speaker 1: the nail on the head in the beginning, and that
Speaker 1: Mikio may have been expected to work from home on
Speaker 1: the holiday, but not necessarily go into the office, not
Speaker 1: explicitly expected, but that stated that he should be working.
Speaker 1: But he should be working. Thing, I have a job
Speaker 1: like that too. Okay, what else did he do? Well?
Speaker 1: He ransacked their house. He went through he found family
Speaker 1: documents like bank statements and credit cards and driver's license
Speaker 1: and other things like that. He cut up some of
Speaker 1: the documents and by the way, there was no evidence
Speaker 1: that they find any evidence that anything was missing, any
Speaker 1: of the documents taken, not explicitly. No, nobody has said,
Speaker 1: oh the blah blah blah was gone. But it does
Speaker 1: appear that he cut up some of this documentation because
Speaker 1: that in the card, the credit cards and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: They're all found in the bathtub, which is weird. Sam's
Speaker 1: water by the way, there's no water. It's not like
Speaker 1: there's fingerprints all over there. Yeah, so there's fingerprints and
Speaker 1: probably d n A because he was bleeding all over
Speaker 1: all this stuff just sitting in the bathtub, of which
Speaker 1: is freaking weird. Let's see what else. Oh well, just
Speaker 1: you know, understandably, so all of this exertion, it takes
Speaker 1: its toll on our killer and he decides to take
Speaker 1: a nice nap on the family's couch for a while.
Speaker 1: Was that because they could tell because he was bleeding.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing that it's it had to be part of it.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing that the couch may have been in a
Speaker 1: bit of a disarray. I'm not positive how they figured
Speaker 1: that out. It Yeah, eventually nature would call uh and
Speaker 1: our killer would decide that it was time to take
Speaker 1: a poop, and he would not bother to flush the poop.
Speaker 1: I don't know. That's funny to me. He left the
Speaker 1: pooper emoji? Did he leave love toilet paper in there too?
Speaker 1: Doesn't The toilet paper quantity usage is not explicitly stated,
Speaker 1: so we do not know if he's a four or
Speaker 1: an eight sheet kind of guy. I know, but so well,
Speaker 1: you know, you're you're a guy, you know, you know
Speaker 1: occasionally go into public restrooms and some guy will have
Speaker 1: come before before you and left the big Please tell
Speaker 1: me you're not going to get too explicit here, but
Speaker 1: some guy will drop a deucee and just leave it
Speaker 1: right because he's so proud of the mad pooper. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What's always amazing to me is there no toilet paper?
Speaker 1: They eat the dude with no toilet paper because they,
Speaker 1: you know, a mudd. I don't know what. I don't
Speaker 1: know if they if they stand up and sort of
Speaker 1: waddle over the next doll real carefully and they clean
Speaker 1: up the mess there. But you know what I'm talking about, right,
Speaker 1: you see it? Right? Sad to say, that's what I've
Speaker 1: always wondered about. It's like, dude, where's the toilet paper?
Speaker 1: But yes, that's why I'm asking this question. So we're
Speaker 1: not only did he also maybe he leaves some clothes
Speaker 1: or some fake please yeah, ok, some of those stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he God, there's still more stuff that he leaves behind,
Speaker 1: other than at some point in the evening, our killer
Speaker 1: decides that it is shot, time for a change of wardrobe,
Speaker 1: so he changes his clothes. Because what we know this
Speaker 1: because there's a set of clothes left behind in the home.
Speaker 1: So they mean they miss presume he took some of
Speaker 1: the father's close Well, we don't know if he took
Speaker 1: some Amikio's clothes or if he brought a change of
Speaker 1: clothes with him for his killer sleepover. Again. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: you wouldn't be able to telefy. Yeah, so that did
Speaker 1: anybody know? Did they do an inventory of the clothes
Speaker 1: that were in the house. There's nothing definitively took dad's
Speaker 1: pants and sweatshirt. Realistically, even like Boof, who like sees
Speaker 1: my clothes every dang day, the entire world probably wouldn't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't even probably know. Actually maybe it depends on
Speaker 1: what it was. But there's some of my clothes where
Speaker 1: I I would just like wouldn't even know. I think
Speaker 1: that maybe they've just been disintegrated or something. So here's
Speaker 1: sub bullet time. We're going to go through the list,
Speaker 1: a partial list of the clothes that were left behind.
Speaker 1: There's there's more to it, but it becomes just at
Speaker 1: nausea at some point here. So they're a pair of
Speaker 1: sneakers which were Slaszinger brand. They were sized in Korean.
Speaker 1: So remember when you buy shoes, they typically have a
Speaker 1: primary country sizing on them, whether it be US or
Speaker 1: European or whatever. These ones were in Korean. Okay. A
Speaker 1: dark green hip bag was found. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: a Fannie pack, but apparently they call it a cooler
Speaker 1: bag than a Fannie pack, which I don't didn't know
Speaker 1: that was possible. Your hip not your Fannie. Take that
Speaker 1: as you will, U K listeners. Okay, A black handkerchief
Speaker 1: was found, a hat was left behind, a scarf, a
Speaker 1: down jacket, and a pair of winter gloves. It was December,
Speaker 1: so that all makes sense. Yeah, yeah, And and there's
Speaker 1: a lot that's been put into not only all of
Speaker 1: those actions that we just talked about, but also the
Speaker 1: clothing that was left behind and what the meaning of
Speaker 1: all of that was. And and we'll get into some
Speaker 1: of that actually we get into it in theories from one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but we need to finish our timeline here because we
Speaker 1: still haven't finished this story, believe it or not. So
Speaker 1: at some point in the morning, our killer decides that
Speaker 1: it's time to leave the home, and so he takes off.
Speaker 1: We don't know exactly when. What we do know is
Speaker 1: that Dijazco's mother tries to call she can't get through
Speaker 1: the phone is literally just not working, which is weird.
Speaker 1: She then goes over to the house herself. We don't
Speaker 1: know if when she got there she if the door
Speaker 1: was locked or not. This is a weird thing to
Speaker 1: us as Westerners, but in Japan, apparently it's not totally
Speaker 1: uncommon for people just to not bother to lock their doors,
Speaker 1: because it really is kind of that's safe of a
Speaker 1: country most of the time. So either the door was
Speaker 1: locked and she went back to her home and got
Speaker 1: the key and came back over, or the door was
Speaker 1: unlocked and so she just went right on in. But
Speaker 1: she goes in the house, she finds Mikio's body on
Speaker 1: the first floor. She then goes up the stairs and
Speaker 1: she finds both Yasco and Nina's bodies on the landing
Speaker 1: at the top of the stairs. Um it appears that
Speaker 1: at the bottom of the ladder, right, Yeah, yeah, toss
Speaker 1: of the stairs and bottom letters damning the same thing. Yeah, absolutely, Um,
Speaker 1: she was not one of those people who screamed and
Speaker 1: ran away and said. She was one of those people
Speaker 1: who jumped in the middle and tried to see for
Speaker 1: is her daughter and granddaughter alive? Um, So she ended up,
Speaker 1: you know, having a lot of blood on her as well.
Speaker 1: But they do, they call the cops, The police come
Speaker 1: and they investigate the crime. By the way, I know
Speaker 1: that we talked about this offline, Joe, is that in
Speaker 1: the beginning I had said, was it Tanner? Eleven hours?
Speaker 1: Is how long our killer stayed? We don't exactly know.
Speaker 1: And and this guy could have if the door was locked,
Speaker 1: he could have heard yas because mother trying the knob
Speaker 1: and you know, did an os moment and said, I
Speaker 1: got to get out of here to back way. Well,
Speaker 1: and he might have gone out the second story window again,
Speaker 1: which is weird. Or he might have just bolted out
Speaker 1: of the front door, you know, and chanced it, or
Speaker 1: he might have left just minutes before over. Yeah. Well, frankly,
Speaker 1: given that we don't know how thin those walls were.
Speaker 1: I mean, I would assume they were thick enough that
Speaker 1: there was they couldn't hear like streaming or whatever. But
Speaker 1: if you're just a single dude kind of like puts
Speaker 1: ent around the house and you hear a conversation happening
Speaker 1: through the wall where you hear somebody go, oh, that's weird.
Speaker 1: They're not answering. Okay, I'm gonna go next door to see.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can hear. It's possible, like having lived
Speaker 1: in places that have shared walls, you can sometimes hear
Speaker 1: those things. It's also possible that he just heard I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go, I'm gonna go next door and see what's
Speaker 1: he sounds of life. He realized people were getting up
Speaker 1: next door, and I was I was going to say,
Speaker 1: the other exterior door for the other part of the
Speaker 1: dwelling open and closed, and we're like, oh, hell, just
Speaker 1: like Joe saying people are up and about. But he
Speaker 1: hears it because it's the front door slam and that
Speaker 1: startles him out of his new you know, comfy little nests.
Speaker 1: Also not impossible that the killer was in the house
Speaker 1: when the mom was in the house. That's highly highly doubtful. No,
Speaker 1: it's not impossible. I mean it's doubtful, but it couldn't impossible.
Speaker 1: But I highly doubt it. It's possible, like that third floor, right,
Speaker 1: it's unlikely that the family went up to the third
Speaker 1: floor because all the family was dead on the second floor.
Speaker 1: So it's possible. Okay, it's unlikely, granted, but it's possible
Speaker 1: that that person was like, oh crap, that door is opening,
Speaker 1: I can't get out the back anymore for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna go up here so hidden, you know,
Speaker 1: around a corner, and she went by and went up
Speaker 1: the stairs and he slipped out. Yeah. I mean there's
Speaker 1: a lot of ways. There's a million ways, and this
Speaker 1: is a James Bond movie in the making. I do suspect.
Speaker 1: I think I think the door must have been locked, though,
Speaker 1: because if assuming a killer has any common sense at all,
Speaker 1: he's gonna lock the door, if he's gonna hang out
Speaker 1: there and taking nap would hell yeah, you don't. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: There's there's a whole bunch of ways. But it could
Speaker 1: have happened. Okay. So the police come to the home
Speaker 1: and they investigate, and as I said before, they recovered
Speaker 1: tons and tons and tons of evidence. Unfortunately, none of
Speaker 1: them led them to any firm suspects, and to this
Speaker 1: day the case is unsolved. This is one of the
Speaker 1: things that I find as an outside oddity about this story.
Speaker 1: There's always outside oddities with the stories I find for
Speaker 1: some reason, and I don't search this out. But on
Speaker 1: the after the investigation was done and the investigators left,
Speaker 1: they posted a police guard in front of the door
Speaker 1: of the house. Seventeen years later, there there is still
Speaker 1: a Japanese police officer standing in the entry way of
Speaker 1: this home. They have cordoned off the exterior of the
Speaker 1: home with that tall blue netting so that nobody can
Speaker 1: break in from the backside. All the other homes that
Speaker 1: were right next to it, because like I said, there
Speaker 1: was four of them in a row. Those other three
Speaker 1: homes are gone. This home is still there, and I
Speaker 1: find it so weird that after all this time, it's
Speaker 1: still there, like they as a crime scene. I would
Speaker 1: agree with that, I would Why the hell else, why
Speaker 1: do you want to build your park keep it around
Speaker 1: for all that time? It must dave. It must be
Speaker 1: because it's a crime scene. And in the case maybe
Speaker 1: they signature yeah, yeah, it's an active crime scene technically, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, they have not solved this murder, and yes,
Speaker 1: they've collected DNA and fingerprint evidence from this place. But
Speaker 1: I don't know the Japanese system well enough to know
Speaker 1: if it would behoove them to keep that crime scene
Speaker 1: uncontaminated for as long as they possibly can. It says
Speaker 1: it's in the middle of the park, they can, right.
Speaker 1: It's not as though somebody's like, oh, I got to
Speaker 1: move into that apartment tomorrow. Yeah, exactly, it's it's a
Speaker 1: safe crime scene to just keep. Well, it's ironic that,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean one of the motives, one of
Speaker 1: the ones has been proposed, is that somebody wanted them
Speaker 1: out of there because they wanted to develop that point
Speaker 1: and it would be isn't that ironic? Yeah, it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's a crime scene now, it's not going to get demo.
Speaker 1: Probably maybe shouldn't have murdered. That's not the first time
Speaker 1: we've come across that as a theory. That would it
Speaker 1: the backfire motive. We've seen that before and I can't
Speaker 1: remember what case, but at least one other we've seen that.
Speaker 1: We've only done two hundred and twenty of them. Now,
Speaker 1: it could have been it could have been the opposite, though,
Speaker 1: the opposite of the people who wanted to develop a
Speaker 1: new park. It could have been somebody who wanted for
Speaker 1: whatever reason, just pure spite. Maybe it's despite the people
Speaker 1: who really, really really had a huge thing for having
Speaker 1: a park there, to the point where they demoed the
Speaker 1: entire neighborhood but a couple of houses. And if you
Speaker 1: have that must spite in you to go murder the
Speaker 1: entire family, turning the house into a crime scene, therefore
Speaker 1: stopping the house from being removed, and sticking a finger
Speaker 1: in the eye of whoever you don't like that wanted
Speaker 1: it there to be a park there. You know what?
Speaker 1: That sounds like a theory? It does it? Does? You know?
Speaker 1: You know what I'm getting ahead of it. I was
Speaker 1: I was waiting for you to run out of wind,
Speaker 1: and you have amazing lungs, so I couldn't do it.
Speaker 1: All right, that is all of our story, So it
Speaker 1: is totally totally Finally, after this whole poor thing, finally
Speaker 1: time to get into theories. But before we do that,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break. Hey, gang, this episode of
Speaker 1: Thinking Sideways is brought to you by Universal Pictures, which
Speaker 1: has a new movie coming out called The Snowman, which
Speaker 1: has theaters on a The movie is based on the
Speaker 1: book by Joe Nasbo and it's about a psycho killer
Speaker 1: who murders his victims during the first snowfall of every winter.
Speaker 1: Who The Snowman stars Michael foss Bender, who you might
Speaker 1: remember from Alien Covenant, where he played a robot. Actually
Speaker 1: played two robots, but he has is His role in
Speaker 1: this one is Detective Harry Hole. When Harry investigates a
Speaker 1: disappearance on the first snow of winter, he begins to
Speaker 1: suspect a connection to a string of old cold cases.
Speaker 1: He realizes that he has only until the next snowfall
Speaker 1: to catch the killer. In other words, just sounds like
Speaker 1: it's right down our alley. Murder mayhemm and history. Snow
Speaker 1: Man is about a cat and mass game between a
Speaker 1: killer and a detective. I haven't seen it yet, but
Speaker 1: I have seen the trailers. It looks actually pretty good.
Speaker 1: It opens again October, and I don't know about you,
Speaker 1: what I do plan to see it, so maybe I'll
Speaker 1: see you there and you will get extra points if
Speaker 1: you wear your Frosty the Snowman suit. The Snowman again
Speaker 1: in theaters October and We're back. The first theory is
Speaker 1: kind of it's really unsatisfying because the first theory is
Speaker 1: that this was just a random killer, and it's a
Speaker 1: random killing some m So the way this theory goes
Speaker 1: is that this creep a zoid picked this family out
Speaker 1: to brutally murder for no other reason than he saw them,
Speaker 1: and he decided to start stalking them and then eventually
Speaker 1: would commit the crime. There is a little bit of
Speaker 1: back history that potentially supports this. Part of that is
Speaker 1: that Yasco apparently said to her father in law on
Speaker 1: the twenty December that for several days in a row
Speaker 1: somebody had been parked in front of their house. And
Speaker 1: that's weird because in this park area there's a lot
Speaker 1: of parking, so there's no real reason to park in
Speaker 1: front of their house. So people say, well, obviously that
Speaker 1: was the killer parking and staking them out in scoping
Speaker 1: the place out. It could have also been somebody who
Speaker 1: just decided that was where they like to park their car,
Speaker 1: but it is weird. On the December, someone was reported
Speaker 1: to have been seen wandering around this home and the
Speaker 1: other homes near it, I will say, well, that guy
Speaker 1: was described as being in his four season. By the way,
Speaker 1: the ages on people who are described in the theory
Speaker 1: set and both this one, all of our theories they
Speaker 1: bounced between twenty and forty, just so you're warned and
Speaker 1: don't get thrown off by that. But this particular person
Speaker 1: was described as walking around the house, being a forty
Speaker 1: year old man, so wandering around the side of the house,
Speaker 1: not the inside. Correct. Correct. And I will tell you
Speaker 1: that I find this rather innocent because of the fact
Speaker 1: that a it's a public park space at this point,
Speaker 1: and to be it is entirely possible that it's somebody
Speaker 1: who's involved with the conversion process from residential homes to
Speaker 1: park space assessing the space and oh what's going here?
Speaker 1: What's that? I mean, it could be people just looking
Speaker 1: at it. So a guy wandering around, just isn't that
Speaker 1: out of the organ or somebody lost? Yeah, very true.
Speaker 1: The closest road. Yeah, I'm sorry, it's not to think
Speaker 1: about it. This is evidence in any one of the theories,
Speaker 1: or kind of is. But I'm throwing it all on
Speaker 1: the random killer because well it's just random information. So
Speaker 1: that worked weird. The day before the killings, a man
Speaker 1: is said to have been seen wearing the same outfit
Speaker 1: as the one that was seen in the home. This
Speaker 1: guy is supposedly spotted at Sajoe cagu in My station,
Speaker 1: which is about a mile or so away from the home.
Speaker 1: I believe that's the southern station. There's more than one
Speaker 1: train station about a mile or so away from the house.
Speaker 1: Talking about train station, yes, so this that is the
Speaker 1: train station. There's one south and one north. But reportedly
Speaker 1: people noticed this guy and remembered his outfit because it
Speaker 1: wasn't appropriate for the weather and the bag was so unique,
Speaker 1: So that's why people figured it out, were just misremembering
Speaker 1: possibly or that was like a popular fashion at the time,
Speaker 1: the sort of kind of for a certain ilk, which
Speaker 1: we will discuss soon. Oh by the way, also on
Speaker 1: this particular day, someone had purchased sashimi knife in the
Speaker 1: area around the station. They did find record of a
Speaker 1: sale of sashimi knife, so well, so we don't know
Speaker 1: it wasn't the family, that's true. Are they Are they popular? Yes?
Speaker 1: In Japan? Not not too surprising. Then let's see what
Speaker 1: else is there. There's also reporting that someone presumably someone
Speaker 1: walking in the park By the way, this is at night,
Speaker 1: on the night of the murders. Saw another person heading
Speaker 1: quickly down the path in the direction of the family's house.
Speaker 1: I'll be honest, I think that's a bit of a
Speaker 1: red herring. I think that's an easy I stitched this
Speaker 1: on because the Mayasawa's were killed, and that's just kind
Speaker 1: of probably a junk state. Yeah. Similarly, like I see
Speaker 1: people walking around Joe's house all the time and I
Speaker 1: never see them again. But I don't say that that's
Speaker 1: because Joe killed them. Did you I don't remember, Okay, blackouts,
Speaker 1: I don't know, did it. Yeah, So that's the random
Speaker 1: killer theory, which I don't know. It's bad, I think,
Speaker 1: But frankly, none of these I was about to say,
Speaker 1: you know, all of these theories have giant, gaping holes
Speaker 1: in them. Yeah. The random killer one kind of does
Speaker 1: fit the least. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's got a
Speaker 1: big enough hole somebody could skate right through it. There.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about there be said, there are things about
Speaker 1: this murder that suggests that whoever it was, it did it.
Speaker 1: Whatever the motive, they had a motive, it wasn't just randomness.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about that in a minute. Yeah, So let's
Speaker 1: let's talk about theory number two, which is the skater
Speaker 1: punk theory. So if you remember we talked about the
Speaker 1: fact that the house is low catered in a park,
Speaker 1: and when you do the reading, you will see people
Speaker 1: talk about the fact or you will see it in
Speaker 1: the reporting that there is a skate park right adjacent
Speaker 1: to the home. Well, that's the thing is that people
Speaker 1: always say it was right behind her, right next to
Speaker 1: the house, which is not actually true because there's the
Speaker 1: driveway that intersects the main road, which is about a
Speaker 1: hundred feet or hundred twenty feet maybe a hundred meters
Speaker 1: away from the house, and then the skate park is
Speaker 1: on the other side of the street. And by the way,
Speaker 1: this is the famous looking skate parket. They're definitely not
Speaker 1: featured in Tony Hawk Pro Skater Team. No, because there's
Speaker 1: there's a couple of concrete berms that go up, two
Speaker 1: of them, one, you know, up and down, up and down.
Speaker 1: Then there's a small half pipe and an even smaller
Speaker 1: quarter pipe, and then a big plasa space. It's very plain,
Speaker 1: it's very benign. It's there's nothing that says to me,
Speaker 1: skater die, Like nothing like that in that space. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: But people make a lot out of it because of
Speaker 1: the fact that a few days before the killing, Mikio
Speaker 1: was seen. He's apparently, according to different theories, he was
Speaker 1: seen arguing with different people, but Mikio was seen arguing
Speaker 1: with a skater. Surprise, nobody ever fights with skater teenagers. Ever.
Speaker 1: They are the most agreeable bunch of all of the humans. Actually,
Speaker 1: I kind of get the feeling that these Japanese skaters
Speaker 1: probably are a very tame and nice bunch. It doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like they're actual skater punks. But but even skater punks, like,
Speaker 1: they're not going to go break into somebody's house and
Speaker 1: murder on people's Unlike, yeah, they will keep your car
Speaker 1: that they might like, you know, three sixty heny grind
Speaker 1: onto your yea, you were trying, you were really trying.
Speaker 1: Well done. Um. But the fact that people saw or
Speaker 1: say they saw Mikio arguing with a skater, combined with
Speaker 1: the clothing that was found in the house discarded, which
Speaker 1: people say is skater garb or something that you know
Speaker 1: at the time was in fashion with skaters, would lead
Speaker 1: them to say, well it had to be it. Okay,
Speaker 1: so let's talk a little bit about the clothing that
Speaker 1: was found in why this kind of the textiles, Yes,
Speaker 1: the text tiles. Okay, So there was that down style jacket, um,
Speaker 1: which was an air Tech brand jacket, and it apparently
Speaker 1: had both sweat and blood in it. That blood type
Speaker 1: was a but that didn't DNA linked. The DNA from
Speaker 1: that didn't link to anybody, didn't link to the killer's
Speaker 1: blood left behind in the house even you know, I
Speaker 1: actually haven't seen that the two were connected. It may
Speaker 1: have been, and it's just not reported that way. Again,
Speaker 1: this is one of those issues with translations, so I
Speaker 1: don't know for sure. Might have nobody connected it was
Speaker 1: a victim or or in the system. I just met
Speaker 1: that bought it a second hand store and already had
Speaker 1: a little bood on it. Yeah. Maybe. Uh that there
Speaker 1: was a hat left behind, which was a crusher hat,
Speaker 1: which is I always described this as remember Gilligan's Island
Speaker 1: and Gilligan had that silly sailor hat with the with
Speaker 1: the the edges that folds up folded down. Well, it
Speaker 1: was that made out of fuzzy material. You see rappers
Speaker 1: wearing them. Um, was it? What there was? Was it
Speaker 1: I remember L L. Cool J back in the day
Speaker 1: rocking one of these. Don't You're right, I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't know who LLL cool J is. I all his
Speaker 1: name on the internet and I used it. Yes, I do.
Speaker 1: Was a cigarette. Um. But okay. The other things that
Speaker 1: were found is there was a shirt and it was
Speaker 1: a it was T shirt, cotton fabric, but it was
Speaker 1: white across the chest. And then the arms, the long
Speaker 1: sleeve arms were made out of there was purple. Only
Speaker 1: a hundred and thirty of those shirts were apparently sold
Speaker 1: by a local shop in Marafuru, which is very close by. Um,
Speaker 1: so it seems like there's not a whole lot of
Speaker 1: them sold. And then the shoes that were sold, um,
Speaker 1: which I don't. I gave you the brand earlier and
Speaker 1: I've lost it. Slazenger, I believe it was, but they
Speaker 1: were apparently favored by skaters. Again they were the sizing
Speaker 1: was in Korean and it was a size eight. Oh
Speaker 1: my god, no, it doesn't work like that, career. Um.
Speaker 1: There there are quite a few weird things in the
Speaker 1: clothing though, that are also found. I said that there
Speaker 1: was a black handkerchief was that was found that had
Speaker 1: cologne on it, which was the car help me hear
Speaker 1: devndcar nor is that right? No, thank you, I've been
Speaker 1: saying all kinds of words, right, so the simplest ones
Speaker 1: I have to fly Okay, let drek our noiyard by
Speaker 1: Guy Laroche and so okay. This is the other weird
Speaker 1: thing about about the handkerchief is that it had recently
Speaker 1: been ironed, which leads people to think that this was
Speaker 1: a skater who still lives at home and his mom
Speaker 1: irons everything for him. I don't know, I feel like
Speaker 1: there's like a very I think it's dumb. Japan. Is
Speaker 1: this really amazing place for street fact s? Like crazy amazing?
Speaker 1: And I would say that there is um a real
Speaker 1: pride within certain groups of people in your appearance to
Speaker 1: a Hollywood level, Like they're definitely certain subcultures in the
Speaker 1: fashion of street fashion fashion street. Yeah, whatever's the matter
Speaker 1: that Like the dudes like I think we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about like the dudes who dress like Elvis, like
Speaker 1: and and their pompadours are so giant, and they like
Speaker 1: there's a there's a very meticulous they're like they're oh
Speaker 1: my god. There are some amazing documentaries on Netflix and YouTube.
Speaker 1: About the women who take part in this and the
Speaker 1: men also take so deep part in this that like,
Speaker 1: it doesn't really surprise me, that is, with your own
Speaker 1: fashion and appearance, particularly in the tiny the tiny excess
Speaker 1: reason that you know, we would think like well, like, okay,
Speaker 1: maybe he looked with his parents or whatever, but like
Speaker 1: a guy who was into this kind of subculture, that's
Speaker 1: that's not crazy to me that he would iron his
Speaker 1: especially he might have even ironed it so it looked wrinkled. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, because that was the style. It's crazy. There's
Speaker 1: a crazy amount of thought and time that goes into
Speaker 1: a lot of these subcultures. And that's true with things
Speaker 1: even like skaters, where you would think, well, it's just
Speaker 1: like form over or function over form, but no, there's
Speaker 1: just like it's just it's crazy over. It might have
Speaker 1: also been just iron so it wouldn't I take up
Speaker 1: a much space in your pocket too, But well, but
Speaker 1: it's it's weird that it had the clone on it,
Speaker 1: because that's isn't super popular through most of Japan, which
Speaker 1: is also an oddity about it. There's some other things, Okay,
Speaker 1: so there was the hip bag a k a. The
Speaker 1: Cool Fanny Path, back. Uh, And it was as I
Speaker 1: said before, it was nicer than your average kind of
Speaker 1: bag like that. But the really strange thing about the
Speaker 1: bag is what was found inside of it, which was
Speaker 1: some sand, specifically sand that they traced to be I'm
Speaker 1: guessing they must have done it by the mineral counts
Speaker 1: and stuff. We talked about this in what was Princess do.
Speaker 1: Princess Doe was the last one we talked about this,
Speaker 1: but they traced it and they said it came from
Speaker 1: California and more specifically in the area around Edwards Air
Speaker 1: Force Base in California, which is just craziness. It was
Speaker 1: just like some it was like what a handful of
Speaker 1: sand like I don't think it was even a yeah,
Speaker 1: just a you know, a couple dozen grains or something
Speaker 1: like that. I mean, those guys are nothing that gets
Speaker 1: into the seams and it will just never come out,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, I think about your shoes when
Speaker 1: you go to the beach and just never everybody ever
Speaker 1: imports sad and like for aquariums or for god knows what.
Speaker 1: And so I'm gonna have you hold onto that bear
Speaker 1: with me here because I've dropped to cliffhangers on people.
Speaker 1: One is the sand two is the Korean shoes sizing.
Speaker 1: And because I'm a jerk and I like a good cliffhanger,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna make people wait and we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about that later. Instead, we're gonna go to a completely
Speaker 1: unrelated theory. Yeah, let's go to the third theory. Theory
Speaker 1: number three. Well, this is actually very similar to theory
Speaker 1: number two. This is the biker gang theory. Basically, the
Speaker 1: only difference here is that instead of having fought with
Speaker 1: a skater, Mikia was actually seen outside fighting with a
Speaker 1: local biker. And the bike gangs in the area are
Speaker 1: are called bozozoku. I believe it's how you're pronounced. Listen,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm really trying on this. Japanese is not my language,
Speaker 1: so thank you for everybody and helped us with that.
Speaker 1: But they're the biker gang. So they're the ones we're
Speaker 1: just talking about with the leather jackets, because they got
Speaker 1: these crazy leather jackets, the giant pompadoors, and they're they're
Speaker 1: generally a nuisance. Actually, I was reading a really interesting
Speaker 1: article on Gelopnik about the fact that this culture is
Speaker 1: getting the biker culture is actually waning. As the Japanese
Speaker 1: economy is waning. Because the bikes are expensive, a bunch
Speaker 1: of them are out riding scooters. But even then, modifications
Speaker 1: are not cheap. The jackets aren't cheap. The embroidery on
Speaker 1: those jackets is super expensive. Like you got to have
Speaker 1: are insane. You gonna have a lot of money to
Speaker 1: be a bear do well, and nobody could afford to
Speaker 1: be this level of ne'er do well. But but basically
Speaker 1: the whole theory is that instead of a skater, he
Speaker 1: fought with a biker, and he offended that biker, and
Speaker 1: so this pompadour came in the house and killed the
Speaker 1: entire family. I do I do feel something we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about. I do feel um that my understanding
Speaker 1: of these different gangs because they have I have spent
Speaker 1: no I I you know, going through costume scions, like
Speaker 1: my fascination with Japan in general, I have spent a
Speaker 1: fair amount of time researching the different street fashions of
Speaker 1: Japan and the kind of culture that comes around it.
Speaker 1: And I do feel like that culture around these kind
Speaker 1: of biker gangs is more aggressive. Not to say I
Speaker 1: don't believe that they committed this crime, but I do
Speaker 1: kind of editorially feel like they are more likely than
Speaker 1: the Skeeter Gangs. Well, the way that I got the
Speaker 1: impression was is that they like to make a nuisance
Speaker 1: of themselves and generally rebel, but that rebelling doesn't appear
Speaker 1: to escalate to the level of any kind of major cry.
Speaker 1: They're more revel without a cause and more clue right.
Speaker 1: But I don't again, I don't believe that, like, certainly
Speaker 1: not premeditated. If this happened on their part, well, that
Speaker 1: was the was the park to hang out for these guys,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't think. I don't think so Joe
Speaker 1: really heard. I've read a lot about this story, and
Speaker 1: I've never heard that, you know, I mean, at least
Speaker 1: the skaters they did hang out nearby, they had reason
Speaker 1: to the bikers. I had never heard any of any
Speaker 1: evidence that the actual I really, like many stories, I
Speaker 1: feel like this was kind of just shoved in as
Speaker 1: a theory at some point by somebody, and it's been
Speaker 1: picked up in a number of places. That's really I
Speaker 1: don't think there's much to it, but which means we
Speaker 1: should probably move to the next theory, which is the Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the Yakuza. So anybody who doesn't know the Yakuza
Speaker 1: is the Japanese mob. So the theory goes that this
Speaker 1: family was possibly killed because it was a hit, maybe
Speaker 1: because Mikio either angered the wrong people, or maybe he
Speaker 1: owed the wrong people and he wasn't paying up well,
Speaker 1: because it's usually the man in the family that gets
Speaker 1: the family in trouble because us men are dumb. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but he wasn't the one who was the most brutalized. True.
Speaker 1: But but the point being, somebody in the family owed
Speaker 1: the yakuza, if if it's an o reason, unless it
Speaker 1: was a hit reason for some reason outside of that.
Speaker 1: But I know, I know. But but the point is
Speaker 1: that the yakuza hires somebody and then unbeknownst to them,
Speaker 1: the guy they hired decides to hang out and just
Speaker 1: make it a super creepy weird thing because well that's
Speaker 1: just what he decided to do. I mean, I know
Speaker 1: you're going to talk about this a little bit, but
Speaker 1: if he was an outsider that was hired, maybe they
Speaker 1: didn't get him a hotel room. I mean, like you're laughing,
Speaker 1: but we didn't. He didn't for my room aboard. Fine,
Speaker 1: I'm staying in there. He just didn't have a place
Speaker 1: to go or things to do before his flight left,
Speaker 1: or maybe he was smuggling him out of the country happening,
Speaker 1: you know, like maybe somebody was maybe he had a ride,
Speaker 1: you know, the ride just said the other guy with
Speaker 1: d his ride just said, I'll swing by and pick
Speaker 1: you up at this hour, like nine am. And you said,
Speaker 1: you've got that entire window to get the job done.
Speaker 1: That's that's surveilled the house. Sneak into the house, kill
Speaker 1: them all, get the whole thing done, and I'll pick
Speaker 1: you up in this corner, you know, someplace at nine am.
Speaker 1: And so the guys just like, oh, you know, I
Speaker 1: guess some time to kill And it actually makes a
Speaker 1: lot more sense to stay here rather than go out,
Speaker 1: like you know, two in the morning and hang out
Speaker 1: of the streets all night by myself. Makes a ton
Speaker 1: of sense. So let's let's talk about a bunch of
Speaker 1: stuff that's in here that people really like. For the
Speaker 1: yakuza hit theory, We'll start with the Korean angle, because
Speaker 1: that's what I brought up with the shoe being in
Speaker 1: the listed in a Korean size wa and then there's
Speaker 1: some details that I haven't shared so far about the
Speaker 1: poop emoji. Uh So, investigators figured out that, first off,
Speaker 1: the poop contained several things Aside from DNA, it contained
Speaker 1: the remains of a meal, and that meal was a
Speaker 1: green bean dish with sesame dressing, which is kind of
Speaker 1: a traditional meal, so that it's a vegetarian meal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it had it wasn't anything that would have had any
Speaker 1: It didn't have any meat in it. There was no
Speaker 1: meat found or you know, cast off of meat in
Speaker 1: the poop, so they said, well, he must have been
Speaker 1: a vegetarian. They they also found through testing the genetic
Speaker 1: makeup of our killer, the killer was not of pure
Speaker 1: Japanese descent or origin. Instead, the killer's father was probably
Speaker 1: Chinese or Korean, while the killer's mother was, according to
Speaker 1: their analysis, most likely Southern European. And they're saying that
Speaker 1: she was possibly either from either the Mediterranean or the
Speaker 1: Adriatic Sea area. So that's that's pretty detailed. So were
Speaker 1: they able to tell anything else about the besides that?
Speaker 1: That's really all that I've ever found in the released information.
Speaker 1: So ethnic heritage, that's about it. Yeah, it's the ethnic heritage,
Speaker 1: and some people make a lot out of that, because
Speaker 1: in the Japanese culture, if you are not Japanese there,
Speaker 1: just like any culture, if you're not of true, pure heritage,
Speaker 1: then there there can be some um racism. That's the
Speaker 1: word I'm gonna use, because that's what it is. And
Speaker 1: there are people who can never rise above a certain
Speaker 1: station because of their herit. And so that's why people
Speaker 1: see this and look at this, and you'll see on
Speaker 1: the internet it breaks down how many you know, how
Speaker 1: many and how many Japanese versus Chinese versus Korean could
Speaker 1: have this. But the point is it's a mixed background.
Speaker 1: I don't know if there's a whole lot of it.
Speaker 1: But this this then goes ahead in the theory to
Speaker 1: say that, well, probably this guy wasn't from the area
Speaker 1: if he was of this mixed background, and that the
Speaker 1: idea would be that the yakuza brought him in. They
Speaker 1: brought him in from somewhere else. You've got to you know,
Speaker 1: when you go through a border, you got to go
Speaker 1: through customs and all of that, and you gotta have
Speaker 1: your paperwork in order. But it is entirely possible to
Speaker 1: smuggle people, and it happens in every country in the world,
Speaker 1: and if you're the mob, you're probably pretty good at
Speaker 1: smuggling people in. So that But again, though there's no
Speaker 1: there's not any hard evidence this person didn't live the
Speaker 1: next block over, nor is there any motive on DNA
Speaker 1: based on No, there's nothing to this person lives in
Speaker 1: country or has never been in country. But that's the
Speaker 1: This theory says that this person was brought into the
Speaker 1: country for this deed based on what the contents of
Speaker 1: the poop left in the toilet, of the DNA that
Speaker 1: was extracted from the poop em. Yes, the DNA, not
Speaker 1: the contents as in vegetable matter. Well, I mean, like frankly,
Speaker 1: I'm not a vegetarian, but i've there's like aug weeks
Speaker 1: sometimes months at a time without eating meat. Not I
Speaker 1: mean just because I don't you know, it's not like
Speaker 1: a conscious thing one way or another. Sometimes it doesn't
Speaker 1: sound good, sometimes it does sound good. So it's not
Speaker 1: I don't think because if you you've had one BM
Speaker 1: that doesn't have planner, No, no, no, I don't think
Speaker 1: that's true. I kind of suspect that the killer didn't
Speaker 1: flush because the killer wanted it to be found. More good,
Speaker 1: because because the killer probably was like, say American. So
Speaker 1: you know, if they analyzed one of his regular um
Speaker 1: what's the word. I'm thinking if they analyze one of
Speaker 1: the they would have found typical American. It would have
Speaker 1: been hamburgers and French fries and so one of the yeah,
Speaker 1: they're not a little I'd say Red Harry, but Morebert
Speaker 1: Brown Herring and uh and uh. And so he ate
Speaker 1: nothing but vegetables for like a week before and that
Speaker 1: might be the reason that he actually hung out in
Speaker 1: the house. That might be the you guys, you guys
Speaker 1: have gone far afield. Let me do this for a second.
Speaker 1: So I mean, we're thinking about reasons why he could
Speaker 1: possibly stayed now so long. It might be if the
Speaker 1: guy really really wanted to leave that little calling card
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, that was what Captain sticking around because
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, not quite ready yet. I'll eat some
Speaker 1: more ice cream, I'll drink some more tea. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then finally it happens and then bam, okay, I can
Speaker 1: go the end. Literally. I mean, I don't think the
Speaker 1: yakuza is a good because I think he accused is
Speaker 1: usually cleaner. But I also don't see any motive. I
Speaker 1: also don't see the Tucusa. Would they take out an
Speaker 1: entire family like that or just take out Usually they
Speaker 1: would just like cut off the arm of the person
Speaker 1: who wronged them. I will be honest that I don't.
Speaker 1: I haven't done enough reading on the yakuza to even
Speaker 1: know what they would do. But basically, let me just
Speaker 1: let me just cinch up the tail end of this
Speaker 1: particular theory. It's saying that this guy was so flagrant
Speaker 1: in leaving fingerprints and DNA around because he knew that
Speaker 1: he was not going to be in the Japanese system,
Speaker 1: and so there was no way that they were going
Speaker 1: to pin him down. And then he would just go
Speaker 1: to his his new employer and they would ship him
Speaker 1: home and he was scott free. I mean, that's that's
Speaker 1: the way the theory goes. I will agree, it's there's
Speaker 1: again just like the other ones are giant holes in
Speaker 1: that idea. And I really don't, as Devon said, it
Speaker 1: don't really see why the accusa would go to that
Speaker 1: length because from what we can tell, this family had
Speaker 1: nothing that would have drawn that kind of ire to
Speaker 1: get them all wiped out. I will tell you, and
Speaker 1: these things, these next bits that I'm going to give you.
Speaker 1: I think they're I really think that they're just kind
Speaker 1: of wild cards here, and I don't think they're they're
Speaker 1: actually connected. But on the early morning hours of the
Speaker 1: thirty one December, so this is the morning. You know,
Speaker 1: the killing happens late in the night, so this is
Speaker 1: the early mornings. A cab driver said he picked up
Speaker 1: three men sometime in the early morning around the area
Speaker 1: of the home, and one of those men had a
Speaker 1: wound on his hand, and he took them to a
Speaker 1: nearby train station. They didn't talk during the whole time,
Speaker 1: which he said was kind of weird because early in
Speaker 1: the morning he expected them to be drunken revelers and
Speaker 1: instead they were very very quiet. There's also reporting that
Speaker 1: a man was treated for a deep knife wound in
Speaker 1: his hand at five thirty in the afternoon on the
Speaker 1: thirty one near tober Nico station, which is again, this
Speaker 1: is why I think this is just a wild and
Speaker 1: wild bit at seventy five miles away, which is a
Speaker 1: two kilometers from the home. So I think that that's
Speaker 1: just some random, unconnected bit, but people people grab onto it.
Speaker 1: Speaking of the knife wound, let's talk about that for
Speaker 1: a sec. What Uh so the killer's blood was left
Speaker 1: behind some bandages and some sanitary napkins and and some
Speaker 1: other surfaces around the house. Yeah, okay, and also in
Speaker 1: his clothes and stuff. I don't know about the clothes,
Speaker 1: but I do know it was on surfaces in the house,
Speaker 1: like in the kitchen, on the mouth of the computer.
Speaker 1: There was aces that it was found. Okay, okay, okay,
Speaker 1: never mind that. Okay, okay, Well, let's go to our
Speaker 1: next theory. I know there's you one, at least one
Speaker 1: of you has one more than I do. But we're
Speaker 1: gonna go to our next theory, which is a US airman.
Speaker 1: This theories hinges really on that bag and the sand
Speaker 1: that was found in it, because, like we said, it
Speaker 1: was all traced back to I'm guessing my mineral content
Speaker 1: to the area around Edwards Air Force Base. And this
Speaker 1: leads a lot of people to say that, oh, well,
Speaker 1: it obviously it was a U. S airman who was
Speaker 1: out for a night of light murder, and then when
Speaker 1: he did the deed, he returned to his post and
Speaker 1: then eventually he went home. And I gotta tell you that,
Speaker 1: I think that's the dumbest thing in the world, because
Speaker 1: if The Japanese actually thought that, seriously, a U. S
Speaker 1: citizen had done this murder. They had gone to the
Speaker 1: U S and militaries. Hey you get fingerprints? Yeah, hey,
Speaker 1: I think your guy killed somebody. Can you check his fingerprint?
Speaker 1: And they'd had him in the system, and he'd have
Speaker 1: been busted in arm. They might have actually done that.
Speaker 1: They might have actually run. Yeah. I mean, this whole thing,
Speaker 1: it's it's all based on the sand there there. Okay,
Speaker 1: this is dumb. You asked this before, though, Joe is like,
Speaker 1: there's some very innocent reasons how sand could have got there.
Speaker 1: The second hand bag that was imported could have been
Speaker 1: something like you were asking about aquariums. You know, you
Speaker 1: ever see those um the little balls with sands and
Speaker 1: stones in them that are decorative. That maybe that came
Speaker 1: from the US and it broke. I mean, there's a
Speaker 1: ba jillion ways that sand from that region could have
Speaker 1: ended up in a piece of clothing. Devin would say,
Speaker 1: that's the dumbest thing I ever heard. Bingo, Okay, actually,
Speaker 1: I have one is so much dumber for you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I do. I do, because I and I have one.
Speaker 1: That's pretty good my comparison. All right, Well, My last
Speaker 1: theory is that this was all done by a corporate
Speaker 1: competitor he was in. It was corporate espionage to an
Speaker 1: amazing level. But again this is this doesn't make any
Speaker 1: sense because nothing in this says gives the slightest hint
Speaker 1: that Mikio was involved with anything that was of high
Speaker 1: enough importance that a rival branding agency would send a
Speaker 1: hit man to get what he had. Like I've seen
Speaker 1: this people that they stole WiFi from. They were everybody
Speaker 1: steals WiFi, Joe WiFi. But really it's there's nothing that
Speaker 1: even gives me any inclination to say that there's anything
Speaker 1: solid in that. But you will see that kicked around
Speaker 1: the internet. Devin is over here like waving her hands.
Speaker 1: So I gotta know what is the theory that I
Speaker 1: have missed? Hey, did they fingerprint the family? I believe
Speaker 1: they did. Oh I tell you, wondering if maybe one
Speaker 1: of the people next door was the killer. I believe
Speaker 1: they did. I can't say though, with any certainty, that
Speaker 1: they did. But knowing how the Japanese police in their
Speaker 1: c s I how procedurally bound they are, I would
Speaker 1: imagine that that is one of the thing you would
Speaker 1: do almost right away would also imagine that. But here's like,
Speaker 1: let me just run with a theory for like two seconds.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I guess my theory kind of goes twofold, right. Either,
Speaker 1: like they were starting this wall with this family and
Speaker 1: there was their family. How do you not hear this
Speaker 1: bleep crap stuff stuff? Things go not right? I mean,
Speaker 1: like there's no way that there's not screaming and yelling
Speaker 1: and like help and he's killing it right unless somebody's involved,
Speaker 1: or I guess my main theory is that one of
Speaker 1: the people in this family did it and then maybe
Speaker 1: killed themselves or maybe got killed by a family member
Speaker 1: who came over to try to intervene or whatever it was.
Speaker 1: Six year old. Okay, wait, I'm trying to You're gonna
Speaker 1: have to flesh that out. So let's say like the
Speaker 1: father's downstairs doing work and he just like loses it.
Speaker 1: He goes upstairs, he smothers his child. Okay, continue on,
Speaker 1: goes upstairs, smothers his son. The mom comes down with
Speaker 1: a daughter, and it's like what are you, Oh my god.
Speaker 1: He kills them either commits suicide or the family next door.
Speaker 1: Here's what's going on, and it's like, I like the
Speaker 1: idea he kills them at the top of the stairs
Speaker 1: and then and then turns to trampically walk downstairs and
Speaker 1: get a beer out of the fridge and then trip
Speaker 1: accidentally stabbed and stabbed himself to death rolling down the stairs.
Speaker 1: But some sort of exactly but some sort of you know,
Speaker 1: family dispute. Again. The next door family is kind of
Speaker 1: involved in it. They are like, Okay, well, how do
Speaker 1: we make this look like it was a mistake. They
Speaker 1: like do a couple of things in the computer, They
Speaker 1: like take a poop, and then like leave and then
Speaker 1: come back, and then they call the cops. And it's
Speaker 1: not a perfect theory. But none of these theories are
Speaker 1: perfectly so I guess I that's kind of my thought
Speaker 1: is like, well, what if it were in an inside job?
Speaker 1: Kind of yeah, because somehow it makes more sense to
Speaker 1: me than somebody randomly breaking in and for some reason
Speaker 1: smothering a six year old and then stabbing a bunch
Speaker 1: of people and then hanging out for a while. I
Speaker 1: don't know. That's my the thing I have to contribute
Speaker 1: to this story. It's not good, but I would say
Speaker 1: it's at least as good as the yakuza. Oh yeah, well,
Speaker 1: and and really there if this is not an inside
Speaker 1: job like you're saying, Devon, there is a pretty serious
Speaker 1: amount of planning involved to bring clothes to lead a
Speaker 1: falseter I mean, the clothes seem like they were brought
Speaker 1: to lead the police in the wrong direction, to misdirect them.
Speaker 1: That's that's not just your random freak who decides to
Speaker 1: kill somebody climbing in the house and doing the deed
Speaker 1: and then decided to do something after the fact, Like
Speaker 1: there's there's somebody somebody had a real motivation to do this.
Speaker 1: It wasn't It wasn't random. So the random airman killer
Speaker 1: doesn't fit in the yucuza. I don't really get it. Well.
Speaker 1: One of the interesting things about it is one of
Speaker 1: the theories that you always go to and when people
Speaker 1: get stabbed, especially like this, a very personal kind of burger,
Speaker 1: this sexual jealousy. You always look at ex boyfriends, ex girlfriends,
Speaker 1: things like that, and that doesn't seem to have been
Speaker 1: considered in this case. And the well, the thing about
Speaker 1: it is it's the other thing that it's been assumed
Speaker 1: from the get go that the killer was a man.
Speaker 1: Now imagine the Kailer was a woman. Yeah, I'm not
Speaker 1: in that. Yeah, imagine that, that and that, And this
Speaker 1: woman deliberately brings where's when men's clothes there, leaves them behind,
Speaker 1: knowing that the Japanese police are gonna believe from the
Speaker 1: get go that it was a guy that did it,
Speaker 1: because I mean, who can come over and come into
Speaker 1: this place and overpower and stab a guy and stab
Speaker 1: a family to death. You know, it's gonna be a guy.
Speaker 1: And of course this person doesn't this woman. Let's say so,
Speaker 1: let's just assume for the sake of fund it's a
Speaker 1: woman just says, hey, you know, I'm gonna do a
Speaker 1: little I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna really care to
Speaker 1: their assumptions and leave some guys some clues that was
Speaker 1: a guy here. And so I'm gonna leave all these
Speaker 1: men's clothes and stuff. I'm gonna go take a crap
Speaker 1: and not flush it because women flush the toilet. Dudes
Speaker 1: don't always women always do. So I'm gonna pull this
Speaker 1: dude stunt and take a dump and leave it sitting there,
Speaker 1: just like a dude. But then there's other things that
Speaker 1: make me wonder. I mean, the mother or the mother.
Speaker 1: The wife was stabbed and and the daughter. They were
Speaker 1: especially the wife apparently were stabbed a lot more brutalized
Speaker 1: than anybody else. What's indicates to me maybe a little
Speaker 1: psycho jealousy going on there the clean up. Now, the
Speaker 1: average guy, if he finds he's running out of bandages
Speaker 1: and still bleeding, the average guy is not necessarily going
Speaker 1: to think to go get out the sanitary napkins. But
Speaker 1: a woman would. And and best of all, this person
Speaker 1: would have the motive. Even it does not appear to
Speaker 1: have been investigated, because it appears that it was assumed
Speaker 1: from the get go that was a guy that culturally
Speaker 1: that may be a cultural reason, and that's it could
Speaker 1: be a failing on the Japanese police, not just a
Speaker 1: cultural Well but I was going to say, is that
Speaker 1: you know there there has been criticism of the Japanese
Speaker 1: police because they have an amazing investigative team and an
Speaker 1: amazing forensic team, but they have no experience because this
Speaker 1: kind of thing almost never happens, which is which is
Speaker 1: terrible because on the flip side, in the States, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of places where our investigative capacity blow,
Speaker 1: our forensic capacity blow. But we see stuff like this
Speaker 1: all the time, and so we're really good at figuring
Speaker 1: out where it came from. So it's kind of it's
Speaker 1: a it's a back and forth. But I mean, well,
Speaker 1: I mean we could keep going. I mean, I'm in
Speaker 1: with Joe. Probably was a jealous girlfriend or farmer girlfriends
Speaker 1: something or husband have been jealous husband, mother in law
Speaker 1: or maybe a mother in law or something. That's Devin.
Speaker 1: Jevin has just been dealing with a future mother in law.
Speaker 1: So that's why she's going in law, all right. I
Speaker 1: don't think that, But I also don't think the mother
Speaker 1: in law are the people in the next to the
Speaker 1: next door would have taken a dump and left it
Speaker 1: in the toilet. No, I agree, but I definitely agree
Speaker 1: with you. I could have been probably a woman probably was.
Speaker 1: So if you have agreed, Sorry, sorry I got thrown
Speaker 1: off by the high fiving. Okay. So if you have
Speaker 1: theories of your own, that's totally understandable. This case really
Speaker 1: brings it out. Well, you can share those with us.
Speaker 1: You can do that in a number of different ways.
Speaker 1: You can go on social media and you could share
Speaker 1: it on our Facebook page or Facebook group. A lot
Speaker 1: of people a lot of discussion we when we're talking
Speaker 1: about social media. We also have our Twitter account Thinking
Speaker 1: Sideways and there's also the Reddit accounts, so there's Reddit
Speaker 1: on there. So any of those places you can talk
Speaker 1: about it. You want to talk with us directly about this,
Speaker 1: well you're more than welcome to do that. You can
Speaker 1: eat email us, email us, yeah, email us. You can
Speaker 1: do that at Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com. Questions, comments, concerns,
Speaker 1: all is welcome, uh, you know to It's a little
Speaker 1: while to get back to you, but we'll get back
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Speaker 1: Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. That is all we have
Speaker 1: for week number two of Halloween. We would be bringing
Speaker 1: you more creepiness next week, so hec and creepiness, but
Speaker 1: until then don't know. Arigato anora hi