Tsutomu Miyazaki- The Otaku Killer Who Killed And Assaulted 4 Little Girls

In the late summer of 1988, a parcel was delivered to the address of the parents of a 4-year-old girl Mari Konno. In the box lay a picture of the dress Mari was wearing when she vanished, a few small teeth, as well as an envelope with a message:

The gruesome box of clues was one of the many that families from Tokyo, Japan, would receive while searching for their children. However, these families would never successfully complete their search for their girls if they’ve fallen into the treacherous hands of the infamous Tsutomu Miyazaki, known as the Otaku Murderer.

Tsutomu Miyazaki’s Inner Turmoil

Although Miyazaki eventually evolved into Japan’s top gruesome murderer, he started as an unassuming and quiet kid.

Miyazaki was born prematurely in August 1962, along with an anomaly in the birth that made his wrists stiff. Miyazaki had to spend much of his childhood in solitude, being the target of bullying because of his condition.

Miyazaki was quiet and never attended social occasions or made friends. He was known to hide his hands in photos to avoid embarrassment. However, he was enthralled in drawing comics in his spare time at home.

While he wasn’t an exemplary social student, he was accomplished and ranked among the top 10 students in his class. He went from primary and secondary to high school in Nakano, Tokyo, and continued to be a top student with hopes of becoming a teacher.

However, this dream of his could never become a reality. Miyazaki’s grade plummeted miraculously. He finished 40th out of 56 students in his class and was not accepted at Meiji University. However, Tsutomu Miyazaki was forced to go to the local junior college to pursue a career as a photo technician instead.

It’s unclear the reason why his grades plummeted quickly, but it has to be related to his family life. Miyazaki’s family was influential, especially in Japan’s Itsukaichi district in Tokyo. Miyazaki’s father was the owner of a newspaper. While he was expected to assume the father’s work after retirement, Miyazaki expressed no interest in doing this.

In the belief that they only cared about his material and financial accomplishments, Miyazaki shunned his family. “If I tried to talk to my parents about my problems, they’d just brush me off,” Miyazaki confessed to police after his arrest.

One person he did not disown is his grandfather, whom Miyazaki considered to be the only person concerned about his happiness. Miyazaki felt that his younger sisters were snobby; however, he believed he was more in touch with his older sister.

During his college years, his astonishment only grew. He would take crotch shots of female players on tennis courts. He would pore over pornographic magazines, which also turned out to be boring. He expressed his displeasure with censorship in those magazines during the interrogation.

In the year 1984, Miyazaki started to search for child porn. This was not hindered by censorship because obscenity legislation in Japan prohibits only pubic hair and not sex organs.

He lived with his family of parents and sisters; however, he spent most of the time with his grandfather. While he could recall when he was contemplating suicide, his grandfather’s support kept him going. In 1998, his grandfather passed away. In Tsutomu Miyazaki’s head, this was a terrible life-altering event that had taken place. If you look back at the time, this is what experts believe was the tipping point.

It is unclear if Tsutomu Miyazaki suffered from this disorder in him from the beginning or if it was triggered in response to his grandfather’s death. However, the timeframe suggests that Miyazaki had transformed after his grandfather’s death.

Family members noticed a change in him immediately. They said he’d started spying on his younger sisters as they bathed and then slashed those who confronted him. At one point, he struck his mother.

Miyazaki acknowledged that after his grandfather’s funeral, he took a bite of the ashes to feel closer to him and distance the family he was with.

In August 1988, Tsutomu Miyazaki abducted four-year-old Mari Konno. According to Tsutomu Miyazaki, he just came to her, took her outside, back to the car, and drove off. He took her to a forest east of Tokyo and parked the vehicle below a bridge so that it wouldn’t be visible to people passing by. For about 30 minutes, they sat there doing nothing.

And then, Miyazaki murdered the young girl, stripped her naked of her clothes, and sexually assaulted her. He meticulously stripped her of her clothes, buried her naked body in the woods, and returned home with her clothes.

Over several weeks, he let the body decay in the woods and checked it frequently. Then, he took her feet and hands and put them in a closet.

Miyazaki later called her relatives. He breathed heavily into the phone and did not speak. If the family didn’t pick up his call, he’d call non-stop. Following the girl’s disappearance, he also mailed the family the mentioned evidence box along with an alarming note.

In October 1988, Miyazaki took a second girl.

The second victim was seven years old Masami Yoshizawa, whom Miyazaki was able to spot walking home along the highway. The boy offered him a car and, just like the case with Mari Konno, she was driven to a forest area and then killed her.

He then proceeded to assault her body brutally and mercilessly ditched it in the woods while he brought her clothes along with him.

It was a time of panic among the parents of young girls living in Saitama prefecture. Miyazaki was now a kidnapper and a serial killer and had received the title “Okatu Killer,” and his killings were dubbed “The Little Girl Murders.”

In the following eight months, the killings were likely to escalate, as two additional children went missing, two young girls and each in the same way.

The four-year-old Erika Namba was taken, as was Yoshizawa as she walked home along the main road. This time the kidnapper Miyazaki took her to the vehicle and forced her to remove her clothes in the back seat.

Miyazaki captured photos of her, then killed her, and tied her feet and hands, and quite different than how he handled his other crimes. Instead of burying her body at the crime scene, he buried her inside the trunk of his vehicle under a large bedsheet. After that, he dumped her body in a parking space and her clothes in a tree nearby.

As Mari Konno’s family did, Erika Namba‘s family also received a disturbing letter from newspaper clippings. The message said: “Erika. Cold. Cough. Throat. Rest. Death.”

The Otaku killer’s last victim was among his most shocking victims.

Miyazaki took Five-year-old Ayako Nomoto in the month of June in 1989. He persuaded her to allow him to photograph her, then killed her body and brought her corpse to his family’s home instead of throwing it in the forest as the last time.

He then spent the rest of the two days by taking pictures of the dead body, drinking her blood, eating her hands and feet, and masturbating.

Once she began to decay, Miyazaki dismembered the rest of her body and hid the body parts in several locations throughout Tokyo, including an open cemetery, toilet, and nearby woods.

However, unlike his usual self, he became worried that the police would find the body part he hid in the cemetery, so he eventually got it back after two weeks. Following that, he kept the dismembered body in the house in a closet.

The investigation, Capture and Hanging

The only thing of Konno that police could find was the remains from the box that Miyazaki mailed to her parents. Tsutomu Miyazaki sat and watched the police announce the discovery and wrote her parents a “confession” letter about how Konno’s body decomposed.

The Otaku killer was finally caught when he attempted the fifth time to kidnap.

In the summer of 1989, Miyazaki observed two girls playing together in the yard. He separated the younger one from the older one and carried her to his vehicle. Her older sibling ran off to her father, and he arrived to discover Miyazaki taking pictures of his daughter inside the car.

The father fought Miyazaki and dragged his daughter out of the car but could not control Miyazaki, who fled on foot. But he returned a while later to get the vehicle but was apprehended by police.

After they arrested the suspect, police investigated his vehicle and home and found alarming evidence.

In Miyazaki’s house, the police found more than 5,000 videotapes. Some were slasher and anime movies, but the rest were videos of his abuse of corpses. They also discovered photos of his other victims and parts of their clothes. Of course, they found the corpse of his 4th victim lying in his closet. Her hands were missing.

Through his trial, Tsutomu Miyazaki seemed highly serene. The media reported that he was at times oblivious to his arrest and utterly unaffected by what he did do or the consequences the court was deciding.

He answered questions calmly and appeared sensible in his thoughts despite his unjustified actions. When asked about his crime, He blamed the “Rat-Man,” an alter-ego inside his mind which forced him to commit terrible acts.

Psychoanalysts who examined him throughout the trial pointed out the lack of connection to his parents as a prime indicator of his trouble. They also pointed out that because there was no connection between him and his relatives, he looked to the world of fantasy, which included manga and slasher films, to find comfort.

His parents publicly denied him their support, and his father could not cover his son’s legal costs. He took his own life in 1994.

The media immediately labeled Miyazaki as an “Otaku,”; someone who is obsessed with anime and manga. Fans of the art form disapproved of the label, arguing they had no foundation for their assertion that manga turned Miyazaki into a murderer.

In modern times, this argument may be similar to the idea that video games can encourage violence.

Although three different analytic teams scrutinized Miyazaki throughout his seven-year case to determine if the man could be “feeble-minded” and thus eligible for a sentence of a few years, The courts ultimately decided that Miyazaki was in good health and therefore able to receive capital punishment.

In 2008, the sentence was imposed, and Tsutomu Miyazaki, who was the Otaku murderer, eventually came to justice for the horrible crime he had committed. He was sentenced to death.