British Hostess Trusted A Rich Japanese Tycoon — 7 Months Later Her Body Found Dismembered In A Cave
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Let us go back before the phone call, before the disappearance, before Tokyo.
Let us go back to England, to Kent, to a town called Seven Oaks, where a girl grew up with a wide smile and big plans and no idea what was waiting for her on the other side of the world.
Lucy Jane Blackman was born on the 1st of September 1978.
Seven Oaks is a market town in the southeast of England about half an hour by train from London.
It is comfortable and green and quiet, the kind of place where the biggest dramas are planning applications and school league tables.
It is not the kind of place that produces headlines.
Not the kind of place where people vanish.
Lucy’s father was Tim Blackman.
He worked in property development.
Her mother was Jane Steer.
The marriage did not last.
Tim and Jane divorced while the children were young, and the family split into the complicated geometry that divorced families know well.
Lucy had a younger sister, Sophie, and a younger brother, Whoopert.
The children moved between households.
They adapted.
They got on with things.
Lucy was the eldest.
She was tall.
She was blonde.
She was the kind of person who made friends easily, who walked into a room and changed its energy, who had that indefinable quality that makes people pay attention.
She was sociable and confident and a little bit reckless in the way that 20-year-olds are supposed to be reckless.
She wanted things.
She wanted to see the world.
She wanted to do more than what Seven Oaks could offer her.
After school, she got a job with British Airways as a cabin crew member.
It was a good job by most measures, stable, respectable.
She got to travel.
She wore the uniform.
She served meals at 35,000 ft and handed out blankets and smiled at passengers and said, “Welcome aboard.
” in a voice that was polished and professional, but it was not what she wanted.
The pay was low.
The hours were brutal.
She flew the London to Moscow route, which sounds exotic until you have done it 40 times, and realized that the inside of an aircraft is the same no matter where it is going.
She was working to pay bills and paying bills to keep working and saving nothing and going nowhere.
And she was 21 years old and she could feel time slipping through her fingers like sand.
Her friend Louise Phillips was in the same boat.
Louise was also cabin crew.
The two of them talked about it endlessly about breaking free, about doing something different, about having an adventure before life got serious and the window closed and they became people who talked about what they should have done instead of people who actually did things.
The answer they landed on was Japan.
They had heard about it from other young women.
The word had spread through the flight attendant community and beyond.
Tokyo had a nightlife industry that was unlike anything in the west.
hostess clubs, high-end bars in wealthy districts where Japanese businessmen paid enormous sums simply to sit at a table with attractive western women.
The women poured drinks.
They lit cigarettes.
They made conversation.
They laughed at jokes they did not understand.
They were not prostitutes.
The work was social, not sexual.
At least in theory.
The money was extraordinary.
A single night in a hostess club could earn more than a week on British Airways.
Girls talked about saving thousands of pounds in a few months, about paying off debts, about going home with money in the bank for the first time in their lives.
It was legal.
It was common.
Thousands of Western women cycled through Tokyo’s hostess industry every year.
Some came for 3 months on tourist visas.
Some stayed longer.
The clubs operated in a gray area that everyone understood and nobody questioned too loudly.
Lucy and Louise made their decision.
They quit British Airways.
They booked flights.
They landed in Tokyo in May of 2000.
They had 90-day tourist visas, a shared flat in the city, and the kind of optimism that comes from being young and certain that nothing truly bad can happen to you.
Within days of arriving, they found work at a club called Casablanca.
It was in Rupongi, which was Tokyo’s entertainment district.
A neon labyrinth of bars and clubs and restaurants stacked on top of each other in narrow buildings that climbed six and seven stories into the sky.
Rupongi at night was overwhelming.
Touts on every corner calling out to passing foreigners.
Businessmen in dark suits moving in groups.
Women in cocktail dresses climbing into taxis at 3:00 in the morning.
The air smelled of cigarette smoke and grilled meat and money.
Casablanca was upscale by Rapongi standards.
The clients were wealthy.
The decor was polished.
The hostesses were well-dressed and well spoken.
The system was simple and well understood.
A client arrived.
He was seated.
A hostess was assigned to his table.
She poured his drinks.
She kept his glass full and his conversation flowing.
He paid the club by the hour for this privilege.
The hostess received a cut.
If a client wanted to take a particular hostess outside the club on what was called a dohan, a paid date, he paid a premium.
The dohan was supposed to be dinner, a meal at a restaurant, maybe drinks at a second venue.
The hostess was paid for her time and her company, nothing more.
That was the line.
That was how it was explained to new girls.
In practice, the line was not always where it was supposed to be.
Some clients expected more, some pushed, some offered more money for more time.
The clubs knew this, the hostesses knew this.
Everyone operated within an unspoken framework of negotiation.
But in principle, a dohan was professional.
You had dinner with a wealthy man who wanted company.
You were charming and attentive.
You went home.
You got paid.
Lucy understood the system.
She was good at the work.
She was pretty and she was charismatic and she could make a man feel important just by listening to him.
The money was rolling in.
She was paying off debts.
She was having the adventure she had come for.
Tokyo was dazzling and fast and completely unlike anything she had known in Seven Oaks.
She had been in Japan for approximately 6 weeks when it all ended.
6 weeks of excitement and new experiences and the feeling that life was finally happening.
6 weeks.
That is all she got.
Day one.
Saturday the 1st of July 2000.
Lucy left the flat she shared with Louise.
She was going on a dohan with a client from Casablanca.
She told Louise she would be back later that evening or that night.
It was routine.
She had done this before.
Every hostess did doans.
It was part of the job.
She got into a car with the man and they drove away from Rapongi.
During the drive, Lucy made a few phone calls to a friend.
short calls, casual.
Nothing in her voice suggested alarm or distress.
The calls placed her somewhere south of Tokyo, heading toward the coast.
Each call was a little further from the city.
And then the calls stopped.
She did not call back.
She did not return to the flat.
She did not call Louise.
She did not call anyone.
Her phone went silent and Lucy Blackman disappeared from the world.
Louise waited through Sunday morning.
She was worried but not yet panicked.
Dohands ran late.
Sometimes girls got caught up.
Tokyo was enormous and exciting.
And sometimes you lost track of time.
There were explanations, reasonable ones.
And then the phone rang.
The cult call.
Akira Tagi.
The lie.
The lie that bought a dead woman’s killer precious time.
Louise hung up the phone and made a decision that would shape everything that followed.
She did not wait.
She did not rationalize.
She did not tell herself it was probably nothing.
She called England.
She called Lucy’s family.
She told them exactly what had happened.
Lucy went on a date.
She did not come back.
A stranger called and said she joined a cult.
Something is very wrong.
Tim Blackman was at home when the call came.
He was in his garden.
He picked up the phone and heard Louise’s voice and the world he knew ended.
He would later describe it as a feeling of blind panic crashing in on him.
There were multiple calls, three or four of them in quick succession, each one more urgent than the last.
At first, Tim tried to rationalize.
Maybe there was an explanation.
Maybe Lucy’s phone had died.
Maybe she had gone on a spontaneous trip.
Maybe the cult thing was real, however unlikely it sounded.
But the rationalizations fell apart almost as quickly as he could construct them.
He knew his daughter.
He knew what she would and would not do.
And he knew in the way that parents know things that something terrible had happened.
Within days, Lucy’s younger sister Sophie flew to Tokyo.
She was barely out of her teens.
She arrived in a city of 14 million people where she did not speak the language and she did not know the culture and she did not know where to begin.
But she began.
She went to Rapongi.
She made posters.
She walked into clubs and bars and restaurants and showed Lucy’s photograph to every person she could find.
Have you seen this woman? Have you seen my sister? Nobody had seen anything.
Nobody knew anything.
Or if they did, they were not talking.
Then Tim came.
He flew from England to Tokyo and landed with nothing except a photograph of his daughter and a determination that was absolute.
He went directly to the British embassy.
He went to the police.
He demanded meetings.
He demanded action.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police were investigating, but their pace was not what Tim expected.
The Japanese criminal justice system operates differently from the British one.
It is methodical.
It is procedural.
It prioritizes thoroughess over speed.
Cases are built with extraordinary care, layer by layer, piece by piece.
In a country with a conviction rate of over 99%, prosecutors do not bring charges until they are certain of the outcome.
This makes the system powerful.
It also makes it slow.
And for a father whose daughter had vanished into thin air, slow was intolerable.
Tim held a press conference.
He stood in front of cameras in a borrowed conference room and held up photographs of Lucy.
And he begged.
He begged anyone with information to come forward.
He begged the police to treat this with urgency.
He begged the media to keep running the story.
His voice cracked.
His eyes were red.
He was a man in a suit who had not slept in days, standing in a foreign city, asking strangers to help him find his child.
The media responded.
The Japanese press covered it extensively.
The British tabloids put it on their front pages.
A beautiful young British woman missing in Tokyo.
A mysterious cult phone call.
a desperate father.
It was a story that had every element the press craved and it generated the kind of international attention that the Japanese authorities could not ignore.
30,000 missing person posters were printed.
They were distributed across Tokyo.
Lucy’s face appeared on lamp posts and in shop windows and on community boards and in train stations.
A reward was posted.
Initially, it was £9,500.
Then an anonymous businessman increased it to £100,000.
The amount was staggering.
It suggested desperation and it was.
The then British Prime Minister Tony Blair was visiting Japan for diplomatic purposes.
He met with the Blackman family.
He promised to raise the issue with his Japanese counterpart at an upcoming G8 summit.
This was no longer a missing person case.
It had become a diplomatic incident.
Two governments were now involved.
The pressure on the Tokyo Metropolitan Police was immense and growing, but pressure did not produce answers.
Not at first.
The police followed the only leads they had, a cult call.
The phone records from Lucy’s last known calls, the records at Casablanca.
They investigated the cult angle and found nothing.
There was no cult.
There was no Akira Takagi.
The name was invented.
The phone number led nowhere.
It had been a deliberate deception designed to send the investigation down a dead end.
And for a crucial period, it did.
The police looked into Casablanca’s client records, but the records were sparse.
Hostess clubs operated on cash and discretion.
Client names were often false.
Payment trails were thin.
The industry was built on anonymity, and that anonymity, which served the clients so well when everything was functioning as intended, now served as a wall between the investigators and the truth.
Day 14.
2 weeks since Lucy had disappeared.
Tim Blackman was learning the architecture of frustration.
Every day he went to the police.
Every day he was told that the investigation was ongoing.
Every day he asked what they had found.
And every day the answer was some variation of nothing definitive.
He was learning that the Japanese system, however effective it might be in its own terms, was not designed for the kind of urgent, desperate, publicly pressured investigation that this case demanded.
It was designed for patience.
And patience was the one thing Tim Blackman did not have.
He kept giving interviews.
He kept putting up posters.
He kept standing in front of cameras and asking the same questions.
Where is my daughter? Who took her? Why is nobody finding her? Day 21.
3 weeks.
The police had followed every tip that had come in.
Most were worthless.
People who thought they had seen Lucy on a subway train.
People who thought they had seen her in a convenience store.
People who called the hotline because they wanted the reward money and were willing to fabricate stories to get it.
Each tip had to be investigated.
Each investigation took time.
Each one came to nothing.
Day 30.
A month gone.
Tim was shuttling between Tokyo and England.
He could not stay in Japan permanently.
He had other children who needed him.
He had a life that was disintegrating while he poured everything into this search.
But every time he left Tokyo, he felt he was abandoning Lucy.
And every time he returned, the police had nothing new to tell him.
The financial strain was enormous.
Hotels in Tokyo were expensive.
Flights were expensive.
posters and phone calls and taxi rides to police stations and embassy meetings.
All of it cost money that Tim did not have in unlimited supply.
He was a property developer from the aisle of white, not a millionaire, but he would not stop.
He could not stop.
The cost was irrelevant.
His daughter was somewhere in this city or near it, and he was going to find her, or he was going to die trying.
Day 40.
Still nothing.
And then a letter arrived.
It was sent to the British Embassy in Tokyo.
It was handwritten.
It purported to be from Lucy herself.
It said she was fine.
It said she was doing what she wanted to do.
It said people should stop looking for her.
It said in effect, “Leave me alone.
” The police examined the letter carefully.
It was a forgery.
The handwriting did not match Lucy’s known samples.
The language was wrong.
The phrasing was unnatural.
Someone had fabricated this letter to serve the same purpose as the cult phone call, to slow the investigation, to create doubt, to suggest that Lucy was alive and well and had simply chosen to disappear.
But the forgery told the investigators something important.
Whoever had made that phone call on the 2nd of July was still active, still paying attention, still trying to manage the narrative, still trying to prevent the police from finding the truth.
The cult call could have been a one-time act of panic.
The letter was something else.
It was calculated.
It was strategic.
It was the work of someone who understood that as long as there was ambiguity about whether Lucy was alive, the investigation would proceed differently than if she was confirmed dead.
Day 50.
Day 60.
The weeks accumulated and the frustration deepened.
Tim Blackman was becoming increasingly vocal in his criticism of the investigation.
He felt the police were not doing enough.
He felt the system was failing his daughter.
He did not say it explicitly, not at first, but the implication was clear.
If Lucy had been Japanese, would the response have been different? If the victim had been the daughter of a prominent Japanese family rather than a foreign hostess working in a gray area of the economy, would the investigation have moved faster? These were uncomfortable questions.
They touched on issues of race and class and the value that systems place on different kinds of victims.
The Japanese police bristled at the suggestion that they were not doing their jobs, but the perception persisted and the international media, which was watching everything, amplified it.
Day 70, day 80, the investigation had stalled.
The police had exhausted their initial lines of inquiry.
The cult lead was dead.
The forged letter was a dead end in itself, untraceable.
The club records yielded no definitive identification of the client Lucy had gone on the Dohan with.
The phone records from Lucy’s last calls had established a general direction of travel south from Tokyo toward the coast, but could not pinpoint a destination.
Tim Blackman was running on fumes.
He was exhausted.
He was angry.
He was terrified.
He was spending money he did not have.
He was neglecting his other children.
He was wearing himself to nothing.
But he was not going home.
Not without answers.
And then finally something shifted.
Not from the investigation into Lucy directly.
Not from a forensic breakthrough or a witness identification or a piece of physical evidence.
From something else entirely.
From other women.
From women who had seen Lucy’s face on the news and who had recognized something.
Not her.
not the specific girl on the posters, but the pattern, the shape of what had happened to her, because it had happened to them, too.
As the case dominated the news coverage in Japan and in Britain, as Tim Blackman’s face became a fixture on television screens, women began to come forward, foreign women, hostesses, and former hostesses who had worked in Rapongi’s clubs, women from Britain, from Australia, from Canada, from various parts of the Western world.
They contacted the police.
They told their stories and their stories were terrifyingly consistently similar.
They described a man, a wealthy man, a regular client at hostess clubs in Rapongi, older, well-dressed, polished in his manners.
He drove expensive sports cars.
He seemed to have multiple vehicles, different makes and colors.
He had properties outside of Tokyo.
He would request a particular hostess.
He would take her on a Dohan.
He would drive her out of the city.
The direction was always the same, south, away from Tokyo toward the coast.
He would take her to one of his apartments by the sea.
He would be charming.
He would be attentive.
He would offer her a drink.
And then she would wake up.
She would wake up in a bed she did not recognize.
Hours had passed, sometimes an entire day.
She would be groggy and disoriented.
Her body would be sore in ways she could not explain.
She would have no memory of anything after accepting the drink.
Nothing.
A complete blank.
Hours of her life simply deleted.
The man would be there.
He would act concerned.
He would tell her she had drunk too much.
He would tell her she had passed out.
He would be solicitous and kind.
He would drive her back to Tokyo.
He would drop her off near her home or near the club.
And that would be the end of it.
Except it was not the end of it.
Because the women knew they knew something had happened to them.
They knew the blackout was not from alcohol.
They knew their bodies had been used while they were unconscious.
They knew it even though they could not remember it.
The soreness, the disorientation, the gaps in time, the feeling of violation that had no specific memory attached to it, but was as real as any physical wound.
One woman described waking up in a seaside apartment.
The curtains were drawn.
The man was sitting in a chair near the bed watching her.
She had no idea where she was.
She had no idea how she had gotten there.
She remembered having a drink at his apartment.
Then nothing.
Then waking up, hours had vanished.
She felt sick and confused and deeply instinctively afraid.
She left.
She went home.
She tried to put it behind her.
Another woman described a nearly identical experience.
the same kind of man, the same drive south, the same drink, the same blackout, the same waking up sore and disoriented in an unfamiliar apartment.
She went to the police.
She went to a station in Wongi and told them what had happened.
She told them a man had drugged her.
She told them she believed she had been sexually assaulted while unconscious.
The officers took her statement.
They were polite.
They were sympathetic.
And then nothing happened.
No investigation was opened.
No follow-up occurred.
Her complaint was filed and forgotten.
She was a foreign woman working illegally as a hostess on a tourist visa.
Her word against a wealthy Japanese man’s.
The complaint went into a folder and the folder went into a filing cabinet and the filing cabinet sat in a back room of a police station in Rapongi gathering dust.
A third woman told the same story and a fourth wealthy man.
sports cars, drive to the coast, a drink, blackout, waking up, police reports that went nowhere.
Each woman had experienced the same thing.
Each woman had not known about each other.
They were not coordinating their accounts.
They were scattered across different clubs, different time periods, different nationalities.
Some had been in Tokyo years apart.
But when their stories were laid side by side, the pattern was unmistakable.
It was the same man, the same method, the same geography, the same routine executed with the cold efficiency of long practice.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police, under enormous pressure from the Blackman case, began to take these reports seriously for the first time.
Detectives who had previously filed foreign hostess complaints as low priority were now required to cross-reference them.
The descriptions were compared.
The details were cataloged.
The picture that emerged was staggering.
This was not a man who had done this once or twice.
This was a man who had been doing it systematically repeatedly for years.
The women who came forward were almost certainly a fraction of the total.
Most victims of drug facilitated assault do not report it.
Most do not even know it has happened to them until much later, if ever.
The women who came forward were the ones who had been conscious enough upon waking to understand that something was wrong.
How many others had woken up groggy and confused and accepted the man’s explanation that they had simply had too much to drink? How many had never known? The investigators now had something they had not had before.
A profile, a pattern, a type of perpetrator whose behavior was consistent and repeated and whose victims could describe his world in detail.
the cars, the apartments, the route south, the coastline.
They had a geography.
They had a method.
What they needed was a name.
And the name came through the patient methodical work that the Japanese police are exceptionally good at when they commit to a case.
Club records were reviewed more carefully.
Credit card statements were cross-referenced with client lists.
Vehicle registrations were matched against descriptions.
Membership records at various Rapongi establishments were examined.
The descriptions from the surviving victims were collated into a composite that detectives used to narrow the field.
The process took weeks.
It required cooperation from clubs that did not want to cooperate.
It required subpoenas and court orders and the kind of institutional persistence that the Japanese justice system, for all its slowness, excels at when it is fully engaged.
And slowly, piece by piece, the identity of the man emerged.
His name was Joji Obara.
He was born Kim Seong Jong in 1952 in Osaka, Japan.
His parents were Korean.
This is a significant detail in the context of Japanese society, where Korean residents have historically faced discrimination and marginalization.
The family were Zinichi Koreans, meaning Koreans who had settled in Japan and remained as a permanent minority community.
Obara’s father had begun with nothing, truly nothing.
He was a scrap collector, a man at the very bottom of the economic ladder.
But he had ambition and business instincts that were formidable.
He worked his way up.
He became a taxi driver.
Then he became the owner of taxis.
Then he moved into Pachinko.
Pachinko is a uniquely Japanese institution.
It is a form of mechanical gambling played on machines that resemble vertical pinball tables.
The parlors are everywhere in Japan.
They are loud and bright and filled with rows and rows of machines and the people who feed coins into them for hours on end.
The industry operates in a legal gray area.
Gambling for cash is technically illegal in Japan, but pachinko parlor circumvent this through a system of prizes that can be exchanged for money at separate establishments nearby.
Everyone knows what is happening.
Everyone pretends not to.
The pachinko industry was for decades dominated by zenichi Korean families.
It was one of the few business sectors where Koreans in Japan could build wealth without facing the discrimination that blocked them from mainstream corporate careers.
Obara’s father built a chain of pachinko parlors.
He built property holdings.
He built a fortune.
When the father died, the son was still a teenager, 17 years old, he and his two brothers inherited everything.
properties in Osaka and Tokyo.
The parlor business, a fortune that was by any measure enormous.
The young man who would become Jojio Barara, took his inheritance and ran with it.
He enrolled at Kio University, one of the most prestigious private universities in Japan.
He was educated at the best preparatory school affiliated with the university, which virtually guaranteed admission.
He studied politics and law.
He was brilliant in certain ways.
Driven, strategic.
He understood systems and how to navigate them.
At KO, he changed his name.
First to Seicho Hosyama, then at 21 to Joji Obara.
He became a naturalized Japanese citizen.
He shed his Korean identity as completely as the legal system would allow.
He became on paper and in presentation a wealthy Japanese man of good education and impressive pedigree.
After university, he went into real estate.
He had the capital from his inheritance and he had the instincts.
During the bubble economy of the late 1980s, when Japanese property values were inflating at absurd rates, Oara speculated aggressively and successfully.
At his peak, his assets were estimated at somewhere between 30 and $40 million.
He owned a mansion in Den Chofu, one of the most exclusive residential neighborhoods in Tokyo.
He owned condominiums in multiple locations, including critically along the coast south of Tokyo, in Zushi, in Mura, seaside properties that he used for weekend retreats.
He drove expensive cars, multiple ones, a different car for different occasions.
He dressed impeccably.
He moved through elite social circles.
He was to all outward appearances exactly what he presented himself to be, a wealthy, educated, successful Japanese businessman.
When the bubble burst in the early 1990s, Obara’s financial empire collapsed along with the property market.
He was eventually declared personally bankrupt.
His debts were astronomical, running into the billions of yen.
But somehow, through mechanisms that were never fully explained, he retained his properties.
He retained his cars.
He retained the lifestyle.
There were persistent rumors about connections to the Sumioshi Kai, one of Japan’s major Yakuza syndicates.
Allegations that his business served as a moneyaundering front.
Nothing was ever proven.
But the question of how a bankrupt man continued to live as though he were wealthy was never satisfactorily answered.
What is known is what he did with his time and his properties.
Joji Obara was a regular patron of hostess clubs in Rapongi.
He spent generously.
He was known to the staff.
He requested specific women.
He was charming and attentive and seemed on the surface to be exactly the kind of client that hostess clubs valued.
wealthy, polite, free-spending.
He took hostesses on Dohandans.
He drove them south away from Tokyo toward the coast.
He took them to his condominium in Zushi, the one he had purchased in 1982, the one he had outfitted with video recording equipment, cameras, lights, sound recording devices positioned around the bedroom.
And there in that apartment, he drugged them.
He used chloroform mixed into drinks.
The women lost consciousness and while they were unconscious, he assaulted them and he filmed it.
Every time he recorded himself assaulting unconscious women and he cataloged the tapes and he kept them in his apartment.
He had been doing this since at least 1992.
For eight years before Lucy Blackman walked out of Casablanca and got into his car, Joji Obara had been drugging and assaulting women and filming it and getting away with it.
For 8 years, complaints had been filed by foreign hostesses at Rapongi police stations, and nothing had been done.
For 8 years, this man had operated with impunity.
The earliest confirmed case connected to Aubara was that of Karita Ridgeway.
She was a 21-year-old Australian woman, a model and hostess, working in Tokyo in 1992.
She was young and attractive and far from home, exactly his type.
He took her on a date.
He brought her to his apartment.
He drugged her with chloroform.
Something went wrong.
He used too much.
The dosage was lethal or close to it.
Karita did not simply lose consciousness.
She went into a medical crisis.
Her organs began to fail.
By the time Oara realized how serious the situation was, she was in critical condition.
He took her to a hospital.
He used a false name.
He told the doctors, she was suffering from food poisoning, bad shellfish, a plausible lie for a coastal area.
The doctors treated her, but the damage was too severe.
Karita was placed on life support.
Her family was contacted in Australia.
They flew to Japan.
After days of agonizing, they made the decision to withdraw life support.
Karita Ridgeway died.
Her cause of death was officially recorded as hepatitis E, a natural cause.
No criminal investigation was launched.
The Australian embassy did not push for one.
The Japanese police did not initiate one.
The family asked questions but received no answers.
Karita’s body was cremated.
Her ashes were sent home.
And Joji Bora went back to Rapongi.
He went back to the clubs.
He went back to the dough hands.
He went back to the drive south and the drugged drink and the cameras in the bedroom.
He continued for eight more years.
When the police finally searched his properties in the autumn of 2000 after his arrest in connection with the assault of the Canadian woman, they found what they found.
They found the tapes, hundreds of them.
Some accounts say 200, others say 400.
The exact number varies depending on the source.
What does not vary is the content.
Tape after tape after tape showing Oara engaged in sexual acts with women who were unconscious.
Women who were limp and unresponsive.
Women who had been drugged and who lay there while he positioned them and assaulted them and filmed the whole thing for his own later viewing.
They found the diary, a journal in which Obara wrote about his activities, his ambitions, his philosophy.
He had written that his goal was to have sex with 500 women by the time he turned 30.
He had written in his own hand that he would dedicate himself to becoming evil.
Those were his words, becoming evil.
As though it were a discipline, a practice, something you trained for.
They found the entry about Karita Ridgeway, brief and devastating.
Too much chloroform.
He had recorded the mechanism of her death in his personal notebook and kept it there for 8 years.
They found a videotape of Aubara assaulting Karita Rididgeway while she was unconscious.
Direct evidence linking him to the woman whose death had been falsely attributed to hepatitis E.
They found bottles of alcohol in the Zushi apartment that had been laced with drugs, ready-made weapons sitting on a shelf waiting for the next victim.
They found hairs in the apartment that matched Lucy Blackman.
They found a roll of undeveloped film.
When the photographs were processed, they showed Lucy inside the Zushi condominium.
She had been there in that room, the last room she was alive in, and they found receipts, financial records documenting purchases made in the days immediately after the 1st of July, 2000, the day Lucy disappeared.
The purchases were specific.
They were methodical.
They were the purchases of a man who had a body to dispose of and who went about the task with the same cold practical efficiency with which he had done everything else.
He bought a chainsaw, a portable commercialrade chainsaw, not the kind of thing a real estate developer buys on a whim.
Not a garden tool, an instrument designed to cut through substantial material quickly and efficiently.
He bought bags of cement, multiple bags, enough to encase a significant object or a significant part of a body.
He bought a portable tent, the kind you could set up quickly in an isolated location, the kind that would provide concealment from view while you performed a task you did not want anyone to see.
A chainsaw, cement, a tent purchased within days of Lucy Blackman’s disappearance by the man she was last seen with.
by the man in whose apartment her hair was found.
By the man whose pattern of drugging and assaulting women had been established beyond any doubt.
Think about what those items were used for.
Think about what was done with them.
Think about the practicality of it.
The cold mechanical logic of a man who had a problem, a body that needed to disappear and who went to shops and purchased the tools required to make it disappear.
The forensic scientists would later confirm that the tool used to dismember Lucy Blackman’s body was consistent with a chainsaw.
The cement was used to encase her head.
The tent, investigators believed, was used to provide cover while the dismemberment and concealment were carried out.
These were not impulse purchases.
They were not panic buys.
They were the deliberate, considered actions of a man who had killed someone and who was methodically erasing the evidence.
This was a man who had done something terrible and who sat down and made a list, a shopping list, a list of what he needed to make a woman disappear.
The police now had the man.
They had the evidence of a pattern stretching back nearly a decade.
They had the tapes.
They had the diary.
They had the receipts.
They had the forensic traces placing Lucy in his apartment.
What they did not have was Lucy herself.
The body had not been found.
And without the body, the case was strong.
but incomplete.
The prosecution could prove that Obara had drugged and assaulted women for years.
They could prove he had killed Karita Ridgeway.
They could prove Lucy had been in his apartment.
They could prove he had bought tools for dismemberment and concealment.
But they could not prove what had happened to Lucy’s body unless they found it.
The search continued.
The police focused on the areas around Oara’s coastal properties.
The Mura Peninsula, a finger of land that juts into Sagami Bay about 50 km south of Tokyo.
It was remote and rugged.
Cliffs dropped to rocky beaches.
Fishing villages sat in sheltered coes.
Narrow roads wound along the shoreline.
Obara had an apartment there near the small community of Aberatubo.
The investigators searched the apartment.
They searched the grounds around it.
They searched the nearby roads and paths and beaches.
They expanded outward methodically, covering more ground with each pass.
Day 100, more than 3 months gone, Tim Blackman knew about the arrest.
He knew about the evidence.
He knew the police believed Obara was responsible, but he also knew his daughter had not been found.
And for a father, the evidence and the arrest and the charges were all secondary to one simple, devastating fact.
Lucy was still missing.
She was still out there somewhere.
He could not grieve properly because he did not have her back.
He could not bury her.
He could not hold a funeral.
He could not stand at a graveside and say goodbye.
He was suspended in a limbo that was worse than grief because grief at least has a shape.
It has rituals.
It has endings.
This had none of those things.
Day 120.
Day 140.
The search went on.
The police were thorough.
They were patient.
They covered miles of coastline.
They checked out buildings and sheds and abandoned structures.
They brought in specialist equipment.
They used dogs.
Day 160.
Day 186 months.
Half a year since Lucy had gotten into that car.
Half a year of her father moving between England and Japan.
Between hope and despair.
between the certainty that she would be found and the fear that she never would.
He was a man being eaten alive by the not knowing.
The uncertainty was corrosive.
It worked on him every minute of every day.
Even in his sleep, if he slept at all, the question was there.
Where is she? Where did he put her? Day 200.
Nearly 7 months.
The investigators returned to the Mura Peninsula.
They expanded the search radius.
They went further along the shoreline.
The coast of Mura is popped with caves, natural formations carved into the cliffs by centuries of wave action.
Some are large enough to stand in.
Some are little more than shallow hollows in the rock.
Some are accessible from the beach at low tide.
Some are hidden behind tumbles of boulders and scrub vegetation.
The police began systematically checking the caves.
Day 205.
Day 210.
Day 215.
Each day the same.
Walk the shoreline.
Check it.
Find nothing.
Move again.
Day 220.
3 days away.
The tension was almost unbearable.
The detectives assigned to the search had become personally invested in a way that went far beyond professional obligation.
These were men who had seen the videotapes, who had read the diary, who had cataloged the evidence of a predator who had operated for a decade without consequence.
They knew what Obara was.
They knew what he had done and they believed with every fiber of their professional judgment that Lucy Blackman was somewhere on this coastline hidden in a place that Obara knew and that they had not yet found.
Day 221.
Day 222.
Almost there.
Day 223.
The 9th of February, 2001.
It was winter.
The air was cold.
The sea was gray and flat and indifferent.
The beaches along the Mura coast were empty.
This was not a season for tourists or swimmers or fishermen.
The coastline was deserted.
Assistant Inspector Yugjoo of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police was searching the shoreline near Abberatsubo.
He was a few hundred m from Obara’s apartment.
The cave he approached was a shallow formation at the base of the cliffs.
Its entrance was partially obscured by rock and vegetation.
It was not large, not deep.
The kind of cave you might walk past a h 100 times without looking inside.
He looked inside.
There was a bathtub.
A bathtub in a cave by the sea.
Out of place.
Wrong.
The kind of thing that makes a detective’s spine straighten and his pulse quicken.
An object that has no business being where it is.
The bathtub was positioned on the sandy floor of the cave.
It was inverted, upside down, covering something beneath it.
No called for assistance.
Other officers arrived.
They removed the bathtub.
Beneath it was a shallow excavation in the sand, a grave, and in the grave were bags, separate bags, sealed, multiple bags containing separate items.
Inside the bags were the remains of Lucy Blackman.
She had been dismembered.
Her body had been cut into pieces.
Sources differ on the exact number, eight pieces, 10 pieces.
The accounts vary.
What does not vary is the nature of what was done.
Her head had been shaved.
It had been encased in concrete.
The bags had been placed into the shallow grave.
The bathtub had been positioned on top as a lid, and sand had been pushed over and around the entire arrangement to conceal it from casual view.
She had been there for 223 days.
T 7 months and 8 days.
meter from the apartment of the man who had put her there.
Hidden in a cave that the sea reached at high tide where the salt water and the sand and the air had worked on the remains for more than half a year.
The condition of the body was severe.
223 days of exposure in a coastal cave had caused extensive decomposition.
The forensic pathologists who examined the remains could confirm certain things.
They could confirm her identity through dental records and DNA comparison.
They could confirm that the dismemberment had been performed with a tool consistent with a chainsaw, which matched the purchase records already in evidence.
They could confirm the presence of cement around the skull.
But what they could not determine was the one thing that mattered most for the prosecution.
They could not determine the cause of death.
The decomposition was too advanced.
The tissues were too degraded.
If Lucy had died from a chloroform overdose, as the prosecution believed, the chemical traces had long since dissipated.
If she had died from some other mechanism, there was no evidence of that either.
The body could tell them how she had been disposed of.
It could not tell them how she had died.
This gap between what the body revealed and what it could not reveal would define the legal outcome of the case for years to come.
Tim Blackman was told the news his daughter had been found.
the search was over.
He described a strange, terrible mixture of devastation and relief.
Relief that the not knowing was over.
Relief that the limbo had ended.
Relief that he could begin to grieve in the way that grief requires with a body and a burial and a finite terrible truth.
And devastation, of course.
Devastation that was absolute and permanent and would never fully recede.
Lucy Blackman was 21 years old.
She had been in Tokyo for 6 weeks.
She had gone on one date with one man and she had been found in a cave by the sea in pieces concealed under a bathtub 7 months after she disappeared.
Day 223, the search was over, but the case was not.
The legal proceedings against Jojo Barara were enormous in scope.
He faced multiple charges across multiple victims.
The formal charges included the abduction of Lucy Blackman, rape resulting in her death, the disposal and concealment of her body, the rape and manslaughter of Karita Rididgeway, and the rape of eight additional women identified through the testimony of survivors and the evidence on the videotapes.
The trial began in July of 2001.
It was the largest sex crimes prosecution in Japanese legal history.
The proceedings would last nearly 5 years.
Japanese criminal trials differ significantly from Western ones.
There is no jury.
The case is heard by a panel of judges who evaluate evidence, hear testimony, and render both verdict and sentence.
The proceedings are meticulous.
Evidence is presented in exhaustive detail.
Witnesses are examined and cross-examined across multiple sessions, sometimes separated by weeks or months.
The pace is deliberate.
The judges take time.
In a country where the conviction rate exceeds 99%, prosecutors are expected to present overwhelming evidence and judges are expected to evaluate it with extraordinary care.
The prosecution’s case was built on the mountain of evidence recovered from Obara’s properties.
The videotapes showing him assaulting unconscious women.
The diary with its entries about becoming evil and its clinical notation about Karita Ridgeway and the chloroform.
the testimony of the women who had survived, the receipts for the chainsaw, the cement, the tent, the hairs and photographs placing Lucy in the Zushi condominium, the phone records tracing her last known movements toward the coast.
For Karita Ridgeway, the evidence was particularly strong.
There was a videotape of Oara assaulting her while she was unconscious.
There was the diary entry.
There was the hospital record showing that he had brought her in under a forced name with a false story about food poisoning.
The chain of evidence from drugging to assault to death was clear and documented.
For the other eight women, the evidence was the videotapes themselves, corroborated by the testimony of those who came forward.
For Lucy Blackman, the evidence was circumstantial, powerful, and extensive, but circumstantial.
She had been in his apartment.
he had bought tools for dismemberment and concealment immediately after she disappeared.
Her body was found near his other property.
That Karita Rididgeway’s death was a tragic accident.
That Lucy’s death, whatever its cause, was not Obara’s responsibility.
That the chainsaw and cement were coincidental purchases unrelated to the crime.
It was a defense that strained credul to its breaking point.
But in a legal system that requires proof, not probability, the defense did not need to be believable.
It only needed to create a gap between the evidence and the standard of conviction.
The trial ground on month after month, year after year, the Blackman family attended when they could.
Tim Blackman made repeated trips to Japan for court sessions.
Lucy’s mother, Jane Steer, attended.
The proceedings were reported internationally.
The pressure was immense and unrelenting.
In April of 2007, nearly 5 years after the trial began, the presiding judge, Sutou Tochigi, delivered the verdict.
For the eight rape charges, guilty.
The video tapes were incontrovertible.
The women on those tapes were clearly unconscious.
The encounters were clearly not consensual.
Obara was convicted on each count.
For Karita Rididgeway, guilty of manslaughter.
The diary entry, the videotape, the hospital records, the chain of evidence was complete.
He had drugged her with chloroform.
She had died as a result.
Manslaughter, not murder, because the death was not intentional, but manslaughter.
He had killed her through recklessness.
The sentence for these convictions was life in prison.
And then came the verdict on Lucy Blackman.
Not guilty.
Not guilty of rape resulting in her death.
not guilty of causing her death by any mechanism.
The judge’s words were precise and devastating.
He said the court could not prove that Obara was single-handedly involved in Lucy’s death.
He acknowledged that it was clear Lucy had been with Obara and had then vanished and had been found dead.
But without a confirmed cause of death, without forensic evidence establishing the mechanism by which she died, the court could not convict him.
The courtroom absorbed this in something close to shock.
Tim Blackman was in attendance.
Jane Steer was in attendance.
The man who had purchased a chainsaw days after their daughter disappeared.
The man in whose apartment her hairs were found.
The man whose pattern of drugging women into unconsciousness and assaulting them and sometimes killing them had been established through years of evidence and testimony.
That man had been acquitted of responsibility for Lucy’s death.
Jane Steer said she was heartbroken that she could not believe it.
Tim Blackman was quieter in his immediate response bay, but the devastation was written on his face.
The verdict was in a narrow legal sense defensible.
The prosecution had not been able to prove the cause of death.
The decomposition of the body over 7 months in a coastal cave had destroyed the forensic evidence that might have established it.
Without knowing how Lucy died, the court could not convict Obara of causing her death.
This was the logic.
It was technically sound and it was morally agonizing.
The prosecution appealed.
The appeal was filed with the Tokyo High Court and heard in March of 2008.
The appellet judges reviewed the evidence.
They reviewed the trial court’s reasoning.
They considered the totality of the circumstances.
In December of 2008, the Tokyo High Court issued its revised verdict.
Joji Obara was found guilty of the abduction of Lucy Blackman, guilty of the dismemberment of her body, guilty of the disposal and concealment of her remains.
The appellet court ruled that the evidence was sufficient to establish that he had taken Lucy, that he had cut her body apart, and that he had hidden her in the cave.
He was still not convicted of her rape or her death.
The cause of death gap remained unfilled.
The appellet court did not overturn the acquitt on those charges, but the life sentence was upheld.
Between the convictions for the other rapes for Karita Rididgeway’s manslaughter and now for the abduction and disposal of Lucy’s body, the sentence stood life in prison.
In 2012, the Supreme Court of Japan rejected Oara’s final appeal.
The case was closed.
The sentence was permanent.
Joji Obara would spend the rest of his life behind bars, but not for killing Lucy Blackman.
That is the gap.
That is the space at the center of this story that has never been filled and never will be.
Everyone connected to the case, the investigators, the prosecutors, the surviving victims, the Blackman family believes that JoJo Barara drugged Lucy Blackman and that the drug killed her just as it had killed Karita Rididgeway 8 years before.
The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming.
The pattern is established.
The logic is clear.
But the court could not say it.
The law could not bridge the gap between what everyone knows and what could be proven.
With decomposed remains in a coastal cave, Tim Blackman took the partial victory because there was no other option.
He took it and he continued.
In the years following the case, he established a charity, the Lucy Blackman Trust.
Its purpose was to support British nationals who found themselves in crisis abroad.
Young people who had gone overseas for travel or work or adventure and who had walked into situations they could not handle.
People like Lucy.
The trust provided emergency assistance, advice, and support.
It operated as a lifeline for families dealing with the nightmare of having a loved one in trouble in a foreign country.
The charity ran for nearly 20 years.
It became a respected and effective organization.
In 2020, it was renamed LBT Global as the Blackman family stepped aside from direct management.
But the mission continued.
The work continued to mean something beyond the tragedy.
Tim Blackman took the worst thing that ever happened to him and he built something from it.
That is not redemption.
That is not closure.
Those are words that people use when they want a story to have a tidy ending.
And this story does not have one.
What Tim Blackman did was refuse to let his daughter’s death be the final word.
He made her name stand for something.
He made it stand for help.
Joji Obara is in a Japanese prison.
He is in his 70s.
He has maintained his innocence throughout.
He has never admitted to any of the charges against him.
Not the rapes, not the deaths, not the dismemberment, not the cave.
He claims that every woman on every tape was a willing participant, that every drug was voluntarily consumed, that every death was someone else’s fault.
The tapes speak for themselves.
The diary speaks for itself.
The entry about Karita Ridgeway speaks for itself.
Too much chloroform written in his own hand.
The shopping list of a chainsaw and cement and a tent speaks for itself.
The cave speaks for itself.
But the law does not deal in what speaks for itself.
It deals in what can be proved.
And for Lucy Blackman, the proof was buried in a cave by the sea for 223 days.
And by the time anyone found it, the sea and the sand and the salt air, and the passage of time had taken it away.
Lucy Jane Blackman.
Born the 1st of September 1978 in Seven Oaks, Kent, a flight attendant, a hostess, a daughter, a sister, a young woman who went to Tokyo to see the world and earn some money and have an adventure.
She was 21 years old.
She had been in Japan for 6 weeks.
She walked out of a hostess club in Rapongi on a warm Saturday evening in July.
She got into a car with a wealthy man.
She drove south toward the sea.
She made a few phone calls along the way.
Then the phone calls stopped.
Day one, she was gone.
Day two, a lie was told.
A stranger called her flatmate and said she had joined a cult.
It was designed to buy time.
It bought 223 days.
Day 40, the leads were dead.
A forged letter arrived.
Another deception.
Another attempt to slow the search.
Day 100.
The man was arrested.
The tapes were found.
The diary was found.
But Lucy was not found.
Not yet.
Day 223.
The 9th of February, 2001.
A detective searched a cave by the sea.
He found a bathtub.
He found bags.
He found what was left of Lucy Blackman.
The search ended.
The trial began.
The verdict came.
Guilty of taking her body.
Guilty of dismembering it.
Guilty of hiding it.
not guilty of the act that made all of that necessary.
The sentence was life.
The gap remains.
223 days.
That is how long Lucy Blackman was missing.
That is how long her father searched.
That is how long a predator waited for the world to move on.
The world did not move on.
Tim Blackman would not let it.
But the justice that finally came was incomplete.
It was a sentence without the words that mattered most.
a conviction without the charge that should have been at its center.
And in the space between what everyone knows happened in that apartment in Zushi on the 1st of July 2000 and what the law could demonstrate with a decomposed body in a saltwater cave, there is a silence.
It has been there for more than 25 years.
It will be there forever.
Lucy Blackman, 223 days.
A cave by the sea.
A father who never stopped looking.
A man who will die in prison.
and a gap in the verdict that no amount of time will ever close.
The clock stopped on the 9th of February, 2001.
