Sick, savage sadist rose from ruins of rotten rich kid



A raid on the apartment of Takuya Muramoto (center) unearthed several dozen 'instruments of torture'.

A shabby old 4-story apartment located a few minutes walk from a shopping area in the Osaka Prefecture bed town of Ibaraki was apparently used as a condominium of carnage, judging by Josei Jishin.

Accused of turning the half-empty condo into his own torture chambers is Takuya Muramoto, a 42-year-old man born into the wealthy family that owned the apartment building and gave him everything, but couldn't stop him from wanting more.

Muramoto has already been arrested for the illegal confinement of one woman, but he is suspected of having kept at least four more as prisoners.

"When the woman (Muramoto is accused of confining) was found, she was nude except for a pair of disposable diapers she was wearing. The woman kept saying that she'd been beaten and kicked because her cooking was so bad," a newspaper reporter covering the case tells Josei Jishin.

Muramoto's alleged victim is a 24-year-old OL he met at a matchmaking party in May last year. They broke off once, but got back together again in January. The parties were only supposed to be opened to those aged 25 to 35, but both Muramoto and the woman had lied about their ages to get in.

"The woman says Muramoto was once 'nice,' but when she returned to his side earlier this year, he suddenly changed. Muramoto is accused of using his belt to bind the woman's limbs, and of whacking her with a wooden club. Whenever she looked like she'd tried to escape, he is supposed to have burned her with his cigarette lighter. He used to punish her by making her do crunches and pushups," the hack says.

In the apartment where the woman was purportedly held, Muramoto had blackened out the windows and kept the place dark at all times. Whenever he went out, he locked her in the toilet.

A raid on the apartment following the 42-year-old's arrest unearthed what the women's weekly calls Muramoto's several dozens of instruments of torture, including clubs, wooden swords and back-scratchers.

His arrest has also opened a whole new can of worms. While the 24-year-old he is accused of holding captive was found in a second-floor room, in March 2003, the body of a 29-year-old woman was found in an apartment on the floor above. That woman had been missing for about half a year before her body was discovered. The body was riddled with signs of internal hemorrhaging and she weighed just 36 kilograms at death.

Muramoto is also accused of having kept another woman captive in the apartment block for two weeks back in 1997. Even more woman have appeared, saying that they were confined either in the condo or by Muramoto, who one 20-something woman says held her hostage for two months last year, going from one hotel around Ibaraki to another.

Muramoto wasn't always evil.

"His father is a really scary guy. He used to get really mad at times and scream out wildly," a neighbor of the Muramotos says. "His mother, on the other hand, is a really quiet type. I remember her most for always wearing really nice clothes."

As a child, Muramoto underwent education for gifted children in the hope that he'd be bright enough to take over running his father's construction business. But things didn't quite turn out as planned.

"The father preferred Muramoto's younger brother, saying he was the more talented sibling and wanted him to take over the family firm," a friend of the Muramoto family tells the women's weekly. "In the end, the economic bubble burst and the company went broke, anyway."

After graduating, Muramoto worked under his father, doing a sufficient job without standing out. It seems that when the family business went under, something snapped in Muramoto.

"He hadn't been able to hold down a job recently, so the family made him the caretaker of condos the father owned," the reporter covering the case tells Josei Jishin. "Muramoto had a master key that opened all the apartments. Half the apartments were unoccupied, meaning Muramoto could open them up and go in to do whatever he wanted in them."

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I have "instruments of torture" in my basement.....