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Lindsay Hawker, the young British teacher whose strangled body was found buried in an earth-filled bath in Japan, had been “sadistically” beaten and may have survived, gagged and bound, for a day and a half before her death, her father told The Times.
The appalling details of her last hours were contained in the post-mortem examination report, which was translated recently for her family.
They will add to the pressure on Japanese detectives to apprehend the only suspect, Tatsuya Ichihashi, 28, who escaped from nine police officers from the apartment where Ms Hawker’s body was found on March 26, and who has been at large ever since.
“It was a horrific murder — there was literally not a square inch of her body that wasn’t badly bruised,” her father, Bill Hawker, said from his family’s home in Brandon, near Coventry. “He tied her up with horticultural tape. This is dreadful to say, but he punched, kicked or used a blunt instrument throughout her body. This could have gone on a day and a half, possibly, before the poor thing eventually died.
“There was total bruising of the front of the body, defensive bruises on her arms, which were dreadfully knocked about, all of her back, the inside of her legs. It was as if he’d systematically injured every part of her body. It was sadistic, a truly sadistic murder.
“When I had to identify my daughter, the Japanese had her so that I could only see the top of her head and her face. I didn’t want to see the rest of her body. Her face was badly beaten — they had put on a lot of make-up, and my daughter never wore make-up. So we never realised the extent of her injuries. [He] also cut her hair off — the final indignity for her was to have her hair cut off.”
The Times has also learnt that Mr Ichihashi had attempted to befriend another foreign woman three months before Ms Hawker’s murder in March. He approached a young French woman in December in a bookshop in central Tokyo, and asked her to give him private English lessons and to pose for him as he drew her portrait — ploys that he used on the 22-year-old Ms Hawker. “It’s chilling because this is exactly the same thing that he said to Lindsay,” her mother, Julia Hawker, said. “You wonder how many other girls he might have tried this with, and how many times he might have been successful.”
Police in Chiba, the prefecture adjacent to metropolitan Tokyo, into which many of the capital’s suburbs spill, have steadfastly refused to disclose more than sketchy details of their investigation. Recently, even the Hawkers have received less and less information. “We used to get a report every day, via the British Embassy in Tokyo and the Foreign Office, but now it’s just once a week,” Mr Hawker said.
When Mr and Mrs Hawker visited Japan in June with their other daughter, Louise, they were diplomatically polite about the Japanese authorities, but now all pretence of satisfaction with the police investigation has been abandoned.
“They’re not telling us anything new,” Mr Hawker said. “They say they’re searching amusement arcades, and in ‘love hotels’, and gay bars. They seem to think those are the kind of places he might be hiding. But it’s the same thing over and over again. What we want to hear about is a new initiative.
“We think it is disgraceful that the Japanese police let Ichihashi go when our daughter’s body was lying just yards away.
“We have been told that at that time there was not enough evidence that a crime had been committed to formally arrest him, as it was only a missing person inquiry.
“But the question we want answered is why did they send nine officers if they didn’t suspect a crime had been committed?”
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