They should have parted ways when the English lesson was over. Lindsay would
have left the cafe alone and gone to work at the language school and got on
with her life. She would have come home to England, eventually, returned to
study, surely, become a GP, inevitably, as she had always intended, married
Ryan maybe, had children, made grandparents of her parents, Bill and Julia,
aunts of her sisters, Lisa and Louise, and made old bones herself.
Instead, for some inexplicable, unfathomable reason, Lindsay left the cafe
with the student and went with him to his home. Almost certainly because it
was sheeting rain on that Tokyo Sunday morning in March 2007, she got into a
taxi with him and was delivered the few hundred yards down the road to his
apartment block.
There is CCTV footage of the taxi pulling up outside the building. This has
only just emerged, but it has already been watched with agony by Lindsay’s
mother and father, who can see their daughter leave the taxi with the young
man who will kill her, watch her leaning in briefly to the driver, asking
him to wait just a minute until she comes back, so that the taxi driver can
take Lindsay on to her place of work.
She clearly had no intention of remaining at the apartment.
Don’t go, Lindsay, turn back, don’t go into that building. But she continues.
That’s her right there in the CCTV footage, beautiful and alive, the pride
of her family, on her way into the young man’s apartment and to her death in
the suburb of Ichikawa City, around 10am on Sunday, March 25, 2007. The taxi
driver will wait, but after seven minutes he will take another job. He will
be grilled by the police later and be stricken with guilt when he finds out
why the young woman never came back.
“She doesn’t look like my girl,” Bill said when he first saw that footage. He
thought she was walking like a… he didn’t want to say it… like a zombie and
believed she must have been drugged — why else would she go to the
apartment? But Lindsay had not been drugged; there were no traces of any
drug in her body. Why had she gone, and why only, as she had thought, just
for a minute?
When I met Lindsay’s parents at their home in a village outside Coventry last
month, they were overwhelmed by grief and gave voice to unimaginable
feelings of loss, pain, anger and frustration. Bill told me before we began
that he would become upset when he talked, and he did, crying openly as he
described what they had been through.
He had needed counselling afterwards, not least because he had hated other
girls of a similar age to Lindsay. He regarded them as wasters and chavs
when he saw them out and about, and compared them with his daughter, who
barely wore make-up and never dyed her hair and was always smart and could
speak to anyone, to tramps and university professors alike. Of course, he
realised now it was post-traumatic stress that made him think like that, and
those girls couldn’t help the fact that they were alive when Lindsay was
dead.
Then Julia arrived home from work, made a round of teas and coffees, and stood
in the garden smoking. It was not long before she too broke down. They were
tender with each other, drawn together rather than pulled apart, she reading
the renewed distress on his face and correcting his blurred memories, while
he questioned her interpretations of some of the few facts they had to work
with after 20 months.
As Julia said, only one thing mattered, and that was how Lindsay’s life had
been taken away in the most horrible circumstances. But it did not help that
they had felt so alone and unsupported and insulted by people who ought to
know better — take note, the Foreign Office. Neither did it help that the
Japanese police had not only let Lindsay’s killer slip past them and escape
— not once, but twice, as The Sunday Times Magazine has discovered — but
were still failing to recapture him over a year and a half later, despite
more than 5,000 reported sightings.
The Hawkers’ home is nine hours behind Tokyo time, so it was still a Saturday
night when Lindsay stepped out of the taxi, 6,000 miles away. It did not
take her parents long to sense something was wrong. Lindsay had been in
close contact in the six months she had been in Japan, e-mailing, Skype-ing
or calling several times a week. That Sunday, bizarrely, as if it were an
act of premonition, a powerful earthquake shook Japan at 9.42am, about 20
minutes before Lindsay left the taxi. When the Hawkers woke up, Julia
e-mailed Lindsay to check she was okay. She became uneasy when there was no
reply, and as the day wore on she was getting beside herself. The whole
family was calling, texting, e-mailing. Nothing came back.
Bill was offering reassurance, knowing that Lindsay was due out at a party
that evening — a leaving do for a fellow English teacher. But Julia could
barely sleep that night and couldn’t face work the next day until she
decided to go in to occupy herself. She left and just as she arrived,
Bill pulled up. He’d had a call from the school where Lindsay was teaching to
say she hadn’t turned up. It was now Monday evening in Japan and this was
the second day of work Lindsay had missed. Why hadn’t the school reacted
sooner? Another question that would remain unanswered.Lindsay had never
missed one shift before, let alone two in a row. She worked six days a week
at the Koiwa International Language School opposite Gyotoku station, one of
a chain of schools throughout Japan at the time run by the Nova Organisation
(the company declared bankruptcy six months after Lindsay’s death).
After leaving Leeds University in 2006 with a first in biology, Lindsay could
have gone on to do a masters, but said she wanted a year away and would try
teaching. She picked Japan, saying it was the second safest place in the
world — after New Zealand — and because she had long taken an interest in
Japanese culture and was knowledgable about its distinctive codes of
behaviour.
She took with her 100 lavender bags (paid for by her dad) to give as token
gifts to people she met. She had lived at first in an unfriendly area where
she was sometimes abused in the street as a gaijin (a derogatory Japanese
word for a “foreigner”), but had soon moved and been happy there, as her
family discovered on a visit for her 22nd birthday, just months before she
was murdered. Lindsay was tall with long hair, and her dad recalled how
heads turned in the restaurant where they went. She made a striking figure
in Tokyo, and her dad tried to tell her to keep her head down so as not to
attract unwelcome attention. Instead he saw how Lindsay talked to the locals
in their own language. You’ve got to be careful, he warned her, don’t speak
to them. This is my community, she said, they all know I’m the English
teacher, I have to speak to them. When you’re on the train, just read a
book, Bill told her. Don’t freak, Dad, she said, it’s just crazy Japan. She
was always saying that. Crazy Japan.
She thought it was crazy on Tuesday, March 20, when a young man who had been
sitting opposite her on the train approached her as she left the station on
her way home from work. You’re my English teacher, he said, as she was
getting on her bike. I’m not, she said. But you are an English teacher? Yes,
she said.
As she described it in an e-mail to Ryan, her boyfriend back home, the man had
run after her as she cycled away and he had come to her apartment asking for
water. Out of precaution, rather than recklessness, she had invited him in
so that he could see she was living with two flatmates.
He had taken out a pen and paper and drawn a picture of Lindsay there and then
— that would have impressed her, Bill said — and signed it with his name,
telephone number and e-mail address.
He had not seemed scary, more ridiculous, and Lindsay felt sorry for him and
said she would try to help. That was her nature. Once with her family a
beggar had asked for money for tea and Lindsay had given him £2. Bill was
furious and pointed out he was working all the hours God had sent — running
a driving school — to fund her education. Lindsay pointed out that the
beggar had not had the opportunities Bill had given her. As Bill said, they
were a close, happy family with a comfortable lifestyle living in their safe
little bubble. “And somebody popped that bubble big time.”
Bill and Julia don’t know if Lindsay contacted Ichihashi again or if he
contacted her, but she made an arrangement to give him a lesson at the cafe
that Sunday morning. She did everything she was supposed to do. Nova advised
teachers that it was all right to give private lessons, but only in public
places and always leave a note of where they were going and who they were
going to meet. Lindsay had given a formal private lesson before and had
often talked with Nova students in cafes after school.
The police were not informed by Nova that Lindsay was missing until around
2.30pm on Monday, March 26, the second day she had not arrived for work.
Friends had also tried to report her missing, but the message had not been
passed on from one police station to another. Lindsay had left Ichihashi’s
name and address on a note in her flat, so it was not exactly hard to trace
him. The police timeline, made public here for the first time, does not
suggest they were in a great hurry. It was three hours and 10 minutes after
they had received the missing-person report, at 5.40pm, that the police sent
two officers from Funabashi station in Chiba prefecture to visit Ichihashi’s
apartment in Ichikawa City, one train stop from Lindsay’s home. The police
had by now discovered that although Ichihashi had no history of convictions,
there was a previous allegation of “theft and injury” against him. The story
was that he had assaulted a woman in the street during a robbery, possibly
as far back as six years ago. The Sunday Times Magazine was told that
Ichihashi’s father, acting in line with Japanese law, prevented the case
going to court by paying ¥1m — around £6,000 — to the victim to buy her
silence.
The police carefully noted how, on discovery of this information, they
realised that “Lindsay may have been the victim of a crime”. The officers
did not arrive at the apartment until 7pm (by now 10am Monday morning in
England, where Bill and Julia were frantic and had still not heard from
Nova). They did not go and knock at the apartment — apparently they could
not do so without proper cause, even though they by now suspected that
Lindsay might have been the victim of a crime — but instead observed some
“doubtful points” inside, particularly that there was no light on, but
somebody appeared to be there. The officers called for assistance and three
more were dispatched, and then, at 7.45pm, four more, making a total of
nine. It is worth noting that, even though the police specifically thought
it could be a hostage situation, these nine officers did not have
walkie-talkies to communicate with each other.
Neighbours were asked if they had seen a foreign woman; they hadn’t. The
police went through the neighbouring apartment onto the balcony overlooking
Ichihashi’s home. It was dark, but they were right next to Ichihashi’s
balcony. He had dragged his bath out onto it and Lindsay was dead inside it
with her hand sticking out, but the police did not see her. The police could
see there was somebody inside the apartment but, their notes said, they
could not go in because they could not obtain a key.
Nearly two hours after the nine officers had assembled, at 9.45pm, some were
standing outside the apartment door when it opened and Ichihashi came out,
closing the door behind him. He had a rucksack on and was barefoot, in the
Japanese tradition of keeping your shoes outside your door. The police said:
“You are Ichihashi and we want to talk to you about a foreign woman and we
want to come in.” They later said they could not “compulsorily restrain him”
because they did not have a “grasp of detailed facts”.
Ichihashi turned back, took the key out and began to open the door, then he
turned away, pushed past the officers and ran off down the stairs. An
officer grabbed at the rucksack, which came off while Ichihashi kept
running. He was 28 and very fit. Some officers gave chase but could not of
course use the walkie-talkies they didn’t have to give a quick alert to
their colleagues downstairs. Ichihashi vaulted the last few feet from the
open stairwell to the ground and kept running. The officers in pursuit did
not jump after him — the Hawkers think this was for health-and-safety
reasons — and Ichihashi ran off into the dense neighbourhood of apartment
blocks.
The police began searching for him and must have been persistent as he
suddenly reappeared, now wearing shoes that he must have stolen from outside
a nearby apartment, and ran right past officers for the second time, haring
down the street, turning left and left again before disappearing, never to
be seen since.
Meanwhile, other officers had entered the apartment and found Lindsay. It was
hard for Bill to describe what had been done to his daughter. She had been
bound and gagged with plastic ties and scarves, but only apparently after a
life-or-death struggle. Barely an inch of her body was unmarked by bruises
or injuries, even her feet. Lindsay was 5ft 10in and had learnt martial
arts. But Ichihashi was taller — just under 6ft — and a black belt,
constantly at the gym practising his own martial arts and habitually cycling
25 kilometres every day. He had finally strangled Lindsay, breaking her
neck.
It has been widely reported since that he was trying to escape when he left
his apartment but all he had with him was the small rucksack with gym
clothes. The police apparently think he was only going to the gym to wash —
after all, he had no bath now that he could use. If Lindsay had not left the
note with his name and address she might never have been traced.
Again, it was widely reported that she was found in a bath full of sand but
this too was wrong. Lindsay had actually been buried in a mixture of sand
and compost soil which Ichihashi had soaked in a chemical the Japanese use
to compact and decompose waste. The police believe he had simply taken a
practical approach to disposing of Lindsay’s body. It would be hard to take
her out and hide her so he would keep her there until eventually all trace
of her was gone. He had cut her hair off and left it in a bag found in the
apartment. Hair is evidently slow to rot.
Ichihashi had studied botany at university and so would have been familiar
with the process involved. In time, perhaps the bath would’ve become a
decorative feature, a flowerbed maybe. Japanese plumbing is not like the
UK’s. Taps are plumbed into walls, and baths aren’t sealed into place but
can easily be unclipped and moved.
In the hours before he was interrupted by the police he had been out six times
to a local hardware superstore to buy the materials.
There was little else in the apartment — a computer, a few hundred Manga
comics, and a large number of empty cartons of pomegranate juice. There were
also some wigs that led the police to wonder for a while if Ichihashi was
gay or bisexual or a transvestite. But there was no other evidence — apart
from one man’s unsubstantiated claim to have had gay sex with Ichihashi,
since his escape, in a club in Tokyo’s gay quarter, Shinjuku.
In fact, as I discovered, Ichihashi had a Japanese girlfriend and they had
been together for 12 months in what was described to me as a normal relationship.
He had been due to meet her that Sunday evening, March 25, but instead
e-mailed her saying he had something to sort out and would be in touch
later, which he never was. The woman was not named to me and all I know is
that she was of a similar age to Ichihashi and that her face was featured in
one of about 12 portrait drawings of women — Western and Japanese — which
Ichihashi left behind in his apartment.
It appears he sometimes used the drawings as a pick-up technique and there
have been reports — which I could not substantiate — that he has been asked
to leave bars frequented by Western women after complaints of harassment. If
the wigs are not evidence that Ichihashi was a “sister-boy” (in Japanese
parlance), then possession of them becomes a puzzle. Young Japanese men do
not commonly wear hair-pieces. One theory is that he was fascinated with
Western culture and the wigs were part of his wishful alter ego as a young
man of Western appearance.
The apartment where Lindsay died had once been the family home that Ichihashi
shared with his parents and sister, but it had originally been owned by his
maternal grandmother. The Japanese press have reported that the grandmother
gave the apartment to her daughter and son-in-law after their marriage in
1975 and that both Ichihashi and his sister had been born during their time
there. Ichihashi’s sister is said to be estranged from her brother and did
not invite him to her wedding, a few years ago, perhaps because of his
earlier assault on a woman.
The Japanese press reflect the country’s fascination with class and status,
and much has been made of the grandmother’s origins, which describe her as
being born “into a high-grade tea-leaves shop”. It was the grandmother who
is said to have established the dental practice, with her husband as the
dental technician. Ichihashi’s mother was their only child and she had
declared an early ambition to become a dentist, meeting her husband at
college. She had eventually worked at the practice but closed it down some
years ago when the grandmother became ill.
Restrictive Japanese privacy laws mean I have been unable to find out much
more about the background of Lindsay’s killer, not even his parents’ names.
Japanese press reports have been contradictory. Patients, for instance, are
quoted on the gentle manner of the surgeon father in carrying out “cancer
and hernia” operations, even though he is officially said to be a
neurosurgeon.
In the UK a parental combination of neurosurgeon and dentist would make for a
wealthy upper-middle-class lifestyle, but Japanese values are different and,
although again there are contradictory reports, it appears that the parents live
in modest comfort in a town some 200 miles outside Tokyo.
The Japanese press camped outside their house after the murder, waiting for
the parents to appear with expressions of sorrow and shame. The press left
disappointed. Instead the parents sent Lindsay’s parents an e-mail
expressing “regret”. Bill and Julia think it was a disgrace.
In Britain, if there was such a manhunt, the police would have wanted to put
pressure on Ichihashi, wheeling his parents, his sister, his girlfriend into
press conferences to make appeals to him to give himself up. Ichihashi’s
parents have declined to participate in any such appeal as they believe it
might provoke their son to suicide.
In any event, the police in Japan do things differently to the police in the
UK. They are not seeking Ichihashi on suspicion of murder but want to accuse
him merely of disposing of a body. They do not run massive crime inquiries
around computer-based systems of storing and cross-referencing information
but rely on what was described to me as the “human wave” approach.
There are 140 officers involved in the search for Ichihashi and they are
generating vast heaps of paperwork all the time. The inquiry room on the
fourth floor of police headquarters in Chiba is apparently like a scene from
the television series Life on Mars, which reflects the old school of UK
policing, in the days before the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry when the police
were overwhelmed by paperwork and consistently missed vital clues.In Chiba,
there are said to be something like 20 yards of shelving filled with files
of documents generated by the hunt. Whereas the Holmes computer at the
centre of large-scale investigations in the UK might easily and instantly
make key associations and breakthroughs, how can anyone keep on top of the
information in all those files?
Still, even the Hawkers would concede that the police are nothing if not
determined. The officer in charge, Superintendent Oguma, made a promise to
Bill that Ichihashi would be caught. On meeting his deputy, Tahisha, Bill
discovered that he and many other officers do not go home for days, even
weeks at a time, but sleep on roll-out mats in the gymnasium across the
corridor from the incident room. Tahisha told Bill he would not rest until
his boss’s promise had been kept.
These officers are “salarymen”, in the great Japanese tradition of the
hard-working employee who appears to place his job before his family.
Suspecting that Ichihashi might have tried to escape abroad, perhaps to Canada
where he had once lived and studied in the city of Edmonton, but knowing he
had left his passport in his apartment, the police have investigated around
350,000 of the 700,000 passport applications made in Japan since his escape.
Because pomegranate juice is so unusual — even in Japan — they obtained a
list of retailers and went out and spoke to all of them, in case it might
lead to Ichihashi.They have travelled widely throughout Japan, investigating
many of the 5,200 reported sightings of their suspect, many generated by
30,000 wanted posters the police have distributed.
Ichihashi can have had little or no money with him when he fled and has not
attempted to access his bank accounts. He had never worked but lived on an
allowance of around £600 a month from his parents. The police are convinced
he is still alive and in Japan. Naturally, they must be wondering if he is
being sheltered or supported by friends or family and, even though they are
limited in their powers of surveillance, there is some evidence that they
are monitoring the family’s communications. He was otherwise said to be a
solitary character with few friends, in stark contrast with the popular
young woman he murdered.
Lindsay’s mother, Julia, told me she had actually spoken by phone to one of
the officers stationed outside Ichihashi’s apartment on the evening he
escaped. The officer was a woman who spoke good English, and Julia had been
urging her to go into the apartment.
The call had been made possible by some of Lindsay’s teacher friends who had
also gathered outside Ichihashi’s apartment. Bill had been urging them to
break in. Poignantly, when we considered the timeline together, it became
apparent that Lindsay’s body must have been discovered when these
conversations were taking place.
The first Lindsay’s parents knew of what had happened came not from the police
but from the father of one of Lindsay’s fellow teachers who called to say
they should prepare for the worst as his own daughter had rung him to say
that a body had been discovered. Bill and Julia prayed in vain that Lindsay
might have killed her student and the body would be his but the terrible
confirmation came with a visit from Warwickshire police officers in the
early hours of Tuesday morning.
It wasn’t long after this that they heard the suspect had got away. Twenty
months later this was still eating away at them. Knowing who he was and what
he’d done, and how the police had let him slip past them, was pretty much
unbearable.
Bill flew out to Japan straight away, with a friend and Lindsay’s boyfriend,
Ryan Garside. Staff at the British embassy in Tokyo were helpful but it was
a different story at the Foreign Office in London, who assigned what Julia
described as a “novice” to help them.
Julia asked if the FO adviser could come up to Coventry and was told the FO
never made home visits. Never? No. In disgust Julia wrote e-mails to the
then foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, and to Tony Blair, who was still
prime minister, and his wife, Cherie. Beckett was supportive and later
raised the case during a visit to Japan. Tony Blair wrote back, twice, and
Cherie also replied. When there was a change of leadership, Julia wrote
again, to the new prime minister, Gordon Brown, and his foreign secretary,
Ed Miliband, and this time she heard nothing back. When she and Bill were
eventually invited to the FO for a meeting with junior minister Lord Malloch
Brown, he told them that Ed Miliband had received and noted their e-mails,
and Julia thought, well why hadn’t he bothered to reply, then?
It was an uphill battle with the FO, and they were not strong on sensitivity,
telling the Hawkers that they were fortunate that the Japanese police had
seen fit to communicate with them and again that they were fortunate to have
been able to bring Lindsay’s body home to the United Kingdom.Fortunate? Were
they insane, those people?
Blair’s legacy was considerably more helpful, in this case at least. After
Julia wrote to him, the prime minister’s office called Warwickshire police
and more or less ordered them to send officers out to Japan to support the
Hawkers and establish liaison with the Japanese police. A senior
investigating officer, Detective Chief Inspector Ally Wright, was assigned
to the role and has now been out three times to Tokyo.
Wright is convinced that the Japanese police’s methodical approach will
eventually pay dividends. He has seen them working at close quarters and
says that he can see they are working with the same determined ethos as the
British police would. He also knows they are feeling the pressure of the
family’s campaign to keep the case at the forefront of public attention. In
recent weeks there have been reports that Ichihashi might have killed
himself, but these have been dismissed by the police.
As Wright put it, Ichihashi has to be lucky every day of his life but the
police only need to be lucky once to catch him. Bill and Julia would like to
share Wright’s certainty and don’t want to be seen to criticise the Japanese
police but, understandably, they struggle to get past their frustration that
Ichihashi was able to slip past them.
They continue to be tormented, too, by the unexplained details of the case.
They know Ichihashi must have tricked Lindsay into returning to his
apartment, but how? There is some suggestion he was fumbling for money at
the cafe as they left and they wonder if he claimed he had left her fee
behind and she could come to collect it. Or, Bill speculated, had he
discovered Lindsay’s ambition to be a GP and told her his own father was a doctor
and she could meet him at the apartment? Then there is the missing memory
card from the camera Lindsay had with her. The camera was found at the
apartment but minus the card, and they wonder what it might have recorded.
Above all, why was Lindsay’s hand raised up from the sand and soil that he had
used to cover her? They dread the thought that she might have been buried
alive and trying to reach out. All the experts have told them she was dead
by then.
But they would say that, wouldn’t they, said Bill, who has suffered a
catastrophic breakdown of his faith in human nature.
Additional reporting by Shota Ushio.
www.lindsayannhawker.com