Lindsay Ann Hawker was born on December 30, 1984 to parents Bill & Julia. She was from Warwickshire, England & lived with her parents & her two sisters. She had gotten her degree in biology from the University of Leeds in 2006, graduating with honors & ultimately planned to get her Master’s degree, but wanted some experience before starting her courses. Lindsay was an ambitious & bright girl who had a passion for life. She had the goal of traveling the world for a year with her boyfriend, Ryan Garside. Before her world tour, she accepted a job as a teacher in Tokyo, Japan which delayed the start of their trip. The plan was for Ryan to join her the following summer so they could begin their travel adventures together.
Lindsay was exceptionally excited to begin her time in Tokyo & before she arrived, she studied the culture so she was sure to be respectful when she arrived. In October of 2006, 22-year-old Lindsay arrived in Japan to start her one year teaching job, working at the Tokyo branch of Nova which is Japan’s largest private English school. She assured her family that Tokyo was a safe place & she would make plenty of new friends there. She shared her apartment in the city of Chiba with two other teachers from Nova & they all quickly became friends. Her parents, Bill & Julia traveled to celebrate Lindsay’s birthday with her in December of 2006 & were relieved to see that their daughter was thriving in her new environment.
On Thursday, March 22, 2007, Lindsay traveled from work to home via train & during her journey, she met a man, 28-year-old Tatsuya Itchihachi. He walked up to Lindsay & said, “You are my English teacher.” Despite what he said her, Lindsay knew he wasn’t telling her the truth; she knew all of her students & he wasn’t one of them. Lindsay kept her bike at the train station & as she was unlocking it & preparing to cycle home, Tatsuya continued to speak with her. As she rode away, he chased her home, asking her various questions about her background. When she arrived at her apartment, he asked if he could get some water. Lindsay felt sorry for him & invited him into her flat, knowing her two roommates would also be home. Once inside, she introduced him to her roommates & he asked if she would be willing to give him English lessons & they agreed to meet at a cafe which was permitted by the Nova school with certain rules in mind. They had to meet in a public space & she would have to leave a note with the student’s name & address. Lindsay had given private lessons before so this was nothing unusual. She told him the fee would be 3500 yen or $32 per hour. As he was preparing to leave, he handed Lindsay a piece of paper with his name, e-mail address & phone number. Lindsay was surprised to see that he’d also sketched a picture of her on the sheet.
Tatsuya was born on January 5, 1979 & majored in horticulture, graduating from Chiba University. He came from a wealthy family where his mother was a dentist & his father was a brain surgeon. He wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps & become a doctor, but he was denied access due to his lower grades. After graduation, he lacked ambition & rather than getting a job, he found it easier to live on his family’s money where he was given an allowance of 100,000 yen or $920 a month. His classmates described him as socially isolated & obsessed with violent manga & his girlfriend said that he was a serious & stable man. He had no previous convictions but had been a suspect in a case where a woman was assaulted during a robbery. His father paid the woman 1 million yen or $6,800 to settle the matter & avoid getting the police involved.
He was obsessed with physical fitness & was said to cycle over fifteen miles per day at his gym. Despite his focus on physical health, his mental health was deteriorating & he voiced to his friends that he was feeling unstable. He had not sought any medical help for the way he was feeling.
Two days after Lindsay first met Tatsuya, Lindsay left her apartment on Saturday, March 24 to meet Tatsuya in a cafe at 9 am. She said goodbye to her roommates & never returned. Despite being so far from home, Lindsay maintained close contact with her family & friends back home in England. When her family hadn’t heard from her that Saturday, they chalked it up to the time difference & assumed Lindsay was busy with friends. Lindsay’s routine was to teach six days a week & she had never missed a lesson. When her family still hadn’t heard from her on Sunday, March 25, they were extremely concerned. The next day, Monday, March 26, the staff at the Nova school contacted Lindsay’s father & informed him that she hadn’t shown up to classes on Sunday or Monday. In the meantime, her roommates had contacted the police & reported her missing at 2:30 pm on that Monday. Lindsay’s dad Bill immediately traveled to Tokyo to find his daughter.
Police started their investigation by reviewing CCTV footage & saw photos of Lindsay & Tatsuya in a cafe, ordering drinks. As they stood in line, they could be seen conversing & it was clear that Lindsay was trying to keep her distance, stepping away if he got closer than she’d like. They sat together for about an hour as Lindsay gave him English lessons. From the cafe, the pair got into a taxi & left, stopping in front of Tatsuya’s apartment after he told her he’d forgotten to bring the money to cover the lesson. Lindsay asked the taxi driver to wait for her, saying she would just be a moment & went inside behind Tatsuya. After waiting for seven minutes, the taxi driver could be seen leaving & Lindsay never came out of the building.
On Monday, March 26, police spoke with Lindsay’s roommates & they told them about the strange man that had come to their apartment & Lindsay’s plans to give him English lessons. They handed the police the sheet of paper with his information & at 5:40 pm, two police officers were dispatched to Tatsuya’s apartment building in Ichikawa, a suburban town of east Tokyo. They weren’t permitted to knock without probable cause but his neighbors allowed officers onto their balcony so they could look into his living room. The officers could see that someone was in the apartment despite the lights being off & they noticed that the apartment’s detachable bathtub had been moved to the balcony, which they found odd. Knowing his past record, police feared Tatsuya was holding Lindsay hostage & made the decision to call for backup at 7 pm. Within the hour, seven more officers arrived.
Two hours later, nine officers were assembled outside when Tatsuya left the building, barefoot & carrying a backpack. He began running & despite his lack of shoes, he managed to escape the officers. One officer managed to grab his bag that contained gym clothes, but he vaulted the last few feet off of the stairway & zig-zagged through the streets.
When police entered his apartment & went onto the balcony for closer inspection of the bathtub, they saw that it had been filled with a mixture of soil & sand. Under the mixture, they noticed a small white hand sticking out & found Lindsay’s naked body. Tatsuya had put a decomposition agent into the soil mixture & placed flower seed on top to disguise it as a flower bed. Lindsay had been gagged with a scarf & her hands & feet had been bound with gardening ties. Her head had been shaved & her hair was found inside a plastic bag. Various women’s wigs were also scattered around his apartment & police theorized that Tatsuya may be transgender & possibly shaved Lindsay’s hair to use for a wig.
Police suspect that Lindsay was murdered between Sunday night & early Monday morning & it’s possible she was attacked over the course of as many as 36 hours. Neighbors spoke with police & indicated they had heard the sounds of something heaving striking metal & then something being dragged.
Lindsay’s upper body was covered in egg-sized bruises that appeared to have been inflicted by a fist during a prolonged attack. Other marks on her body indicated that she was likely kicked or a blunt instrument may have been used & she had also collided with furniture inside the apartment. Both Tatsuya & Lindsay were experienced in martial arts but Tatsuya had far more experience & had a black belt. It was clear by the defensive wounds on her arms that Lindsay had tried to fight back, but tragically, she had been overpowered & had been strangled to death. Police learned that Tatsuya had gone to a local hardware store six times to purchase various materials including the soil & sand found in the bathtub.
When Lindsay’s family was contacted & informed that a body had been found, Bill had already booked his flight to Tokyo & was now traveling to identify his daughter. Bill made a statement to the media & said, “When I saw her, I knew it was Lindsay. She was my daughter. She was so tall & beautiful. She was beaten so badly. My life & my soul just fell beneath me.”
In the meantime, Tatsuya was still out on the run & police distributed 30,000 posters of him throughout the country. He was also placed on a nationwide wanted list. A new photo was released that included him disguised as a woman. They also released the image he had drawn of Lindsay, hoping that someone would identify his artistic style.
2008 came & went & police were no closer to finding Tatsuya despite 180 officers being assigned to the case. Lindsay’s family launched a website, asking the public for their assistance in finding him. In 2009 it was speculated that he could have either fled to the Philippines or committed suicide. Life-size cutouts of him were released to raise awareness.
What police didn’t know at the time was that when Tatsuya initially fled police, he wandered around Tokyo without any money, disguising himself under hats, wearing glasses, avoiding all eye contact from the eye of surveillance cameras. He wasn’t in contact with any of his family members. He noticed a wanted photo of himself on display as he passed a police station & noticed that one of his moles were prominently featured so he used a box cutter to slice the mole off his left cheek. He also cut off a portion of his lower lip in order to make it look thinner. Because of the immense pain, his first attempt wasn’t successful & he finished the job while in a public bathroom a few days later.
He cut his nose & bound it with a needle in thread to make it appear smaller. In order to undergo professional plastic surgery to further alter his appearance, he knew he needed to earn money. He got a job, working at a construction company in Osaka, 300 miles west of Tokyo & used the name & address of a dead person. During this time, he saved one million yen (equivalent to $6,800), spending the majority of his money toward plastic surgery, which included a nose job to make his nose more narrow & longer. While visiting various doctors, he used false names & addresses at the clinics.
The cash reward for information leading to Tatsuya’s arrest was raised from one million to ten million yen. During a second visit to a plastic surgeon for additional work on his nose, the clinic in Nagoya noticed suspicious scars on his face from where the moles had been removed & sent photos to the police. Police then released to the media a photo taken immediately before his most recent surgery. The media was notified to be on the lookout & showed the updated photos of his altered appearance.
Tatsuya saw the news reports & knew there was renewed interest in the case. He bought a disguise; a beard, sideburns & a mustache, but despite this, he was spotted by a member of the public.
On November 10, 2009, more than two years after Tatsuya murdered Lindsay, investigators received a phone tip, reporting that they had seen someone resembling him at a ferry terminal. Officers rushed to the scene & arrested him in Osaka’s Suminoe Ward. After he was taken to the police station, his identity was confirmed via fingerprints. The reward money was divided up among the staff at the plastic surgery clinic in Nagoya, an employee of the Osaka construction company & the employee at the ferry terminal where he had been spotted.
After hearing that her murderer had finally been captured, Bill, Lindsay’s dad, released a statement to the media, “I’d like to thank every single person in Japan who looked at the television, looked at the newspaper & watched for Ichiashi to come here. Lindsay loved the children of Japan. I now feel as if Japan has not let her down.”
Tatsuya was initially charged with abandoning a body because he did not confess upon his arrest. He admitted to suffocating Lindsay to prevent her from screaming out as he raped her. Before the trial began, he wrote a letter to Lindsay’s family since in Japan, defendants can get shorter sentences if the victim’s family accepts their apology. In his letter, he wrote: There is no one to blame but me. I will take responsibility. I will never forget about her & what I did to her & you. And I will carry my cross until the moment of my death. I am very sorry. I not only destroyed her life but I also changed your lives. What I did to her & you will never be forgiven. I was evil.
Lindsay’s family refused to accept his apology & asked that the court show him “no mercy” & that he be given the death penalty.
During the first hearing of the trial, Tatsuya spoke while weeping & said, “Yes, I raped her. Yes, I agree that Lindsay died because of my actions. But I did not mean to kill her. Only Lindsay & I know what really happened that day but she can no longer speak for herself because of me. It is my responsibility to tell the truth throughout this trial.” The prosecution didn’t believe that the death was an accident since there was nothing to indicate he had tried to resuscitate Lindsay & he hadn’t called for help. Lindsay had gone back to his apartment so she could receive payment & it’s likely that soon after she entered, she was struck with strong blows to the face.
950 spectators lined up to claim one of the sixty chairs in the court’s public gallery on the day the verdict was to be read. Before his sentencing, Tatsuya entered the courtroom, cuffed & secured & bowed in the direction of Lindsay’s family who were seated near the prosecutors. He was shown to display a dramatic show of remorse which Lindsay’s family completely ignored.
A panel of six lay judges & three professional judges were to determine the verdict & the presiding judge, Masaya Hotta, read the ruling: “Shortly after he entered his apartment, the defendant administered strong blows to the victim, especially around the right eye. He also assaulted other parts of her body & used tape to bind her to stop her resisting when he raped her. He raped her to satisfy his sexual desire, then tried to cover up the rape by killing her. He then attempted to conceal the murder by abandoning her body. The crime was inexcusable & savage. Ichihashi has repeated irrational, unnatural statements that are contradicted by the evidence. We do not believe that he has reflected on his crime from the bottom of his heart.”
In Japan, the death penalty is rarely used for killing only one person & Tatsuya had no previous convictions. On July 21, 2011, more than four years after Lindsay was viciously murdered, Tatsuya was sentenced to life in prison. He was sent to the Nagano Prison & listed as a class-B offender. A fellow inmate described him as aloof & only engaged with those he was comfortable with. He also indicated that his parents visited him monthly & continued to financially assist their son.
Tatsuya went on to write a book, “Until I Was Arrested” in order to tell his side of the story. He offered Lindsay’s family all royalties, but they declined his offer.
According to Article 28 of the Japanese Penal Code, Tatsuya will be eligible for parole after serving as little as ten years, but the average length of incarceration for life terms is 32 years & 10 months.
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