FUKUOKA (TR) – Yuko Takahashi, as soon as a well-liked hostess bar proprietor in Fukuoka City’s bustling Nakasu red-light district, stays behind bars serving a life sentence for the murders of two of her husbands to gather profitable life insurance coverage payouts.
Born right into a rich household and nicknamed “Snow White” in her youth, Takahashi’s path from a classically skilled pianist to a convicted serial killer shocked the nation twenty years in the past.
She was a pampered magnificence who known as herself a prize turned ice-cold killer when her males stopped offering. As courtroom data present, she drowned and stabbed her second and third husbands over a interval of six years earlier than Fukuoka police lastly closed in.
Husband quantity two
Fukuoka Prefectural Police arrested Takahashi, then 48, on suspicion of extortion in July 2004, earlier than charging her with the murders of two former husbands she had killed for insurance coverage payouts totaling practically 190 million yen.
The first sufferer was her second husband, Yuji Nomoto, 34, a one-time housing salesman turned licensed architect who had deserted his pregnant spouse to marry Yuko in 1987. Together the couple constructed a three-story mansion in Kasuya-gun Shimemachi. Nomoto established his personal design agency, Tsukasa Kenchiku Kobo, in Fukuoka City’s Minami Ward. In the Noda family, along with the couple, there was a 13-year-old daughter, a 10-year-old eldest son, and a 1-year-old second daughter.
Takahashi put in herself as firm president. But as Japan’s “bubble economy” deflated within the early Nineteen Nineties, the agency buckled beneath money owed of 130 million yen.
Bankruptcy
By March 1994, Yuko had begun changing numerous home items of worth into money — stashing the proceeds at her dad and mom’ dwelling — as she ready to file for chapter.
Yuko took her youngsters and moved right into a luxurious condominium in Chuo Ward, Fukuoka City, in May. Around the identical time, she approached her former housekeeper, who on the time additionally ran a “snack” bar, which is a modest hostess membership. Yuko she requested if she might work there.
“She had no experience, but she was good-looking, so I decided to hire her at an hourly wage of 1,000 yen,” the previous housekeeper instructed Friday (May 14, 2019).
Yuko started working on the bar, and in keeping with the previous housekeeper, she rapidly grew to become in style — due to her magnificence, allure and music expertise gained throughout her stint at Musashino Academia Musicae in Tokyo.
“She always wore mini-skirts that ended above her knees, and with her great figure and gentle, pleasant demeanor toward customers, I thought she was well-suited for the nightlife industry. When she sang karaoke, she often chose songs like Teresa Teng’s ‘Tsugunai’ or Chisato Moritaka’s ‘Watashi ga Obasan ni Nattemo’ (‘Even If I Become an Old Lady’).”
Yuko confirmed up for work diligently for a couple of month, however then her shifts started to lower. Eventually, she began returning to the institution — not as an worker, however as a buyer, accompanied by a person.
“I later learned from her that during the time she stopped coming to my place, she had actually been working at a club in Nakasu, Fukuoka City, run by the mother of one of her daughter’s friends,” the previous housekeeper mentioned.
Kyushu graduate pupil
Hooked on host golf equipment and pachinko along with luxurious automobiles and a designer wardrobe, Yuko then turned on her husband over the debt. Her answer, which she repeated to him day by day in keeping with courtroom testimony: “If you die, the insurance will pay off the debt.”
Nomoto tried suicide twice by carbon monoxide poisoning; each occasions he survived. Each time, Takahashi greeted his survival not with aid however with fury. “Why didn’t you die? How are we going to pay the debt?” she demanded, police mentioned.
By this level Yuko had taken up with Kenichi Ide, a Kyushu University graduate pupil she had employed as a tutor for her son. Besotted, the scholar reportedly researched killing strategies utilizing a industrial suicide guide and proposed injecting benzene-laced whisky into Nomoto’s glass. When the odor proved too robust, he devised a second plan: a deep stab wound to the stomach to puncture an artery, the blade withdrawn instantly.
On the evening of October 22, 1994, Yuko combined sleeping capsules into Nomoto’s whisky, waited for him to lose consciousness, pulled on work gloves, and drove a kitchen knife into his stomach and decrease again. She then known as the graduate pupil to assist affirm dying and clear the scene. Nomoto was discovered within the tatami room of his dwelling surrounded by scattered mortgage paperwork, the wound passing clear via to his again.
“She called out of the blue and said, ‘My husband has passed away.’ Even though he had actually been killed in their own home, she claimed, ‘He committed suicide at a friend’s place. He left behind individual suicide notes for me and for each of our children,’” the previous housekeeper mentioned.
Police initially dominated the dying a suicide by debt misery, a conclusion supported by two earlier makes an attempt and a word Nomoto had written earlier. The ruling allowed Yuko to gather 160 million yen in life insurance coverage.
After promoting the property for roughly 50 million yen and repaying the money owed, she walked away with near 100 million yen in hand, police mentioned.
Nomoto’s mom later instructed investigators that her son’s voice had been discovered on her answering machine. The message, fragmented and barely audible, appeared to say: “I was… done…”
Luring prospects into affairs
Flush with insurance coverage cash, Yuko reaffirmed her place in Nakasu, opening up her personal snack bar, Freesia, within the Nakasu Daiichi Building on the age of 40.
With her allure and appears, she rapidly constructed a loyal clientele amongst older male patrons. She parlayed that loyalty right into a second revenue stream, luring prospects into affairs after which, together with her lover Fumio Aoki, threatening to reveal them to their wives until they paid, police mentioned.
According to the previous housekeeper, she managed to osecure “high-value” shoppers, similar to financial institution executives. She even confided to the previous housekeeper that she had engaged in makura eigyo —buying and selling sexual favors for enterprise — with a few of these males.
“There was a customer of ours and Yuko told me he had visited Freesia. She spoke quite nonchalantly about having had a sexual relationship with him. Later, when I casually brought him up in conversation, Mr. A confessed that he had lent her 400,000 yen — money that was never paid back,” the previous housekeeper mentioned.
Nine victims had been extorted in complete; losses exceeded 10 million yen.
Husband quantity three
In 1999, a daily at Freesia, Takayuki Amano, divorced his spouse of 27 years to marry Takahashi. An government posted on the time as normal supervisor to a well known inn in Aomori Prefecture, Amano took Yuko’s surname and entered her household register as Takayuki Takahashi.
A dispute with a former lover of Yuko’s led to Amano being transferred to a resort in Fukuyama City, Hiroshima Prefecture. Yuko had closed Freesia upon getting married, however Amano — who had been demoted — ended up resigning as a result of stress of an unfamiliar work atmosphere.
Left with no different alternative, Yuko had Amano signal the lease for the premises and reopened Freesia with him serving because the supervisor. However, irrespective of how a lot Yuko tried to lean into her personal intercourse enchantment, a bar the place her husband was additionally current within the room stood no likelihood of changing into in style.
As a outcome, the bar struggled; Amano, careworn and out of his depth, finally stop his job fully. Without a wage coming in, Yuko’s endurance expired. “No job, no use. Go and find some money,” she instructed him, in keeping with prosecutors. She subjected Amano to sustained psychological strain and, at occasions, bodily violence.
Drowned in bathtub
Less than eighteen months into the wedding, on November 12, 2000, at round 4 a.m., Amano drank beer and whisky laced with two sorts of prescribed sleeping treatment and lowered himself into the bathtub. Yuko held his shoulders beneath the water till he drowned. He was 54. Because Amano had a authentic prescription for the sedatives, police recorded no suspicion of foul play.
A month earlier than his dying, Yuko had taken out 138 million yen in life insurance coverage on Amano. The insurer refused to pay after discovering he had not disclosed his diabetes. Yuko collected solely 27.4 million yen from a postal financial savings coverage.
Freesia closed 9 months after Amano’s dying, by then infamous in Nakasu for rolling shoppers and robbing them. Yuko sued the insurer in Fukuoka District Court for the 80 million yen she believed she was owed. The courtroom dismissed her declare.
“I accept all charges”
In the autumn of 2003, Fukuoka Prefectural Police’s First Investigative Division, reviewing chilly suspicious-death recordsdata, surfaced the identify of a girl who had collected insurance coverage on two successive husbands. Plainclothes officers spent months canvassing Nakasu’s bars, the place the story of a snack-bar mama who had killed for insurance coverage was already an open secret. On July 22, 2004, Yuko was arrested on extortion costs, the pretext police used to deliver her in for questioning in regards to the murders. Under polygraph examination she admitted her involvement in each deaths, police mentioned.
The first legal trial opened at Fukuoka District Court on December 13, 2004. Yuko confronted two counts of homicide, two of extortion, three of insurance coverage fraud, and one in all tried fraud. In her opening assertion, weeping, she mentioned: “I accept all the charges. I don’t mind if I receive the death penalty.”
Two months later she reversed course, claiming Ide, the graduate pupil, had acted on his personal initiative and that she had by no means requested him to kill Nomoto.
The courtroom was unmoved. The presiding decide mentioned her shifting account mirrored a clear effort to scale back her personal culpability and shift blame onto a person for whom she had romantic emotions, and located it unreliable.
On the killing of Nomoto after his two failed suicide makes an attempt, the decide mentioned her conduct was “outrageously selfish and self-centered, leaving no room whatsoever for leniency.” Prosecutors described her to the courtroom as a queen bee demanding her drones sacrifice themselves for her.
“Leave me alone”
On July 19, 2007, Fukuoka District Court sentenced Yuko to life imprisonment. The killing of Amano was labeled as solicited homicide on the discovering that Amano had, by that time, a real intention to die and hand his insurance coverage to Yuko.
The Fukuoka High Court dismissed her enchantment on December 18, 2007. On April 26, 2011, the Supreme Court rejected her closing enchantment, making the life sentence closing. She was 55. She is presently serving her sentence at Fumoto Prison, Kyushu’s solely girls’s correctional facility.
Ide, the graduate pupil, was tried individually. He was convicted at first occasion of aiding and abetting homicide and sentenced to 3 years and 6 months. Prosecutors had demanded imprisonment of 12 years.
On April 22, 2008, the Fukuoka High Court overturned the conviction on grounds of inadequate proof and acquitted him. “I just want them to leave me alone,” he mentioned in a remark launched by his authorized crew lawyer after the excessive courtroom ruling.
Prosecutors didn’t enchantment. He had been residing in Kobe City together with his spouse and two youngsters on the time of the enchantment judgment.