Lucie Blackman was working as a bar hostess in Tokyo at the time of her disappearance.
(2 of 7)
Lucie Blackman hated it all when she first arrived. The hours. The pressure to go out on dohans. She had worked for two years on BA's long-haul routes to Africa and the Americas, but she had seldom been away from her family home — where she still lived with her mother and younger sister and brother — in the London suburb of Sevenoaks, Kent, for more than four days in a row. After arriving in Tokyo, she phoned and e-mailed family almost daily, telling them she was homesick.
She had quit her job as a stewardess because, she complained to her sister, it left her feeling "permanently jet-lagged." Her annual salary at BA had been $18,700. A good hostess could earn that in two months. Before even boarding that flight for Tokyo she was anti-cipating the hostessing windfall, charging $1,400 to her credit card to buy a new bed that she planned to use when she returned from Japan. "Lucie was not the most intelligent person," says her sister Sophie, "nor was she stupid. She did the things a normal 21-year-old would do."
Lucie e-mailed her sister that working in the club was "like being an air hostess without the altitude." She phoned her mother once to tell her that a customer had offered her "a fantastic sum of money to sleep with him." Lucie said she laughed off the proposal, reminding her mother that her job was to pour drinks, light cigarettes and "discuss boring subjects like volcanoes." She confessed to Sophie that sometimes her customers spoke English with such thick accents, all she could do was nod. "I can't believe I am paid so much money just to pretend I am listening to them," she reported.
Lucie and Louise Phillips, a friend who came with her to Tokyo from England, shared a room in the Yoyogi gaijin house. By the start of her second month in Tokyo, Lucie hadn't managed to save any money, but she was beginning to make peace with her Tokyo environs. Continuing to e-mail her sister nearly every day, she told her she was earning the equivalent of $1,450 a week. And she expected her earnings to increase as customers more frequently requested her. She was enjoying the Roppongi nightlife and had gone on a few actual dates, as opposed to dohans, with an American, Scott Fraser, a young Marine stationed on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Kittyhawk.
On July 1, a Saturday, Lucie went on a dohan with a customer from Casablanca. The man, whose name Lucie did not share with anyone, had offered her a prepaid mobile phone if she would accompany him to a restaurant near the beach. Her roommate Louise was still in bed in their six-tatami matted room when Lucie left. Louise recalls glimpsing Lucie on her way out in sandals and a black one-piece dress, and a silver necklace with hearts on it. They had plans to see each other in the evening, along with Scott. Lucie phoned Louise three times that day, first at 1:30 to say she had met her lunch date, then at 5:00 saying, "I'm being taken to the sea" and finally at 7:00 when she said, "I'll be back in half an hour." She phoned Scott a few minutes later with the same message. No one heard from her again.
The next day, Phillips received a call on her cell phone from a man who spoke in a thick accent and identified himself as Akira Takagi. He told her: "Lucie has joined a newly risen cult. She is safe and training in a hut in Chiba."
The white stucco four-story apartment building on the rocky, windswept Miura coast is called the Blue Sea. The palm tree in front is lashed down with ropes to keep it from blowing over. But the views of the sailboat marina and rugged coastline are spectacular. It's a tony area: Japan's best-known actor of the 1960s, Toshiro Mifune, lived a few hundred meters down the coast until he died a few years ago. It takes no more than 60 seconds to walk from the front lobby of the Blue Sea to the spot where Lucie's remains were discovered.
The killer had only one direction to go when he carried Lucie's body parts from his apartment. A driveway turns out to the right of the front door; the marina is straight ahead. To the left there is a small parking lot, then a narrow path leading across stones and cement pilings to the tiny beach, which is maybe one-quarter the area of a tennis court. Five meters back from the water is a rock face with a crevice a couple of meters wide extending a few meters from the beach. It is partially open on top, and light streams into it. There used to be a discarded bathtub there among pieces of trash blown in by the wind. During the four months when Tokyo Metropolitan Police officers, with assistance from elements of the Self-Defense Force, combed the area, no one bothered to look beneath the discarded tub. Eventually, at about 9:00 a.m. on Feb. 9, police revisited the cave they had already searched in the fall. Poking around by the bathtub, they found Lucie's body cut into eight pieces, buried approximately 50 cm beneath the sand. At first, investigators couldn't identify the corpse. The head had been entombed in cement. The body parts were so badly decayed that their gender could not even be determined. When postmortem examiners cut into the cement encasing the head in hopes of finding teeth to match with dental records, they immediately found one identifiable feature, unmistakably foreign: long, natural blond hair.