Joji Obara, The Lucie Blackman Murder : Serial Killer Documentary

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• published: 15 Mar 2016
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Joji Obara is a convicted rapist who was accused of the rape and subsequent deaths of two women, British hostess Lucie Blackman in the summer of 2000 and Australian Carita Ridgeway in 1992, and the rapes of six other women. Joji Obara was born Kim Sung Jong in 1952 to zainichi parents in Osaka. During his youth, his father worked his way from scrap collector to taxi driver to immensely wealthy owner of a string of pachinko parlours. At 15, Obara enrolled in prestigious private high schools, a prep school which is owned by Keio University, which at graduation guarantees entrance to the University. Two years later, upon his father's death, he inherited holdings in Osaka and Tokyo. After graduating from Keio University with degrees in politics and law, he became a naturalized Japanese citizen and legally changed his name to Joji Obara. During the late 1980s and early 1990s Obara invested heavily in real estate speculation. After losing his fortune when the bubble burst and his firm collapsed, he reportedly used his business as a money laundering front for the yakuza syndicate, Sumiyoshi-kai. His pornographic video collection, 4,000 to 5,000 of which were recovered by police, led police to believe that Obara may have raped anywhere from 150 to 400 women.[4] A recreational drug user, he was reported to have an obsession with Caucasians and developed a sex fetish for molesting unconscious women. Police found over 200 sex videos involving Obara molesting women in this manner sometimes wearing a facemask and report that his extensive journals made reference to "conquer play", a euphemism describing his sexual assaults on women he wrote were "only good for sex" and on which he sought revenge, "revenge on the world" drugging them with chloroform. Lucie Blackman (1 September 1978 – 1 July 2000) was an English woman who worked as a hostess in Roppongi, Tokyo. Blackman had previously worked as a flight attendant for British Airways but had come to Japan to see the world. At the time of her disappearance she had been working as a hostess at Casablanca, a night club in Roppongi. She was 21 years old at the time of her death. Blackman's mysterious death and disappearance, as well as Obara's trial, received high press coverage in Japan as well as internationally — especially in the British media. As a result of the publicity surrounding the case, three foreign women came forward to describe waking up, sore and sick, in Obara’s bed, with no memory of the night before. Several of them, it turned out, had reported him to the Roppongi police, but had been ignored. On July 1, Lucie went on a douhan (a paid date) with a customer from Casablanca. No one heard from her again. The Blackman family, wanting to find Lucie, flew to Tokyo and took the opportunity to start a high-profile direct media campaign, including approaching British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook who was in Tokyo at that time. Newspapers started publicizing Blackman's disappearance on July 13, when British Prime Minister Tony Blair made mention of the case during an official visit to Japan where he met with Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori. An information hotline was staffed by British ex-pats, a reward of £100,000 made by an anonymous businessman. On January 10, 2001, Blackman's dismembered body was found, buried in a shallow grave under a bathtub in a seaside cave at Miura, Kanagawa, about 30 miles south of Tokyo, just a few hundred meters from Obara's apartment. The body had been cut into eight pieces. Her head had been shaved and encased in concrete. The discovery of the body was too late to determine the cause of the death.