028 The Hotel Nihonkaku Murders A tale of greed and betrayal in 1950s Japan, where a woman's dream of hotel ownership led to a deadly conspiracy and double homicide.
Description
The Hotel Nihonkaku Murder Case, uncovered in 1961, involved a series of calculated killings orchestrated by K, a woman driven by ambition to own a hot spring inn. In 1958, K learned that Hotel Nihonkaku in Shiobara Onsen, Tochigi Prefecture, was facing financial difficulties and might be auctioned. Aspiring to run her own inn, she approached the hotel's owner but was initially rejected. Later that year, the owner proposed that if K provided a severance payment of 500,000 yen to his current wife, he would divorce her and marry K, making her a co-owner of the inn. K negotiated the amount down to 300,000 yen, but the owner's wife refused the divorce, deeming the amount insufficient. Consequently, K and the owner conspired to murder his wife. On February 8, 1960, they hired O, a handyman, to carry out the killing. The wife's body was buried beneath the earthen floor of the hotel and reported missing.
After marrying the owner, K invested 2 million yen of her savings into expanding the inn. However, she discovered that the owner had not transferred the property's title to her and that the inn was heavily in debt, nearing auction. Feeling betrayed, K persuaded O to help her murder the owner, promising they would run the hotel together. On December 31, 1960, O strangled the owner, and K fatally stabbed him. His body was concealed beneath the hotel's floor.
Suspicion arose when both the owner and his wife were reported missing. On February 19, 1961, police arrested K and O. O confessed immediately, while K admitted her involvement after three days. Subsequent investigations uncovered the buried bodies. Additionally, a tip led authorities to question K about her previous husband's death nine years earlier, which she confessed to, revealing she had poisoned him with cyanide.
In August 1963, the Utsunomiya District Court sentenced K to death and O to life imprisonment. The Supreme Court upheld these sentences in July 1966. On June 11, 1970, K was executed, becoming the first woman executed in Japan after World War II.
K's life story, marked by poverty, ambition, and manipulation, has been the subject of various books and films, reflecting on the complexities of her character and the societal factors influencing her actions.
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CC BY-SA 4.0
United States
