The Mammoth Book of New Csi (13 page)

“I am not the person the accusers say I am,” she said. “They say I am dangerous, devilish, jealous, uncaring and violent. Their theories depend on this, but I was never that girl. People who know me can talk of my real past, not that which is recounted by the tabloids . . . I have seen justice fail me. The truth is not yet recognized and we are paying with our lives for a crime we did not commit . . . We deserve freedom like anyone here in this courtroom. I am innocent, Raffaele is innocent. We did not kill Meredith. Please believe that there has been an enormous mistake. There will be no justice for Meredith and her loved ones by taking our lives from us and making us pay for something we did not do.”

Speaking Italian in a shaking voice and frequently comforted by her lawyers, Knox broke down as she claimed she was “honoured and grateful” to have known Meredith. Kercher’s father had complained that his daughter had been forgotten while Knox was becoming “a celebrity”. Knox attacked the issue head on, telling the court: “I want to say sorry to Meredith’s family that she is no longer there . . . I can never know how you feel, but I have little sisters and the idea of their suffering and loss terrifies me.”

On 3 October 2011, the appeal court in Perugia overturned the verdict against Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, and they were released.

T
WENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD
Lindsay Hawker was taking a year off between graduating with a first-class honours degree in biology from Leeds University and beginning her Masters when she moved to Japan in October 2006 to teach English in the Koiwa International Language School in Tokyo. She shared a flat in the Funabashi area with two other female English teachers, one Canadian, the other Australian. Soon, she found she had a stalker.

On 20 March 2007, twenty-eight-year-old Tatsuya Ichihashi spotted her hanging out with friends in the Hippy Dippy Doo, an English pub in Chiba Gyotoku. She was a tall, good-looking Western girl, much beloved by Japanese men. He tailed her as she got on the train home, where he approached her. She related the incident by email to her boyfriend, BBC researcher Ryan Garside, back in Britain. Ichihashi had claimed that she was his English teacher, though she was not. But she did admit to being an English teacher, then set off home on her bicycle.

Ichihashi was obsessed with physical fitness. He attended the gym regularly and cycled 15 miles (25 km) a day. As Lindsay cycled home, he set off after her on foot. He kept up and, when they arrived at her doorstep, he said: “Do you remember me?”

He then asked for a glass of water. Lindsay felt sorry for Ichihashi and invited him in so that he could see she was living with two flatmates. Once inside, Ichihashi took out a felt-tipped pen and paper and drew a picture of her, signed it and added his telephone number and email address.

Later she emailed her boyfriend: “Love u lots – don’t worry abt the guy who chased me home, its jus crazy Japan miss u xxxx.”

Lindsay agreed to meet Ichihashi in a café five days later to give him an English lesson. The Nova Organization, who ran the Koiwa International Language School as part of a chain of language schools across Japan, allowed its teachers to give private lessons, but advised them to do so only in public places and always to leave a note of where they were going and who they were going to meet. Lindsay had given a private lesson before and was friendly with her students, talking with them in nearby cafés after school. Besides, she needed the extra money to pay for her flight home.

However, she left the café with Ichihashi and went with him by taxi to his apartment in the eastern suburb of Ichikawa. CCTV caught them getting out of the cab at around 10 a. m. on Sunday, 25 March 2005. Her father, Bill Hawker, said she appeared to be drugged, but no drugs were found in her body. It is not known how Ichihashi had persuaded her to come back to his apartment. The couple was also caught on CCTV in the Doutour café near Gyotoku station. After fifty minutes, Ichihashi was seen fumbling for money to pay for the coffees. Perhaps he said that he had left the fee for his English lesson behind in his flat. Her father thinks that he might have learnt of her ambition to become a GP and offered to introduce her to his father, who was a medical man. They also had a shared interest in botany.

She told the cab driver to wait. They would only be a minute. When she did not reappear after seven minutes, the cab driver took off on another job.

Just twenty minutes before Lindsay got out of the cab, a powerful earthquake hit Japan. Lindsay’s mother Julia emailed to check that she was all right. There was no reply. Until then Lindsay had kept in close communication with the family, emailing, Skyping or calling several times a week. Julia grew worried. The whole family then tried calling, emailing and texting – to no avail.

In one email, Lindsay’s elder sister, Lisa, wrote: “Mum has heard about an earthquake in Japan (I’ve told her that Japan is the most common place in the world to experience such phenomena) . . . she is vv worried that you might have been injured . . . can you call or something? It’s not good fun living with the worried one xxx.”

In another her boyfriend, Ryan Garside, wrote: “Get in touch you fool! . . . Where is your moral support??”

Lindsay missed her classes on 25 and 26 March, something she had not done before. At around 2.30 p.m. on Monday 26th – the second day she had failed to turn up for work – Nova informed the police. Her flatmates had also tried to report her missing when she did not return home or answer her mobile phone, but the message had not been passed through the system. As advised by the college, Lindsay had left a note at the flat giving Ichihashi’s name and address, so it was not hard to trace him. At 5.40 p.m. – three hours and ten minutes after the police had received that missing-persons report – they sent two officers from Funabashi station in Chiba prefecture to visit Ichihashi’s apartment in Ichikawa City, one train stop from Lindsay’s flat.

The police had already discovered that, although Ichihashi had no previous convictions, an allegation of “theft and injury” had been made against him. It seems he had assaulted a woman in the street during a robbery some years earlier, but Ichihashi’s father had bought her off with one million yen. Then in 2006, he was given a police caution for following a female student at the university and stealing money from the coffee shop where she worked. These earlier offences immediately alerted the police to the fact that Lindsay may have been the victim of a crime. Nevertheless, the officers did not arrive at Ichihashi’s apartment until 7 p.m.

They noticed that, while the lights were off, there was someone at home. But still they did not have “just cause” even to knock on the door. They called for backup and, by 7.45 p.m., there were nine officers on the scene, anticipating a hostage-taking situation.

They asked the neighbours if they had seen a foreign woman. They hadn’t. Then they managed to gain entry into a flat that overlooked Ichihashi’s balcony. By then it was dark and they could not see the bath on the balcony, filled with soil, with Lindsay’s hand sticking out of it.

At 9.45 p.m., some police were standing outside Ichihashi’s flat when he opened the door and came out, shutting the door behind him. He was barefoot and carrying a rucksack.

“Are you Mr Ichihashi?” one of them asked. The suspect confirmed that he was. “We want to talk to you about a foreign woman and we want to come in.”

Ichihashi simply took out his key and turned to let himself back into his flat. The police said they could not “compulsorily restrain him” because they had not established the facts. But before he had opened the door, he turned and made a run for it. The police grabbed for his rucksack, which came off as Ichihashi sprinted away. The police had no walkie-talkies, so they could not alert other officers in the building. There were police at the bottom of the staircase, but Ichihashi simply vaulted the last few feet into the stairwell, made his escape and disappeared into the neighbourhood, which was dense with apartment blocks.

While the police searched for Ichihashi, he suddenly reappeared. He now had some running shoes, seemingly stolen from outside another apartment. He ran right past officers and disappeared into the maze of streets again.

Meanwhile, the father of one of Lindsay’s fellow teachers called Julia and warned her to expect the worst. She eventually got in touch with another teacher who was outside Ichihashi’s flat. This gave Julia the opportunity to talk to one of the police officers and she urged them to break in. Eventually, they did so.

Inside the flat, they found that Ichihashi had removed the bath from the bathroom. With Japanese plumbing, this is easily done. The taps are plumbed into the wall, but the bath is free-standing and can easily be shifted. The police think that this was done sometime on Sunday night and neighbours had heard the sounds of banging metal and something being dragged. He had put the bath, which measured 47 27 20 in. (120 70 50 cm), out on the balcony. In it was the naked body of Lindsay Hawker. She was bound and gagged with scarves and the plastic cord used to tie plants, though first she had put up a terrific fight. She was 5 ft 10 in. and was trained in the martial arts. But Ichihashi was taller – 6 ft – and a black belt. Hardly an inch of her body was left unmarked by bruises or other injuries, even her feet. She had been the victim of a prolonged attack.

Egg-sized bruises on the left side of her face seemed to have been inflicted by a fist, while other marks on her upper body were the result of colliding with furniture during the struggle.

At first, Superintendent Yoshihiro Sugita, of the Chiba Prefecture Police said: “There was no sign of strangulation, and no sign that the body had been stabbed, but there were signs of violent assault – bruises on the face and in numerous places all over the body. We have found no traces of blood and there was no sign of a physical struggle. The victim was completely naked and her clothes were scattered around the apartment, although we don’t know whether they were taken off by her or by the suspect.”

Later the post-mortem report said that Lindsay had died when her assailant began strangling her, which he did so forcefully that he broke the cartilage of her neck. She was tied up and repeatedly beaten over several hours as the ligatures had tightened around her wrists.

“It would have been a long and terrifying time for her,” a police officer said. “Judging by the bruising on her body and the fact that our examination showed she was tied up for a long period of time before her death suggests she went through a great deal of pain and fear before she died.”

Detectives believed Lindsay was probably gagged during her ordeal as she would have screamed for help and neighbours had not reported hearing any cries. They concluded that Ichihashi might have used torture to force her to have sex with him.

It was widely reported that the bath was full of sand. In fact, Lindsay had been buried in a mixture of sand and compost soil, soaked in a chemical that the Japanese use to compact and decompose waste. A shopping trolley, which he may have used to transport the sand and compost bags, was removed from Ichihashi’s building. Before he was interrupted by the police, Ichihashi had made six trips to a local hardware store for supplies. Plainly, he had been planning the murder for some time.

Lindsay’s head was shaved after she was killed. Her hair was found in a bag in the apartment. Ichihashi had studied horticulture at university and would have known that hair takes longer to decompose than other tissue. The speculation was that, when Ichihashi had finished filling the bath with soil, he was going to turn it into an ornamental flowerbed. Another source said he intended to cover her with concrete. The Hawkers feared that Lindsay may have been buried alive as, when the police found her, one arm was sticking out of the soil, but experts assured them that she would have been dead by then.

Bill Hawker flew to Tokyo to identify the body.

“I knew it was Lindsay because she was so tall and because she was my daughter, but she was so badly beaten,” he said. “Her hair was wrapped in gauze, her body in a Japanese gown and they’d had to put a lot of make-up on her. They let me say goodbye and I just stayed there, holding her toe under the blanket. She was beautiful and to see her lying on a mortuary table like that . . . All I can say is that it’s a very dangerous man that did this.”

The apartment where she was found had originally belonged to Ichihashi’s maternal grandmother, who had started a dental practice with her husband. They had one child, Ichihashi’s mother, who was also a dentist. When she married a neurosurgeon, they took over the apartment. Ichihashi and his sister were born and brought up there. But since his earlier assault on a woman, his sister was estranged, while his parents had gone to live in suburban comfort 200 miles (320 km) from Tokyo.

Lindsay’s clothes and possessions, including her handbag and passport, were found strewn across the room. Otherwise, there was little in the apartment – a computer, a few hundred violent manga comics that featured scenes of rape and torture (it is thought that he may have tortured, raped and murdered her in imitation of a plotline) and a large number of empty cartons of pomegranate juice. There were also twelve portrait drawings of women – both Western and Japanese. Apparently, Ichihashi used his artistic ability as a pick-up. There were reports that he had often been asked to leave bars frequented by Western women for harassing the customers.

A number of wigs were found, leading the police to believe that Ichihashi was a “sister-boy”, in Japanese parlance. However, he did have a Japanese girlfriend for about a year. He had been due to see her that Sunday night but had emailed to cancel. They were of a similar age and their relationship seemed normal enough. There was no evidence that he was bisexual or a transvestite except for one man’s unsubstantiated claim to have had gay sex with Ichihashi, since his escape, in a club in Tokyo’s gay quarter, Shinjuku. The other possibility was that he was trying on the wigs to look more Western.

The rucksack grabbed by the police at the crime scene contained Ichihashi’s gym kit, clean underwear and Lindsay’s shoes. The police believe that he was on his way to the gym to wash – after all, he no longer had a bath he could use. Clearly, he was not expecting to be greeted by the police. And, had Lindsay not written the note giving Ichihashi’s name and address, her body might never have been found.