In Japan, the four-decade hunt for a notorious serial killer continues
- Police are appealing for information about the 1996 disappearance of a four-year-old girl that could shed light on four other murders
- The case has already seen one wrongful conviction, and the authorities believe the true criminal is still at large
In the photo on her “missing” poster, Yukari Yokoyama looks directly into the camera, a slight smile playing about her lips. The picture, more than two decades old, is one of the last that her parents took of their four-year-old daughter before she vanished in Ota, about 100km north of Tokyo, in July 1996.
Now, police in Gunma prefecture are making what is surely a final appeal for anyone to come forward who may have seen Yukari after she wandered off from her father in a pachinko parlour. The information they have may seem insignificant, the authorities say, but it could hold the key to the little girl’s disappearance.
It could also help shed more light on the deaths of four girls over the previous 17 years, as it is believed that Yukari may have been the final victim of a serial killer who prowled a small area to the north of the capital. The bodies of the other girls were later discovered; only Yukari has yet to be found.
To emphasise that they are still treating this as a missing-person case and that they have not given up hope that she might still be alive, the police have added an artist’s impression of what she might look like today, at the age of 28.