Inside an abandoned freezer washed ashore lay a naked female corpse—she was two months away from her wedding, but instead walked into a "birthday party" and never came out again.
On the morning of May 21, 2012, in Lake Kuzuryu, Fukui Prefecture, Japan, two workers were clearing driftwood from the shore. A commercial freezer washed ashore in the distance caught their attention; the door was tightly closed, and the exterior was covered in silt and moss. One of them curiously opened it—inside was a naked female corpse, curled up in a kneeling position with her legs bent and her back arched. Her skin had long since lost its color, and the outline of her bones was clearly visible. She had been dead for nearly six months.
Fukui Prefectural Police arrived at the scene, with the head of the criminal investigation team, Seicho Matsumoto, personally leading the investigation. A preliminary forensic examination confirmed that the deceased was a woman around 20 years old, approximately 150 to 160 centimeters tall, and the cause of death was mechanical asphyxiation; there were no obvious external injuries to her bones. Even more bizarrely, a silver necklace, a brass bracelet, and a heart-shaped women's watch were found in the freezer. Police were perplexed—the killer had removed all of the victim's clothing, clearly intending to conceal their identity, yet deliberately left behind these identifiable pieces of jewelry; this didn't make sense. Seicho Matsumoto said, "A person who would think to hide a body in a freezer and dump it in a lake wouldn't make such a basic mistake. Either it was deliberate provocation, or there was something inside that we didn't understand."
The victim's identity was unknown, the freezer was an old model manufactured 20 years ago and long since discontinued, and there were no witnesses in the upstream area. The case reached a stalemate. Until three days later, police in Ichinomiya City, Aichi Prefecture, reported that a 27-year-old woman named Madoka Morioka had disappeared in November 2011, the time of her disappearance coinciding with the victim's death. Madoka Morioka worked as a hostess at the "Starlight" cabaret and was one of the club's most popular girls. In the early morning of November 24, 2011, after returning home from work, she told her fiancé that she was going to celebrate the birthday of an "important customer," and then drove away in a white Mercedes-Benz, disappearing without a trace. She was supposed to get married in two months. A week after her disappearance, she sent text messages to relatives and friends saying she would "return in ten days," but her phone went unanswered.
Police reviewed Morioka's work records and found that she had written "Mr. K's birthday" in a memo on November 23, 2011. Colleagues revealed that a regular customer named Keiji Hayashi was infatuated with Morioka and had spent millions of yen on her. After learning that she was resigning to get married, he repeatedly complained that "his efforts had been wasted" and even caused a scene at the store. After Morioka's disappearance, Hayashi never appeared again. The first letter of Hayashi's name is "K."
Police quickly identified Hayashi as the suspect. He was 40 years old, unemployed, and had previously worked at a used car dealership, where he was very knowledgeable about vehicles. More importantly, Morioka's white Mercedes was later found abandoned in a mountainous area 100 kilometers away. The front and rear license plates had been pried off, the vehicle identification number (VIN) had been erased, and the car's navigation system was missing. This thorough destruction of vehicle identification information was the work of professionals. Police extracted trace amounts of DNA from the car, which matched Morioka perfectly.
As the investigation deepened, police discovered that Keiji Hayashi did not act alone. His accomplice, Tomoyuki Watanabe, 36, a truck driver, was a close former colleague at a car dealership. Watanabe had long been coerced by Hayashi and obeyed his every command. On October 26, 2012, police arrested both men. Hayashi refused to confess and remained silent, but Watanabe, under pressure from the evidence, confessed everything, revealing a shocking secret: this was not Hayashi's first murder.
Watanabe confessed that Hayashi's motive for killing Morioka was to cultivate her into his "money-making machine," but his plan failed because she was getting married. In the early morning of November 24, 2011, Keiji Hayashi lured Morioka out under the pretense of a "birthday party." In a parking lot in Inuyama City, Aichi Prefecture, he and Watanabe strangled her to death with a rope. Afterwards, the two took the body back to Hayashi's home, removed her clothes, cut her long hair, and replaced her with new necklaces and bracelets in an attempt to confuse her identity before stuffing the body into a freezer. In the early morning hours, they drove 100 kilometers to Lake Kuzuryu and pushed the freezer into the lake from a bridge. The jewelry wasn't left unattended; it was deliberate—he wanted to make the police spend more time on "why the jewelry was left," thus delaying the investigation.
Even more chillingly, Watanabe also confessed that Hayashi had murdered another woman two years earlier—Eri Chino. In 2009, Chino was strangled to death by Hayashi after a financial dispute. This time, he didn't use a freezer. He dismembered the body into 25 bags and disposed of them in the mountains and rivers of Gifu, Aichi, and Nagano prefectures. Based on Watanabe's confession, police launched searches in the three prefectures and gradually recovered some of the remains. Chino Eri's family waited two years, only to receive an answer of 25 pieces.
In 2016, the Nagoya District Court sentenced Keiji Hayashi to life imprisonment and Tomoyuki Watanabe to 14 years in prison in the first instance. Hayashi appealed, but his appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court of Japan in 2018, confirming his imprisonment. The presiding judge wrote in the verdict: "The defendant took two lives in an extremely cruel manner, showing no remorse, and his crime is grave."
Madoka Morioka's fiancé, Kenta Takahashi, told reporters outside the courthouse: "She just went to celebrate a client's birthday; she didn't know anything." She didn't know that "birthday party" was a death date. She didn't know that the man who professed to love her would strangle her with his own hands. She had no idea that the light-colored dress she wore would eventually be taken off and replaced with a necklace left behind by a stranger.
That necklace was still around her neck. She would never have the chance to take it off again.
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