What do you with your own body when you've killed someone?
By William Wetherall
After an accident or an impulse of rage, if not a premeditated act, your choices are few. You turn yourself in, or do yourself in. Or you leave the victim's body and run, then turn or do yourself in. Or you go underground and disinter yourself as a different person.
Or -- you dispose of the victim's body and hang around town until police discover it -- then surrender, fight to the finish, or flee and live to die another day.
Getting rid of the bodies
Hiding a woman's body under a mat in an outhouse behind his home, in the mountains of Miyazaki prefecture in 1874, proved successful for a man named Gitaro -- until a dog sniffed out the corpse and hauled the woman's head into the village. Gitaro was immediately arrested. He was probably beheaded within weeks if not days.
Then as now, it was possible to flee to another part of the country and change one's identity. But you would have hoofed it. There were few horses, no planes, trains, buses, automobiles, bicycles. No convenience stores, Internet cafes, capsule hotels. No ATMs or cellphones. Photography was not yet common. Telegraphy was just beginning. Radio and fingerprinting were decades away. Television and DNA were unimaginable.
In late March 2007, Lindsay Hawker, of Tokyo, was reported missing. The following day, Ichihashi Tatsuya fled through the ranks of the police who had come to the door of his condominium in Ichikawa city, near Tokyo, to question him about her disappearance. The police then found her body in a sand-filled bathtub on his veranda.
Ichihashi, reportedly barefoot when he dashed off, simply vanished. And for over two and a half years, he gave Japanese police, and the whole world, the slip.
Then, on 4 November 2009, news began to break of reports that someone who might have been Ichihashi had gotten a nose job at a Nagoya cosmetic surgery clinic in late October. The next day police released a pre-op photo.
The next several days were full of one flash report after another about the hot pursuit of Ichihashi's past and present whereabouts and activities. His choices, though, remained the same -- to continue to flee, give himself up, or kill himself.
By the 10th the police had arrested their man at an Osaka ferry terminal where he was awaiting a boat for Okinawa. He did not resist, but submitted -- very much like an antelope that races and darts away from a chasing lion, is finally hauled down, struggles against the first tears of claws and teeth, then suddenly jerks still and resigns itself to its fate.
Dead or alive
Immediately after Ichihashi ran off in 2007, police put out the usual bulletins and wanted posters. In time they also offered a huge reward for information leading to his arrest.
A lean 180 centimeters, he would have stood out in most crowds. His face, too, was not the sort that would easily have been missed in a herd of commuters, shoppers, or amusement goers.
Disposing of a body is difficult, especially if the body is one's own. Any vanishing act, regardless of the circumstances, is a form of self-disposal.
Changing one's identity is not an uncommon form of self-disposal. All manner of people adopt aliases and guises to pursue livelihoods or obsessions in a world other than the one in which they are known and recognized by their parents, neighbors, friends, even spouse.
But suicide is also a form of removing oneself from the present world. And suicide is a much more predictable behavior following homicide or suspicion of homicide.
Most people who commit suicide, following an act they know will extremely and unfavorably change their lives, do so in order to avoid the consequences of their act. In the case of a crime, the consequences include not only investigation, suspicion, detention, arrest, prosecution, trial, conviction, imprisonment, and possibly execution -- but, often, also overwhelming guilt and shame.
Suicides following homicide are usually seen as admissions of guilt, but some people kill themselves by way of denying charges. Some suicides are committed in flight. Others are committed by resisting arrest and provoking police to shoot to kill. Still others are committed in captivity. And a few are committed by exploiting a penal system that allows a death sentence.
Fleeing, and committing suicide in a place and manner in which one's body will not soon if ever be discovered, however, requires considerable planning and effort, including knowledge of local geography and a long list of other conditions.
Bodies wash ashore. They are exposed when the snow melts. Hunters, gatherers, and lovers who stray off trails trip over roots, fallen limbs, and skeletons.
If you drive to the locality where you intend to die, the car will be found. Drive it off a road into a reservoir behind a dam, and it will be seen in the next drought. Cliffs, piers, ravines, and wrecking yards are equally uncertain venues.
Life wish
It is easy to view Ichihashi as a cold-blooded killer who deserves to die. It is quite another matter to understand his human desperation to survive under conditions and pressure that would have defeated most people -- driven them to give themselves up or take their own lives.
Most criminal psychiatrists will focus on the reasons someone would murder another human being and dispose of the body in the manner Ichihashi is alleged to have done regarding Hawker. While she is not to be blamed for her tragic death, students of victim behavior will want to know what she might have done to trigger the violence that killed her.
Yet there is also considerable interest in the measures Ichihashi took to implement his obviously strong motives to remain both free and alive. The crimes he is supposed to have committed may be heinous. And his evasion of judicial review and possible punishment may reflect a lack of remorse if not a lack of faith in the courts.
Despite the various scores of music Ichihashi apparently did not want to face, his desire to remain free -- at all cost of imprisoning himself in a new identity -- is an act that is full of extraordinary human drama. The extremes to which he went to remain both free and alive demand as much understanding as everything else.
Police did not anticipate the surgically alterations. They are now shortlisting clinics that perform feature-altering operations as places to notify and canvass when a suspect takes flight and is not quickly apprehended.
As time passed and there was no scent of Ichihashi's trail, I began to imagine him finding a place to take his own life where his body might never be found, at least not in my epoch. Suicidal vanishing would take a bit of smarts and resources in any country, and would seem especially difficult in Japan. But not a few people have died in the middle of even cities like Tokyo and its sprawling suburbs and not been found for weeks, months, even years.
Parental feelings
Hawker's parents and family showed the usual range of emotions. Her father's feelings toward Ichihashi, after his arrest, were more compassionate than vengeful -- which reflects the depth of his character in a world where too many families of murder victims think only of retribution.
Ichihashi's parents -- his father a brain surgeon who resigned his post after his son's flight, his mother a former dentist -- were as shocked as any parents would be to learn that a child was wanted for murder. Of course they hoped he would turn himself in and wear the proverbial shoe if it fit him.
They also appear to have been genuinely shocked to hear, two and half years later, that he was still alive -- and to learn of the lengths to which he had gone to become another person -- the multiple surgeries to change some of his facial features, the various forms of dress including women's clothing, wigs, and makeup to disguise himself -- the manner in which he financed his new life with money earned while working for a construction company and living in its dormitory under an assumed name -- the possibility that he had been seeking a bogus passport to help him leave the country.
In interviews Ichihashi's parents gave shortly before and after his arrest, they said they had not thought him capable of surviving as he had. They also revealed that, as the days, weeks, and months passed after his flight, they had feared -- then concluded and even hoped -- that he was dead.
By all accounts, Ichihashi was a normally disfunctional young man of the kind who had been raised to achieve, with all the advantages of opportunity and support. He played basketball and ran track, and had friends -- but was also known for his fits of anger and, in the end, his isolation.
After graduating from college, he had not worked but continued to live, mostly off his parents, while residing at the Ichikawa condominium, which apparently belonged to a relative. Something was obviously missing in a life that left him short of his own dreams of becoming a doctor. Apparently he then aimed to polish his English in preparation for seeing if the grass was greener abroad, and led to his acquaintance with Hawker, who taught English.
As of this writing, a week after his arrest, Ichihashi has reportedly eaten nothing nor answered questions about Hawker. He is also said not to want authorities to contact or otherwise involve his parents.
Media-friendly psychiatrists are making a killing in TV appearances speculating as to what continues to make Ichihashi tick -- or not tick. Time may not tell, even as it heals some of the wounds.
I would predict that, at some point, Ichihashi will begin to talk -- and substantiate all the gory details that Hawker's father understandably hopes the police will confirm but not reveal. In the meantime, the fact that he is drinking tea is no assurance that he is not still thinking of ways to vanish -- by defeating the 7/24 suicide watch.
17 November 2009
