Japan woman hides mother's corpse for 10 years to avoid eviction, later arrested

Japanese law enforcement authorities on January 29 arrested a 48-year-old woman for hiding her mother’s corpse for 10 years in her apartment's freezer. Fearing eviction, Yumi Yoshino, stored the dead body of her mother at home instead of giving her a funeral to avoid getting caught, and asked to vacate the property by the accommodation owners. Nearly a decade ago, Yoshino’s mother had died of unidentified causes aged 60 and the police only recently discovered the dead body of the woman who has been missing for several years.

According to sources of the Kyodo news agency, the accused was staying at a housing complex which was registered under her deceased mother and she had already, once, been asked to evacuate the home due to a delay in her rental pay mid-January. A home help, as per agencies’ sources, noticed the dead body in a freezer and raised an alarm. 

Yoshino, in her defense, told the police officers that she had stored the corpse as she feared that she would be asked to evacuate her Tokyo apartment. She took the gory step, having nowhere else to go, police sources told the local Japanese media outlets. The officers, post an autopsy, are outrunning homicidal death as no wound marks on the dead body have been found. Meanwhile, a probe has been ordered to ascertain the time and cause of the woman’s death. The accused, the deceased woman’s daughter, was arrested by the Police from the city of Chiba, near Tokyo at a hotel. The corpse, having been stored in the freezer, had toughened, bent, and frozen inside the enclosure and was dragged out by the police. The woman, as per Japanese media’s ground reports, had been anxious about her mother’s body discovered as she didn’t want to vacate the place. 

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Twitter killer stored dismembered bodies

Similarly, last month, the Japanese high-profile criminal dubbed as ‘Twitter Killer’ who dismembered at least nine victims, all of whom were women, was sentenced to death over 2017 serial murders. According to sources of The Japan Times, the Japanese court sentenced the 30-year-old Takahiro Shiraishi who brutally murdered and later butchered the dead bodies of the ‘suicidal people' that he met online. The killer was charged with the first count of homicide for luring the women aged between 15 and 26 to his apartment in Zama, Kanagawa Prefecture, Tokyo, where he attacked them with weapons and stashed the pieces of their bodies in a freezer in a likewise manner to avoid being caught red-handed with the crime. Presiding Judge Naokuni Yano ruled that the nine victims had not ‘consented’ to the killing and may not have been in a mentally sound state. But Shiraishi was mentally fit to be held accountable for the murders, the judge said in the verdict, adding that the crime was extremely ‘vicious’. 

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