In February and March 1997, three young girls were attacked in Kobe, Japan. On 15 March 10-year-old Ayaka Yamashita was bludgeoned to death with a steel pipe in the same area. On 27 May 1997, some time before pupils were due to arrive at Tainohata Elementary School, the caretaker found the head of 11-year-old Jun Hase, who had been missing for three days, in front of the school gate. He had been decapitated with a handsaw and in his mouth was a note in red ink reading, “This is the beginning of the game… You police guys stop me if you can… I desperately want to see people die, it is a thrill for me to commit murder. A bloody judgement is needed for my years of great bitterness.” It was signed ‘The School Killer’. Later in the same day the rest of the boy was found under a house in the woods near the school. The killer also wrote a symbol similar to one used in San Francisco by the Zodiac. Near most of the crime scenes were mutilated bodies of cats.
On 6 June the newspaper Kobe Shimbum received a 1,400-word letter, purporting to be from the killer. It read in part “I am putting my life at stake for the sake of this game. If I’m caught, I’ll probably be hanged… police should be angrier and more tenacious in pursuing me… It’s only when I kill that I am liberated from the constant hatred that I suffer and that I am able to attain peace. It is only when I give pain to people that I can ease my own pain.” The Letter was signed “Sakakibara Seito” with a PS, “From now on, if you… spoil my mood I will kill three vegetables a week… If you think I can only kill children you are greatly mistaken.” On 28 June 1997 a 14-year-old boy was arrested for the murders assaults. He had begun mutilating animals when he was 12 (he would line up frogs and cycle over them) and started carrying knives when in junior school. He had kept a diary detailing his exploits and in his bedroom police found thousands of pornographic videos. Japanese law at the time meant that no one under the age of 16 could be charged as an adult so he was sent to a reformatory for treatment. In 2003 he was pronounced cured and paroled on 10 March 2004, aged 21. His supervised parole ended on 31 December 2004 and he is now free, with a new identity.
On May 7, 1972, Edmund Kemper picked up two hitchhikers named Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa and murdered them. Here he describes the murder of Anita:
“I was thrusting and the knife was going very deep, and it amazed me that she was stabbed three times and then was still going at it. I tried stabbing her in the front again. or towards the throat area, and she was making quite a bit of noise and was trying to fight me off, and I stabbed her in the forearms. One was so bad you could see both bones, and she saw it. When I hit, I didn’t think it really hurt so much, as it was the shock of everything happening so fast. She looked at it, and I could see the expression on her face of shock.”
“Henry is going to be executed but I’ll be alive surrounded by cute fuck-boys. I have everything I want in prison. Except I miss the freedom to drive down the highway robbing and killing from town to town. That’s excitment at its best and miss being able to bar-b-que a boy when I get the urge. I did like to bar-b-que. You can write it your story that anyone who wants to write me and get a recipe for my home made sauce, I’ll send it free. Just send a few stamps for the reply letter. That’s all honey.”
-Ottis Toole.
Dear Stranger, by Shizuka Yokomizo
For this 1998-2000 series of portraits, photographer Shizuka Yokomizo left several anonymous letters on the doorsteps of random ground floor apartments that read:
“Dear Stranger,
I am an artist working on a photographic project which involves people I do not know…. I would like to take a photograph of you standing in your front room from the street in the evening.”
The letter specified a certain ten-minute period during which the artist would approach, take the picture, and slip back into the darkness. She would only reveal her identity once her subjects received a print and contact information (so that they could let her know if they objected to their portrait being exhibited).
Yokomizo made sure that when the photos were taken, the light would be too dark outside to see her — it would only allow her subjects to see their own reflections in the window they were looking out of.
