Editing Tsutomu Miyazaki (section)

==Background==
Between August 1988 and June 1989, Miyazaki mutilated and killed four girls between ages four and seven, and sexually molested their corpses. He drank the blood of one victim and ate a part of her hand.<sup>[4]</sup> These crimes—which prior to Miyazaki's apprehension were named the "Little Girl Murders" and later the Tokyo/Saitama Serial Kidnapping Murders of Little Girls (東京・埼玉連続幼女誘拐殺人事件 ''Tōkyō Saitama renzoku yōjo yūkai satsujin jiken'')—shocked Saitama Prefecture, which had few crimes against children.

During the day, Miyazaki was, by all accounts, a mild-mannered individual. Outside of work, he randomly selected children to kill. He wrote to the families of his victims, sending them letters recalling the details of his murders. Police found that the families of the victims had something else in common: all received silent nuisance phone calls. If they did not pick up the phone, it would sometimes ring for 20 minutes.

On August 22, 1988, one day after Miyazaki's 26th birthday, Mari Konno, a four-year-old girl, vanished while playing at a friend's house. After failed attempts to find her, Konno's father contacted the police. Miyazaki had led Konno into his black Nissan Langley and abducted her. He drove westward of Tokyo and parked the car under a bridge in a wooded area. There he sat alongside the girl for a half-hour before murdering her. He then engaged in sexual acts with the corpse and left her corpse in the hills near his home. He took her clothes with him and departed. He allowed Mari Konno's corpse to decompose for a while before later returning to remove the hands and feet, which he kept in his closet. These were recovered upon his arrest. He charred her remaining bones in his furnace, ground them into powder, and sent them to her family in a box, along with several of her teeth, photos of her clothes, and a postcard which read: "Mari. Cremated. Bones. Investigate. Prove."

On October 3, 1988, Miyazaki was driving along a rural road when he spotted seven-year-old Masami Yoshizawa. He offered her a ride, and she accepted. He then drove to the same place he had killed Konno, and killed Yoshizawa. He engaged in sexual acts with the corpse, and took the girl's clothes with him when he departed.

On December 12, 1988, four-year-old Erika Namba was returning home from a friend's house when Miyazaki kidnapped her, forcing her into his car. He drove to a parking lot in Naguri, Saitama, forced her to remove her clothes in the back seat, and began to take pictures of her. After killing her, he tied her hands and feet behind her back, covered her with a bed sheet, and placed the body in his car's trunk. He disposed of the girl's clothes in a wooded area and left the body in the adjoining parking lot. Miyazaki sent a postcard to her family, assembled using words cut out of magazines: "Erika. Cold. Cough. Throat. Rest. Death."

On June 6, 1989, Miyazaki convinced five-year-old Ayako Nomoto to allow him to take pictures of her. He then led her into his car and murdered her. He covered the corpse with a bed sheet and placed her in the trunk of his car, taking the body to his apartment. He spent the next two days engaging in sexual acts with the corpse, taking pictures of it in various positions, and filming it.

When the body began to decompose, Miyazaki [[Dismemberment|dismembered]] it, abandoning the torso in a cemetery and the head in the nearby hills. He kept the hands, from which he drank blood and ate part of them. Fearing that the police would find the corpse, he returned to the cemetery and the hills two weeks later and carried the remains back to his apartment, where he hid them in his closet.

On July 23, 1989, Miyazaki attempted to insert a zoom lens into the vagina of a schoolgirl in a park near her home and was confronted by the girl's father. After fleeing naked on foot, Miyazaki eventually returned to the park to retrieve his Toyota car, whereupon he was arrested by police who had responded to a call by the father. A search of Miyazaki's two-room bungalow produced 5,763 videotapes, some containing anime and slasher films (later used as reasoning for his crimes). Interspersed among them was video footage and pictures of his victims. He was also reported to be a fan of horror films of which he had a collection. Miyazaki, who retained a perpetually calm and collected demeanor during his trial, appeared indifferent to his capture.