29 years on, TEPCO OL’s killer remains at large

TOKYO (TR) – An office lady (OL) of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) was found strangled in a vacant room of a Shibuya apartment building on March 19, 1997, and nearly three decades later, nobody has been held accountable for her death, reports Smart Flash (Oct. 31).

The victim, Yasuko Watanabe, had been witnessed soliciting clients in the hotel district near the scene in the years before her murder, a double life that stood in stark contrast to her image as a career professional at one of Japan’s most powerful corporations, and which drew intense public scrutiny at the time.

A Nepali man found to be residing illegally in an adjacent building was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing. He served 15 years before the conviction was overturned in 2012, when a retrial found that biological material recovered from the victim’s body did not match his DNA.

The retrial exposed a damning prosecutorial scandal: evidence favorable to the defense, including the presence of a second, unidentified man’s DNA, had been withheld by prosecutors for years. The wrongful conviction case drew fierce criticism from legal observers and civil liberties groups across Japan.

Investigators were left with a case riddled with loose ends from the start. Among the most glaring: the victim’s commuter pass turned up not at the Shibuya crime scene but in the garden of a private residence in Sugamo, on the other side of the city, with no explanation ever made public.

The six-story wooden apartment building where the body was found, constructed some 60 years ago, still stands on the same Shibuya street, largely unchanged since the night of the murder. Residents continue to rent rooms there, and the izakaya on the ground floor has operated without interruption. In a neighborhood swallowed by relentless redevelopment, the building looks frozen in time, and so does the investigation.

With 29 years now elapsed and the real perpetrator never identified, pressure is mounting on Tokyo Metropolitan Police to show meaningful progress on one of the capital’s most notorious unsolved homicides.

Published in Crime , News and Tokyo

The editorial team at The Tokyo Reporter brings the site's readership the latest news from the under side of Japan.

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东京（TR）——据 Smart Flash（10 月 31 日）报道，1997 年 3 月 19 日，东京电力公司 (TEPCO) 的一名女职员被发现死于涩谷一栋公寓楼的空房间里，死因是窒息。近三十年后，仍然没有人为她的死负责。

受害者渡边康子在遇害前的几年里，曾被目击在案发现场附近的酒店区招揽顾客。这种双重生活与她作为日本最强大的公司之一的职业女性的形象形成了鲜明的对比，并在当时引起了公众的强烈关注。

一名尼泊尔男子因非法居住在隔壁建筑内而被捕，并被判处终身监禁。他在服刑15年后，于2012年被推翻，当时重审发现从受害者遗体上提取的生物样本与他的DNA不符。

重审揭露了一起令人震惊的检方丑闻：对辩方有利的证据，包括另一名身份不明男子的DNA，多年来一直被检方隐瞒。这起冤案在日本各地引发了法律界人士和公民自由团体的强烈批评。

调查人员从一开始就发现这起案件疑点重重。其中最令人费解的是：受害者的通勤卡并非在涩谷案发现场找到，而是在城市另一端的巢鸭市一处私人住宅的花园里被发现，而警方至今仍未对此做出任何解释。

发现尸体的那栋六层木结构公寓楼建于约60年前，至今仍屹立在涩谷同一条街道上，自案发当晚以来几乎没有什么变化。居民们依然在那里租房居住，一楼的居酒屋也照常营业。在这个被无情重建吞噬的街区，这栋建筑仿佛时间静止，案件调查也同样停滞不前。

29 年过去了，真正的凶手仍然没有被找到，东京警视厅面临着越来越大的压力，要求其在首都最臭名昭著的未破凶杀案之一的调查中取得实质性进展。

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