A 54-Year-Old Man Stabbed a 24-Year-Old Former Idol to Death in a Hotel in Fuchu

‘I was in a relationship with her.’

The 54-year-old arrested man is said to have described his relationship with the victim, who was 30 years younger than him.

The suspect, Akira Ishikawa, 54, a resident of the city with an unknown occupation, was arrested on suspicion of murder by the Fuchu Police Station of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department on February 3. He allegedly stabbed Sana Hirabayashi, 24, an unemployed woman, in the neck and other parts of her body with a knife at a hotel in Fuchu City. The scene was a hotel about 700 meters from Fuchu Station on the Keio Line.

The security camera footage showed Ishikawa and Hirabayashi entering the hotel around 2:00 a.m. on February 2. Ishikawa left the room alone about four hours later, after 6:00 in the morning. At around 1:30 a.m. on the following day, a full day after the check-in, a hotel employee became suspicious that Hirabayashi had not come out of their room and called 110. When police officers arrived, they found Hirabayashi dead in the room on the second floor, bleeding from the neck, with no clothes on.

The suspect, Ishikawa, is immediately taken into custody. A passerby saw him exhausted and slumped over in the grounds of his condominium about 1 km away from the hotel. When a police officer questioned him and searched his belongings, he found Mr. Hirabayashi’s personal number card. When the police officer questioned him, he admitted to the crime, saying that he had killed her, so they decided to arrest him.

After leaving an idol group, she became a model for individual photo shoots.

When he was taken into custody, Ishikawa was carrying two survival knives, one of which was covered in sticky blood. He told investigators that he used the knives in the hotel room to stab the sleeping victim three times in the neck to kill her, and that he stabbed her in the neck to ensure that he would kill her.

Hirabayashi, who was stabbed to death by the suspect Ishikawa, had at one time aspired to be an idol in the entertainment industry.

He said, “Her grandfather and father were both doctors, so her family was relatively well-off. After graduating from high school, she joined a group of singers as an underground idol and performed live. However, she left the group after about six months. After that, I heard that she participated in cosplay events as a model for pictorials.”

It seems that she was acquainted with Ishikawa.

“Ishikawa met Hirabayashi several times in the past and stated that he was acquainted with her. In December last year, he consulted the police, saying, ‘Hirabayashi disclosed the number of a payment application for my smartphone on SNS. Later, he said, ‘It was a misunderstanding.’

Ishikawa has many inexplicable behaviors. Perhaps he may have become close to Ms. Hirabayashi during the individual photo shoots in the closed room. Did he develop a one-sided fondness for her and assume that they were “in a relationship”? It is possible that he was denied a relationship and had murderous intent.

The police are investigating how the two met and the detailed motive for the murder.