43-year-old Defendant Who Secretly Watched a College Student in an Attic for 10 Months Revealed His Creepy Motive

“I like women’s buttocks with their underpants digging in. However, I have been unable to confide in those around me and have kept it a secret. This time, when Mr. A’s front door was open, I thought that I might be able to realize my proclivity. I thought, and I lost my ability to reason.”

On May 10, a high-profile first trial was held at the Kawagoe Branch of the Saitama District Court, where Keita Hariya, 43, who was arrested on March 15, made a hole in the attic of a wooden apartment building in Iruma-gun, Saitama Prefecture, from around last spring to March of this year, and filmed a female university student, A, who lived in the room next door with a small camera. It is also suspected that he used a ladder to break into the room.

Then, at around 5:30 p.m. on March 14, the defendant entered Ms. A’s room, where she was sleeping, through the unlocked front door, and the incident was discovered when Ms. A reported the incident. The statement at the beginning of this article is the surprising motive given by defendant Hariya during the trial of this case.

The full details of the crime, as revealed at trial, are as follows.

In early May of last year, the defendant became interested in Ms. A when a relative, who had started living alone in the apartment, told him about her, saying, “There is a pretty lady living in the room next door.” While the relative was away, the defendant made a duplicate key to the relative’s room without permission. He installed a small camera at the entrance to observe Ms. A walking down the passageway, and repeatedly broke into her room from the attic over a period of about 10 months.

In the early morning of March 14 of this year, the defendant left his home and went to his relative’s room and entered the room using a duplicate key as usual. At trial, the prosecutor described the circumstances as follows.

“When Ms. A came home that evening, she went straight to bed in his room. When he heard no noise from the next room, he thought that Ms. A was sleeping, so he turned the doorknob of the front door of Ms. A’s room. Since the door was unlocked, he decided to enter Ms. A’s room and commit an indecent act on her while she was sleeping. The defendant put on a blindfold, which he had left in the attic of his relative’s room, and entered Ms. A’s room.”

Ms. A told the police that she was terrified at the time.

“When I woke up and raised my upper body, I saw a man wearing a black balaclava sitting on his knees at my feet. The man was looking at me, so I immediately asked him who he was, and he got up silently and walked slowly out the front door. When I found the man who did this, I thought he could have killed me.”

Ms. A then called the police. Neighbors saw defendant Hariya tiptoeing into an adjoining room. Subsequent investigation uncovered a hole in the attic and a homemade ladder used to enter the room.

The defendant, who committed the outlandish crime of breaking down walls with tools and monitoring the life of a female university student he had never met for 10 months, is said to have been a “kind father as depicted in a picture ” in his everyday life. He and his wife and three daughters make up a family of five. He purchased a single-family home in Furukawa City about 12 years ago, and at the time of the crime, he was working for a company that assembled automobiles.

A neighbor interviewed by FRIDAY Digital had this to say about Hariya’s family.

Mr. Hariya is kind and earnest; when he was an officer of the neighborhood association about five years ago, he worked diligently to clean up and prepare for the work for that day. I thought he was cheerful and easy to talk to. On holidays, they have barbecues in their yard, go to Disneyland with their family, and they are a very close family.”

The crime was committed without regard for his precious family. The motive that strongly motivated him was his “sexual proclivity,” which he had kept hidden, as mentioned at the beginning of this article. On May 11, the day after the trial, he was sent to prosecution on suspicion of breaking into Ms. A’s house and stealing three items, including stockings and plastic bottles, etc. On May 15, prosecutors filed additional charges of destruction of property, and the investigation is now considered to be almost complete.

Around last summer, victim A consulted the management company about noises coming from the attic. Eventually, the noises stopped and she forgot about it. She never would have thought that a man wearing a balaclava hat was lurking in the attic. The psychological damage to the victim, who had to experience being watched in her room for almost a year by a man she did not know, was immeasurable.