Key man in Kakogawa stabbing case is dead

Occurred on October 16, 2007 in Kakogawa City, Hyogo Prefecture.

Beppu Town, Kakogawa City, Hyogo Prefecture, overlooking the Seto Inland Sea. In mid-December 2009, a FRIDAY reporter visited this town. It was more than 14 years ago that a tragic incident took place here, when a second-grade girl was stabbed to death.

The victim was Yuzuki Unose, then 7 years old. At around 6 p.m., Yuzuki was returning home from a nearby park when someone stabbed her in the chest and abdomen in front of her house. When she was taken to the hospital, Yuzuki, who was still conscious, described her attacker as “an adult” and “a man. The main reason why the investigation took so long was that there were few streetlights near the scene at the time, and almost no pedestrians, so we were unable to get any strong eyewitness testimony.

When the FRIDAY reporter visited the crime scene, he found that unlike at the time of the incident, there were more streetlights and the roads had been cleaned. A large park and nursery school had also been built within a stone’s throw of the scene. Yuzuki’s house was left untouched for a while after the incident, but now it has been demolished and turned into an apartment. Yuzuki’s family all left the town after the incident.

At the time of the incident, the vice-president of the neighborhood association was the one who gathered information from the community and acted as a contact point for the police and media. When I visited him at home, the wife of the vice president answered my questions.

My husband passed away in March 2008,” she said. At that time, the police kept coming to our house and asking us if we had seen a car of this color. The frequency of police visits has been decreasing over the years, and I haven’t seen them for a few years now. My husband had always hoped that this case would be solved. Just before he passed away, he said, ‘That was a pity.

Even among the residents of Beppu Town, the memory of the incident is gradually fading.