Murder.com (22 page)

The other case involved a chatroom participant who claimed that she was a victim of incestuous abuse. Police immediately opened an investigation into her allegations.

Shula Rahum, Ofir’s mother, observed, ‘Maybe parents should warn their kids about computers like they do with drugs and diseases. They should browse through their chats to see whom they are communicating with and where they are going.’

Ofir’s parents had no idea what he had been doing, nor who had so skilfully seduced him via his computer. Shalom Rahum says that he only found out afterwards, from his son’s school friends, and that was far too late.

O
n June 2001, the watching world recoiled as news of a former caretaker at Ikeda Elementary School, in a suburb of Osaka, 250 miles west of Tokyo, went berserk and stormed the building armed with a kitchen knife.

The 39-year-old, who had a long history of mental illness, rampaged through the schoolyard and classrooms, slashing away at as many children as he could lay his hands on. He had
managed to stab eight of them to death before he was brought to ground.

The judge presiding over the trial of Mamoru Takuma at Osaka District Court wasted little time in sentencing him to death by hanging, choosing to reject his defence of insanity and instead finding him entirely culpable of committing the murders of seven girls and a boy aged between six and eight, who had cowered in their classrooms during his onslaught.

Takuma had also attacked a number of other people that fateful day, injuring 13 small children and two teachers. The judge had no qualms about sentencing this man to death, just as Takuma himself had felt no compunction about massacring his way through Ikeda Elementary School. The convicted killer had even informed the court that he would have killed more had he had the forethought to carry out his spree at a local kindergarten.

Without any obvious displays of remorse, Takuma, who suffered from a long-term schizophrenic condition, was hauled out of the public eye by guards, to await his fate. Japan was faced yet again with the fallout from another example of extreme violence in its school system.

Tuesday, 1 June 2004 saw the emergence of another terrifying attack on a young person at her school, only this time, rather than some deranged, socially inadequate adult, her killer was one of her peers, both girls having attended Sasebo Elementary School in Nagasaki Prefecture.

That day, an 11-year-old girl calmly approached her classmate, pretty 12-year-old Satomi Mitarai, and unleashed an explosion of violence against her with a knife. Her throat and arms slashed, Satomi slumped to the floor, instantly
losing consciousness from massive loss of blood. She died later that day.

Her killer, for legal reasons known only as ‘Girl A’ but later dubbed ‘Nevada’ on the internet, left her to die, returning to her classroom covered in her victim’s blood, to greet her shocked teacher and fellow pupils.

Unsurprisingly, the story made the headlines around the world, for nobody could comprehend how this child had reached the point where she was able to methodically butcher a school friend in broad daylight. It came as a huge shock, this grisly homicide, the like of which could have been seen in any number of gory ‘slasher’ movies. In fact, this young female killer had quite a predilection for such dubious entertainment. This fascination was just one of the factors that led her to act on the appalling fantasies she had developed, most of which revolved around killing.

At her trial, Nevada was quickly sentenced and placed in a juvenile facility where, it is said, she will languish until at least 2013.

The ghastly nature of her crime, and the constant media notoriety it generated, marred the psyches of those around her, perhaps for ever. However, her story did not end with her incarceration. Rather, her actions that June day would spawn an internet phenomenon – dark, perverse, but not altogether impossible to understand, given today’s often murky online climate.

Tucked within the recesses of the vast Japanese realm of the web, a photograph depicting a school class was posted. Two of the girls in the picture are instantly identifiable.

On the far left stands a young girl, grinning broadly, wearing
spectacles and a green sweatshirt. It is Satomi Mitarai, and the obviously delighted child presents to the camera a triumphant finger-sign of victory.

Beside Satomi is another girl, lacking all the joy and vitality of her glossy-haired classmate. This girl has a strange, unreadable expression on her face. Like a spirit in a ghostly portrait, a dark harbinger of things to come, this child would one day be Satomi’s executioner.

The enduring image of an outwardly normal-looking
pre-teen
, clutching a box-cutting knife and with murder in her heart, has scored a deep groove in the communal consciousness of the internet. Stories detailing Nevada’s crime were later posted on online forums across Europe, the United States and Asia. Especially in Japan, with its steady undercurrent of horror movies and its creation of extremely graphic and often sexually violent cartoon imagery, where this kind of killer culture is keenly embraced, Nevada became an instant focus of attention.

Indeed, an online cartoon character would be based upon her. It did not take long for this juvenile murderer to be assigned the moniker of ‘Nevada-tan’; the ‘tan’ suffix presumably used to connote a child’s pronunciation of the honorific ‘-chan’.

The police investigation into the shocking murder of Satomi Mitarai and the background of her young slayer revealed that Nevada was, at least initially, a relatively normal child, with no overt history of bad behaviour, let alone a propensity for violence. It was noted that she had a keen interest in horror films and any other form of entertainment featuring murder and mayhem, from TV shows to comic books.

A particular favourite of hers is the Japanese cult film
Battle
Royale
. Made by Kinjt Fukasaku in 2000, it is the story of a group
of young students who are taken to a tiny, remote island and handed a map, food and various weapons, then made to hunt and kill each other in ways that would have had the schoolboys of
The Lord of the Flies
running for cover. The film, exceptionally popular the world over, was consumed voraciously by the impressionable Nevada.

Another of her favourite movies was
Voice
. This charts the descent of a girl who goes insane and embarks upon a savage killing spree. Though Nevada enjoyed a diet of violent films like these at the time, it seems that she had an outlet in the form of basketball. However, after being forced out of her team, at the behest of her mother, to focus on improving her school results, Nevada chose to retreat further into her fantasy world of death, becoming surly with her parents and those around her.

By now, the lure of the internet had started to overtake all else. She began collecting ‘flash’ horror movies on a website she had started, and would frequent many violent sites, constantly searching for more bloody fodder. She would regularly access a site, viewed by these authors, that features a short story entitled
The Red Room
, in which a boy is slashed to death. There is a warning on the opening page advising that those with a ‘weak heart’ should steer clear.

Concentrating as much of her time as she could on the internet, and regarding the real world as superfluous, she aimed to induce other web visitors to join her site and share in her domain by commencing her own blog – an online live diary – detailing her interests, and even regaling those that came to see with gruesome stories and cooking recipes.

The following extract appeared on the website – now removed – run by Nevada:

Also worthy of note is her interest in the TV horror series
Monday Mystery Theatre
, in which a number of unfortunate victims are brutally dispatched with box-cutters. Nevada later threatened a boy with such a tool, and ten days after the incident led Satomi Mitarai into an empty classroom, covered her eyes and slit the girl’s throat with one.

Nevada and Satomi Mitarai had been close friends. They were in an art class together, played basketball together, shared a group diary and often passed notes on an internet ‘home page’ bulletin board. But Nevada turned into a mortal enemy after Satomi made the gross error of slighting her about her physical appearance, using her online journal to do so.

Nevada demanded an apology for what she perceived as an insult, the worse for coming from someone she considered a friend. Satomi refused, instead branding her ‘pretentious’. The final straw came when Mitarai typed another message
commenting on Nevada’s weight. This marked her out for death. The message was posted four days before she was murdered.

On the day of the killing, the girls’ teacher said she first noticed something unusual when the two had been missing from class. But, before a search for them was begun, Nevada returned, her hands and clothing spattered with Satomi Mitarai’s blood. After the police were called, Nevada confessed to the murder, sobbing, ‘I have done a bad thing.’

She later explained under police questioning that her relationship with her friend had curdled after the hurtful and humiliating remarks Satomi, the more attractive girl, had made about her during exchanges in internet chatrooms.

Inevitably, the Japanese media later highlighted the dangers of this form of interpersonal communication. Similar to text messaging, this method of conversing with another person does not easily convey nuances or subtleties. Neither can it give a precise indication of their mood. As a result, intentions can be misread and animosity can burgeon when one person misconstrues the intention of another participant.

Describing the event that day to police, Nevada stated, ‘She [Mitarai] wrote something bad about my appearance several times on the net a few days before the incident. I didn’t like that, so I called her [to a classroom] and slashed her neck after getting her to sit on a chair.’

Revealing that the murder had been premeditated, she took investigators through the planning and preparation she had made. She told how she had been inspired to use the small knife after seeing the method used in one of her favoured television shows. ‘I saw that drama,’ she stated. ‘I thought I’d do it that way.’

In the aftermath of the killing, Nevada had expressed remorse,
going so far as to openly question her inexplicable actions. ‘I wonder why I did it. If I thought and acted properly, it wouldn’t have happened. I would like to apologise.’

A psychiatric examination found her to be suffering from no effects of any recognised mental disorder. Nevertheless, the sudden outward alteration in Nevada’s behaviour sparked concerns that the problem may be broader. Once again, the internet became the prime target. ‘Over a computer… you can’t see the person’s face, so it’s easier to use increasingly violent language. If that’s the case, it’s an incident that reflects a pathology of society in the age of the internet,’ declared the
Tokyo Shimbun
, a major metropolitan newspaper.

Around this time, other national papers covered stories about the surging use of the internet by children, reporting, courtesy of the Telecommunications Ministry, that 62 per cent of Japanese children between the ages of six and 12 have internet access. The gruesome crime committed by Nevada cast a pall over the emphasis on technology, which is particularly marked within the country’s schools.

‘What children need most is to be able to piece together real things and real experiences,’ wrote Hisashi Sonoda, an internet crime expert at Konan University.

‘We must make children understand even more the basic importance of life,’ the newspaper
Yomiuri
said in an editorial.

Although Japan is still reportedly one of the safest of all the developed nations, youth crime has dramatically increased there in recent years. In fact, the number of children under 14 committing serious crimes in 2003 rose to 212, an increase on the previous year of 47 per cent.

Youth crime in Japan has been a source of great concern since
a horrific incident dating from 1997, in which a 14-year-old lad murdered an 11-year-old, placing the boy’s severed head outside the gates of the school the two attended.

This shocking incident nudged Japan’s parliament a step in the right direction: it lowered the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 14.

In 2002, a 12-year-old boy in Nagasaki was accused of the murder of a toddler by pushing him from a rooftop.

Nevada, too young to be punished under Japan’s penal code, was transferred to juvenile detention until her case was determined in a family court.

This horrific crime, perpetrated by one so young, stirred up as much sensation as might be expected, especially in media-frenzied Japan. It is another example of internet addiction leading to destruction: in this case, not just one life, but two. And not only did the lure of the net drag Nevada away from what she should have been focusing on in her real, everyday life and feed her horror-orientated interests to dangerous proportions: but, bizarrely, it also helped to turn her into a celebrity in the wake of her atrocity.

Many began to cruise the internet looking for the latest piece of ‘fan art’ to do with young Nevada, or sought to join the most recent chatroom discussion about her. This tragic, lonely, 11-year-old killer was transformed into an online phenomenon – perhaps as bold a statement about the perverse pull of the internet as one can make.