The Fukuoka District Court sentenced a 52-year-old man from Fukuoka Prefecture to death Wednesday for murdering a man and a woman in 1990 for insurance money.
Yoshikatsu Oda received the sentence that prosecutors had sought for his role in the murders of the two, who were unrelated. Prosecutors said he tried to make the deaths appear to be a double suicide.
Oda had pleaded guilty.
The court said Oda and his girlfriend, Chie Masuda, 30, stabbed the 20-year-old woman and 27-year-old man to death, placed their bodies in a car and set it on fire in December 1990.
Masuda remains at large. She was the proprietor of a jewelry shop where the female victim worked, and was the beneficiary of 100 million yen in insurance contracts taken out on the woman's life.