The investigation into the murder of a 7-year-old boy in a farming community in northern Honshu has taken a bizarre twist. A 33-year-old woman from the community was arrested and she initially admitted that she had abandoned the body of the boy near a river.
As evidence against her emerged, she eventually admitted that she had murdered the boy. The woman was the mother of a 9-year-old girl who had drowned slightly more than a month before the boy was murdered. Living two houses away from the murder victim's home, she was on good terms with his family. Her daughter and the boy played together. The investigators must first determine what the woman actually did. But more important is to find out what caused her to do what she is suspected of doing.
The boy, Goken Yoneyama of Fujisato, Akita Prefecture, went missing in the afternoon of May 17. He was last seen around 3:20 p.m. that day. His body was found the next afternoon in grass near the Yoneshiro River in Noshiro in the same prefecture, about 8 km downstream from his home. An autopsy determined that he had been strangled.