TERROR IN TOKYO

A NEW DOCUMENTARY REVEALS HOW A SERIAL PREDATOR WAS FINALLY CAUGHT

- Michael Crooks

When police raided the home of wealthy businessman Joji Obara in Tokyo in 2000, on the suspicion he was a sexual predator, they found hundreds of videos of him raping drugged and comatose women. Among the many victims on the more than 400 tapes was Australian Carita Ridgway, a former model from Perth who died in mysterious circumstances in Tokyo eight years earlier.

“They also found a diary with girls’ names and comments next to them,” says investigative journalist and author Clare Campbell who wrote the 2009 book, Tokyo Hostess. “Next to Carita’s name, Obara had written, ‘Too much chloroform.’”

Those three words lifted the curtain on a dangerously warped mind. In 2001, Obara, 49, was arrested over the drugging and rapes of multiple women, and the deaths of Carita and British flight attendant Lucie Blackman, whose tragic story is now the subject of the Netflix documentary, Missing: The Lucie Blackman Case.

“He wrote in his diary that he couldn’t ‘do’ women unless they were unconscious,” Campbell tells WHO. “And his ambition was to sleep with 500 women by the time he was 50.”