Tatsuya Ichihashi: The Murder Of Lindsay Hawker

On the 24th of March 2007, in the city of Chiba Japan, 23-year-old Lindsay Hawker went missing and what police uncovered in the following days was not only disturbing but led into a 3-year long manhunt.

Lindsay Hawker was from a town called Coventry, England. She was born on December 30th 1984 and was well loved in her community. She did really well academically and graduated from the university of Leeds with a first-class honours grade in biology in 2006. Lindsay decided she wanted to take a year off to travel before going for her master's degree. In October that year, she signed up to Nova teaching school and left for the beautiful country of Japan.

After landing in Japan, Lindsay was assigned to Koiwa, a district in Edogawa, Tokyo. She lived slightly further east in a city called Chiba because the rent was cheaper and she moved in with two other Nova school teachers who quickly became friends with her. During her time in Japan, Lindsay made sure to keep in regular contact with her family and boyfriend back in England through Facebook, Whatsapp, Skype, text and calls. She was enjoying her time in Japan and everything was seemingly going well.

Six months into her stay, in March 2007, Lindsay had a strange encounter. After finishing work for the day, she took the train back to Chiba station where she usually kept her bicycle. Whilst unlocking her bike, she was approached from behind by a man who greeted her with the words “You are my English teacher.” This didn’t sit right with Lindsay because she was adamant he wasn’t one of her students so she politely left the conversation and got on her bicycle to ride back to her apartment. The man started to follow her, when she sped up her pace he ran after her. Whilst trying to get away from the man, he kept asking questions like “Where are you from?” and “Where did you study?” Lindsay couldn’t shake the man off and eventually stopped her bike outside her apartment where she was once again approached by him. He asked if she’d be willing to give him English lessons because he felt like he needed some help with the language. He offered to meet in a public café so she was comfortable and he would pay generously by the hour, Lindsay refused as she was too busy with her work and hardly got any free time to herself. The man seemed disappointed but accepted her answer. He, then, asked if she’d be so kind to give him a glass of water as he was thirsty from chasing her down. Reluctantly, Lindsay agreed and let him in. She wanted her housemates to see his face in case it came up again in the future and she also wanted to show that she didn’t live alone so it would deter the man if he was planning anything.

Once inside, he asked Lindsay for lessons again but this time he said he’d pay her 3500 yen ($32) an hour. This time, Lindsay accepted because she couldn’t refuse the easy money he was offering and she arranged to meet him at a coffee shop a few days later. The man was grateful and before leaving, he took out a pen and a scrap piece of paper and started scribbling. He passed the note to her and to her surprise it was a drawing of her with his name and number on.

Tatsuya Ichihashi, 047-356-7238.

Tatsuya was a 28-year-old man from the city of Ichikawa but moved to Chiba. He wanted to follow in his father's footsteps in becoming a medical doctor but when he was denied access to further his education, he settled for a degree in Horticulture from the University of Chiba in 2005. However, once graduating, he never made an effort to find work and instead, lived off an allowance of 100,000 yen ($920) a month from his parents. He had no previous convictions with the law but he had been a previous suspect in an allegation of theft and assault. Allegedly, Tatsuya had assaulted a woman on the street during a robbery but his father paid the woman 1 million yen ($10,000) to settle the matter outside of court. Tatsuya was regularly described as a loner with an obsession with physical fitness. He’d often go to his local gym and cycle over 25 Kilometres every day.

Saturday 24th of March 2007, Lindsay and Tatsuya have their first lesson together in a local coffee shop. CCTV captured them conversing together in the que to buy a drink and Lindsay didn’t look uncomfortable but she was making an effort to keep distance between the two of them and you can see her stepping away from him if he got too close. The lesson took a little over an hour and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

At the end of the lesson, Tatsuya said he forgot to bring the money to pay her and said she could come by his apartment to collect her payment as he only lived a half mile down the road. Lindsay agreed and they got into a taxi together. Once at Tatsuya’s home, Lindsay asked the driver if he would mind waiting as she wouldn’t be long and had to go to work that afternoon. The driver accepted and both, Tatsuya and Lindsay disappeared into the building. After several minutes, she hadn’t come back out and the driver assumed she changed her plans and left.

Lindsay never turned up to work that afternoon and after multiple hours of not showing up at home, her roommates decided to call the police and report her missing but they didn’t take it seriously. When she didn’t clock in at work on the Monday, Nova teaching school contacted her parents in England to inform them. They knew something was wrong and the police were called again. The search for Lindsay started at her apartment and when they questioned her room mates, they told police of the strange man she had a lesson with that day and handed them the sketch of Lindsay with his details on them.

At 5:40pm on Monday 26th of March, two police officers were dispatched to Tatsuya’s apartment. When they knocked on the door, nobody answered. However, Tatsuya’s neighbours were kind enough to allow them onto their balcony so they could look over into his living room. All the lights were off but someone definitely seemed to be lurking inside. They noticed his detachable bath tub had been moved from his bathroom to his balcony which seemed odd. The officer's assumed Lindsay was being held hostage in Tatsuya’s apartment and immediately called for backup. After three hours, nine officers had turned up and they started planning a raid of his home. As they were preparing to charge the apartment, Tatsuya opened the door barefoot with a rucksack. He took advantage of the officer's panic and stormed past all nine of them. In an attempt to grab him, they managed to snatch his rucksack but unfortunately, Tatsuya managed to get away and disappeared into the night.

When searching Tatsuya’s apartment, they found the naked body of Lindsay Hawker in the bathtub on the balcony. He had completely covered her with a mixture of soil and sand. The only piece of her showing was her right hand hanging out of the tub. Upon further investigation, they found that Tatsuya had put a decomposition agent in the soil mixture and put flower seed on the top to disguise it as a flower bed. He had shaved all of Lindsay’s hair off. Police also found multiple women’s wigs scattered around the accommodation which led them to believe Tatsuya was a cross dresser. When this became public knowledge, rumours started to circulate that he killed her to make her hair into a wig but this was never confirmed.

By the next morning, Tatsuya was officially a wanted man all across Japan. Police distributed wanted posters and shown his face on several news outlets multiple times a day but nothing came of it. After a couple weeks and no leads, police released photoshopped pictures of Tatsuya in wigs just in case he was out in drag and nobody had recognised him. Again, nothing came of this and the trail had gone cold.

Two months after Lindsay’s death, her parents arrived in Japan to assist in raising awareness to find Tatsuya because they believed the police were getting lazy in their searches. Her father even befriended members of the Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) with bottles of whiskey to ask for assistance in finding his daughter's killer.

The media turned the spotlight to the Japanese police and started to question their competence. How did nine police officers fail to apprehend one man when they were preparing to raid his home? Why did they take a month to question vital witnesses? Did they know their wanted picture was seven years out of date? The police and Lindsay Hawker’s family started to publicly argue with one another which led to the heavy involvement of both British and Japanese media. Whilst this was happening, Tatsuya had travelled across most of the country, ranging from Aomori, the most northern city in Japan, to the most southern island of Okinawa.

In the year 2008 to 2009, Tatsuya was living in Osaka, 250 miles west of Tokyo. He was sleeping in internet cafes and worked on construction sites to get by and saved up whatever money possible to get plastic surgery to covert his face. However, he had already changed his face through self-mutilation- he had cut off the moles on his face with a knife, used scissors to cut off part of his lower lip and sewn a thread through his nose to alter its shape. In the summer of 2009, police were getting desperate and raised the cash reward from one million yen ($10,000) to Ten million yen ($100,000) along with more photoshopped pictures stating that he had most probably gotten plastic surgery.

In October 2009, a plastic surgeon informed police that he believed he’d worked on Tatsuya recently and he’d taken a before and after photo which was quickly released to the public.

This proved to be successful as a colleague on the construction site Tatsuya was working at recognised him and informed police. In a state of panic, he planned to flee to Okinawa and find an abandoned bunker on one of its remote islands which he had done many times before when he felt police were getting too close.

10th of November 2009, Tatsuya made a run for Osaka’s ferry port and tried to keep his head down. All he had to do was not be recognised on the ferry for three days and he would have gotten away again. Unfortunately for him, a staff member of the port recognised him and instructed security to call police. When police arrived and asked his name, he knew he’d been caught and said the words “Yes, it is me, Tatsuya Ichihashi.” He was arrested on the spot. He was initially charged with abandoning a body. Two other charges were later brought to him for rape and murder.

4th of July 2011 Tatsuya Ichihashi’s trial began. Due to the nature of the crime, deliberation didn’t last long and he admitted that he enticed Lindsay into his home, raped her and strangled her because he was afraid his neighbours would hear her scream and get him in trouble. Most of the media coverage from this time was around how the court system would punish him as Japan still enforced the death penalty, however not many single-person murderers meet that fate. Many voices were campaigning for Tatsuya to meet the death penalty but on the 21st of July 2009, he was sentenced to life imprisonment serving a minimum of 10 years before the possibility of parole. In 2012, Tatsuya appealed his sentencing and his lawyers argued he was sentenced too harshly and repeated the claim that the death was accidental as he was just trying to muffle Lindsay’s screams. The Tokyo high court upheld the original sentencing. However, Tatsuya continued to torment the Hawker family by writing a book detailing his time on the run from his prison cell. The book was popular in Britain and sold over 100,000 copies, he offered Lindsay’s parents the royalty money but they refused. The book was so successful that the story was made into a film called “I am Ichihashi- The Journal of a Killer.” In 2022, he is still in prison.

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