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Junko Furuta - Concrete-encased high school girl murder
On November 25, 1988, four teenage boys abducted and held Junko Furuta, then 16 years old, for 44 days. They kept her captive in the house owned by the parents of one of the boys. To forestall a manhunt, one of them forced Furuta into calling her own parents and telling them that she had run away from home, but was with “a friend” and was not in danger. He also browbeat her into posing as one of the boys’ girlfriends when the parents of the house where she was held were around, but when it became clear that the parents would not call the police, he dropped this pretext. Furuta tried to escape several times, begging the parents more than once to help her, but they did nothing, apparently out of fear that the boys would hurt them.
According to their statements at their trial, the four of them raped her, beat her with metal rods and golf clubs, introduced foreign objects including a light bulb into her vagina, made her eat cockroaches and drink her own urine, inserted fireworks into her anus and set them off, forced Furuta to masturbate, cut her nipple with pliers, dropped dumbbells onto her stomach, and burned her with cigarettes and lighters. One of the burnings was punishment for attempting to call the police. At one point her injuries were so severe that according to one of the boys it took more than an hour for her to crawl downstairs to use the bathroom. They also related that “possibly a hundred different people” knew that Furuta had been imprisoned there, but it is not clear if this means they visited the house at different times while she was imprisoned there, or themselves either raped (approximately 1000 times in total) or abused her. When the boys refused to let her leave, she begged them on several occasions to “kill (her) and get it over with”.
On January 4, 1989, using a loss at mah-jong as a pretext, the four beat her with an iron barbell, poured lighter fluid on her legs, arms, face and stomach, and set her on fire. She died later that day of shock. The four boys claimed that they were not aware of how badly injured she was, and that they believed she had been malingering. On January 5, the killers hid her corpse in a 55-gallon drum filled with cement; the perpetrators disposed the drum in a tract of reclaimed land in Koto, Tokyo.
They boys were arrested and tried as adults, however, none of them got a life sentence. One of them got a twenty year sentence, and the other three got much less. Two of them are currently out of prison, one is still serving his sentence, and another is in prison again for committing a different crime.
