The Shocking Story of the Saitama Dog Lover Murders
In my many years as a writer, I have come to learn that my readers love stories about dogs. Unfortunately, the story of the “Saitama Dog Lover Murders” doesn’t have a happy ending – at least not for the victims of this brutal pair of killers, who sought out their prey using their love for the canine companions.
The murders took place in and near the Saitama Prefecture in Japan in 1993. They were carried out by Gen Sekine and ex-wife Hiroko Kazama and became known as the “Saitama Dog Lover Murders” due to the victims’ connection to the assailants via their dog-breeding business.
The case drew global attention from the media at the time of the couple’s arrest due in part to the gruesome methods involved. When Sekine confessed to the four brutal slayings, he was alleged to have said, “I should be awarded the gold medal for murder.”
The pair were quite well-known and respected dog breeders in the area. Despite being divorced – which authorities later found out was for reasons of tax evasion – the pair ran the “Africa Kennel” pet store together.
As it turned out, their regular “business practices” involved scamming customers by convincing them to purchase over-priced “rare breeds” with the promise that their investment would produce handsome returns when the animals produced litters of their own to be sold.
Sekine had a very shady past. He reportedly had ties to the Japanese “mob” the Yakuza, a partnership that supposedly cost him his left pinky finger after he pocketed dirty money that was loaned to him. He had also been accused of similar crimes involving scamming pet owners in the past.
In his hometown of Chichibu, it was said that he had a reputation for stealing back animals he had sold, only to sell them on to new owners. He was once accused of poisoning animals by doctoring the food he sold his customers so that dogs would get sick and die in order to encourage owners to purchase a new dog from him as a replacement.
The Scam Revealed
How Sekine and his wife were bilking their customers came to a head in 1993. They had sold a pair of Rhodesian Ridgebacks to a wealthy area CEO for a hefty sum of over $100,000 American, with the promise that when the client mated the pair, Sekine would buy back the litter for a huge profit. However, the man who purchased the dogs soon found out that the female was too old to bear young and that even if she had, the breed has not worth anything near what he had paid for the pair. Rhodesians sold for typical sold for about $1000 – ten times less than what he had paid!
To make matters worst, the female of the pair “ran off” one day and was never found. Upon demanding a refund from the nefarious salesman, the businessman soon found himself with a target on his head.
The First Victim
The man who had been scammed suddenly disappeared. Later, it would be found out that he (never identified to the public) was the first of four victims – “Victim A” of the murderous pair of dog breeders.
It seems that Kazama and Sekine were in financial trouble. The store was losing money and in deep debt due to Seskine’s poor management and propensity to get in over his head gambling. The pair decided it would be better to have the complaining industrialist “disappear” then come up with the funds to return his money.
Within a matter of months of Victim A’s disappearance, Sekine became the suspect in three more disappearances and seeming homicides.
After a missing person’s report was filed by Victim A’s family. As soon as he went missing, his family told police of the deal that went afoul with Sekine, and he immediately became a primary suspect. Weeks later, Victim A’s car was found abandoned a few weeks later in an underground parking garage.
As it turned out, he was to meet Sekine at the garage on April 20th, where the dog breeder was supposedly going to refund his money. Instead, Sekine engaged in conversation with his soon-to-be-victim before slipping strychnine—a toxin used to euthanize pets—into his drink, killing him quickly. It would soon be discovered that Sekine dispatched at least three more victims the same way — a gang leader, his driver, and a housewife. Each were conned in a similar fashion and later killed using the same shocking methods.
An employee of the store, Eikō Yamazaki, was forced against his will to help Sekine dispose of the body of Victim A and the three other victims. According to the local press, afraid that any surviving bodily evidence could link them to the murders, Sekine dismembered the bodies of each of the four victims by hand. He separated organs from flesh and meat from the bone with knives and other tools, scattering the unrecognizable, finely chopped-up remains in a nearby river. When only the victims’ bones and material possessions remained, Sekine started a fire in an unused oil drum, burning them down to ash to be scattered in the woods near to Yamazaki’s home.
Confession and Conviction
Almost a year after Victim A’s disappearance, Sekine, Kazama, and Yamazaki came under investigation for unrelated accounts of fraud. Over the course of that, Yamazaki cracked and confessed to the crimes that had taken place under Sekine’s command to the police. By December of the same year, Yamazaki’s testimony led police to uncover minor remains and belongings from the four victims from a wooded area in Katashina Village, Gunma prefecture. By January 1995, the perpetrators had been arrested.
Despite a major lack of material evidence, Sekine and Kazama were convicted based on the consistency of Yamazaki’s testimony—who was himself convicted for three counts of bodily mutilation and four counts of abandonment of a corpse.
For his involvement, Yamazaki received a three-year prison sentence in December 1995. But it would take several more years for Sekine and Kazama to receive sentencing after both perpetrators accused each other of being the principal perpetrator.
On March 21st, 2001, Sekine and Kazama were sentenced to death for the murders of four people, with Kazama only the 12th woman to receive the death penalty in Japan since the end of the Second World War. Sixteen years later, Sekine died from a heart-attack-related illness at Tokyo Detention House; Kazama still awaits her execution.
The events of the Saitama Dog Lover Murders were fictionalized in the brutal and bloody independent film Cold Fish in 2011.
LISTEN UP…The TWO JAPANESE SERIAL KILLERS DESERVE to have Their HEADS WHACKED OFF With a SAMURAI SWORD. DON’T LET THEM COMMIT ..HARI KIRI. THEY DON’T DESERVE an HONORABLE DEATH. THEY are BOTH GOING to HELL. From SamuraiQueen.???