OSAKA -- A woman and her brother have been arrested on suspicion of murdering her husband and dumping his dismembered body into the sea, police said.
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Mainichi Shimbun
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| Keiko Ishitani, left, and her brother Yasunori Matsumi. |
The head of the victim, Matsuo Ishitani, was found along the Osaka Bay shoreline last November and it was only identified as that of the Osaka transport company president Wednesday following DNA tests.
Police arrested Ishitani's wife, Keiko, and her brother Yasunori Matsumi on Thursday on charges of mutilating a corpse and illegally disposing of it.
Keiko, 44, has reportedly admitted to killing her 45-year-old husband. "We were financially struggling because he didn't work but had a habit of spend heavily. I wanted to end all that," the woman was quoted by investigators as saying. Matsumi, who was an employee at Ishitani's company, said he wanted to help his elder sister. "My sister was troubled saying, 'Matsuo would never work.' I thought killing him was the only solution."
Police said the pair drugged Ishitani and strangled him inside a company van in late October last year. They drove the body to a storehouse in Osaka's Minato-ku, where they dismembered it using a chainsaw.
In early November, Keiko and her brother allegedly put the severed body parts back into the van and sped down the Hanshin Expressway's Wangan Line and dumped the parts and the chainsaw from a section overlooking Osaka Bay.
Ishitani's head remained unidentified for some time because Keiko did not report him missing until this month.
Since killing Ishitani, she cancelled his life insurance policies and received several million yen. (Mainichi Shimbun, Feb. 21, 2003)
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