Zama, a sleepy suburb in southwestern Tokyo was plagued by a series of disappearances of women and girls as young as 16 in late summer 2017. Ultimately, it was the foul stench of human remains which led police to the victims.
While searching for missing 23-year-old Aiko Tamura, neighbors called the police after noticing a profound and acrid smell emanating from a nearby apartment; The tenant had only just moved there just two months previously, having left his family home within the same suburb.
When police arrived on the scene and entered the apartment on Halloween morning 2017, they happened upon a gruesome scene worthy of the most sinister and macabre horror fiction ever conceived: Two severed heads, a dismembered pair of arms and legs and the bloodied saw used to wrest them from the remaining decaying corpses.
The apartment would soon be dubbed the ‘house of horrors’ in Japanese media, and for good reason: body parts were found stored in cooler and tool boxes strewn throughout the apartment and sprinkled with cat litter in a vain attempt to hide the putrid scent of decay.
