44 Days of Tortured

Criminal Case of Junko Furuta

Nov. 22, 1972 - Jan. 4, 1989
44 days of Torture & Murder

A 17 year old girl named Furuta Junko, was kidnapped and then tortured by 4 boys with very unimaginable way and finally death after 44 days.

The crime:

In November of 1988, Boy A (18), Boy B (Jo Kamisaku, 17; Kamisaku was a new family name he took after being released from prison), Boy C (16) and Boy D (17) from Tokyo abducted Furuta, a second year high school (grade 11) student from Saitama Prefecture in Misato, for 44 days. They kept her captive in the house owned by the parents of Boy C.

To forestall a manhunt, Boy A coerced 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 of Boy C more than once to help her, but they did nothing, apparently out of fear that Boy Awould hurt them. Boy A was at the time a low-level yakuza leader and had bragged that he could use his connections to kill anyone who interfered.

According to their statements at their trial, the four of them raped her, beat her, introduced foreign objects including an iron rod into her vagina, made her drink her own urine and wasfed cockroaches, inserted fireworks into heranus, and set them off, forced Furuta tomasturbate, cut her nipple with pliers, droppeddumbbells 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 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 one of the boys' loss at mah-jongg 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.

The killers hid her corpse in an 55-gallon drum filled with cement; the perpetrators disposed the drum in a tract of reclaimed land in Koto, Tokyo.

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