Killer Confesses After Victim's Severed Head Starts "Visiting" Him｜Mariko Iguchi Case

But the man's reasoning was especially strange. He wasn't intimidated by the police. He wasn't plagued with guilt. Instead, he said he felt compelled to confess because the victim's head had been haunting him. The psychological pressure became too much, and eventually he broke down completely. So what actually happened?

Today we're looking at a case that was ultimately solved thanks to what some consider a supernatural phenomenon. A case where the victim allegedly haunted the man who killed her. This is the Mariko Iguchi case.

Over the next few days, she would explore the city of Tainan, befriending a taxi driver named Lee, who would show her the sights. Then on April seventh, she would board the Fuxing Express to Kaohsiung, walk out of the station gates at around noon, and vanish without a trace. Her family tried to reach her multiple times with no success. Her April 18th return flight to Japan was never canceled. But she never boarded it. Immigration records showed no exit data for her. She had never left Taiwan.

Her mother, Hisaku Iguchi, who had waited at the airport all day on April 18th, for a daughter who would never arrive, flew out to Taiwan on April 25th. She was worried sick.

She filed a missing persons report with the National Police Agency, hoping they could find her daughter. On July 7th, police received a tip saying that Mariko had been murdered, and her body was buried in a cemetery in Shinji Township. Tainan. Since Lee was based in Tainan and he was the last known person to have had contact with Marie Cole,

Police brought him in for questioning, but his alibi checked out. He was released, and the investigation hit a dead end. In October, they questioned another taxi driver, a man named Liu Xui Tiang. But his mental state seemed unstable, and his statements were all over the place. They couldn't get anything useful from him, so they let him go. But something seemed off. They decided to keep him on their radar.

By December, the reward for information leading to a named suspect, dead or alive, had climbed to one million new Taiwan dollars, which at the time was worth over thirty-seven thousand US dollars. Despite the sizable amount, no one came forward. Then on January fourth, nineteen ninety one, police found an unidentified female body in a sugarcane field in Holy Township, Taichung County.

At first, they thought it might be Marie Cool. The body seemed to resemble her. But when they compared the dental x-rays, they didn't match. So the case dragged on. Nearly a year after Bari Ku disappeared, the case finally took a turn in the investigators' favor. A reliable source pointed to Liu Xui Chiang as the prime suspect. On march fourth, nineteen ninety one, police arrested him at his home.

he broke down crying and admitted to killing her. He said that every time he closed his eyes he saw her face, not as she looked in life, but the way she looked when he last saw her. mutilated and covered in blood. He couldn't sleep. He couldn't escape it. But what happened the day he killed her? And where was her body? Well, before we get into that, let me give you some background information about Marikol.

She was born on May twenty fourth, nineteen sixty seven, into a comfortable middle class family. Her parents weren't extraordinarily wealthy, but they made sure she had every opportunity, and they succeeded. She grew into a young woman who was cheerful, curious, and loved learning new things.

She had a particular passion for Chinese culture, and even served as president of the Chinese Studies Association at her university. Mariko was serious about her studies, and her family supported her wholeheartedly. She was meticulous, always planning everything carefully to make sure nothing would go wrong. Whenever she traveled, she always kept her family informed of her activities. She'd send postcards or letters to her mother, updating her on where she was and what she was doing.

So when Bariko told them she wanted to travel to Taiwan alone, they weren't worried. They trusted her.

When Bariko flew to Taiwan, she had her whole itinerary mapped out, and she was keeping in touch as she always did. So what happened? Bariko spent her first two days in Taipei, and on the morning of April 4th, She sent a postcard home describing her experiences and That afternoon she took a train south to Tainan, where she met a young taxi driver named Lee.

They hit it off. He showed her around, introduced her to popular spots, and when she couldn't find a hotel, he invited her to stay at his home, which operated as a small bed and breakfast. And she agreed. One of the things Bariko valued most about travel was meeting new people and experiencing the local culture firsthand. Staying with a local family felt like exactly the kind of experience she was looking for. On April 5th and 6th,

Lee accompanied her around Tainan. She was having a wonderful time. On April seventh, she sent one more postcard to her family, telling them how beautiful the city was, and how much she was enjoying the local culture. And that was the last they ever heard from her.

The case of Mariko's disappearance drew serious attention and dealt a heavy financial blow to Taiwan. And at the time, the nation's economy relied heavily on Japanese tourism, and the country aggressively marketed to Japanese visitors. However, Japanese tourist numbers dropped by about 10% as a direct result of this case.

The Taiwanese government treated this as a matter of national importance, and the police formed a special unit called the O four O seven Joint Task Force, named after april seventh, the date Mariko had last been seen. When the police questioned Lee, he turned out to be just as kind and trustworthy as Mariko had believed him to be. They discovered that not only did he drop Mariko off at the train station on April 7th.

But he also specifically asked a conductor to look after her. He explained that she was traveling alone and didn't speak much Chinese. The conductor confirmed this, also noting that she had boarded the train to Kaohsiung and was traveling alone. Having ruled out Li and confirmed that she had, in fact, boarded the train. The police shifted their attention to Kaoh Xiong station. They canvassed the area, asking if anyone had seen her.

But Kaoh Xiong Station is one of the busiest and most chaotic transit hubs in Taiwan, and Mariko was East Asian. She could easily pass for Taiwanese. No one remembered her. And why would they? She looked like any other local commuter. As it turned out, this is where Mariko would meet Liu Xuiang, the strange taxi driver who would later kill her. Now, often when someone turns out to be a killer, people are shocked. Neighbors express disbelief.

Others in their life struggled to reconcile their image of what they thought to be a normal person with the horrific crimes that were committed. That was not the case with Liu Xu Tian. Even before he was caught, sources described him as a thirty five year old anti social loner. who lived by himself, and had a reputation for being rude and aggressive. He was known for telling colleagues that he hated stray cats and dogs in his neighborhood.

He had even bought a crossbow specifically to shoot at these animals at night. Naturally, his co-workers were horrified. Nearly a year after Mariko vanished, a new tip came in that pointed the finger at Leo. If someone had seen Mariko eating noodles at a food stall near Leo's house with Liu himself on the night she disappeared. Investigators tracked down the noodle seller, who confirmed it. Liu had been with Mariko that night. Police went straight to his house.

Leo answered the door, looking exhausted and afraid. When the investigators started questioning him, the first thing he said was, What's the day today? It was a strange thing to ask. If the police showed up at your door, you'd likely ask what was going on, not what day it was. They told him it was March 4th, and remember this date. Liu's face fell, he looked devastated, something in him broke, and he collapsed on the spot. When he came to, he confessed.

Because the case was so prominent and had been open for so long, the police were eager to move quickly. On march fifth, Liu was transferred to the Kaoshung District Prosecutor's Office on suspicion of murder. But in front of the prosecutor, he suddenly denied knowing Mariko at all. With no progress, he was remanded to a detention facility. That same day, Leo attempted to hang himself using cloth strips wrapped around his shackles, tied to a window. The guards found him in time to save his life.

Over the next two days, investigators pressed him for details. At first, Leo's statements were all over the place, but eventually he started talking coherently, almost eagerly, about how he met Mariko. And there was something twisted about the way he spoke about her. According to Leo, on April 7th, 1990, he saw Bariko walking alone through the arcades.

on Jianghua Third Road near Kaohxiung Station. She was carrying a backpack. He approached her on his motorcycle and struck up a conversation using notes and gestures, since she didn't speak much Chinese. She told him she was looking for a place to stay, and he offered to let her stay at his house in Xiao Gang district. Maybe she assumed he was another kind stranger like Li had been. She climbed onto the back of his motorcycle and he drove her to his home.

They spent the afternoon sightseeing together, Chungqing Lake, Feng Shan, the Datung Department Store, before returning to his place in the evening. That night, Liu made sexual advances toward her. She refused and went to bed. And this enraged him. He felt humiliated. So in the early hours of April 8th, while she was asleep, he grabbed his crossbow, the one he had purchased to kill the stray animals in his neighborhood, and shot four arrows into her head.

He stole her money, sexually assaulted her body, decapitated her, and put her head in a plastic bag. He wrapped her body in a bed sheet, disposing of it in a remote location the following night. He also got rid of his bloodstained clothes, the crossbow, and Bariko's backpack. To cover his tracks, he poured gasoline on her body and set it on fire. He even burned the bed she'd slept on. For some reason, he disposed of her head in another place entirely.

Having destroyed and abandoned the evidence, he thought he had gotten away with the murder. But that is when the terror began. From that night on, he felt like something else was in the room with him, breathing. That's also when Mariko's head started appearing constantly, asking him why he had killed her. The haunting became so unbearable that

that he moved into his taxi filling it with talismans and Buddhist statues in a desperate attempt to ward off her spirit. His behavior changed, and it didn't go unnoticed. On February fourth, nineteen ninety-one, another taxi driver named Wang was chatting with a taxi dispatcher at headquarters, when the dispatcher suddenly stopped mid-conversation and pointed out the window.

They watched Liu sprint across the busy parking lot, clutching a golden Buddha statue, before throwing himself into his taxi and slamming and locking the door. Then he scanned around frantically as though something was chasing him. This wasn't a one off. Wang and others had been watching Liu's increasingly erratic behavior for weeks. Wang volunteered to call the friend and the police.

He discovered that Liu was already on the radar as an uncleared suspect in the Mariko case. But the news of Liu's increasingly bizarre behavior led Detective Lin Xiao Chi to put Liu under twenty four seven surveillance. Detective Lin and his team tailed Liu around the clock. They observed that Liu essentially never left his cab. He picked up fares all day, then slept in it at night.

He only went into his apartment briefly to use the bathroom. Every time he did, he went through the same frantic ritual, scanning around wildly, sprinting inside, staying only minutes. Then bombing back out and diving into his cab, clutching his Buddha statue and rubbing the fulu talismans he had taped all over the interior windows. His cab was so packed with statues and paper talismans that he could barely see to drive.

Liu was truly losing it. Frustrated and afraid of Mariko's ghost, Liu went to Foguang Temple to beg a monk for help. According to accounts, he said, whenever the lights go off and I'm away from Buddhist scriptures, Miss Iguchi comes to me asking, Why did you kill me? Why did you do this to me? I might as well kill myself. The monk told him that March fourth would bring a great test in his life, and that if he didn't get through it,

he would face ruin. And it's difficult to argue that the monk was wrong. March fourth was the very date that the police found Leo. While Leo might have been the only one to be haunted by Mariko, He wasn't the only person to experience something unusual following Mariko's death. People across the city started receiving mysterious phone calls from an unknown number. When they picked up, they would hear a woman's voice speaking frantically in Japanese.

In Taiwan, where most people speak Taiwanese and Mandarin, this was bizarre. The calls would end abruptly. No one could explain it.

Liu confessed on march fourth and was formally detained on march fifth, nineteen ninety one. Police repeatedly asked him where he disposed of Mariko's body, but his story kept changing. One time he said Tainan County, another time, Tainan City. Officers went back and forth between two areas but found nothing. Then on March seventh, Liu finally gave a more specific location. He said he'd left the body in an open area on Chungming Thirteenth Street in Tainan City.

The head, he said, was in a garbage dump near the Nunman Presbyterian Church on Nunman Road. On March 8th, police found the place where Leo claimed Mariko's body had been abandoned. They excavated the site the next day, finding over 100 bone fragments of varying sizes beneath the roots of a fell tree. The bones were sent to Taipei for identification, and there's a strange detail about the place these bones were found.

The landowner had tried to level that plot of land multiple times over the past year, but every time the bulldozer got close to where the body was buried, it would mysteriously stall and refuse to start up again. Thanks to this, the remains were never disturbed. Based on Liu's other confessions, police recovered several items: Mariko's flashlight, tools, umbrella, and the crossbow he'd used to kill her.

On march fourteenth, Hisako flew to Taiwan again. Around the same time, the remains were being examined by two of the most prominent forensic experts in Asia. doctor Yang Ji Song, Taiwan's renowned forensic pathologist, and doctor Henry Li, the internationally famous forensic scientist. The bones were confirmed to be bariko Iguchis. As for Bariko's head, the police had planned to search for it and run the township, but the cost of excavating an entire garbage landfill was too high.

So the search was cancelled, and her head was never found. On April eleventh, Liu Xuia Chang was formally charged with murder, theft, assault. and abandonment of a corpse under the criminal code of the Republic of China. On november twenty fourth, nineteen ninety one, after a long legal battle and testimony from numerous witnesses, The Kao Xiang District Court sentenced Liu Xu Chang to death for murder and abandonment of a corpse.

However, a psychiatric evaluation determined that he suffered from mental health issues, and his sentence was reduced to life imprisonment with permanent deprivation of civil rights. After the case was closed, one of the officers noticed something unusual about Leo's taxi license plate. Zero three four four four four four four four four four four four four four four four four four four four nine eight.

The first three digits, 034, corresponded to March 4th, the day Liu was arrested. And the last four digits, 4498, sounded like death, death, ninth eighth. in Chinese language. Police found the body disposal site on the 8th. They excavated the bones on the 9th.

it was as if the plate had foretold everything. On may third, nineteen ninety three, Mariko's remains were cremated in Taiwan. Her mother, Hisako, traveled there one last time to bring her daughter's ashes home to Japan. As for Liu Xuiang, because his crime occurred in 1990, he qualified for Taiwan's old parole laws, which made him eligible for release after serving just ten years. As of twenty nineteen, he'd been in Yilan prison for nearly twenty-eight years, held in solitary confinement.

Prison officials assessed him as suitable for parole, but when they contacted his family to obtain the required residence consent form, his own relatives refused. They said, Whoever releases him is responsible. Bariku's story has since been adapted into several media productions, mostly focusing on the horror and supernatural elements of the case.

There's one more detail worth mentioning. During the investigation, one of the officers said he felt someone push his back when he entered Liu's house. When he turned around, no one was there. He later said he believed it was Bariko's spirit guiding him toward the truth. And maybe it did. Maybe in some way she helped capture the man who killed her. So what do you guys think? Whether Bariko's spirit truly haunted Liu Xuia Chang or

Whether it was just his own guilt devouring him from the inside, we will never know for sure. But something broke him, something made him confess. Liu is still alive, rotting in solitary confinement, abandoned by his own family. Bariko is gone. Her body reduced to ashes that her mother carried home on a plane, her head never found. So is that justice? Can anything? Her life was taken in a brutal manner, simply because she refused a man's sexual advances. Murder is never excusable, of course.

But to be killed for such a frivolous reason seems especially cruel. And if you were Badicole, a young woman who just wanted to see the world But was instead removed from it, would you rest in peace? Or would you make sure your killer never slept again? I know what my answer is. That is all for today.