Days after the broken body of British teacher Lindsay Hawker was discovered in a fourth-floor flat in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, when the media feeding frenzy was at its most intense, a newspaper editor called me from London.
"Are there any new developments in the case?" he asked. "It's simply impossible to overestimate the degree of interest there is in this creature, with his fascination for white women."
Journalists get used to the sometimes cynical demands of editors struggling to keep mass-selling modern newspapers afloat. This story brimmed over with the best front-page ingredients: a violent crime with a hint of salacious color, a beautiful victim and a poisonous, clever villain who got away. It also had one other, more troubling component: race.