Prosecutors demanded the death penalty Tuesday for a woman and man charged with murdering the woman's husband and her son, both for insurance payouts.
When their Nagasaki District Court trial opened in February 2000, Reiko Yamaguchi, 43, and Kazuo Hokao, 55, admitted drowning Yamaguchi's husband, Katsuhiko, 38, and son, Yoshinori, 16.
According to prosecutors, Yamaguchi, a former insurance saleswoman, and Hokao, an antique dealer, killed the husband after giving him a sleeping drug, on a pier in Tara, Saga Prefecture, on Sept. 11, 1992.
The wife received 99 million yen in insurance money after she and Hokao allegedly conspired to falsely declare the victim had died in a fishing accident.
The two are also charged with drowning Yamaguchi's son in Konagai, Nagasaki Prefecture, on Oct. 27, 1998, after giving him a health drink laced with sleeping pills.
The defendants claimed an insurance payment of 35 million yen for the son's death. But the insurers refused to pay because rescuers who retrieved his body from the sea were suspicious about the couple's explanation that he had died accidentally, and police then opened an investigation, the prosecutors said.
The two have given conflicting accounts about who plotted the crimes.
Prosecutors said Yamaguchi proposed killing her husband to Hokao after her mother-in-law had told her that her husband planned to divorce her. Hokao proposed killing Yamaguchi's son six years after they killed her husband, prosecutors said, adding that Yamaguchi actually helped kill her son by forcing him under the water.