A 55-year-old woman charged with strangling her 19-year-old daughter in their apartment in Hiratsuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, last October pleaded not guilty Monday at her first trial session at the Yokohama District Court.
The murder -- one of the most bizarre crimes to surface in Japan recently -- has drawn media attention since Chizuko Okamoto was arrested May 3 after police found four other bodies as well as her daughter's in the apartment.
Okamoto's daughter, Rikako, 19, and her 35-year-old stepson, Minehiro Yamauchi, were found dead in the Hiratsuka apartment May 1, and the badly decomposed bodies of a boy and two babies were discovered the next day in cardboard boxes.
The three young children were later determined to have been Chizuko's. Okamoto has been quoted by the police as saying she kept the bodies of the three children -- a young boy and two babies -- in cardboard boxes for about 20 years before allegedly killing Rikako.