When I read the news item in early November about the three men in Tottori Prefecture whose mysterious deaths were linked to a woman already under arrest for fraud, I associated them with the similarly mysterious deaths of several other men linked to a Tokyo woman who was under arrest for swindling.
This initial confusion had to do with the fact that the major media weren't revealing much about either woman at the time, so it was easy to make the mistake that they might have been the same person. The particulars have since been clarified, and the public now knows that the two cases are separate and distinct.
The 34-year-old Tokyo woman is from a fairly well-to-do Hokkaido family and allegedly tried to maintain a high-end lifestyle on her own by tricking single men into thinking she wanted to marry them and then getting them to give her money. Some of these men later died under suspicious circumstances. The 35-year-old Tottori woman is a poor, single mother of five who once worked as a bar hostess. She was arrested for telephone fraud, but police are now investigating her possible involvement in the deaths of several men, at least two of whom she once had relationships with. The closest similarity between the two cases is that sleep-inducing drugs were involved in some of the deaths in both cases. Another similarity is that both women are overweight.