Body parts trail leads to wife, confession

A woman has been arrested in the slaying and dismemberment of her brokerage employee husband, whose body parts were found in December in Tokyo's Shinjuku and Shibuya wards and whose head was found in a suburban park, the Metropolitan Police Department said Thursday.

Police said the body parts were those of Yusuke Mihashi, 30, an employee of a securities firm affiliated with the Morgan Stanley group of the United States.

They said his wife, Kaori, 32, was arrested late Wednesday night on an initial charge of abandoning his corpse. She admitted during questioning to killing her husband on Dec. 12, claiming it was after he had assaulted her.

On Thursday, police searched the couple's home in a ritzy 11-story condominium complex in Shibuya Ward.

The man's unclothed torso was found inside a plastic bag on a street in Shinjuku on Dec. 16. The lower half of his body was found in the garden of a vacant house in Shibuya on Dec. 28. DNA analysis matched the two grisly finds as belonging to the same victim.

Mihashi told police she killed him by clubbing his head with a wine bottle after he went to bed on Dec. 12 after coming home early in the morning. Two days later, she dismembered his body in their living room with a saw she bought along with garbage bags, police said.

"The body was heavier than expected so I cut it up. It was difficult to move it by myself," police quoted the suspect as saying. "I wanted to get (the body) out of my sight as soon as possible."

Based on her testimony, police found his head Wednesday in a park in the Tokyo suburb of Machida. The head had multiple bruises and its skull was partly shattered, police said.

The head was found face down inside a hole about 35 cm deep in shrubbery. It was covered by about 10 cm of soil and was half decomposed, according to police.

His hands have not been found, and police suspect the wife tossed them out with the trash.

On her motive, the police quoted her as saying, "I had been arguing with him over many different things. I suffered from domestic violence. He denied my existence and showed no respect for what I had been doing."

The couple had been married for 3 1/2 years, but their relationship began to sour six months after their March 2003 wedding, sources said.

"I could not be the person I am, because our ways of living never matched," she told investigators. "After he assaulted me, I decided to kill him."

Police allege that Mihashi carried her husband's torso on Dec. 15 to Shinjuku in a taxi. On Dec. 28, she put the lower half of the corpse on a cart and rolled it to the empty house about 300 meters from their condominium.

As for the head, they allege that she put it into a bag and carried it on a train to the Machida park about 1 km northeast of JR Machida Station.

Mihashi renovated the condominium late last year and filed a false missing persons report after killing her husband, police alleged.

In filing the missing persons report on Dec. 15, she alleged that her husband had not come home after leaving on Dec. 11.

But he was captured on security camera footage arriving at the condo complex early on Dec. 12, police said.

That discovery prompted investigators to take a DNA sample of the victim's mother, which led police to identify the dumped body parts as those of the victim, police said.