Four-Year-Old Killed for Interrupting Lovers

(Akita Prefecture, Japan) A 31-year-old mother, Mika Shindo, and her 42-year-old lover, high school janitor Hiroshi Hatakeyama, were making love in the front seat of a parked car with Mika's 4-year-old son, Ryosuke, asleep in the back seat. The boy woke up and thought his mother was being attacked so he started hitting Hatakeyama.

"Ryosuke wouldn't stop crying because he thought his mother was being hurt, so Hatakeyama withdrew from Mika, who turned around and punched her little boy in the face," the [Shukan Shincho newspaper] reporter says. "Hatakeyama then jumped in, smashing a can of coffee into the boy's face any number of times, then throttling him until he stopped breathing."

Ryosuke was still breathing at this stage, but it wasn't going to last much longer.

"Hatakeyama was worried that he was going to get caught for bashing Ryosuke, so he convinced Mika to dump the boy. He told her that he was about to be made a full-time employee and that she could go and live with him as long as she promised not to tell anybody he was involved in the boy's injuries," the reporter tells Shukan Shincho. "Mika believed him and hurled Ryosuke into the rice paddy ditch and they left him there."

One month after the discovery of Ryosuke's body, Mika Shindo and Hiroshi Hatakeyama were arrested for the boy's murder. The evidence that broke the case was a unique imprint on the boy's face left by a ring his mother was wearing when she punched him.