Yukio Yamaji was a serial killer from Japan who would murder his first victim in his teens
According to court documents Yukio Yamaji would kill his first victim when he was just sixteen years old. Yukio would beat his mother to death using an aluminum baseball bat. For the murder Yukio would be sentenced to prison and would be paroled after four years
Once free Yukio Yamaji would murder a 27-year-old woman named Asuka Uehara and her 19-year-old sister, Chihiro. Yukio would then set fire to the apartment building
When he was arrested Yukio Yamaji would tell police that he wanted to know if he would get the same thrill he received after the murder of his mother
Yukio Yamaji would be convicted and sentenced to death. Four years later Yukio would be executed by hanging
Yukio Yamaji Execution
“Which will come first, my own death or the execution? That’s all I’ve been thinking about. I now have something to take with me to my daughters when it’s my time to go,” says the victims’ father, Kazuo Uehara, 60.
Uehara, still coping with his health after suffering a stroke last year, heard from the media that the execution had taken place. Yukio Yamaji, 25, one of the youngest to be handed the death penalty in postwar Japan, was executed on July 28 at the Osaka Detention Center.
In 2000, Yamaji had killed his mother with a metal baseball bat at the age of 16. Shortly after being released in 2004, in the following year he raped and stabbed to death two sisters sharing an apartment – Asuka Uehara, 27, and her sister Chihiro, 19.
The man admitted to the slaying of the sisters and asked for the death penalty, making freakish comments in court such as “Killing humans is the same as breaking something.”
Akira Hashiguchi, his attorney at the time, expressed his disappointment in being unable to find any sign of remorse in the man. The death row inmate had long been uncommunicative, but the final time he met Yamaji, he was certain the man was suffering “incarceration fatigue,” having lost considerable weight and asking to be executed as soon as possible.
Without family or friends, he had no last words, and remained silent all the way to the execution chamber. In the absence of any clarification as to his motive for the killings, the murder remains a mystery.
Silent execution of Osaka sisters’ killer – Japan Today
Yukio Yamaji Case
Police issued an arrest warrant Monday to a 22-year-old man after he admitted killing two sisters in Osaka.
He had been detained since early this month for allegedly trespassing in a building adjacent to the women’s condominium, police said.
The man, who killed his mother in 2000, told investigators he murdered the sisters Nov. 17 because he “could not forget the feelings” he experienced when he killed his 50-year-old mother, police said.
He was identified as Yukio Yamaji, 22, unemployed with no fixed address.
The two victims are Asuka Uehara, 27, and Chihiro Uehara, 19.
They did not know Yamaji. Police suspect he killed them for pleasure.
“I wanted to see human blood,” Yamaji was quoted as saying by an investigation source.
The two women were found with deep stab wounds to their chests and faces at their condominium in the early hours of Nov. 17.
The man was institutionalized after beating his mother to death with a baseball bat in August 2000 in the city of Yamaguchi when he was 16.
The Yamaguchi family court had sent him to a reform center for minors after concluding that the attack on his mother was not deliberately planned and “it is possible to correct” him “although he does not have deep sense of guilt.” He was released from the reform center in October 2003.
According to police, Yamaji told the investigators about the knife he used in the murders and they found it at a Shinto shrine a few hundred meters from the building.
His fingerprints were allegedly detected at many locations on the wall and duct at the third-floor level.
