A Japanese court has sentenced a woman to one year in jail, suspended for three years, for hiding her daughter’s body in a closet and later a freezer for nearly 20 years, calling it a “heinous crime”.
Keiko Mori, 76, was arrested in September after she confessed to concealing her adult daughter’s body in a freezer at her home in Ibaraki prefecture, northeast of Tokyo. Her daughter, Makiko, was 29 years old at the time of her death and her decomposed body was found at the family home in Ami town.
The Tsuchiura branch of the Mito district court handed down the sentence on Thursday after prosecutors sought a one-year prison term, a relatively lenient punishment after the court found strong mitigating circumstances.
Judge Shizuka Asakura said Mori had initially kept her daughter’s body in a closet at her house and later moved it to a freezer in the kitchen after it began to decompose.
Mori told investigators that the smell from the body had filled the house, prompting her to buy a freezer and place the body inside it.
She was taken into custody and charged with concealing a corpse after she arrived at a local police station with a relative and confessed.
Investigators who went to Mori’s home found the body dressed in a T-shirt and underwear, kneeling face-down inside the freezer, police said.
Mori said she had kept the body there for about 20 years, since around 2005. Due to the length of time, police said the decomposition was advanced despite the freezing, and an autopsy was ordered to determine the official cause of death.
The court acknowledged Mori’s testimony that her daughter had struggled with “illegal drug use” and had been “physically violent towards her parents”, local media reported.
Makiko was killed by her father, Mori’s husband, who died in September, but the court noted that when he had tried to report the murder to police, he was stopped by Mori’s mother.
That point on, the court said, Mori was compelled to continue concealing her husband’s crime, which ultimately led to her own offence.
“This was a heinous crime,” the court ruled, adding that the prolonged concealment of the body gravely violated society’s religious and moral respect for the dead.
Makiko, born in 1975, would have been 49 or 50 years old at the time her mother went to police.
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