The Metropolitan Police Department's investigation division 1 rearrested Takuya Miura, 36, on suspicion of murder on October 28 over the death of his partner, Mahiro Muroga, a 25-year-old part-time worker from Tokyo's Nerima Ward whose body was found in the mountains of Kurihara, Miyagi Prefecture. Miura, who runs a bar, has already been indicted for abandoning the body.
Investigators suspect Miura pressed on Muroga's neck and suffocated her in the early hours of September 28 at the apartment in Minamimura, Nerima Ward, where the two lived together.
According to people involved in the investigation, the two met in the summer of last year at the bar Miura runs near Numabukuro Station in Nakano Ward, as customer and owner, and began living together in the Nerima apartment around September of that year. From March onward, police received four 911 calls and consultations in total from both of them, including reports of arguments and of being hit, suggesting trouble over the relationship had continued.
A mother's call, and a 400-kilometer drive
The case came to light after Muroga's mother contacted police. Muroga last exchanged messages with her mother on the night of September 27 and then stopped responding, and the worried mother went to the Metropolitan Police Department on September 30. Analysis of security camera footage and other investigative work established that Miura left the apartment by car at around 7:40 a.m. on September 28 and headed toward Miyagi Prefecture.
Muroga's body was found on October 4 in the mountains around Lake Hanayama in Kurihara, about 400 kilometers from the apartment. She was fully clothed, and a plastic bag had been pulled over her head and shoulders. Police arrested Miura on suspicion of abandoning the body the following day, then moved to rearrest him for murder after a judicial autopsy and further tracing of his movements.
"I wanted them to catch him at the scene"
About two months before her death, Muroga told people around her that she had been assaulted, including being strangled. A man in his 30s who was her former boyfriend and stayed in touch with her as a friend on the messaging app LINE described their exchanges to FRIDAY.
She had moved to Tokyo from Nagoya to follow him, the man said, and around October of last year, when the relationship had soured over problems involving alcohol, she told him she wanted to break up because she wanted to be with a bar employee who lived nearby. That man was Miura. She kept confiding in him about fights and domestic violence after the new relationship began, he said, and the worst of it came in a LINE message around July 20 this year.
In that message, Muroga sent a photo of her badly swollen face and described what had happened. She had argued with Miura at his bar between 6 and 8 a.m. and was punched in the face, breaking her nose, she wrote.
“I threw the ring because I'd had enough of him, and he broke my nose.”Mahiro Muroga, in a LINE message to her former boyfriend
“He's gone this far, and he told me he'd kill me and strangled me.”Mahiro Muroga, in a LINE message to her former boyfriend
“I really wanted them to catch him red-handed, but he'd taken my phone, and I was going to a cosmetic surgeon and so on.”Mahiro Muroga, in a LINE message to her former boyfriend
In another exchange, she wrote that she wanted to skip out on a payment and that she wanted to walk away from about 1 million yen she had spent, suggesting she was trying to end the relationship while caught up in a money dispute over Miura's credit card.
The Metropolitan Police Department has not said what Miura has told investigators about the murder allegation.