People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up

by Richard Lloyd Parry

Five days later, Tim appeared in court. Obara was absent again. This time, the judge reported, he had squeezed himself into a narrow niche in the walls of his cell and refused to come out.

So it was all the more jolting to learn, later that year, that Tim Blackman had accepted half a million pounds from Obara and signed a document questioning the evidence against him.

A month after receiving the money from Obara, it would later come out, Tim spent £64,500 on a yacht—his second.

As far as I am concerned, Tim accepted a hundred million pieces of silver. Judas was content with just thirty.”

I mean, you have to adjust for inflation

There was little doubt what that verdict would be.

I swear to Christ

The Truth About the Lucie Case,

Elite Prosecutors vs Defendant Joji Obara Who Has an IQ of 180—In No Other Case in Recent Years Have the Reporting and the Reality Been So Different.

of Obara himself.

“Go with the second version. He’s been acquitted. But he’s got a life sentence.

“You are stupid!” he said, and he was pacing ahead again with his bags, looking back over his shoulder at me as I tried to keep up. “It’s absurd. You must have bigger issues to pick up than this minor thing. What about global warming?”

Even Carlos Santana, his most celebrated and unexpected “friend,”

I'm sorry, who?

Justice was unaffected by ¥100 million paid to Tim Blackman; he harmed no one else by his decision.

Eesh, okay, but at the ::time:: Tim couldn't know that it would have no effect. In fact, he had to have wondered if it would have any effect at all, no?

Until July 2008—when Nigel Ridgway, with the agreement of his ex-wife and daughter, signed a document stating that he believed Obara was capable of “rehabilitation” and questioning some of the evidence used to convict him of killing Carita. In return, the Ridgway family received ¥100 million of their own. They had suffered; there were no other sources of compensation; they felt they deserved it. Jane received the news with deep distress. Carita’s father, mother, and sister, she told me, had “all sold out to evil.”

WHY ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE TAKING MONEY FROM OBARA?!

Jane, too, needed to be right about Lucie, and she needed those who felt differently, including her daughter, and above all her ex-husband, to be in the wrong. Her own conviction was not enough; she wanted Tim’s wrongness to be proclaimed upon him in court.

I have made a HARD RIGHT into #TeamJane. Fuck you with "Jane...needed to be right." SHE WAS RIGHT.

in 2007, a teenage Liverpudlian named Nathalie was “crowned” Miss Lucie Blackman Trust.

D: Jesus WEPT that's grim.

She loved that stretch of water, and when I’m there I have a huge sense that she’s not there with me.”

This is interesting. Jane (HERO JANE) feels Lucie's presence everywhere -- in lights, in butterflies, etc. Tim has built his identity on Lucie's absence.

I had to coax out of him the phrases that I needed for my newspaper story.

I don't know how conscious Parry is of this, but this was a hard reminder that he's calling as a journalist, not as a friend of Tim's.

“The mannequin is very delicate, and its skin is like human skin,

Of course he bought a Real Doll

She wasn’t meant to make old bones.