The Roppongi Stalker

When his last victim was found, she was buried in a cave, her dismembered limbs wrapped in plastic garbage bags, her head encased in a block of concrete. The tall blond 21-year-old from the United Kingdom had worked in a Tokyo hostess bar. The killer was a Japanese playboy/real-estate developer with a taste for young gaijin women. He had stalked Tokyo's sex districts for years, paying for the company of modern-day geishas, then inviting his favorites on dates, drugging them, and raping them while he videotaped what he called his "conquest play." He eventually became so adept at using date-rape drugs most of his victims never knew what had happened to them.

But something went terribly wrong with the English girl. Investigators would discover that eight years earlier he had killed a young Australian beauty with an accidental overdose of chloroform while raping her. He was finally caught thanks to the bulldog tenacity of the English girl's father, but the families of his foreign victims never anticipated the odd laws that govern the Japanese criminal justice system. It would take ten years before the case was resolved and the atrocities committed by "the beast with a human face" were fully revealed.

Veteran crime writer Anthony Bruno has investigated many serial offenders in his writing career, interviewing murderers and the cops and prosecutors who put them behind bars. He has written more than 50 articles for Time Warner's Crime Library and 14 published crime-related books. His publishers include Amazon Kindle, Bantam Dell, Forge, HarperCollins, iUniverse, RuggedLand, and St. Martin's Press. His full-length book, "The Seekers: A Bounty Hunter's Story" with Joshua Armstrong, was nominated for an Edgar Award.