She Was Lured from Her Classroom and Killed — Then the Girl Who Did It Returned and Said Something No One Could Believe

Nobody suspected anything sinister when a sixth grader at Okubo Elementary School in Sasebo, Japan, asked her 12-year-old classmate Satomi Mitarai to leave their classroom just before lunch break on June 1, 2004.

Satomi followed her 11-year-old friend to a nearby study room, where — after drawing the curtains — the girl slit Satomi’s throat with a box cutter and kicked her in the head and sides, The Washington Post reported.

After the slaying, Satomi’s killer, who was covered in blood, returned to her fellow students with the box cutter in hand.

“This is not my blood,” she allegedly told the stunned group, according to the Post.  

Not long afterward, a teacher found Satomi face down on the floor and not breathing, per the Associated Press. 

”When I arrived, Satomi was already lying there collapsed,” her father, Kyoji Mitarai, said at the time, according to the AP. ”I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I can’t put in words what I’m feeling right now. I can’t understand it at all. I don’t have a clue.”

The killer, who was referred to by police as Girl A, quickly confessed, telling authorities: ”I have done a bad thing,” according to the AP.

At the time of the murder, homicides by children were becoming a troubling topic in Japan. In 1997, a 14-year-old boy decapitated 11-year-old Jun Hase and dumped the child’s head at his school’s entrance gate, per the Guardian.  In another instance, in 2003, a 12-year-old boy pushed a 4-year-old to his death off the roof of a parking lot in Nagasaki, according to the Guardian.

It was discovered that Girl A was an enthusiast of Battle Royale, a movie that later inspired internet games, in which students are forced to kill each other, per the Post.

It was believed by many at the time that the girl, who was undergoing psychological testing, was upset that Satomi allegedly called her “overweight” and “prissy” online, per the Post.

“She wrote something bad about my appearance several times on the Net a few days before the incident,” she allegedly told police sources, according to BBC, citing the Yomiuri Shimbun. “I didn’t like that, so I called her (to a study room) and slashed her neck after getting her to sit on a chair,”

She allegedly decided to kill Satomi four days earlier and chose the murder weapon after she watched a television show.

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“I saw that drama. I thought I’d do it that way,” she allegedly told investigators, per BBC, citing a Mainichi newspaper.

After Satomi’s death, her classmates were asked if they wanted photos of Satomi and her killer in their graduation handbook, according to the Mainichi Shimbun.

After a vote from students and talking to parents, the school decided to include Satomi’s photo in the graduation handbook and leave a blank page for Girl A – leaving the choice up to the students if they wanted to add it in, per the Shimbun.

Satomi received a posthumous graduation certificate from the school — and so did Girl A, who at the time was being held at a correctional facility for children, so that she could enter junior high school and reintegrate into society, per the Japan Times.

In September 2004, a family court sentenced Girl A to a state-run juvenile correctional facility and ordered her to have counseling as part of a rehabilitation program, a court official source told Associated Press at the time.