On this date in 1926, serial killer Sataro Fukiage (English Wikipedia entry | Japanese) was hanged at Ichigaya prison for rape-murder.
Most of what’s out there about Sataro Fukiage is in Japanese (like this book). Born in 1889, his hardscrabble upbringing saw him enter the workforce at age nine. He was not a model apprentice, alternating escape attempts with evictions for bad conduct; stealing from his master to procure a prostitute landed him in Kyoto prison at the tender age of 12, and it was in his periodic incarcerations that, Oliver Twist-like, he learned the finer points of pickpocketing from yakuza. He would need those finer points to do the breadwinning for his penniless mother in between his stints behind bars.
His somewhat sympathetic childhood also included a voracious and deviant sexual appetite which was to blossom in time into a carnivorous pattern of abuse.
Fukiage committed his first murder in 1906, when he took an 11-year-old acquaintance to a remote location, then raped and strangled her, only avoiding the death sentence because he himself was still underage at that time.
Released in 1922, he immediately brought himself to widespread public notoriety for a 1922-23 rape spree with at least 27 victims — most of them, again, underage girls. He mixed at least six murders into the one-man crime wave.
He completed an autobiography in prison, but it was banned shortly after its publication.
On this day..
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- 1852: Eduardo Facciolo Alba, Cuban patriot
- 1956: Melvin Jackson, by calculus
- 1654: Hieronymus Duquesnoy the Younger, sculptor
- Daily Double: Felix Platter's Diary
- 1554: A handsome young man from Montpellier
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- 1529: Adolf Clarenbach, Lower Rhine evangelist
- 1637: William Schooler and John Williams
- 1832: Lucy (Wells), jealous slave
- 1987: Mehdi Hashemi, Iran-Contra whistleblower
- 1898: The Six Gentlemen of the Hundred Days' Reform
- 1402: False Olaf
I hope it hurt.