On March 18, 1984, Katsuhisa Ezaki, the head of Japanese candy manufacturer Ezaki Glico, was enjoying an evening bath in his home in Osaka. Suddenly, two hooded armed assailants broke into his home and kidnapped the naked Ezaki. The next day, a ransom note demanded Ezaki’s company Glico turn over 1 billion yen and 100 kilograms of gold in a specified phone booth, the equivalent of $10 million today.
Candy manufacturer Ezaki Glico kidnapped by The Monster with 21 Faces
Two days later, before any ransom was paid, Ezaki escaped. At least one account related his break for freedom in dramatic detail, describing how before dawn, the bound Ezaki managed to work his ropes loose, break down a door of the isolated warehouse he was kept in, and find two railroad employees to help him contact police while still wearing clothes his assailants had given him. Unfortunately, Ezaki had no idea who his captors were. Though their plan to ransom Ezaki had collapsed, the people behind the kidnapping didn’t let that keep them down for long. The perpetrators next demanded $480,000 threatening to poison Glico candies with cyanide if they didn’t receive the money, Adding credibility to their threats, the group then reportedly snuck into Glico headquarters to set some of their property on fire.
Despite a growing list of crimes, authorities were at a loss to pin responsibility on whoever was targeting Glico. In the 1980s, a case stymieing Japanese police like this was a relative rarity. To get an idea of how effective the police in Japan were, in 1983, they solved 97.1% of the murder cases and 55.3% of thefts compared to the US’s 73.5% of murders and 17.3% of thefts. Failing to get to the bottom of the Glico case was a black eye on the police’s reputation. One newspaper, Yomiuri, ran an editorial saying, quote, “we do not recall a case in which criminals have made such fools of the police.”
Police failed to make any progress
Unfortunately for the cops, their situation only became more embarrassing. Perhaps no one was more upset at the police’s lack of progress on the case than the criminals themselves. On April 8, the press received one of the first of what would be over 100 letters sent by the perpetrators over the next year and a half. The letter taunted the police and even tried to help them do their job. It began quote, “To the stupid police. Are you idiots? What are you doing with so many people? If you were pros, you would catch us. Because you guys have such a high handicap, we’re gonna give you some hints.”
A letter proceeded to debunk a few theories, such as the kidnapping being an inside job or the owners of the warehouse Ezaki escaped from being involved. The letter writer also gave police more clues, informing them that the car they used was gray and naming the grocery store where they bought their food. The letter continued, “if you can’t catch us after this much info, you guys are just thieves of the taxpayers’ money. Should we also kidnap the head of the prefectural police?”
Group of kidnappers antagonized police with letters
Letters from the group continued to pour in. The group showed a knack for getting the public’s attention and leveraged the media to ensure their threats and crimes were widely reported. Critics at the time categorize their actions as gekijo hanzai or crime as theater. The letters often provided authorities with seemingly random details, such as the gate used to enter a factory or the model of typewriter they were writing on. None of the clues provided in the notes, however, went anywhere causing the police to look more and more incompetent.
Almost all the evidence actually left behind at the crime scenes was either stolen or mass-produced, meaning tracking the group down remained impossible. One clue about the letters themselves, however, stood out. The dialect in which they were written pointed to someone from Osaka. Though this linguistic theory was interesting, it did not help authorities get any closer to apprehending the people responsible. By June, the criminals had begun referring to themselves in letters as The Monster with the 21 Faces, a nod to a 1936 children’s story by Japanese writer Edogawa Rampo entitled “The Mystery Man with the Twenty Faces.”
The Monster with 21 Faces refers to children’s story
“The Mystery Man with the Twenty Faces” is about a thief, “stirring up the newspapers every day,” end quote, and is so adept at disguises that they could be anyone. One excerpt from the story seemed particularly descriptive of the group targeting Glico, “up until now, no matter how many police have been called up, they haven’t been able to stop this dreadful gang. There is one particularly strange feature of this gang. When they have set their sights on one particular object or artifact, without fail, they will send a letter of warning announcing their intentions, the date, place, and object of the planned crime. Even though they’re criminals, perhaps they don’t want to engage in an unfair battle, or perhaps they want to show that no matter how many precautions are taken, they can still commit the crime with their great skill.”
By September 1984, another Japanese confectioner Morinaga & Company began to receive extortion letters threatening unspecified action if the sender did not receive $410,000. According to police, Morinaga never sent the payment. On October 8, Japanese newspapers received the following letter, “to moms throughout Japan. In autumn, when appetites are strong, sweets are really delicious.
When you think sweets, no matter what you say, it’s Morinaga. We’ve added some special flavor. The flavor of potassium cyanide is a little bitter. It won’t cause tooth decay, so buy the sweets for your kids. We’ve attached a notice on these bitter sweets that they contain poison. We’ve put 20 boxes in stores from Hakata to Tokyo.” The same day, packages of cookies and candy were found in grocery stores throughout Japan with type written labels attached, reading, “Danger. Cyanide!” In total, 18 packages were discovered and tested. One found at a supermarket only 35 yards away from the home Katsuhisa Ezaki.
Some candy contained cyanaide
While not all the labeled packages were found to contain cyanide, at least one had enough to kill someone. Perhaps because of the warnings, no one ever consumed any of the tainted candy. The letter warning of the tainted sweets, however, said that next time there would be 30 boxes and they would not be labeled. For the next two weekends, it’s reported about 40,000 officers staked out grocery stores across the country.
The stakeouts yielded nothing. Though thankfully, it doesn’t appear the group went through with their latest threat. Investigators did, however, find surveillance video from October 7, showing a suspect with permed hair, glasses, and a baseball hat, placing something on a shelf where poisoned candy was later found. Unfortunately, the camera was bad. The lighting was poor. And the security tape hadn’t been changed for over a year. Meaning the quality of the image wasn’t great. Images of this man, known as Bideo No Otoko, or Video Man were released to the public, but he was never found.
In addition to this grainy video tape, some phone calls attempting to extort money and purportedly placed by The Monster, were released to the public. Disturbingly, the voices on the tapes were not those of hardened gangsters, but of a woman and a child. At one point, the child is heard giving instructions to leave money, “behind the seat of the bus stop bench.” While the phone recordings never resulted in any arrests, it did provoke the public to reconsider just who The Monster could be.
A year later Japan was still baffled by the case
By March of 1985, a year after the first kidnapping. 31 food and candy companies had been harassed and Japan’s finest were still baffled by the case. Sometimes a company being extorted would actually pull together the money demanded. The Monster with the 21 Faces, however, always refused to pick the money up, correctly assuming police would be waiting for them. In one instance, 21 Faces instructed Glico representatives to wait for a phone call at a truck stop. Plainclothes policemen went instead and no call ever came. The next letter from 21 Faces read, “so you guys thought you could fool us, dressed up in your nice businessmen’s blue suits, acting like salary men? But we could tell immediately, those shifty eyes gave you away.”
At every turn, The Monster with 21 Faces seemed a step ahead. On the flip side, according to police, the group never received any of the money demanded. On August 12, 1985, a year and a half after they first kidnapped a candy man from his bathtub, The Monster with 21 Faces sent their last letter announcing they would stop. By this time, according to Japan’s National Police Agency, authorities had received over 28,000 tips and had used over 130,000 police officers.
Theories
The Monster with 21 Faces was an inside job, and that Katsuhisa Ezaki was in on it from the start.
This theory was popular at the beginning of the crime wave and seems to derive mainly from people’s disbelief that Ezaki was able to escape his kidnappers.
There’s never been any actual evidence to back this theory up. Though, some might find it suspicious that Morinaga’s candy was poisoned, while Glico’s was only threatened to be. Casting doubt on this theory is the fact that even with no cyanide being discovered in their products, Glico’s business was greatly affected by the whole ordeal. At one point, after The Monster with 21 Faces publicly threatened to poison Glico candy, all of Glico products were pulled from shelves, forcing the company to shut down production temporarily and lay off 2/3 of their part-time employees.
The Monster with 21 Faces was someone seeking revenge on Japan’s food companies.
Almost 30 years before 21 Faces sent their first letter in mid-1955, a stabilizing agent in Morinaga-produced dry milk, accidentally contained the poison arsenic. By June, 1956, over 12,000 infants had been injured and 138 had died.
Morinaga reached a settlement with the families of the affected infants. But a 1969 report showed that the survivors continued to suffer related ailments. By the time The Monster with 21 Faces began its campaign, the victims of the dry milk incident would have been almost 30, and perhaps ready to seek revenge on the company that made their early years so difficult. This theory, however, doesn’t account for why 21 Faces targeted the entire industry instead of just Morinaga.
A man named Manabu Miyazaki was at the very least, somehow involved.
In November 1984, after the cyanide poisoned confections showed The Monster with 21 Faces meant business 100 million yen were set to be turned over to the criminals in Kyoto. Police surveilling the drop-off spotted a suspicious “fox-eyed man” and gave chase. The suspect eluded capture. The police did manage to find the stolen car he had been driving, complete with a police scanner inside.
In January, authorities released a sketch of the fox-eyed man, leading to his identification as Manabu Miyazaki. The sketch was apparently so true to life that even Miyazaki’s own mother believed it was him. That mother, by the way, happened to be from Osaka. The son of a yakuza boss, Miyazaki was a known criminal who had organized anti-police actions in college and had already been arrested several times. While it appeared that police had finally made a face-saving break in the case, charges were never brought against Miyazaki. Miyazaki apparently had a rock solid alibi and no hard evidence was ever turned up to tie him back to the case.
Miyazaki went on to write a memoir detailing his life of crime. The book was released shortly after the statute of limitations for The Man with 21 Faces case expired. And the cover was the sketch police released while trying to track Miyazaki down. Though he confessed to other crimes in the book, Miyazaki never mentioned any involvement in the 21 Faces spree. If Miyazaki was on his way to pick up the extorted 100 million yen when police gave chase, he did eventually get his money. The book went on to earn the known criminal over 100 million yen.
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