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A Japanese court has sentenced a woman to one year in prison, suspended for three years hiding her daughter’s dead body Kept in a closet and later in a freezer for nearly 20 years, calling it a “heinous crime.”
Keiko Mori, 76, was arrested in September after she confessed to concealing Adult daughter’s body in freezer At her home in Ibaraki Prefecture, northeast of Tokyo. His daughter, Makiko, was 29 years old at the time of his death and her dismembered body was found at the family home in the city of Ami.
The Tsuchiura branch of the Mito District Court handed down the sentence on Thursday after prosecutors had sought a one-year prison sentence, a relatively lenient sentence after the court found strong mitigating circumstances.
Judge Shizuka Asakura said Mori initially kept his daughter’s body in a closet in his home and later placed it in a freezer in the kitchen as the body began to decompose.
Mori told investigators that the smell of the body filled the house, prompting him to buy a freezer and place the body inside it.
After arriving at the local police station with a relative and confessing to the crime, he was taken into custody and charged with concealing a corpse.
Police said investigators who went to Mori’s home found the body, dressed in a T-shirt and underwear, kneeling inside the freezer.
Mori said he had kept the body there for about 20 years, since 2005. Police said that due to the long time, decomposition had progressed despite the cold, and an autopsy was ordered to determine the official cause of death.
According to local media reports, the court accepted Mori’s testimony that her daughter struggled with “illegal drug use” and was “physically violent toward her parents”.
Makiko was murdered by her father, Mori’s husband, who died in September, but the court heard that when she tried to report the murder to police, she was stopped by Mori’s mother.
At that point, the court said, Mori was forced to continue concealing her husband’s crime, which ultimately led her to commit her own crime.
“This was a heinous crime,” the court ruled, adding that the prolonged concealment of the body constituted a serious violation of society’s religious and moral respect for the dead.
Born in 1975, Makiko would have been 49 or 50 years old when her mother went to the police.