Lindsay Hawker

Tatsuya Ichihashi (市橋 達也) was born in Gifu Prefecture on 5 January 1979.

He grew up in Gifu as well as in Chiba Prefecture, which is just east of Tokyo.

His mother is a dentist and his father is a medical doctor.

Lindsay Ann Hawker (30 December 1984 – 26 March 2007) was a 22-year-old British teacher who was murdered in Japan in early 2007 by Tatsuya Ichihashi (市橋 達也), a 28-year-old Japanese man from Chiba Prefecture.

Ichihashi was seen fleeing his apartment, and police sought him for the murder of Hawker and the abandonment of her corpse.

After graduating from the Department of Horticulture at Chiba University in 2005, Ichihashi did not work and lived on a monthly allowance of about ¥100,000 — around GB£600 or $760 at that time — from his parents.

Ichihashi was 28 years old at the time of the murder, and lived in the city of Ichikawa in Chiba.

Ichihashi had no previous convictions, but he had been the subject of an allegation of "theft and injury" six years before Hawker's death.

He had allegedly assaulted a man on the street during a robbery, but the matter had been settled out of court.

Ichihashi had been in a stable, year-long relationship with a Japanese woman at the time of Hawker's killing.

Police described him as a loner with an obsession for physical fitness; he regularly attended a gym and cycled 25 kilometres a day, which some reporters linked to the case.

Hawker told her boyfriend in England how she met Ichihashi in an e-mail message.

Four days before she died, Ichihashi approached Hawker during her train journey home from work.

He at first said Hawker was his English teacher (she was not) and then asked her to confirm that.

Ichihashi chased her as she cycled home and asked for a glass of water when she arrived.

Hawker felt sorry for him and allowed him inside her flat, but showed him to her two flatmates as a precaution.

Once inside, Ichihashi drew a picture of her and signed it with his name, telephone number and e-mail address.

The pair agreed to meet for an English lesson at a cafe four days later, which was permitted by the Nova school.

She was schooled at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, and studied biology at the University of Leeds, where she achieved a first-class honours degree, graduating in 2006.

Although she planned to pursue a Master's degree, she taught English for a year in Japan starting in October 2006 at the Koiwa, Tokyo, branch of Nova — then Japan's largest private English conversation school.

Hawker shared her accommodation with two other foreign female teachers.

On the day she disappeared, her family became distressed because of her lack of contact; she had used e-mail, Skype, and telephone calls to maintain frequent contact with her family.

Hawker and Ichihashi met on Saturday, 24 March 2007 in a cafe.

Afterwards, they caught a taxi to Ichihashi's apartment, a few hundred yards away.

Hawker told the taxi driver to wait for a short time and went to the apartment.

Seven minutes later, the taxi driver left after she failed to return.

Hawker's naked body was later found buried in a bath filled with a mixture of compost soil and sand on the apartment's balcony.

She had been bound and gagged with plastic ties and scarves, with one of her hands lying outside the mixture.

Bruises across Hawker's upper body indicated that she had been subjected to a prolonged attack.

Police said the egg-sized bruises on the left side of her face appeared to have been inflicted with a fist, while lesser marks on her upper body resulted from collisions with furniture.

Both Hawker and Ichihashi were familiar with martial arts; Ichihashi was more experienced than Hawker, having attained a black belt.

Hawker had died when her assailant began strangling her and broke the cartilage in her neck.

Hawker's head was shaved after she was killed.

Her possessions were found strewn across the room.

Media had reported in the days after Hawker's death that Ichihashi had buried her in sand, but he actually buried the body in a mixture of sand and compost soil, then sprayed it with a substance used to compact and decompose waste.

It is believed that he planned to either bury the body in concrete or to wait until it had decomposed.

The police arrested Ichihashi on 10 November 2009.

On 5 July 2011, Ichihashi confessed to killing Hawker, stating that he smothered her to prevent her from screaming while he raped her.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment on 21 July 2011.

Lindsay Hawker was born to Bill and Julia Hawker, who lived in Coventry, England; her family came from the nearby village of Brandon, Warwickshire.