Lucie Blackman: the Tragic Murder Case That Exposed a Serial Rapist in Tokyo
There are few things as terrifying as hearing that a loved one is missing, and such news is even more unsettling when said person has vanished in a foreign country whose cities, systems, and customs are wholly unfamiliar. Tim Blackman faced that very situation when, in early July 2000, he received the phone call that changed his life: His eldest daughter Lucie, a 21-year-old former British Airways flight attendant, was nowhere to be found in Tokyo, where she’d been living and working as a hostess at one of the metropolis’s many clubs. It would be far from the last shock he received during the ensuing ordeal, which was complicated by culture-clash obstacles and ultimately came to revolve around a monster of unthinkable depravity.
Missing: The Lucie Blackman Case (July 26 on Netflix) is a standard true-crime retelling of the search for Lucie, who had last been seen at the Casablanca nightspot in the Roppongi district, where she earned a living serving drinks to—and imbibing with—older male customers. Upon learning that Lucie’s whereabouts were unknown, Tim flew to Tokyo to involve himself in the investigation. When he arrived from his native England, however, he discovered that things were done differently in Japan, especially when it came to law enforcement procedures. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department was far from forthcoming when it came to providing Tim with details about leads or developments. As a result, the grief-stricken father turned to the media and, in particular, expat reporter (and Daily Beast correspondent) Jake Adelstein, who had worked in the country for years and therefore knew how to glean information that was unavailable to Tim.
Jake had little to relay at the inquiry’s outset. Police superintendents and inspectors—many of whom are interviewed in Hyoe Yamamoto’s documentary—didn’t immediately view this as an emergency, since foreigners frequently ran away when they feared they might get busted for overstaying their visas or working illegally. As Jake explains, while the Japanese press was loathe to speculate on the record, that wasn’t the case with their British counterparts, and within days the media was suggesting that Lucie might have committed suicide or, more sensationally, fallen prey to an evil cult. Tim didn’t buy that nonsense, but neither did he have an alternate theory about what had taken place. To try to rectify that state of affairs—and to motivate police, who he believed weren’t doing enough to find Lucie—he began his own personal crusade. He held press conferences to maintain his plight’s headline-worthy profile, and he plastered flyers around Tokyo. For his labors, he was thought of as a “flamboyant showman” by locals not used to such an aggressive approach.