How Renegade Cops Finally Caught Prolific Sex Attacker
TOKYO—On July 1, 2000, Lucie Blackman, a former British Airways flight attendant then working as a hostess in Tokyo, went on a date with a customer “near the beach.” Blonde, personable, and quick-witted, she was well-liked by her friends, customers, and co-workers. Hostess clubs were benign places where girls flirted with mostly Japanese customers, poured drinks, and made small talk. Lucie described the job as being a flight attendant but without a plane. The occasional date with a customer outside of the club, a dohan, was part of the work. Her customer had promised her a cellphone—still an expensive and hard-to-obtain item for a Japanese office worker in 2000, even more so for a foreign woman. She assured her friend Louise Phillips that she’d be back by the evening.
She never came home. It was like she had vanished off the face of the Earth. A few days later her family became worried. At first the Tokyo Police thought she might have just been another foreigner who failed to check in with her loved ones—“There were a lot of foreigners working illegally back then. They were often reported missing,” says former Assistant Inspector Masahiko Soejima, one of the detectives who worked her case, in the Netflix documentary Missing: The Lucie Blackman Case, which drops on Thursday.
It didn’t take them long to realize that something was seriously wrong when they learned that a strange man had called Louise and told her that Lucie had joined a cult and would never be back.