A court in Japan has delivered a suspended prison sentence to a 76-year-old woman found guilty of concealing her adult daughter's body in a freezer for close to two decades, a case the judge labelled a "heinous crime".
A Grisly Discovery in Ibaraki
Keiko Mori was arrested in September after arriving at a police station with a relative and confessing to hiding her daughter's remains. Police who subsequently searched her home in Ami town, Ibaraki prefecture, discovered the decomposed body of Makiko Mori, who was 29 at the time of her death, kneeling face-down inside a kitchen freezer. The body was dressed only in a T-shirt and underwear.
Judge Shizuka Asakura of the Tsuchiura branch of the Mito District Court revealed that Mori had initially kept her daughter's corpse in a closet. When the body began to decompose and the smell permeated the house, Mori purchased a freezer specifically to place the remains inside. She stated the concealment had lasted since around 2005, meaning the body had been hidden for approximately 20 years.
Mitigating Circumstances and a Father's Crime
On Thursday, the court sentenced Mori to one year in jail, suspended for three years. This was a more lenient punishment than the one-year prison term sought by prosecutors, as the court acknowledged strong mitigating factors.
Local media reported that the court accepted Mori's testimony regarding her daughter's struggles with illegal drug use and violent behaviour towards her parents. Crucially, the court found that Makiko had actually been killed by her father—Mori's husband, who died in September 2025. The ruling noted that when Mori's husband had attempted to report the murder to the police, he was stopped by Mori's own mother. From that point, the court stated, Keiko Mori was compelled to continue concealing her husband's crime, which led to her own offence of hiding the corpse.
A Violation of Societal Norms
Despite the mitigating circumstances, the court was severe in its condemnation of the act. The judge emphasised that the prolonged concealment of the body gravely violated society's religious and moral respect for the dead. The advanced state of decomposition, even with freezing, necessitated an autopsy to determine the official cause of death.
Makiko, born in 1975, would have been 49 or 50 years old at the time her mother finally went to the authorities, ending a tragic and lengthy chapter of concealment that has shocked the local community and drawn international attention.
