JAPAN. COUPLE SENTENCED TO DEATH FOR SERIAL KILLINGS

a Japanese couple, Futoshi Matsunaga, 44, and his common-law wife Junko Ogata, 43, were sentenced to death at the district court in Fukuoka on the southern island of Kyushu for killing seven people, including six of their relatives, dismembering their bodies and dumping them in the sea.
The murders, which shocked the nation, took place from 1996 to 1998 in Kita-Kyushu in southern Japan. They came to light only in 2002 when a girl, now 21, escaped from an apartment where the murders were committed and where she had been held captive by the couple.
No remains of the victims had been found but the girl's testimony proved decisive in establishing the couple's guilt.
"We are frightened by the couple's disrespect for human life," presiding judge Toshinobu Matsunaga said.
He called the couple "cruel and mean" as they "tried to destroy evidence completely by dismembering the bodies of the victims." The murder victims were the girl's father and six of Ogata's relatives including her parents.
Matsunaga extorted money from some of them and forced others to borrow huge sums of money for him, prosecutors said. They said the couple abused and confined the victims, killing them when they thought there was no way of making money from them any longer.