Heinous – An Asian True Crime Podcast · Mediacorp

The Puppet Master of Kitakyushu | Futoshi Matsunaga | 1996

·33 min·2 clips

A 17-year-old in Kitakyushu says a man made children kill fathers, wives, and mothers.

1. Heinous – An Asian True Crime Podcast covers Futoshi Matsunaga and the Kitakyushu apartment case in Japan. 2. The episode is narrated by the show’s hosts, with Mediacorp and 1UP Media credited, because the story centers on Matsunaga, Junko Ogata, and the 17-year-old survivor. 3. The core question is how Matsunaga turned ordinary people into participants in killings without raising a weapon himself. 4. The story begins in March 2002, when a 17-year-old girl reaches police in Kitakyushu after a failed escape and describes sustained electrical burns. 5. She says she was held inside an apartment for years, along with men, women, children, and entire families who were brought in and never left. 6. She describes dead bodies being dismembered, boiled, and disposed of so thoroughly that nothing remained. 7. Matsunaga is introduced as someone born in 1961 in Kitakyushu and raised in Yanagawa, with strong grades, teacher attention, and disciplinary problems. 8. He married at 19, had a son, and maintained at least 10 other relationships at the same time. 9. The episode frames his main skill as control, not physical intimidation, because he could read people, gain trust quickly, and make them dependent on him. 10. In the mid-1980s, he bought a building, opened a futon company, and began using staff members the same way he used romantic partners. 11. The narration says the abuse escalated from intimidation to private beatings on the third floor and then to deliberate electric shocks. 12. Matsunaga also invoked spirits, karma, and divine forces to destabilize the people around him. 13. By 1992, he had extracted the equivalent of roughly 2 million US dollars and landed on Japan’s most wanted list. 14. Junko Ogata is described as born in 1962 in Kurume, raised in a stable family, and working at a preschool before her relationship with Matsunaga began in 1982. 15. After she moved in with him in 1985, he isolated her from her parents, sister, friends, and work while subjecting her to abuse and shocks. 16. The episode then moves through the later victims, including a married woman with three children in 1993, Kumio Toraya, and Toraya’s daughter, who was forced to take part in his abuse. 17. The most disturbing pattern is that Matsunaga made victims believe they were guilty, so reporting him meant exposing themselves too. 18. The audio keeps a grim, narrated true-crime style, with direct timelines, age and date details, and repeated reminders that Matsunaga never carried out the violence personally. 19. People interested in Japanese true crime and coercive control. 20. Listeners looking for a light, spoiler-free crime recap.

As heard by us

A grim look at coercion, blame, and the way abuse can trap everyone in the room.

This episode follows Futoshi Matsunaga's grip on a Kitakyushu apartment, where fear and isolation were turned into tools of control. It begins with Kumio's death in 1996 and moves to the March 2002 escape of a 17-year-old survivor, showing how abuse can be sustained by…

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want coercion, guilt, and escape to be the real mystery here.

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