When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain (21 page)

What happened to them remains a mystery. The most likely explanation is that they stole a boat and tried to make it back to Germany. Whether or not they were successful remains unclear.

But their empty beds at Camp 198 must have been a thorn in the side of Edwin Darling and a constant reminder that he had presided over one of the greatest prison breakouts of the Second World War.

 

PART IX

A Painful End

Hosoya did not want the case to arouse the other judges sexually if they might then discover that their wives were having their periods, since they would be without the proper means of relieving their excitement.

KEIJIRO HOSOYA, SENIOR JUDGE IN THE SADA ABE CASE, EXPRESSES HIS CONCERN THAT HIS FELLOW JUDGES WILL BE SEXUALLY AROUSED BY THE EROTIC DETAILS.

 

25

Never Go to Bed with a Knife

It was the most sensational trial in years – one so sexually charged that even the judge confessed to being aroused by the evidence.

In the dock stood Sada Abe, one-time geisha, prostitute and waitress who was accused of strangling her lover in an elaborate sex game. That was not all. Once he was dead she had cut off his penis and testicles with a large kitchen knife and kept them as a sex toy.

There was never any doubt as to her guilt: Abe freely admitted to what she had done. What made the case so compelling was her graphic testimony. The sexual practices in which she indulged were so dark and dangerous that they sent shockwaves through the conservative Japanese society of the 1930s. Yet they were also to turn Sada Abe into a national celebrity, with her exploits feted in scores of books and half-a-dozen films. Even today, Sada Abe has the status of a bizarre icon.

Abe's sexual life had begun brutally at the age of fifteen when she was raped by a family acquaintance. Her father subsequently sold her to a geisha house, justifying his actions by saying it would bring structure to her life. But Abe proved an unwilling student. Before long she had turned to street prostitution, working in Osaka's brothel district.

In 1936, she had a dramatic change of lifestyle, getting herself a job in a Tokyo restaurant owned by a gregarious individual named Kichizo Ishida. The forty-two-year-old Ishida was married, but this had not stopped him from having a string of extramarital affairs. In Sada Abe, he found a partner who was willing to experiment with dangerous sexual practices.

Abe grew increasingly fixated with Ishida, but she also became obsessively jealous of his wife. She wanted to have Ishida all to herself and possess him, but he refused to leave the family home.

One evening, Abe went to the theatre and watched a play in which a geisha threatened her lover with a knife. Enthralled by what she saw, she bought herself a large kitchen knife and suggested to Ishida that it could be an instrument for sexual pleasure.

Most men would have made their excuses and left, but not Ishida. He was aroused by her threats and agreed that the knife could add an interesting twist to their extreme lovemaking. The two of them headed to the red-light district in the Ogu neighbourhood where they rented a room.

Every last detail of that fateful night was recounted by Sada Abe at her trial. She told the judge how she had put the kitchen knife to the base of Ishida's penis and said that she would make sure he'd never play around with another woman. Ishida assumed she was joking and got a perverse kick out of the threat.

After forty-eight hours of sustained lovemaking, Sada Abe began a whole new sex game. She removed the sash from her kimono and wound it tightly around Ishida's neck. It was the first time he had experienced erotic asphyxia and found that it heightened his sexual pleasure.

Sada asked him to do the same to her. She, too, found it exhilarating. They repeated the process for more than two hours, until Ishida's face became so distorted that it would not return to its normal appearance. He took thirty tablets of the sedative Calmotin to soothe the pain.

At around 2 a.m. on the morning of 18 May, as Ishida slept, Abe wrapped her sash twice around his neck and strangled him to death. She later told police: ‘After I had killed Ishida I felt totally at ease, as though a heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders, and I felt a sense of clarity.'

After lying with his corpse for several hours, she severed his genitalia with the kitchen knife and wrapped them in a magazine cover. She used his blood to write
Sada, Kichi Futari-kiri
(‘Sada, Kichi together') on his left thigh and also on the bed sheet. She then put on his underwear and left the inn at about 8 a.m.

Ishida's mutilated corpse caused a sensation when it was found. Sada Abe was the obvious culprit, but she had disappeared without trace. A nationwide hunt failed to find her, even though she did nothing to hide her whereabouts. She stayed in a Toyko inn, had a massage and went to various bars.

Her behaviour, already disturbingly bizarre, now took an even darker turn. In the privacy of her hotel room, she started to engage in necrophilia. ‘I felt attached to Ishida's penis and thought that only after taking leave from it quietly could I then die. I unwrapped the paper holding them and gazed at his penis and scrotum. I put his penis in my mouth and even tried to insert it inside me. It didn't work however, though I kept trying and trying.'

Two days after the murder, the police eventually tracked Abe down to her hotel room. She gave herself up immediately. ‘Don't be so formal,' she said to the police. ‘You're looking for Sada Abe, right? Well that's me. I am Sada Abe.' The police were still not convinced, so she showed them Ishida's genitalia.

The interrogating officer was struck by Abe's demeanour when asked why she had killed Ishida. ‘Immediately she became excited and her eyes sparkled in a strange way.'

Her answer was: ‘I loved him so much. I wanted him all to myself. But since we were not husband and wife, as long as he lived he could be embraced by other women. I knew that if I killed him no other woman could ever touch him again, so I killed him.'

On 21 December 1936, Sada Abe was convicted of murder and the mutilation of a corpse. She was sentenced to just six years in prison – an extremely lenient sentence for murder – yet she didn't even serve the full term. On 10 November 1940, her sentence was commuted and she was released. Despite her horrific crime, she was allowed to walk free.

In the years that followed, she was often asked why she had severed Ishida's penis. Her answer was logical if bizarre. ‘I wanted to take the part of him that brought back to me the most vivid memories,' she said.

For a while she cashed in on her notoriety, but eventually she tired of the publicity and disappeared from the public eye. Her last years are believed to have been spent in a Kansai nunnery.

As for Ishida, his penis and testicles were moved to the pathology museum at Tokyo University's Medical School. They remained on public display for some years until they mysteriously disappeared. No one has subsequently been able to trace their whereabouts.

 

Further Reading

1. When Lenin Lost His Brain

Gregory, Paul R.,
Lenin's Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives
(Hoover Institution Press Publication, 2008).

Kreutzberg, G.W., Klatzo, I., Kleihues, P., Oskar and Cécile Vogt, ‘Lenin's Brain and the Bumble-bees of the Black Forest' (
Brain Pathology
, October 1992, Volume 4).

Zbarski, I.B., Samuel Hutchinson,
Lenin's Embalmers
(The Harvill Press, 1998).

2. Into the Monkey House

Adams, Rachel,
Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination
(University of Chicago Press, 2001).

Verner, Phillips, Blume, Harvey,
Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo, One Man's Degradation in Turn of the Century America
(Schwartz Publishing, 1993).

3. The Human Freak Show

Crais, Clifton, Scully, Pamela,
Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography
(Princetown University Press, 2010).

Holmes, Rachel,
The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman: Born 1789 – Buried 2002
(Bloomsbury, 2008).

Qureshi, Sadiah, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman, the Hottentot Venus' (
History of Science
, 2004, Issue 42).

4. Freak Wave

Dash, Mike,
The Vanishing Lighthousemen of Eilean Mór
(Fortean Studies, 1998).

McCloskey, Keith,
The Lighthouse: The Mystery of the Eilean Mor Lighthouse Keepers
(The History Press, 2014).

Northern Lighthouse Board, ‘The Mystery of Flannan Isle' (
http://www.nlb.org.uk/historical/flannans.htm
).

5: Japan's Deadly Balloon Bomb

Anon, ‘Saw Wife and Five Children Killed by Jap Balloon Bomb' (
Seattle Times
, 1 June 1945). Available online:
http://web.archive.org/web/20140417180525/http://www.stelzriede.com/ms/html/sub/mshwfug2.htm
).

Mikesh, Robert C.,
Japan's World War II Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America
(Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 1990).

Powles, James, M., ‘Silent Destructions: Japanese Balloon Bombs' (
World War II
, 2003, Vol. 17).

6. Never Go to Sea

Miskolcze, Robin,
Women and Children First
(University of Nebraska Press, 2008)

Saunders, Ann,
A Narrative of the Shipwreck and Sufferings of Miss Ann Saunders
(1827)

7. Eiffel's Rival

Barker, Felix and Hyde, Ralph,
London as it Might Have Been
(John Murray, 1995).

Hodgkins, David,
The Second Railway King: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Watkin, 1819–1901
(Merton Priory Press, 2002).

Lynde, Fred. C.,
Descriptive Illustrated Catalogue of the Sixty-Eight Competitive Designs for the Great Tower for London
(The Tower Company, 1890).

8. Emperor of the United States

Cowen, Robert Ernest, ‘Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico' (San Francisco California Historical Society 1923,
http://www.emperornorton.net/NortonI-Cowan.html
).

Drury, William,
Norton I, Emperor of the United States
(Dodd, Mead, 1986).

Lane, Stanley Allen,
Emperor Norton: Mad Monarch of America
(Cadwell Caxton, 1939).

9. The Man Who Bought His Wife

Brander, Michael,
The Perfect Victorian Hero: The Life and Times of Sir Samuel White Baker
(Mainstream, 1982).

Shipman, Pat,
To the Heart of the Nile: Lady Florence Baker and the Exploration of Central Africa
(HarperCollins, 2004).

10. Hitler's Final Hours

Fest, Joachim,
Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004).

Junge, Traudl and Muller, Melissa,
Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003).

Trevor-Roper, Hugh,
Last Days of Hitler
(Macmillan, 1995).

11. Seizing Eichmann

Aharoni, Zvi and Dietl, Wilhelm,
Operation Eichmann: The Truth About the Pursuit, Capture and Trial
(Wiley, 1997).

Harel, Isser,
The House on Garibaldi Street: The First Full Account of the Capture of Adolf Eichmann
(Viking, 1995).

Pearlman, Moshe,
The Capture of Adolf Eichmann
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961).

12. The Celebrity Executioner

Klein, Leonora,
A Very English Hangman: The Life and Times of Albert Pierrepoint
(Corvo Books, 2006).

Pierrepoint, Albert,
Executioner: Pierrepoint
(Harrap, 1974).

13. Trapped on an Iceberg

Grenfell, Wilfred,
Adrift on an Ice-Pan
(Houghton Mifflin, 1909).

Reason, J.,
Deep Sea Doctor
(Edinburgh House Press, 1941).

14. Volcano of Death

San Diego State University Department of Geological Science, ‘How Volcanoes Work: Mt Pelée Eruption (1902)'
.
Available online:
http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/Pelee.html
.

Scarth, Alwyn,
La Catastrophe: The Eruption of Mount Pelée, the Worst Volcanic Disaster of the 20th Century
(Oxford University Press, 2002).

Zebrowski, Ernest,
The Last Days of St. Pierre: The Volcanic Disaster that Claimed 30,000 Lives
(Rutgers University Press, 2002).

15. The Female Robinson Crusoe

McClanahan, Alexandra, ‘The Heroine of Wrangel Island', (
http://www.litsite.org/index.cfm?section=History%20and%20Culture&page=Life%20in%20Alaska&ContentId=850&viewpost=2
).

Niven, Jennifer,
Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic
(Hyperion, 2003).

16. The Last Post

Perisco, Joseph,
Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour
(Arrow Books, 2005).

Rodricks, Dan, ‘The Sad, Senseless End of Henry Gunther' (
Baltimore Sun
, 2008).

17. To Hell and Back

Graham, Don,
No Name on the Bullet
(Viking Press, 1989).

Murphy, Audie,
To Hell and Back
(St Martin's Press, 2002).

Official website: ‘Audie L. Murphy Memorial Website' (
http://www.audiemurphy.com
).

18. Let's Talk Gibberish

McClain, Sally,
Navajo Weapon: The Navajo Code Talkers
(Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2002).

Tso, Samuel, ‘Code Talker Samuel Tso: Navajo Oral History Project' (Navajo People, Culture and History:
http://navajopeople.org/blog/code-talker-samuel-tso-navajo-oral-history-project/
).