Hey y’all, it’s Julie Mattson, and in this episode of Pushing Up Lilies, I’m taking a trip across the globe to uncover the unsettling story of Japan’s “Black Widow,” Chisako Kakehi. This infamous serial killer has been accused of luring her victims into deadly traps—often using poison—as she pursued financial gain and control. I’ll guide you through the disturbing details of her crimes, the complex investigation that unfolded, and the questions that still linger about what drove her to commit these horrifying acts. Join me as we shed light on one of Japan’s most notorious murder cases, revealing how seemingly ordinary encounters can conceal the darkest of intentions. * Listener discretion is advised.
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0:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies.
0:08 I'm your host, Julie Mattson.
0:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual, and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
0:24 Do I have some stories for you?
0:26 Are you ready?
0:31 I cannot believe that it is 2025.
0:35 2024 kind of sucked.
0:38 I mean, I don't know how y'all feel about it, but I have a lot of friends who suffered losses and just people who have been put through the wringer.
0:51 Their ability to handle life in general has been tested.
0:56 It's just been a hard year.
0:57 I think it's been hard for everybody.
0:59 I keep saying 2025 is going to be my year.
1:04 But we're going to give it a shot anyway.
1:07 I think attitude has a lot to do with it.
1:09 And I think that if you go into the new year feeling like it's going to be a terrible year, then it will be.
1:16 And if you go into the new year feeling like you're going to take 2025 by the balls, then it's going to be amazing.
1:26 Attitude has so much to do with it.
1:28 And I've learned that over the years, and I'm sure y'all have too.
1:33 But I'm just kind of glad Christmas is over.
1:36 Christmas was, it was so rushed and hurried this year.
1:40 My house is always a mess during the holidays.
1:43 I've got gifts thrown everywhere and gift wrap and tape, and we can't find the scissors.
1:49 And then when everyone comes over here, there's paper flying everywhere and when the holidays are over and all the gifts are gone, I think that.
1:59 There's a little bit of relaxation that comes across our house.
2:04 We did just get back from Mexico.
2:06 We left the day after Christmas.
2:08 We spent about 45 days in Cancun.
2:12 It was amazing.
2:13 I have to say the first couple of days it rained, and we were kind of questioning our decision to go there this time of year.
2:22 The streets were very flooded.
2:25 And we were unable to cross the street from our hotel and get to the restaurants that were on the other side of the street.
2:30 Literally, we would have had to swim.
2:33 Cars were barely making it down the road and it got pretty rough.
2:36 But a couple of days into our trip, the sun came out and we got to spend some time at the pool before we came home.
2:44 That was amazing, but I did some research while I was out of town at the pool, and I always try to find material that's maybe not necessarily recent, but I don't really want to be like everybody else.
3:01 I don't want to air stories that are necessarily a Netflix documentary at the present time or anything that's big in the news because, I mean, sometimes we get tired of hearing the same old stories.
3:16 You can just literally beat a story to death and then it's not interesting anymore.
3:22 Today I'm going to talk about a Japanese death row inmate.
3:28 She was dubbed the black widow after she used cyanide to kill her elderly lovers, and she died in a detention center at the age of 78.
3:41 Her name is Chisako Kakehi, and she was sentenced to death for the murder of three men, and one of those included her husband, and also the attempted murder of another man over a decade ago.
3:57 Now she was found lying in her jail cell at the Osaka detention center just right after Christmas and her death sentence was upheld in 2021.
4:09 After the Supreme Court judge said that she used cyanide on the men after making them trust her as a life partner.
4:17 We've heard a lot of stories about black widows, and I know that I've had previous episodes on cyanide poisoning and arsenic poisoning, and to me, this is just a cruel way to kill somebody.
4:31 I know that with arsenic, a lot of times people will put small amounts in someone's food, and they'll get sick, and they'll just continue to deteriorate.
4:41 It sounds like she used enough cyanide to get the job done pretty quickly.
4:47 Kakehi obtained $9 million in insurance payouts and inheritance over 10 years, but she subsequently lost most of the money through financial trading that was not at all successful.
5:03 And that's how it would be if I tried to invest money.
5:08 I know nothing about it.
5:09 I envy those who do.
5:11 I have a friend who invests a lot of their money and is very, very successful at it.
5:17 I do not understand anything about financial trading and stocks, but I wish I did.
5:25 I feel like it could be a lucrative business if I understood anything about it.
5:29 But Kakehi primarily had relationships with elderly and or ill men, and then she met some of them through dating agencies.
5:42 She actually voiced on her profile that prospective partners should be wealthy and childless.
5:51 So to me, that throws up some red flags and maybe a lot of desperate men are OK with that.
5:57 But I think you'd have to be pretty crazy to think that she was a normal person when she voices that on her profile.
6:07 Anyway, cyanide was found in the body of at least 2 of the men she was involved with, and traces of cyanide were found in the trash at her home.
6:21 Now, the deaths weren't immediately investigated because it was initially determined that these men who were her spouses at the time, died from illness because they were elderly, and they had health problems.
6:35 I mean, she made sure of it.
6:37 It didn't look suspicious at all.
6:39 I mean, if somebody's elderly, they have a history of medical problems, they're on medications, you know, us as medical examiners, we wouldn't investigate it.
6:49 There were no reports that she had previously lost spouses under unusual circumstances.
6:58 So there was really no reason at the time of these guys' deaths for the police to suspect anything and to perform any kind of investigation.
7:07 Other than just to assume that this was natural.
7:11 No autopsies were performed because of the lack of suspicion.
7:17 Her arrest came after police discovered her most recent husband, who was 75-year-old Isao Kakeki, died from cyanide poisoning.
7:29 And then police began looking into earlier cases, and then they began to find a pattern.
7:36 And that's usually how it happens, right?
7:38 I mean, there's no suspicion, and then all of a sudden something happens and then it's like, wait a minute, she's lost two other spouses, or her boyfriend passed away unexpectedly, and then it starts to become a possible issue and then an investigation is open.
7:57 This is kind of what happened in her case.
8:00 She was suspected of being responsible for at least 7 other deaths that she was never convicted of because they couldn't prove that she had anything to do with them.
8:12 But Kakehi was arrested in 2014, again after cyanide traces were found on her fourth husband's autopsy.
8:23 Now she initially pleaded not guilty during her 2017 trial, and then she confessed, and then she stated on the witness stand that she had no intention of hiding her guilt, and she wanted to kill her husband out of deep hatred.
8:39 Two days later, she retracted her confession.
8:42 She claimed that she didn't remember saying it, and then her lawyers claimed that she had dementia and that she shouldn't be convicted due to diminished responsibility.
8:53 That's normal, right?
8:54 Your lawyer is going to try to come up with a reason why you're all of a sudden saying, I'm not guilty after you've already been on the witness stand saying that you hated your husband, and you didn't feel any remorse because you wanted to kill him.
9:12 Of course, her defense attorneys are going to try to come up with something to say to justify her changing her mind, basically.
9:20 Japan is among a small amount of developed democracies that still use capital punishment.
9:28 They only carried out one in 2022, and in 2023, none were carried out.
9:35 So they do still believe in it.
9:37 It just doesn't happen often.
9:40 In 2013 is when she embarked on this relationship with her most recent husband, Chisako Kakehi.
9:51 Now he was a 67-year-old widow, and the two met through a Japanese matchmaking agency.
10:00 I don't know how many of y'all have gone through matchmaking agencies, but I can honestly say, even the ones that say they do a background check don't necessarily do a background check.
10:11 Years ago, I went through an agency here in the Dallas area, way before I met my husband.
10:17 I thought, hey, you know, it's expensive, but many times you get what you pay for, and they promised to do background checks on everyone.
10:26 And of course, when I went and talked to them, they said, It was very expensive, $1500.
10:32 I think for 10 dates within a year.
10:35 And so if you met someone before that 10, then good for them, you know, but anyway, they were banking, to say the least.
10:43 Of course, I at first was like, whoa, that's expensive and went home and did not make the investment.
10:49 Of course, the next day, they called me, and they said, oh my gosh, we just had the man of your dreams come in and sign up.
10:55 Literally, he checks all the blocks on what you're looking for, and we would really love for you to join so that we can hook you all up.
11:06 My very first date, and mind you, the thing that they bragged about the most was background checks because no one else does that.
11:13 Plenty of Fish, Match.com, eHarmony, all those dating websites are great, and I have a lot of friends who have met their significant other through them, but they don't really do background checks.
11:24 In a nutshell, they were trying to stand out from everyone else, and they did, but it was also pricey.
11:31 Anyway, my very first date was a gentleman who proceeded to tell me that he had just bonded out of jail for writing a hot check on his ex-father-in-law’s bank account to buy drugs.
11:46 Anyway, I was like, no, I don't think so.
11:49 They're not doing what they say they're doing.
11:51 They're taking everyone's money.
11:52 And so I opted to just not follow through with any more dates that they tried to set me up on.
11:59 We know that these matchmaking agencies don't always do background checks, and they don't always check to see what the quality is and honestly, the quality of people that I met when I was dating on the free websites was better than the quality of the people who were paying.
12:17 Now, within 2 months, Kakehi and her soon to be new husband, they were married, and they moved in together.
12:26 They had met close to the end of the year, but he didn't live to see the new year.
12:34 On December 28th of 2013, he became her fourth victim.
12:39 Now the murders, this is what's interesting, the murder started back in'07 when she was 61, but again, she escaped suspicion until her most recent husband passed away.
12:53 She used this matchmaking agency.
12:56 To get acquainted with elderly victims one after another, and then she poisoned them after making them trust her.
13:04 The case highlighted the dangers of lurking online for aging singles vulnerable to love scams.
13:12 We know that the elderly are vulnerable to a lot of scams.
13:15 They're vulnerable to the phone calls, people trying to scam them and to give them their debit card.
13:21 Someone called my mother-in-law once, disguised their voice as my stepsons, and pretended that they were in jail and wanted her debit card so they could bail out of jail.
13:32 She knew better.
13:33 He would never be arrested.
13:36 And so she knew that and had the wherewithal to call us and say, oh my gosh, you know, before she gave out her debit card.
13:44 But there's so many scams that aging people are vulnerable to, and this is one of them as well, and to be scammed by their own is not really fair, but little is known about Kakehi's personal life.
13:59 She was born in Japan's southwestern Saga Prefecture, and she worked at a printing factory.
14:06 She married her first husband in 1969 when she was only 23.
14:11 And their marriage apparently was a good one.
14:14 It lasted 25 years before he died of an undisclosed illness back in 1994.
14:21 And I don't think that she had started her killing spree.
14:26 Now the murders started back in'07 when she was 61, but she escaped suspicion until her most recent husband passed away.
14:38 She would use matchmaking agencies to get acquainted with elderly victims one after another and poison them after making them trust her.
14:48 Her case highlighted the dangers lurking online for aging singles vulnerable to love scams.
14:57 You know, I'm sure this has happened a million times, and I feel like elderly people get scammed a lot.
15:03 They're very trusting, back in the day, you didn't get phone calls on your cell phone of people claiming to be someone they're not asking for your debit card.
15:14 Criminals have just gotten smarter, unfortunately.
15:18 In 007 she entered into a relationship with 78-year-old Toshiaki Suhiro.
15:25 On the afternoon of December 18, 007, they had been dating for a while, and she had lunch with him and his children, and he took health supplements, so that made it really easy for her to disguise a cyanide capsule as one of his pills.
15:41 Ironically, less than 15 minutes after lunch, he collapsed.
15:46 She accompanied him to the hospital in an ambulance.
15:49 Now he did survive, but he was the only one of her four victims to do so.
15:54 He was left though with incurable dysfunction and visual impairment and ended up dying a year and a half later of an unrelated illness.
16:06 But she owed him $437,000.
16:11 Masanori Honda was a 71-year-old who was in great shape.
16:15 He'd been diagnosed with diabetes, but by 2011, his diabetes was improved because he worked out.
16:21 He was in good shape.
16:23 He began a relationship with Kakehi.
16:26 It was unclear how they met or how long they dated, but they told friends that they had planned to marry.
16:32 The following spring she made her move.
16:35 On March 9th of 2012 she met him at a store, and then the two went their separate ways.
16:43 At 5 p.m. that day, he lost consciousness while riding a motorcycle and died in a hospital less than two hours later.
16:52 She had no plans to live out her years with him.
16:55 Two months before his death in January of 2012, she had begun secretly dating other men through an agency.
17:04Minoru Hioki struggled with loneliness and a relapse of lung cancer, but by July of 2013, his cancer had been almost completely treated by radiation, and he was in good health.
17:18 He was 75 years old, and he began dating Kikihi.
17:22 Now, by August of 2013, he wrote her an email saying that he wanted to stay together forever.
17:29 They were close, and they had dinner together and would frequently stay at each other's homes, but this came to an end on September 20th of 2013 when they went out to dinner and Hioki, who also took health supplements, lost consciousness after their meal together.
17:49 So again, it was really easy for her to give him a cyanide pill, to put cyanide inside one of his capsules and disguise it.
17:58 Now, despite knowing he had children, Anne had recovered from cancer.
18:03 Kakehi lied to the ambulance crew when they picked him up from the restaurant, and they told him that he had no family and he had terminal lung cancer, and she refused permission to resuscitate him, and he died within 2 hours.
18:19 His poor kids didn't even know, and they thought she was next of kin.
18:25 They gave her the right to decide that he was a DNR and so they did not resuscitate him, and he did not survive.
18:34 So she lied to him, and you know, I wonder about that sometimes.
18:38 I mean, we have people at the medical examiner's office who lie about being married.
18:42 They lie about common law status because they want the belongings of the person that passed away.
18:50 And it puts us in a bad position because we have to challenge the family, which we don't like doing, but it becomes civil after that.
19:00 We don't really get involved and prove to me whatever, like we won't release the body.
19:06 We'll put the body on hold until the family decides that they're going to get along long enough to choose a funeral home so that next of kin can follow through with funeral arrangements.
19:16 It's really aggravating.
19:18 And it's so obvious to us when people try to make up stories so that they can take someone's belongings or, you know, their girlfriend at someone's house and their boyfriend passes away and they want access to the residents so that they can get, you know, quote unquote, their belongings, but they're also going to take anything of value that belonged to the person.
19:40 We're really strict and all medical examiners' offices are really strict about designating next of kin.
19:47 Assuring that next of kin is the one who gets property, we only remove property on the body, that you have to actually bring your driver's license with you to our office to prove you are who we believe you are and that you are the legal next of kin of a decedent before we will release property to you.
20:06 Anyway, she seemed to get more bold, accumulating relationships and accumulating victims.
20:12 And in November of 2013, just two months after Hioki 's death, she'd already married her next and final target.
20:22 Isao Kakehi and he was barely a month after their wedding.
20:28 She began dating someone else.
20:30 Now Kakehi was none the wiser.
20:33 He wanted to enjoy a bright second life and live long and prosper, but within weeks of the marriage, he suffered a heart attack shortly after eating dinner with his wife and died an hour later.
20:45 Now this is when suspicion unraveled her web of deceit.
20:51 Autopsies are apparently rare in Japan, which is why all the deaths before his had kind of gone unnoticed.
21:00 And quite honestly, I feel like they did more of what we call full autopsies on people back in the day than they do now.
21:09 And also what was once called an autopsy is now called an inquest.
21:15 And so an autopsy doesn't always necessarily mean a full autopsy.
21:19 Sometimes they just look at the brain.
21:22 Sometimes they just look at the heart.
21:24 And so they don't always completely look at everything on an exam anymore.
21:31 Kakehi had an autopsy which revealed lethal amounts of cyanide in his heart, blood, and stomach.
21:40 Now days after his death, health supplement pills and empty capsules were found in their apartment, suggesting that she emptied capsules and then filled them with cyanide that had been ground into a powder.
21:54 In August of 2014, police found a bag buried in a pot plant that contained traces of cyanide in her residence.
22:02 The color of the bag and its contents suggested that it had been buried for several months.
22:08 She had obtained the cyanide from her job at the printing factory.
22:14 Now 2 months later, she was arrested after confessing to poisoning Honda, Hioki and Sahiro with cyanide.
22:24 Police also believe she was linked to the killings of 4 other men, but again she was not indicted for those due to insufficient evidence.
22:34 All 4 men though, lived in different cities, worked different jobs.
22:38 They had no connection to one another at all, except that they had a considerable amount of money.
22:44 They had assets, and she knew that they were the perfect target.
22:50 Their late age also and their single status made it even better.
22:55 Those were bonuses.
22:57 The first of the four poisonings was driven by debt because she owed Suehiro again $437,000.
23:05 Now I don't know how long they dated before she ran up that bill, but that's crazy that he would actually, I mean, he may not have even given it to her.
23:13 She thought she would kill him to avoid repayment.
23:18 In February of 2008, 2 months after his death, she wrote a letter to his children saying that she had paid back the money using another man's inheritance.
23:28 The letter kind of shocked Suehiro’schildren.
23:32 They were unaware that their father had given her money, and they knew very little about her.
23:39 But by her fourth victim's death, she'd taken so much money that her motive could no longer be explained.
23:45 I mean, at this point, it's like you're rich, you have all this money.
23:48 Why do you keep marrying rich men so you can take more?
23:52 She gained $145,000 from Honda.
23:55 But they are unsure how much she pocketed from other men.
24:00 It's estimated that she gained 4.5 million from her partner's inheritance, valuables, and other assets, and some estimates also placed the figure as high as 7.3 million.
24:13 I don't know why she kept doing it.
24:15 I mean, she had plenty of money.
24:17But Japan actually has a second black widow killer, Kane Kijima, and she is 46 and she's also on death row for killing three men that she met on dating websites in'09, making the deaths look all like suicides.
24:33 After her 100-day trial, she was also sentenced to death in 2012.
24:39 Interesting and also scary.
24:42 I mean, I can say that I do have friends also who have gone on dating websites and met people who claim to be singers, songwriters and famous.
24:54 And then they start asking them for money.
24:57 Because their band manager won't give them money to fly out of town to visit somebody and they promised to pay them back, and then they just keep mailing the money, and of course the trip never happens, and it's so sad.
25:13 I mean, you don't have to be elderly to be taken advantage of, obviously.
25:17 Dating websites are just one way to do it, but it's very common, and if someone advertises that they're looking for a rich elderly person, that should throw up some red flag.
25:29 I'm just saying, like, be a little cautious of people who seem suspicious.
25:37 Your gut is going to tell you a lot when it comes to a person and what kind of a person they are.
25:44 I feel like my gut tells me so much and sometimes I don't listen to it.
25:47 I have to admit, I don't always listen to it.
25:50 But your gut can tell you a lot.
25:53 That's how we're going to end the year.
25:55 We are going to be smarter and more aware of our surroundings, and more aware of how we're being treated by others, and a little more suspicious when things sound too good to be true, I guess, is the way to put that.
26:12 But looking forward y'all to 2025, looking forward to new Patreon followers.
26:20 There is a free option on my Patreon.
26:23 You do not have to commit to giving a monthly amount, but you do get added bonuses if you do, which I much appreciate.
26:30 My YouTube channel again is up and running.
26:33 However, I haven't started doing videos yet.
26:35 2025 is the year for that.
26:37 My subscription box is going to start in 2025.
26:41 The boxes are designed, and we are about to start launching that super exciting.
26:48 Please continue to private message me on Facebook.
26:51 I will answer every one of them personally.
26:54 I can promise you that.
26:55 If you would like to be a guest host on the show, if you have a family member, or yourself, has been through anything difficult that you want to talk about, let's investigate it.
27:04 Let's look into it.
27:05 Let's talk a little bit about it.
27:07 If you have a question about how your local medical examiner handled the case, maybe I can kind of explain the how and why to you.
27:15 But anyway, super excited for 2025 and I hope you all are as well.
27:19 I wish everyone a very safe and happy new year and I'm looking forward to talking to y'all next year.
27:26 See y'all later.
27:27 Bye.
27:29 Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies.
27:32 If you like this podcast and would like to share with others, please do me a quick favor and leave a review on Apple Podcast.
27:40 This helps to make the podcast more visible to the public.
27:43 Thanks again for spending your time with me and be sure to visit me at pushinguplilies.com for merchandise and past episodes.