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Hunting Through Hashtags — The Case of Takahiro Shiraishi
An infamous ‘Twitter Killer’ changed the platform’s policies forever
When he deleted direct messages that might otherwise become lost in the abyss of social networking, Takahiro Shiraishi erased the correspondences which linked him to his murder victims. Most of the deceased were suicidal and posted to Twitter looking for someone to ease their suffering, which he took full advantage of. He approached them, then drugged and sexually assaulted their bodies while they were still alive. Preferring to kill by strangulation, Shiraishi fostered a longtime obsession with choking, suicide and death. Police discovered a total of nine victims, eight women and one man, in his apartment in Zama, Japan, cat litter haplessly thrown on cold storage boxes that housed severed heads and limbs.
Officers were looking for a specific missing girl. They asked him where she was.
“In there,” he said, pointing to one of the many containers abundant with human remains.
Growing up, Shiraishi was someone who frequented the shadows, an inconspicuous person that went under the radar during his youth. An elementary-school classmate said that he enjoyed playing the “choking game” with friends as a child, where in one case, he even passed out completely. After…
