8 cases from Asia
Convicted: Fusako Shigenobu
On May 28, 2022, a 76-year-old woman in a black hat and gray suit walked out of a Tokyo prison and let her daughter drape a Palestinian keffiyeh around her shoulders. Cameras clicked. Supporters waved Palestinian flags. And Fusako Shigenobu, the woman Western media had dubbed 'the Empress of Terror,' blinked into the daylight after two decades behind bars. For thirty years before her arrest, she had been one of the world's most wanted fugitives: the founder of the Japanese Red Army, a group linked to bombings, hijackings, and one of the deadliest airport massacres in history. On May 30, 1972, three JRA militants opened fire with automatic weapons at Lod Airport near Tel Aviv, killing 26 people and wounding approximately 80 more in a crowded arrival hall. Shigenobu was never charged for that attack. Born in postwar Tokyo to a disgraced ultranationalist father, she transformed herself from a Kikkoman soy sauce office worker into a global revolutionary, building an armed network from the refugee camps of Beirut while raising a stateless daughter in the shadows. This is the story of how she got there, what she built, and what remains unanswered.
Accused: Phoolan Devi
At 1:30 on a July afternoon in 2001, three masked gunmen opened fire outside a government residence on Ashoka Road in New Delhi. Nine bullets found their mark. The target was Phoolan Devi, 37, a sitting Member of Parliament who had once been the most wanted woman in India, hunted across three states for a massacre that left twenty men dead on the banks of a river in Uttar Pradesh. She had been a child bride, a gang rape survivor, a feared dacoit who robbed from the rich and shared with the poor, and a democratically elected lawmaker. The arc of her life was so extreme that it seemed impossible any single person could have lived it. The man who would claim responsibility for her killing, a Thakur named Sher Singh Rana, said he did it to avenge the 1981 Behmai massacre. The Behmai case itself would not reach a verdict until February 14, 2024, exactly forty-three years after the killings that defined her legend. This is the story of a woman born at the very bottom of one of the world's most stratified societies, who refused to stay there, whatever the cost.
Convicted: Miyuki Ishikawa
Miyuki Ishikawa was a Japanese midwife and real estate agent turned serial killer. During the American occupation of Japan, she and several accomplices were involved in the deaths of dozens of infants. These horrific events, known as the Kotobuki San'in incident, marked one of the most devastating crime sprees in post-war Japan.
Convicted: Doris Marie Payne
She was 86 years old, wearing an electronic ankle monitor from her previous arrest, and she was shoplifting $86 worth of merchandise from a Walmart near Atlanta. That is the last chapter, so far, in the seven-decade criminal career of Doris Marie Payne, a woman who once walked out of a Monte Carlo Cartier boutique with a half-million-dollar diamond hidden in the seam of her girdle. Born in the coal-scarred poverty of Slab Fork, West Virginia, in 1930, Payne became the most prolific jewel thief in American history: over $2 million stolen, 32 aliases, nine passports, ten Social Security numbers, and an FBI file reportedly six feet long. She wore designer clothes into the finest jewelry stores in Paris, Rome, Geneva, and Tokyo, charmed the clerks with a smile, and walked out richer. Judges called her "the Terminator." Interpol tracked her for decades. She expressed no remorse, ever. Now approaching 95, she lives as a free woman in Atlanta. A documentary about her life won an Audience Award at Tribeca. Halle Berry is reportedly attached to play her in a biopic. And through it all, Doris Payne has remained exactly what she always was: the best-dressed thief in the room.
Convicted: Gu Kailai
On November 15, 2011, British businessman Neil Heywood was found dead in his room at a Chongqing hotel. Chinese authorities ruled it alcohol poisoning, cremated the body without an autopsy, and closed the file. It was, by every official measure, an unremarkable death. What the world did not yet know was this: November 15 is also the birthday of Gu Kailai, the wife of one of the most powerful politicians in China, a woman who had spent her life accumulating credentials, connections, and carefully constructed respectability. She had lured Heywood to that hotel. She had watched her aide carry his incapacitated body to the bed. And she had poured potassium cyanide into his mouth herself. The case that unraveled in the following months would expose a world of princeling privilege, illicit fortunes, cover-ups at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party, and a murder so brazen that it triggered the largest political crisis in China since Tiananmen Square. This is the story of Gu Kailai: lawyer, author, power broker, and killer.
Convicted: Masumi Hayashi (林 眞須美)
On a sweltering July evening in 1998, residents of a quiet Wakayama neighborhood lined up to ladle curry from a communal pot at their summer festival. Within hours, sixty-seven of them were fighting for their lives. Four never recovered: a local council president, his vice president, a ten-year-old boy, and a sixteen-year-old girl. Investigators would eventually determine the pot contained at least 130 grams of arsenic trioxide — enough poison to kill more than one hundred people. The suspect was a thirty-seven-year-old mother of four who had been seen loitering near the curry pots, alone, for over forty minutes. Before her arrest, a photograph captured her in her garden, smiling, hosing down a crowd of reporters. That image would follow her everywhere. Masumi Hayashi was convicted of mass murder and sentenced to death on purely circumstantial evidence: no confession, no confirmed motive, no direct physical evidence. She has maintained her innocence ever since. Now sixty-three years old and still on death row, her case raises a question that haunts Japanese legal scholars: what if the evidence was never enough?
Accused: Zheng Yi Sao
Zheng Yi Sao, also known as Shi Yang, Shi Xianggu, Shek Yeung and Ching Shih, was a notorious Chinese pirate leader who wreaked havoc in the South China Sea from 1801 to 1810. Commanding hundreds of ships and thousands of men, she was responsible for countless acts of piracy, including theft, murder, and kidnapping. Despite her notorious criminal activities, she was never officially convicted.
Convicted: Sada Abe (阿部 定, Abe Sada)
When Tokyo police finally cornered their fugitive at a Shinagawa inn on May 20, 1936, they didn't believe she was who she claimed to be. The woman in the kimono was too calm, too composed, nothing like the monster the nation's newspapers had conjured over two days of breathless coverage. Then she reached into the folds of her robe and produced the severed genitalia of Kichizō Ishida, wrapped in a magazine cover, and the officers had no more questions about her identity. Sada Abe had strangled her lover to death in the small hours of May 18, carved her name into his arm in blood, and spent the subsequent forty-eight hours shopping, attending a cinema, and writing farewell letters at a series of Tokyo inns. She had planned, with characteristic precision, to kill herself one week later. Her arrest photograph, published across Japan's major newspapers, showed a woman who appeared almost serene. The nation could not look away. The case became known as the 'Abe Sada panic,' flooded police switchboards with thousands of false sightings, and inspired satirists to compare it to a military coup that had shaken the government just months before. Here was a life shaped by assault, exploitation, and a system that offered women like her no protection and no language for what had been done to them — and here, finally, was the story they couldn't stop reading.
