The occurred in Suma, Kobe, Japan, on 16 March and 24 May 1997, when two children, ten-year-old and eleven-year-old were murdered. Yamashita was fatally injured in a series of assaults on elementary school girls between February and March 1997 while Hase was abducted, strangled and mutilated before his severed head was left in front of a school.
The perpetrator, fourteen-year-old used the alias to write two messages to the public following the discovery of Hase's remains in May 1997, taunting police and threatening to commit more murders. Azuma was arrested in June 1997 and confessed to the murder of Hase. He also admitted to killing Yamashita and three additional attacks on schoolgirls.
As a juvenile offender, Azuma was prosecuted and convicted as "BoyA." His real name has not been officially released to the press because Japanese law prohibits publishing the identification, but his real name has been reported in some weekly magazines. Beginning in 2004, Azuma was released on provisional basis, with full release announced to follow on 1 January 2005. The murders and subsequent release of Azuma gained widespread attention from Japanese media and politicians.
Attacks On 10 February 1997, Shinichiro Azuma attacked two twelve-year-old sixth-grade students of Minami-Ochiai Elementary School, at around 16:35 near an apartment complex in Nakaochiai district. The two girls were returning home when Azuma struck them in the back of the head. One of the injured girls required a week of treatment for her injuries.『朝日新聞』1997年10月18日東京朝刊第一総合面1頁「中3、精神医学的治療を 医療少年院送致を決定 神戸の連続児童殺傷」（朝日新聞東京本社）
Ayaka Yamashita On 16 March 1997, at around 12:25, Azuma bludgeoned ten-year-old Ayaka Yamashita, a fourth-grade student of Ryugadai Elementary School, near a residential building in Ryugadai, causing her death the following week. Ten minutes after the attack, Azuma stabbed and injured a nine-year-old girl with a 13-cm dagger outside of Tatsugaoka Park. The same day, Azuma wrote in his diary: "I carried out sacred experiments today to confirm how fragile human beings are... I brought the hammer down, when the girl turned to face me. I think I hit her a few times but I was too excited to remember."
The following week, when Yamashita was declared brain dead, Azuma added on 23 March: "This morning my mom told me, 'Poor girl. The girl attacked seems to have died.' There is no sign of me being caught... I thank you, "Bamoidōkishin",バモイドオキ神 for this... Please continue to protect me." As revealed in Azuma's manuscript, "13 Years Imprisonment" ("懲役十三年"), "Bamoidōkishin" refers to an apparent deity, evidenced by the character 神 for "kami," whom he claimed to have "created from hatred" in his childhood. The manuscript details a contract which would end with Azuma serving thirteen years in prison for committing murders as part of a "crime pact" to pledge allegiance with "Bamoidōkishin" in exchange for forgiveness of the same crimes.酒鬼薔薇聖斗の告白 悪魔に憑かれたとき (May 1998)
On 15 May, Azuma stopped attending his third-year class at Tomogaoka Junior High School after an incident two days earlier in which he had phoned a classmate for a meeting in the park and then punched him in the mouth, chipping some of the classmate's teeth by wrapping his watch around the fist. Azuma's parents regularly took him to a child psychiatrist during this time.高山(2001a)、pp.85-86 The assault was considered the high point in a number of other "eccentric delinquent acts" at Azuma's school, including stealing and burning other students' shoes, hitting people with a table tennis racket and slashing bicycle tires with a box cutter.岩田信義『校長は見た!酒鬼薔薇事件の「深層」』（初版）五月書房、2001年5月28日。
Jun Hase
Just before 14:00 on 24 May 1997, while walking a street of Tomogaoka, Azuma encountered eleven-year-old Jun Hase, a special education pupil at Tainohata Elementary School, where Azuma had attended primary education. Hase was lured to Tank Mountain in Taihata, where Azuma claimed that he would show Hase a turtle.『朝日新聞』1997年7月2日東京朝刊第14版第一総合面1頁「フォーカス 容疑中3の写真掲載 ○○君事件 販売中止広がる」（朝日新聞東京本社） - 『朝日新聞』縮刷版 1997年（平成9年）7月号57頁 There, Azuma overpowered Hase and fatally strangled him with the boy's own shoelaces. He stole a hacksaw and padlock from a nearby co-op supermarket, then broke into an empty television relay station on the mountain in which he hid Hase's body. Hase was reported missing by his family the same evening.『文藝春秋』1998年3月特別号「供述調書」（平成10年3月1日発行）
On 25 May, Azuma returned to the station, where he beheaded Hase's body between 13:00 and 15:00. He further mutilated Hase's head by stabbing out both eyes, cutting into both cheeks and unsuccessfully attempting to cut out the tongue. Azuma took the head and left Hase's body inside the station. He first hid the head in a hole near Irikakunoike pond, then brought the head to his home on 26 May. There was a widespread search for Hase by this point through Hyōgo Prefectural Police, the Kobe Fire Department and Tainohata Elementary School's PTA, due to which Azuma assumed that he would soon be caught and believed that leaving the head in a public place would draw attention away from him. He chose his junior high school for the location, since he thought it would implicate school staff in the killing.
In the morning of 27 May, at around 2:00, Azuma snuck out of his room through a window and drove to Tomogaoka Junior High School with his bicycle, carrying Hase's head in a plastic bag inside the bike's satchel. He tried to place the head on the outer wall, but it fell down, after which Azuma left the head in front of the main gate. Before leaving, Azuma stuffed a handwritten note into Hase's mouth, taking care to have the signature of the letter visible. He returned home after watching the head for six to seven minutes.
Hase's head was discovered a few hours later. While Azuma had planned for Hase to be seen by his fellow pupils when they arrived for school, a passerby instead found the head before opening hours. The note, which was written with each sentence in a vertical listing, was published in newspapers the same day and read:
Azuma used the term "vegetables" to refer to people around him; he had learned this term from his parents, who had once told him, "If you are nervous at your sports day, picture the people around you as vegetables." According to Azuma, he wrote the word "SHOOLL KILL" because he believed it to be English for "school killer." The note also included a symbol which Azuma later described as "inspired by the inverted swastika of Nazi Germany", after reading Mein Kampf while in elementary school.
Investigation Hase's decapitated body was found at the relay station a few hours after the discovery of his head. Newspapers connected the killing of Hase to the schoolgirl attacks in February and March.
Police commented that the style of Hase's killing and the note was reminiscent of that of the Zodiac murders in the United States during the late 1960s. According to friends of Azuma, he had developed a fascination with the case through the 1986 true crime book Zodiac by Robert Graysmith when its Japanese translation was published.
Having heard of the discovery of Hase's remains, Azuma was surprised that his murder site was found in addition to the head. Journalists initially thought that "Sakakibara" was a "highly-educated" adult man in his thirties due to the formal kanji used in the letters. However, linguists noted that these expressions were common in popular manga and it was suggested that the perpetrator was not a social person since the texts weren't very colloquial,神戸小学生殺人事件を考える会(1997)、pp.219-220 to the point where it was considered that the writer was a Chinese speaker.神戸小学生殺人事件を考える会(1997)、pp.224-225 There were two prevailing descriptions of middle-aged men in menial workwear reported around Tank Mountain at the time of Hase's murder. There was the "Padlock Man," who was seen at the same supermarket where Azuma had stolen tools. Another was the "Scooter Man," who was seen driving a scooter near the mountain. Both men were identified in mid-June and quickly dismissed as suspects.神戸小学生殺人事件を考える会(1997)、p.222 Other reports focused on suspicious vehicles seen during the previous attacks, either a black Nissan Bluebird sedan or white van, with varying descriptions of their drivers. Rumours persisted until Azuma's arrest.神戸小学生殺人事件を考える会(1997)、p.223
The newspaper Sankei Shimbun speculated that the perpetrator was left-handed due to the angle of wounds inflicted on the injured girl on 16 March. According to police reports, however, the investigation believed that the perpetrator was right-handed due to noticeable pressure marks found on the base of Hase's head.
Based on press coverage, Azuma assumed that he was unlikely to be caught since police were looking for an adult. He decided to write a manifesto to the press, worried that the note left with Hase's head didn't express his worldview clearly enough. Azuma wrote the messages in what he thought was the style of a man in his thirties from an unstable homelife who resented the school system for bullying. He made several drafts in his school notebook, incorporating some phrases and kanji characters from the previous note, before copying the writing onto a separate sheet. The letter was postmarked on 3 June with no address or name. Afterwards, Azuma burned the pages containing the original drafts.一橋(2011)、p.312
Letter On 6 June, the letter was sent to the newspaper Kobe Shinbun. Enclosed was a three-page, 1400-character letter, also written in red ink, which included a six-character name that can be pronounced as "Sakakibara Seito." The same characters, which mean "alcohol," "devil," "rose," "saint" and "fight", were used in the first message that was left inside Hase's mouth. In the letter, "Sakakibara" claimed responsibility for the killing and mutilation of Jun Hase, threatening that more killings would follow. He included the slightly revised signature "SHOOLL KILLER."「供述調書」 『文藝春秋』 1998年3月特別号 1998年3月1日発行
Azuma had begun the letter by addressing a mistake made by a local TV broadcaster, which mispronounced the "Sakakibara" name as "Onibara" – "Demon Rose," which he disliked, writing that he wanted to be called by his "real name." The letter largely blamed the Japanese educational system for his actions, claiming "compulsory education formed me, an invisible person." Azuma also accused police of putting no effort into the investigation to "cover up [his] existence," which was supposedly a recurring event in his life. He claimed that his crimes differed from "pathetic revenge" in that he stylised the murders as a game which created for him "a new world all your own," further writing, "I am putting my life at stake for the sake of this game... If I'm caught, I'll probably be hanged... police should be angrier and more tenacious in pursuing me." Azuma stated that he was driven by a natural urge to kill, writing, "It's only when I kill that I am liberated from the constant hatred that I suffer and that I am able to attain peace. It is only when I give pain to people that I can ease my own pain." At the end of the letter, he wrote, "From now on, if you misread my name or spoil my mood I will kill three vegetables a week. If you think I can only kill children you are greatly mistaken. I have the ability to kill the same person twice."今後一度でもボクの名を読み違えたり、またしらけさせるような事があれば一週間に三つの野菜を壊します。ボクが子供しか殺せない幼稚な犯罪者と思ったら大間違いである。ボクには一人の人間を二度殺す能力が備わっている
Kobe Shinbun assumed that the letter was authentic and similar in nature to those by serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, who also wrote taunting letters to authorities with the purpose of confusing police.『神戸新聞』1997年6月6日朝刊第15版1頁「須磨の男児殺害 犯人名乗り本社に封書 現場紙片と筆跡酷似 「義務教育に復讐」 兵庫県警、鑑定急ぐ」「勝手な論理、自己正当化 松本関学大教授が分析 追い詰められた犯人」（神戸新聞社）
Custody and confession