Three Women, Five Bullets & ¥5 Million Left Behind.. THE NANPEI MURDERS

On July 30, 1995, 47-year-old Noriko Inagaki and high school students Megumi Yabuki, 17, and Hiromi Maeda, 16, were shot and killed inside the second-floor office of the Nanpei Owada supermarket in Hachioji, Tokyo. The teenagers had been restrained with adhesive tape, while approximately ¥5 million remained inside the store's safe. Despite fingerprints, footprints, ballistics evidence and decades of leads, the killer has never been identified.Thirty years later, the Hachioji Supermarket Murders, also known as the Nanpei Murders, remain one of Japan's most notorious unsolved crimes. Tokyo Metropolitan Police renewed their appeal for information in 2025, even asking people who attended a nearby Bon Odori festival that night to search old photographs and videos for possible clues. In this episode of You Can't Unhear, we reconstruct the night of the murders, examine the robbery and targeted-killing theories, and explore why three decades of investigation still haven't answered the most important question: who killed the three women at Nanpei?