Katsutaro Baba

was a Japanese serial killer who killed five women and one child in the village of Asahi (present-day Tatsuno, Nagano Prefecture) between 1905 and 1907, ripping out their gallbladders post-mortem. He was convicted, sentenced to death and executed for his crimes in 1908.

Murders On September 1, 1905, a 16-year-old girl working at a local liquor store went missing during an autumn festival that was held at a shrine in Asahi. It was initially suspected that she might have run off with a man, but that changed nine days later, when she was found dead in a rice field crossing Asahi and a neighboring village.

Two months later, on November 3, a 30-year-old silk mill worker went missing while another festival was being held celebrating the Emperor's Birthday, simultaneously coinciding with the ongoing construction of Tatsuno Station and the recent victory in the Russo-Japanese War. The woman's body was found along a forest path near the Tenryū River, a few kilometres outside the village, and like the victim two months prior, her body had been mutilated and her gallbladder removed. Both female victims had their bellies slit open, with the killer shoving the decapitated infant's body into his mother's abdomen. Hearing that human organs could be sold for high prices as ingredients for Chinese medicine the same way bear organs were sold at the time, the police hypothesized that the killer was selling the organs for profit.

In August 1907, a 32-year-old woman was attacked by an unknown assailant who began to strangle her. Thinking quickly, she clasped the man's testicles, which forced him to let go. As it was a moonlit night, the woman was able to recognize the attacker as 30-year-old Katsutaro Baba. Considered an honest and hard-working family man, Baba had moved to Asahi about ten years prior, initially working at a liquor store before he became the independent manager of the local watermill. In the end, Baba would be convicted for his crimes, sentenced to death, and summarily hanged at the Tokyo Prison in June 1908. No similar attacks took place after his death, and the incident now remains a part of local history.