1981 tourist killing may get day in U.S. court

The case is of fierce media interest in Japan, and reporters have been making frequent visits to Sakoda's home in Cerritos, a quiet suburb in southeast Los Angeles County. Sakoda said he hoped reporters would grant him more privacy now that he had spoken publicly.

"It's the equivalent of the O.J. Simpson trial in Japan," said Rene Chen, a staff writer with Japan's Kyodo News agency.

At the time, the Los Angeles Police Department's major crimes unit initially seemed to believe Miura, who has all along denied involvement in his wife's death. Sakoda said police had issued an alert for two "hippie-type" men Miura claimed were responsible for the killing.

"To be honest, it was not really done with any effort," Sakoda said of the LAPD's investigation at the time.

The case could have been abandoned were it not for Sakoda's persistence, according to Ira Reiner, the district attorney at the time. After Sakoda retired from the LAPD in 1985, he joined Reiner's office as an investigator, for which one of his first orders of business was to re-energize the Miura case.

Meanwhile, in Japan, the media had also treated Miura with sympathy until a series of blistering news articles was published in 1984. They said Miura had taken out two life insurance policies on his wife in 1981 and a separate travel insurance policy.

Miura reportedly collected hundreds of thousands of dollars on the policies. In addition, an adult-film actress who claimed to be Miura's lover told a Japanese newspaper that Miura had hired her to kill his wife at their hotel on a trip to L.A. three months before the shootings.

In 1985, Miura was arrested in Japan on suspicion of assaulting his wife with intent to kill her for insurance money in the hotel incident. An indictment said he asked the actress Michiko Yazawa to kill his wife with a hammer-like instrument, and he was eventually convicted of attempted murder.

While serving a six-year sentence for the attempted murder, Miura was charged and convicted under Japanese law with his wife's murder. But in 1998, that sentence was overturned by a Japanese high court.

In overturning the murder conviction, the Tokyo High Court raised doubts about the evidence, which was largely circumstantial.

"The prosecution's claims do have substantial reason to make the defendant guilty," they wrote in their decision. "But they still leave a reasonable doubt to fully make the defendant guilty."

For his part, Sakoda believes the case is as strong as it was 20 years ago.

"In terms of new evidence, I don't think that has to be a major concern," Sakoda said. "The warrant will stand by itself."

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