Widow Pleads Not Guilty To Murder Of Japanese "Don Juan"

WAKAYAMA (Japan), Sept 12 (Bernama-Kyodo) -- A 28-year-old woman on Thursday pleaded not guilty to murdering her wealthy elderly husband who described himself as the "Don Juan" of the western Japan area where he lived, Kyodo news agency reported.

Saki Sudo is accused of causing Kosuke Nozaki, who was 77 years old at the time of his death, to deliberately ingest a lethal amount of an illegal stimulant drug on May 24, 2018, according to the indictment.

As a president of a liquor sales company and real estate business in Wakayama Prefecture, Nozaki is said to have accumulated around 1.3 billion yen (US$9.1 million) in personal wealth.

He married Sudo, who was more than 50 years younger than him, in February 2018.

The Wakayama District Court plans to hand down a ruling on Dec 12 this year. She was also convicted earlier this month of stealing from another man between 2015 and 2016 and faces a prison sentence of three years and six months.

Nozaki had gained notoriety for publishing an autobiography titled "Don Juan of Kishu: The Man Who Gave 3 Billion Yen to 4,000 Beautiful Women" in 2016, likening himself to the mythical Spanish playboy. Kishu is a historical name for the region in the prefecture where he lived.

Sudo said she found Nozaki collapsed at their home, according to investigative sources, with the cause of his death later confirmed as acute stimulant intoxication, but no needle marks were found on his body.

Security camera footage of Nozaki's house did not show any other person entering or leaving and analysis of Sudo's smartphone revealed she had searched for such words as "stimulant" and "murder" before the incident, the sources said, leading to her arrest in April 2021. She was indicted the following month.

The focus of the trial is whether she can be convicted of murder after prosecutors decided to argue the case on the basis of circumstantial evidence.

--BERNAMA-KYODO