After graduating from the Department of Horticulture at Chiba University in 2005, Ichihashi did not work and lived on a monthly allowance of about ¥100,000—around £600 or $760 at that time—from his parents.
[1] Police described him as a loner with an obsession for physical fitness; he regularly attended a gym and cycled 25 kilometres a day,[1] which some reporters linked to the case.
[1] Hawker's naked body was later found buried in a bath filled with a mixture of compost soil and sand on the apartment's balcony.
[13] Police said the egg-sized bruises on the left side of her face appeared to have been inflicted with a fist, while lesser marks on her upper body resulted from collisions with furniture.
[1][16] Ichihashi had bought the materials over the course of six visits to his local hardware store in the hours leading up to the arrival of the police on 26 March.
Ichihashi eluded the officers by vaulting the last few feet of the stairway to the ground, but he was later rediscovered wearing a pair of athletic shoes.
[1] Police suspect that between Sunday night and early Monday morning, Ichihashi had moved his bathtub from the bathroom to the balcony and put Hawker's body into it.
On Tuesday, the police obtained an arrest warrant for Ichihashi on suspicion of abandoning Hawker's body; they put him on the nationwide wanted list.
[17] On 29 March, detectives removed a shopping trolley, in which Ichihashi is believed to have transported the bags of horticultural soil he used to bury Hawker, from his apartment building.
[14] Police released a new wanted poster of Ichihashi, which included an enhanced image of the suspect disguised as a woman.
In early 2008, police investigated sightings of Ichihashi among sections of Kabukicho popular with homosexuals, where he had tentatively been identified by his male sexual partners.
[21] On 21 March 2009, on the run-up to the second anniversary of Hawker's death, the police released life-size cut-outs of Ichihashi to raise the profile of the case.
[24] On 4 November 2009, police disclosed that Ichihashi had undergone plastic surgery on 24 October at a clinic in Nagoya, where he had his nose uplifted.
[25][26] He had apparently received cosmetic surgery on several occasions to remove two moles on his cheek, add a fold to his eyelids, thin both lips and increase the height of his nose before he visited the Nagoya clinic.
[32] On 23 December, one of his lawyers announced that he had acknowledged that he was involved in Hawker's death but he had not intended to kill her and had attempted artificial resuscitation.
As of 2010[update], fewer than ten of the 111 inmates of Japan's death row had killed only one person, including previous convictions.
Although Bill Hawker expressed dismay at the lack of information about Ichihashi's whereabouts, he said "we have not come here to criticize the Japanese police".
[38] Hawker's family returned again on the second anniversary of her death, and her father revisited the country a month after Ichihashi's arrest to express his gratitude.
[41] On 29 February 2008, ABC News aired a US documentary titled Vanished in Japan related to the deaths of Hawker and Blackman.