[12][15] On the afternoon of 24 August, Kawagishi, Kanda and Hori met to draft another plot at the parking lot of a video rental shop in Midori, Nagoya.
[17] Kanda suggested that they kidnap and rob a woman walking on a street and kill her to prevent their robbery from being detected.
[14] Kanda and Hori put handcuffs on Isogai, threatened her with knives, and demanded her money and ATM cards while Kawagishi drove his van to a lonely parking lot in Aisai, a suburban city of Nagoya.
[3] After killing her, the three men dumped the victim's body in a forest in Mizunami, Gifu Prefecture at around 4:00 a.m.,[16][22] and tried to withdraw money from her bank account at an ATM in a convenience store, only to find that she had told them the wrong PIN.
[21] Disappointed after failing to withdraw money, they shared 62,000 yen which they had found in the victim's handbag,[10] and parted, promising that they would rob and kill women at random near Nagoya Station in the evening that day.
[19] The Japanese penal code provides that punishment shall be extenuated if a criminal surrenders before being identified as a suspect by the authorities.
Fumiko Isogai, whose only child was killed in this crime, launched a campaign to call for the death penalty for the three murderers in September 2007.
[32] Although single murderers rarely face a death sentence in Japan, Takeshi Tsuchimoto, a criminal law scholar at Hakuoh University and former prosecutor of the Supreme Public Prosecutors' Office, expected that the recent trend toward stricter punishments, backed by the growing public support for capital punishment, would encourage the court to sentence Kanda and Hori to death.
[37] Kanda made fun of Rie Isogai and called her a liar in his blog, which he started in order to reveal what he claims to be the true story of this case.
[18] She said that their motives for the crime left no room for leniency[2] and that capital punishment was the only option, even after considering that there was only one victim, because their criminal acts were extremely merciless and heinous[41] and deemed to be a serious threat to society.
[3] Kawagishi received a life sentence because the court judged that he had provided the police with useful information that led to the arrest of Kanda and Hori.
[3][17] Major national newspapers published editorials in support of Kondō's unorthodox judgment on the premise that capital punishment should be retained.
[42][43] The Tokyo Shimbun expressed the view that capital punishment was inevitable when they thought how brutal the murder was and what the victim's family felt of it.
[42] Hiroshi Itakura, a criminal law scholar at Nihon University said that this decision could be a new criterion for capital punishment under the lay judge system.
[2] Four hours after he received the death penalty, Hori told journalists that he felt the words "capital punishment" were "heavy", though he had been prepared for it.