Murdered Lindsay's family launch email campaign to find her killer
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The family of murdered Coventry teacher Lindsay Hawker today (Mon 14th August) launch an email campaign to try to aid the hunt for her killer.
It’s now been four months since Lindsay was murdered and the police still have no clues to the whereabouts of Ichihashi despite more than 100 officers assigned to the case.
Julia Hawker
It is now four months since Lindsay’s battered body was discovered in a bath of sand on the balcony of the home of the only suspect Tatsuya Ichihashi in a suburb of Tokyo.
So far police efforts to trace Ichihashi have failed and now the Hawker family are launching a chain email to raise awareness of the case.
The email will be distributed around the globe including Japan, USA and UK. Bearing a picture of Lindsay and a picture of Ichihashi, the email will urge people to look out for the suspect and to report any sightings to the Lindsay Hawker website www.lindsayannhawker.com
The family have also launched a T-shirt campaign with T-shirts bearing a picture of Ichihashi and the words: ‘While he’s still free, I can’t sleep at night’ which can be purchased via the website.
And as police admit the hunt for Lindsay’s killer has drawn few clues her parents have hit out at police after they admitted they didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him when they first met him outside his apartment as they hunted for missing Lindsay.
In an email to the Hawker family Japanese police said: “At this time there was not enough evidence to arrest him. ‘
This comes despite the fact that they sent nine officers to look for Lindsay when it was only a missing person’s inquiry. Yet minutes later Ichihashi saw his chance to escape and made a run for it, the nine police officers were unable to capture him.
Today the Hawker family say they are angry that the police did not arrest the suspect when they had the chance.
Bill Hawker said: ‘We think it is disgraceful that the Japanese police let Ichihashi go when our daughter’s body was lying just yards away. We have been told that at that time there was not enough evidence that a crime had been committed to formally arrest him as it was only a missing person inquiry.
But the question we want answered is why did they send nine officers if they didn’t suspect a crime had been committed?’
Lindsay’s mother Julia, said: “It’s now been four months since Lindsay was murdered and the police still have no clues to the whereabouts of Ichihashi despite more than 100 officers assigned to the case.
We feel very disappointed in the police and frustrated that the lines of communication are so vague, although we understand that there are some aspects of the case the police need to keep confidential we don’t feel that the standard of investigation is the same as in the UK. Had he been arrested on suspicion of Lindsay’s abduction at least he would be facing justice for what he has done.
What happened to Lindsay has broken all our hearts but seeing Ichihashi face justice would have made her murder easier to bear, we could have found some peace knowing that he was being punished for taking our beautiful daughter from us, now we are left in a nomans land of grief and frustration that her killer hasn ‘t been caught and we are concerned that he could strike again and leave another family facing a life sentence like we are.
We worked tirelessly to get two British police officers out to Japan in a liaison role but despite spending considerable time with the Japanese Police with the aim of improving the lines of communication we feel that this has not achieved anything we hoped.
The Japanese police also seem reluctant to believe that Ichihashi may have escaped the country but we believe this may be the case as we know he has travelled before to Canada and France.
We have had several reported possible sightings of him via the Lindsay Ann Hawker website, which we set up ourselves, but despite passing them to the police they have not been investigated.
We have had to follow them up ourselves, one of the sightings in Canada turned out not to be him and another in Portugal was followed up by us but although it started to look unlikely that it was him, we can’t be sure.
We feel like we are conducting out own police investigation at the moment and as we can’t rule out the fact that Ichihashi may be abroad we are launching a global email campaign to try to find him and are going onto American TV to raise the profile of the case.”
To report sightings or to find out about the hunt for Lindsay’s killer log onto www.lindsayannhawker.com