The Glico-Morinaga case: the poisoned-candy extortion never solved

What happened

One evening in March 1984, two masked men broke into the Osaka-area home of Katsuhisa Ezaki, the 42-year-old president of Ezaki Glico, one of Japan's largest candy makers. They had already forced his mother, who lived next door, to hand over a house key at gunpoint. The men bound his wife and child, took Ezaki from his bath, and drove him to a warehouse in Ibaraki. A ransom note left in a phone booth demanded 1 billion yen in cash and about 220 pounds of gold bullion, by some accounts the largest ransom ever demanded in Japan. Ezaki escaped after 65 hours when he was left unattended.

The extortion campaign begins

Weeks later, letters signed by "the Monster with 21 Faces" — a name borrowed from a villain in a novel by the mystery writer Edogawa Rampo — began arriving at Glico and at Osaka news organizations. The group had already set fire to vehicles connected to Glico on April 10, 1984. On May 10, a letter claimed that Glico candy on store shelves had been laced with potassium cyanide. No tainted sweets were ever found, but Glico pulled its products nationwide, a recall that cost the company at least $21 million and led to roughly 450 part-time workers being laid off.

The campaign then widened. In October 1984, letters warned that 20 packages of Morinaga candy, including Choco-Balls and Angel Pie, had been laced with sodium cyanide; police searched stores across Tokyo and western Japan and found more than a dozen packages carrying stickers that read "Danger: Contains Toxins" before anyone was harmed. House Food Corporation, Marudai Ham and other food makers received similar threats and ransom demands in the months that followed, all signed with the same "Monster with 21 Faces" name.

What investigators found

The police response became one of the largest manhunts in Japanese history, with investigators questioning an estimated 125,000 people over the course of the case. During one failed cash handoff, officers watching a train near Kyoto spotted a man they described as having "eyes like a fox," a sighting that gave the case its lasting nickname, the fox-eyed man. Despite the scale of the investigation, police were never able to intercept a payment or make an arrest, and no conclusive evidence ever surfaced that any ransom money changed hands.

The main theories

Investigators and journalists have floated a range of theories about who was behind the campaign, none of them confirmed. CrimeReads reports that suspects considered over the years ranged "from yakuza to disgruntled employees to stock manipulators to North Korean agents," reflecting how the case touched organized crime, corporate grievance and Cold War-era anxieties all at once. Japan Today notes that police followed leads on several suspects, including a man caught on a security camera, but no one was ever charged, and no single theory has been backed by evidence strong enough to close the case.

How the campaign ended

The case took a grim turn in August 1985. On August 7, the head of Shiga Prefecture's police, named in news coverage as Yamamoto, took his own life after another failed operation. Five days later, on August 12, the Monster with 21 Faces sent what became its final letter, telling reporters, "So we decided to give our condolence... It's fun to lead a bad man's life," and announcing it would stop "torturing food-making companies." No letter, threat or poisoned package was ever traced to the group again.

Where the case stands

No one was ever arrested or charged. Under Japan's statute of limitations, prosecutors lost the ability to charge anyone over the Ezaki kidnapping in 1995, and the deadline covering the poisoning and extortion crimes expired in February 2000. Police officially closed the file once the final deadline passed. Real or Legend lists the Glico-Morinaga case as unsolved: a name, a face and a motive were never pinned down well enough to bring anyone to trial.

What is still missing

More than four decades later, the core questions remain open. No individual or group was ever definitively linked to the kidnapping, the poisonings or the letters. Investigators never confirmed whether the campaign was about the ransom money, revenge against a company, or something else entirely. The fox-eyed man was never identified. Even why the group stopped in August 1985, rather than continuing or being caught, is something the surviving public record does not explain.