CEBU CITY -- A retired Japanese director and his wife were found dead inside a Lapu-Lapu City resort Wednesday, in what the police initially ruled were cases of an assisted death and suicide.
The police found no signs of foul play and retrieved a note, written in Japanese.
“Sinabutan nila (They probably agreed to do this). They reportedly appeared happy on the night before their death,” said SPO2 Rolito Jumao-as.
Among the items found in the couple’s room were an empty bottle of beer, gin and sake.
The staff at the Blue Reef resort said that Takao Ouchi, 70, and his wife Yukiko, 84, checked in last Monday noon and were supposed to check out Wednesday.
A room boy who went to check on them first found the bodies, and hotel staff immediately contacted the police at 1:30 p.m.
When Marigondon Police Station’s commander Inspector Christian Torres entered the couple’s room, he saw Takao hanging from behind the bathroom door. Yukiko was on the bed, lying under a blanket. Takao was a retired TV commercial director; his wife, a retired scriptwriter.
A wheelchair waited beside the bed. Police later learned the wife could no longer walk.
Both originally came from Tokyo, Japan, but the police learned they have been staying in the country for nine years now.
Rope marks on the wife’s neck led Torres to suspect that the husband first strangled her, and then hanged himself.
Torres and crime scene investigators saw no signs of an attack inside the room.
The bodies were sent to the Cosmopolitan Funeral Parlor for an autopsy.
In case of emergencies, the couple had given the names of their neighbors in Barangay Camputhaw, in this city, who were identified as Rosemarie and Marilou Enopeña.
Rosemarie served as the Japanese man’s secretary, her mother said.
SPO2 Jumao-as said they had the note translated by a member of a Japanese association in Cebu. It reportedly said it was the couple’s decision to end their lives, because they could no longer bear the pain of Yukiko’s condition.
Rosemarie Enopena said that Yukiko had been bedridden for years.
Takao, she added, told her about his wife’s two attempts to commit suicide last December by taking more than her prescribed amount of sleeping pills.
She said the two worked in the same TV station in Tokyo, Japan and decided to resettle in the Philippine after Yukiko suffered a stroke.
Jumao-as said other people who knew the couple attested that they never quarreled and were very attached to one other. (OCP/AIV/Sun.Star Cebu)