Lindsay murder suspect had face surgery, say reports

Police said they are yet to confirm the reports and were still no closer to finding Tatsuya Ichihashi, two-and-a-half years after Hawker’s badly beaten body was found buried in a bathtub at his flat in Gyotoku, a suburban town in Chiba prefecture, east of Tokyo.

Ichihashi, 30, has reportedly visited clinics to render his face unrecognisable from the one that appears on tens of thousands of wanted posters. Newspapers, citing police sources, said he gave false names and addresses at the clinics and failed to return for follow-up appointments, denying police the opportunity to arrest him.

Takeshi Otani, a spokesman at Gyotoku police, said investigators were in the process of confirming the sightings.

The Yomiuri newspaper said Ichihashi had visited a clinic in the southwestern city of Fukuoka in mid-October, but his request for surgery to change the shape of his mouth had been refused. Later the same month he reportedly had an operation on his nose in the central city of Nagoya. Photographs taken by the clinic revealed that he had undergone extensive cosmetic surgery, including the addition of a crease to his eyelids and removal of two moles.

Hawker’s naked body was found buried in a bathtub filled with horticultural soil on the balcony of Ichihashi’s flat on 26 March 2007. Hours before her death, security cameras captured the 22-year-old giving Ichihashi a language lesson in a nearby café after he had begged her to teach him English.

The Guardian