was a Japanese businessman who was accused of being involved in the killing of his wife, Kazumi Miura. The prolonged legal battle, lasting decades, ended when he presumably committed suicide in October 2008. Early life Miura was born in Yamanashi Prefecture in 1947. After dropping out of a high school in Yokohama, he was arrested for arson and served some years in a juvenile prison. He was suspected of the 1979 killing of his former lover Chizuko Shiraishi. Attack on Kazumi Miura Miura, a clothing importer who often traveled to the United States, was suspected of conspiring to kill his wife, on November 18, 1981, while visiting Los Angeles]. On that day, an unknown assailant shot Miura in the right leg and his wife in the head while the two were in a parking lot. After the shooting, Kazumi Miura remained in a coma. She was flown back to Japan by a U.S. Air Force hospital jet. She was blind, paralyzed, unconscious and subsisting on life-support machinery. She died almost a year to the day after the shooting. Kazumi Miura was the mother of a 13-month-old child. Miura said that street robbers killed his wife, and while in the hospital, campaigned against violence in Los Angeles. Miura said that he wrote letters to President Ronald Reagan and California Governor Jerry Brown and asked the two to secure Los Angeles. The incident reinforced Japanese stereotypes about U.S. violence. Arrest and trial in Japan In 1984, the Japanese magazine Shūkan Bunshun published articles which indicated Miura had been involved in the killing of his wife. The articles revealed that he took out a life insurance policy on his wife worth the equivalent of US$1.4 million. In addition, an actress, who said she was Miura's lover, said that Miura asked her to kill his wife. Daryl Gates, the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department during the Miura incident, said that the department and Japanese police suspected Miura had arranged to have his wife killed. However, the shooter never was found, and there was no physical evidence linking Miura to the murder. According to then Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner, LAPD homicide detectives did not believe that Miura was the perpetrator, but rather that the events had been a "vicious...street crime". However one officer, Jimmy Sakoda, head of the Asian Crimes Squad, did not share the homicide detectives' conclusions. He took his