THE INVESTIGATOR: KAYO

“Nine years ago, the decomposing body of young Japanese student Kayo Matsuzawa was found in a fire-alarm cupboard in the Centrecourt Building in downtown Auckland. She had been murdered – by whom, no one knows. It’s a case that is in sharp contrast to the recent coverage of the murder of Auckland mother An An Liu. Kayo’s case might have been solved long before now, Bryan Bruce believes, had it not been virtually ignored by the media.
“I asked Kayo’s best friend when I spoke to her in Tokyo, ‘Why do you think this did not get the kind of coverage that it should have done?’ and she said, ‘It’s because we’re Japanese.’” For Bruce, whose David Bain: a Question of Justice was the highest-rated documentary of 2005, that comment was the motivation to “do everything we can to try to vindicate the situation”.
The Investigator features “unsolved or puzzling” cases, but it is also a poke around the criminal justice system, from police inquiry through to sentencing and release. Topics include the public’s right to know, paid police witnesses and the death penalty.” www.listener.co.nz, 23/10/2007