Episode 85:
The Tinder Tourist's Twisted Fantasy: The Saki Kondo Case

A call comes into a police station in Osaka, Japan. A foreign tourist says, "There's a terrible smell coming from a room we just checked out of. Please check it out." Police respond immediately, but the room is completely clean, as if nothing had happened.

Then they notice a severe stench coming from a suitcase in the corner. They carefully open the bag, and black hair peeks out through the crack. The moment they spray luminol in the dark, the clean room is instantly covered in blue fluorescent light.

On the afternoon of February 18, 2018, police arrived at the lodging where the incident occurred and began an immediate search. Tiny traces of blood and hair were discovered in the bathroom drain, all belonging to the victim — but there was no way to identify the killer, since the property was an unlicensed lodging known in Japan as a "Yami Minpaku," operating with minimal staff, non-face-to-face check-ins, and no identity verification. The only detail the owner could offer was that the guest had been a Western man.

Identified, but Nowhere Near Home

With no way to trace the suspect, investigators ran the victim's DNA through the missing persons database and got an immediate match: Saki Kondo, a twenty-seven-year-old English-Japanese interpreter who had been reported missing the day before in Hyogo Prefecture, about 31 miles from Osaka. Saki had grown up traveling internationally with her father, developed a strong command of English, and lived an unusually disciplined, punctual life — which made her sudden absence from work immediately alarming to her coworkers. Only her head was recovered from the lodging; the rest of her body was missing entirely.

Reviewing security footage across Osaka's train stations, police found Saki at Morinomiya Station on the night of February 15, meeting a foreign man who greeted her naturally before the two walked together to a nearby lodging — the same unlicensed property where her head was later found. Camera footage from inside the building showed both of them entering the room, but only the man was ever seen coming and going afterward, always carrying a large travel bag. Saki was never seen again.

A Ghost Named Jay

Digging through Saki's phone and computer, investigators found the connection: Tinder. Saki, fluent in English and enthusiastic about meeting people from other cultures, used the app regularly — and had a meeting scheduled in Osaka that day with an American man going by "Jay." It looked like a real breakthrough, until police discovered he'd deleted his Tinder account without a trace right after the murder, and "Jay" turned out to be a fake name. Security footage showed him, but with a hat pulled low and a mask covering his face, making identification impossible.

Refusing to give up, police spent four days tracking the man's movements frame by frame across every camera in Osaka, following his trail through Kyoto and into Nara, where he'd gone into hiding at another unlicensed guesthouse. Police raided the property and arrested him — a twenty-six-year-old American named Yevgeniy Bayraktar.

The Mother Who Made Him

Investigators found a chilling throughline to Bayraktar's upbringing centered on his mother, Regina, a Russian-born woman who treated people as tools to be used and discarded. After divorcing Yevgeniy's father with a large settlement, she burned through the money and turned to dating sites to find a path to U.S. citizenship, marrying a much younger man named Benny, convincing him to fund four years of nursing school, then vanishing with her son the moment she graduated — informing Benny of the divorce with a cold phone call telling him the paperwork was in a drawer.

Raised watching his mother exploit men for money, Yevgeniy developed the opposite fantasy: an obsession with finding a submissive woman who would sacrifice everything for him, built on the racist assumption that Japanese women were naturally obedient. When Japanese women he approached through American dating apps didn't fit that fantasy, he concluded they'd simply been "westernized," and decided the solution was to travel to Japan himself. There, he contacted ten Japanese women simultaneously and graded them on looks, personality, and English skills — Saki scored highest on his list.

Two Days in the Bathroom

Yevgeniy pursued Saki aggressively, declaring love at first sight and pressuring her for nearly a month despite her repeated refusals to meet. She eventually agreed to a single meeting, deliberately choosing the crowded Morinomiya Station rather than giving him her address. They met after midnight on February 15 and walked to a lodging he'd booked — with hours left until the first train home, there was little else to do, and she went in without suspicion.

Yevgeniy denied everything at first, showing no reaction even when police showed him a photo of Saki's severed head, but broke down under sustained questioning about his phone's Tinder records and payment history. Investigators' working theory, pieced together from his eventual account, was that Saki tried to leave as morning approached to make it to work, he tried to stop her, and her refusal to be controlled triggered a violent rage that ended with him strangling her.

What followed was calculated. He deleted his Tinder account, researched how to dispose of a body, and bought a knife, a saw, and air fresheners at a nearby store before spending two full days dismembering Saki in the bathroom. He cut off her head, placed it in a suitcase, and deliberately left it in the room — assuming that as an unlicensed lodging, he wouldn't be traced and that decomposition would render her unrecognizable before anyone found it. He packed the rest of her body into black plastic bags, carried the bag onto a train with no car of his own, and scattered the pieces across stations in Osaka and Kyoto as he traveled.

Final Thoughts

Rather than fleeing the country, Yevgeniy stayed in Japan, moving to another unlicensed lodging in Nara for four days, where he continued messaging other Japanese women on Tinder, confident Japan's relatively sparse surveillance network meant he'd never be caught. Because the killing happened behind a locked door with no witnesses, prosecutors couldn't prove intent to kill and were unable to charge him with murder — his defense successfully argued it was an accidental death, and he was charged instead with assault resulting in death, corpse abandonment, and property destruction, with prosecutors requesting just 13 years.

At his January 2019 trial, Yevgeniy tearfully read a letter of apology, which the victim's family rejected as hollow. The court reduced his sentence further because he'd cooperated by revealing where he'd disposed of the body, and he was ultimately sentenced to just eight years. He is scheduled for release in January 2027.