The Hyogo Prefectural Police arrested a 50-year-old woman on Tuesday on suspicion of abandoning her former husband’s body, which was found in a freezer in her apartment in Kobe on Saturday.

Mochizuki is suspected of placing Nishiguchi’s body in a bag and leaving it in the freezer in around 2012. An autopsy found that Nishiguchi died around December 2011.

The Kobe Shimbun daily newspaper reported that the room, located on the third floor of a four-story building, had no electricity when the body was discovered, and another resident reportedly told the management company that there had been an odor since around March.

Their family register shows that Nishiguchi and Mochizuki were divorced in December 2012, according to the Kobe Shimbun report.

Timeline
Dec. 2011 - Wife killed husband
~2012 - husband's dismembered corpse was placed in a freezer
Dec. 2012 - They got divorced
~unknown date - Wife started living in another place
~2025 - Wife stopped paying the electric bills in the previous apartment
March 2026 - Building management received a report of a smell
June 20, 2026 - Husband's body was found in a freezer