The Insurance Fraud Switcheroo Murder was a Kitakyushu insurance-fraud scheme built around a false identity and a substituted victim. When an exhibition talk described the case, Kido recognized that its central mechanism—killing one person in another’s place—resembled X’s impersonation of Daisuké Taniguchi, turning a criminal case presented as background into a crucial link in his investigation.

Scheme and Intended Fraud

The scheme began with A, the manager of a karaoke bar in Kitakyushu, and B, one of his employees, both short of money. A financial backer adopted them so that they could legally become brothers. B then took out an expensive life-insurance policy naming A as its recipient. The pair’s plan was to kill a homeless man in B’s place and claim the insurance money through the apparent death of the insured person.

Exposure and Criminal Consequences

The substitution failed because the man killed was markedly different from B in both age and height. The mismatch quickly drew police attention, and the fraud was uncovered before the pair could carry it out as intended. The exhibition’s account also identified B as already responsible for arson and a murder-robbery; he was sentenced to death. The case thus joined an attempted insurance fraud to a wider record of serious crimes.

Kido’s Recognition

At the exhibition, a critic introduced the perpetrators’ artworks while explaining the case. Kido had initially listened without taking in the talk, but the unofficial name, Insurance Fraud Switcheroo Murder, made the identity switch at its center suddenly legible to him. He connected the scheme to X’s impersonation of Daisuké Taniguchi: in both cases, one person’s identity was used to conceal another person’s fate.

That realization redirected Kido’s attention from the perpetrators’ nude illustrations to the landscape pictures displayed beside them. He searched his phone for photographs of X’s belongings, taken at Rié’s home, and compared X’s sketches with the exhibition landscapes. The subjects were geographically distant, but the style appeared identical. The critic identified the landscape artist as Kenkichi Kobayashi, who had been executed twenty years earlier, while X was supposedly Yoshihiko Sonézaki. The apparent stylistic match therefore opened a new question about X’s identity and connection to the case, rather than resolving it outright.

Significance in the Investigation

The murder case matters not only for the fraud it exposed but for the pattern of substitution it gives Kido a way to recognize. Its role in the exhibition is initially explanatory: a critic treats the artworks as objects of aesthetic analysis and recounts the crime behind them. For Kido, however, the account becomes investigative evidence by analogy. The shift from the case’s insurance plot to the landscapes’ matching style links a public criminal history to the uncertain identity of the man who lived as Daisuké Taniguchi.