The crime did not begin on that December morning. In the weeks before, the bank manager had received threatening letters warning of violence against him. Those letters were part of the plan. When the fake officer appeared on his white-painted motorcycle and spoke of an explosion at the manager's home, the bank employees had every reason to believe him -- the threat was already in their minds. The robber had primed his victims with fear before he ever showed his face. The flare beneath the car was another layer of theater: real smoke, real flames, a convincing performance of imminent danger. By the time the four employees realized what had happened, the Cedric was gone. The thief abandoned it shortly after, transferring the metal boxes to a second car he had stolen in advance. That car, too, was abandoned, and the money moved to a third stolen vehicle. Three cars, no witnesses to the transfers, and 294 million yen vanished into Tokyo.

The investigation that followed was the largest in Japanese history. Police distributed 780,000 copies of a montage picture across the country. The suspect list swelled to 110,000 names. An astonishing 170,000 police officers participated in the search. At the crime scene, investigators recovered 120 pieces of physical evidence, including the white-painted motorcycle. But the evidence was largely common, everyday items -- deliberately scattered to create noise and confusion. Fingerprints were gathered and compared against six million prints on file, one by one. No match was found. The robber had left a mountain of clues that led nowhere, and investigators began to suspect that the mess itself was intentional, a final act of misdirection from someone who had thought of everything.

Within days, police focused on a 19-year-old man, the son of a police officer, who had no alibi for the morning of the robbery. Five days after the heist, on December 15, 1968, he was found dead of potassium cyanide poisoning. His death was ruled a suicide. The money was never found in his possession, and officially he was considered not guilty. A year later, the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper identified a 26-year-old suspect, but he had an airtight alibi: he had been taking a proctored examination at the time of the robbery. Just before the statute of limitations expired in 1975, a friend of the original 19-year-old suspect was arrested on an unrelated charge. He was found with a large amount of money and had been 18 at the time of the crime. Police pressed him for an explanation, but he said nothing, and they could not prove the money came from the robbery. He walked free.

In December 1975, seven years after the robbery, police announced that the statute of limitations had expired. The criminal investigation was over. By 1988, all civil liabilities had also lapsed, meaning the thief -- whoever he was -- could tell his story without fear of any legal consequence. No one ever did. The case became a cultural landmark in Japan, profiled on the NHK television series Project X in 2001 and endlessly revisited in books, manga, and films. Comparisons to D.B. Cooper, the American skyjacker who vanished with ransom money in 1971, are inevitable: both crimes were audacious, nonviolent, and unsolved. But the Fuchu heist came first, and its theatrical precision -- the letters, the costume, the flare, the three stolen cars -- suggests a mind that planned not just a robbery but a performance. The quiet street next to Fuchu Prison looks unremarkable today. The money has never surfaced.