Police hunting the suspected murderer of Lindsay Hawker in Japan believe he has gone to ground close to home, near the apartment where the British teacher’s naked body was found in an earth-filled bath.

Three months after Ms Hawker was strangled in a Tokyo suburb, detectives have raided homeless communities, doss houses, abandoned apartments, parks and the private duck-hunting park used by Japan’s Imperial Family in search of 28-year-old Tatsuya Ichihashi, who escaped from nine officers sent to question him.

They are concentrating their investigation around his apartment in the commuter suburb of Gyotoku, where Ms Hawker’s body was being kept as a grotesque trophy, according to her family.

“The police believe he’s still in the area,” her father, Bill Hawker, told The Times last night after meeting detectives in Chiba Prefecture, the area immediately to the east of Tokyo where she lived and worked as an English conversation teacher.

“The police haven’t ruled out that he’s got an accomplice or a girlfriend, someone who might be hiding him, shielding him, supplying him with food or money.”

The Hawkers arrived in Tokyo last Wednesday for meetings with police and embassy officials and interviews with the Japanese media.

These included an appearance on Saturday night on The Power of Television, a two-hour live programme that had been billed as the equivalent of Crimewatch. Instead, it featured contributions from psychics and a lurid re-enactment of Ms Hawker’s murder that reduced her sister and parents to tears.

Detective Chief Inspector Ally Wright, a senior murder detective from the Hawkers’ home county of Warwickshire, arrived in Japan last month and has taken part in police raids on 24-hour internet cafés where young homeless people often spend the night.

Police are also searching the Shinjuku Ni-chome area of Tokyo, an area of gay clubs and bars that Mr Ichihashi is reported to have frequented.

There is growing speculation that he may have killed himself, but 148 investigators are continuing the manhunt on the assumption that he is alive.

“They have told us that three months is a critical point in a murder inquiry,” Mr Hawker said, “because now he’s probably gaining a bit of self-confidence, and he might well come out of the woods.” The investigation is being hampered by lack of information about Mr Ichihashi, a seemingly solitary character who left few clues to his personality and habits.

“They say it’s difficult to build a profile because there isn’t an awful lot known about him,” said Ms Hawker’s mother, Julia, who is in Japan with her husband and youngest daughter, Louise.

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