When a foreign exchange student from Japan enrols at a small private college in Texas,

all goes well until she hosts a modest end of semester party in her apartment.

Investigators retrieve her remains from a deliberately set fire

and discover the scorched evidence of a brutal crime in this episode of Last Seen Alive.

Thanks for listening to Last Seen Alive. I'm your host, Leah, crime analyst by day, and true crime storyteller by night.

And as always, I'm your co. Scott.

A quick heads up. This episode contains discussion of sexual assault. Please listen with care.

Makiko Kasahara was last seen alive on December 13, 2002.

She was 21 years old at the time and lived in Sigeen, Texas, a small town about a 40-minute

drive east of San Antonio.

Place we're both very familiar with.

Yeah, Makiko wasn't from Sagan, though, or from Texas at all. Rather, she was from Japan and had come to Texas as a foreign exchange student.

She'd first enrolled at Texas Lutheran University in Sigeon in the summer of 2000 to study English as a second language.

Texas Lutheran University is a very small, private college with a student body of about 1,400 enrollees.

Yeah, I mean, it's one of those places where even if you're local, you don't really hear about it very much.

Yeah, the college experience at Texas Lutheran is unusually intimate, especially in Texas, where the largest schools have student bodies equivalent

in number to the populations of small cities. Besides its intimate and inclusive educational setting,

Texas Lutheran is known for its liberal arts and professional programs. Most of its students are

from Texas, although about 20% are from out of state. And a very small percentage, less than half

a percent, according to the Princeton Review, are from outside the U.S. These student studies at Texas

Lutheran are often facilitated by the school's International Education Office, which assists

its own interested students in studying abroad and international students in studying at

...