On July 25, 1977, a 45-year-old bank employee in Maebashi, Japan, went out to collect money from a client. He never came back. Neither did the more than ¥18 million in cash and checks he was carrying.
For the next five years, almost everyone agreed on what had happened. The police believed he had stolen the money and disappeared. The newspapers reported it that way.
His wife was the one person who refused to believe it. She told police her husband was innocent and would never take the money. They did not listen.
She and their two sons were harassed as the family of the bank man who ran off with the money. She died in 1981, still unable to prove otherwise.
The answer finally came in December 1982, during routine maintenance on an office building in Maebashi. Nobody there was looking for him. What the workers found proved that everyone but his wife had been wrong.