After 27 years, his duty still calls

Or maybe it was her father's anguished plea for justice.

Certainly it was the Japanese values of bushido, the samurai code that promotes a fierce sense of duty and obligation, honesty and fidelity to self, to truth, to endurance.

Veteran Los Angeles County lawman Jimmy Sakoda mentions all of this in trying to explain why he has pursued a murder case for 27 years, a relentless quest that has produced comparisons to the lingering mystery of the still unresolved Black Dahlia homicide.

The case of who killed Kazumi Miura on a Los Angeles street has haunted and shaped Sakoda's life -- helping end his career with the Los Angeles Police Department but launching another with the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, fueling nasty rumors about him here but bringing him celebrity status in Japan, including a coveted decoration for meritorious service last year presented by Emperor Akihito himself.

Nearly three decades after Miura was shot in one of the biggest trans-Pacific whodunits ever, the case -- and Sakoda -- are back on center stage. Next week, the district attorney's office is scheduled to face off against celebrity lawyer Mark Geragos in arguing whether Miura's husband, Kazuyoshi Miura, should stand trial in Los Angeles for her murder.

Miura was convicted of her murder in Japan in 1994, acquitted on appeal four years later and arrested on a U.S. felony warrant in February in the U.S. territory of Saipan, where he is being held pending an extradition request from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Geragos said his client, who proclaims his innocence, was acquitted of all charges in Japan and cannot be tried for them here because of double jeopardy laws; prosecutors say a 2004 California law allows the prosecution of those who have been cleared in foreign courts.

Sakoda has been rehired by the district attorney's office to serve as a senior investigator on the case, a decade after his retirement.

For him, the developments bring the case full circle.

"I really think this thing is following me, it's almost spooky at times," Sakoda, 72, said in a recent interview. "Who would ever think 25 years later I would have this thing back on top of me?"

The case's dramatic twists and turns mirror his own life.