hkc (hello kitty case)

background, kidnapping and more.

BACKGROUND.

Fan Man-yee was abandoned by her family as a child, resulting in her being raised in an all girls' orphanage . When she turned 15, she was told to leave the orphanage because they had an age restriction. Becoming homeless and addicted to drugs , Fan was forced into street prostitution  until the age of 21, when she began working at a brothel. Fan would eventually marry one of her clients, a fellow drug addict, in 1996. She gave birth to their son two years later, not long before her murder. Fan's husband was described as abusive  and neighbors would report being woken-up by sounds of the couple's fights from their apartment.

KIDNAPPING.

Chan Man-lok (陳文樂), a 34-year-old triad member, was one of Fan's regular clients at the brothel. In early 1999, Fan stole Chan's wallet, which contained about $HK4,000 (roughly US$500). When Chan realized what had happened, he demanded Fan to return the money in addition to a fee of $HK10,000. Although Fan immediately returned the stolen money, she needed additional time to secure the additional fee.

On 17 March 1999, Fan was abducted  by three men and one girl: Chan; his grooming victim  Ah Fong, age 14; Leung Wai-lun (梁偉倫), age 21; and Leung Shing-cho (梁勝祖). The group took her to an apartment at No. 31 Granville Road, tsim sha tsui , where they imprisoned Fan for a month. Initially, Chan had intended to make money off of Fan by pimping her out to other men.

ORDEAL

During her imprisonment, Fan was tortured and raped . According to one source, she was beaten with metal bars, kitchen utensils, and furniture pieces, sometimes while being strung up and used as a punching bag. On one occasion, Fan was kicked in the head around fifty times. Spices were rubbed into Fan's wounds, her legs and feet were burned with candle wax and hot plastic (specifically so she couldn't walk), she was forced to consume human feces and urine, and she was forced to smile and say she enjoyed the beatings; if she refused, they subjected her to even harsher torture. This treatment eventually lead to traumatic shock and ultimately death.

Fan succumbed to her wounds on 15 April 1999. Some sources claim that she died while her captors were out, while others say she died overnight. Upon returning Fan's body, her captors dismembered  and boiled the remains; her skull was sewed inside of a doll while the rest of the body was discarded. Only her skull, one tooth, and some internal organs were recovered in a plastic bag, after Ah Fong led police to the scene.

TRIAL

After a trial which lasted over six weeks, the three men were convicted of manslaughter, as the jury ruled the remains were not sufficient to show whether Fan was murdered or died from a drug overdose . While the jury could not rule that the men intended to kill Fan, they did determine that had she died as a result of their abuse. Ah Fong testified at the trial in exchange for immunity .

Justice peter nguyen , who sentenced the trio to life in prison with the possibility of parole, stated, "Never in Hong Kong in recent years has a court heard of such cruelty, depravity, callousness, brutality, violence, and viciousness." Psychiatric reports described the three as "remorseless". There would be no review for parole for twenty years, i.e. until 2020.

AFTERMATH

The apartment building, in which the crime took place, was demolished in September 2012 and has been rebuilt as a hotel in 2016.

The publicity around the case resulted in the production and release of films that told the story. Both Human Pork Chop (烹屍之喪盡天良) and there is a secret in my soup  were released in 2001.

hope you enjoyed this, goodbye.