Hello Kitty Murder

Fan Man-yee was twenty-three, a Hong Kong nightclub hostess raised in an orphanage, with a baby son at home. Early in 1999 she took about four thousand Hong Kong dollars from Chan Man-lok, thirty-three, a Wo Shing Wo triad member who worked as a cashier at her club. She repaid it; he said the debt had grown far beyond that.

On March 17, 1999, on Chan’s orders, two of his followers, Leung Shing-cho, twenty-six, and Leung Wai-lun, nineteen, took her from her home to a flat at 31 Granville Road in Tsim Sha Tsui. She was held there about a month, beaten and burned almost daily, and died around April 14. The men dismembered her, boiled her skull and sewed it inside a Hello Kitty doll, then scattered the rest through nearby rubbish bins.

A fourteen-year-old girl who had been in the flat throughout could not sleep and went to police on May 24, 1999. Officers found the doll. The trial opened in October 2000, and on December 7 a jury convicted all three of manslaughter rather than murder, unable to find that they had meant to kill her. All three were sentenced to life; Leung Shing-cho’s conviction was later quashed, and he was given eighteen years after pleading guilty at a 2004 retrial.