The Hello Kitty Murders
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Due to the nature of this case, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of graphic violence, substance use, assault, kidnapping, torture, and the sexual abuse of minors. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen.

In May of 1999, a girl approaches Hong Kong police about nightmares she's been having. She says she's being haunted by a woman, a young mother who died in a flat on Granville Road in the city's Kowloon district.

The girl is 13 years old. She tells a harrowing story of captivity, torture, and suffering. The inclination is to chalk the report up to an overactive imagination, possibly the result of watching too many horror films. Surely the girl hasn't been visited by the dead. But the officers investigate her claims anyway.

They arrive at the apartment she described, a seven-room flat that looks like a drug den. The general grime of the apartment is contrasted by some unusual decor.

It's covered in Hello Kitty memorabilia, including sheets, curtains, and kitchenware. In the hallway, there's an oversized Hello Kitty mermaid doll. The doll in particular draws officers' attention. It's covered in stains, and for whatever reason, it's been cut open and re-sewn.

I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. You can find us here every Monday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. If you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Stay with us.

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In the mid-90s, Hong Kong is gripped by a sense of uncertainty. The city has existed as a British colony for over a century now, but in 1997 it will be returned to China. The historic handover will mark the end of 156 years of colonial rule over the territory.

The agreement with Britain stipulates that, though Hong Kong will once again be part of mainland China, it will also be unique. It will retain its democratic systems and the liberties they afford, like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly. The slogan becomes "One Country, Two Systems."

The decade preceding the handover is marked by a string of high-profile crimes perpetrated by rival gangs. But nothing quite captures the city's attention, like what has become known as the Hello Kitty murder case.

In May of 1999, a 13-year-old girl approaches Hong Kong police about some horrifying nightmares she's been having. Officials initially dismiss the girl's concerns, but she later makes a shocking confession: She contributed to the woman's death. Before that happens, police follow the girl to an address on Granville Road, where she'd been living with three older men.

Aside from the bizarre presence of some assorted Hello Kitty decorations, the apartment is no place for a 13-year-old. It looks run down and likely reeks of decomposing flesh.

Police quickly learn there are plastic bags filled with human organs scattered about the apartment, including one sitting outside on the building's canopy. It contains a liver, heart, lungs, and intestines. The body itself is missing. Police don't find any limbs or bones, just a single tooth.

It's lying next to an oversized Hello Kitty mermaid doll that has clearly been tampered with. Someone ripped its head open and re-sewed it shut with a human skull inside. The skull is missing its jaw.

Police soon learn the remains belong to a 23-year-old mother who went missing more than a month earlier. Her name is Fan Man Yi. She'd been kidnapped by the three men who lived at the address. Their names are Chan Man Lok, Leung Shing Cho, and Leung Wai Lun. All of them are triads. ♪

The Triads are an ancient secret society that can be traced back to the 18th century during the Qing Dynasty. At the time, China was experiencing unprecedented population growth. Limited resources and policies instituted by the new Qing government made life difficult, especially for the lower class.

Secret societies formed as a means to survive. Members found strength in numbers, banding together for mutual aid and protection. While not all secret societies are criminal enterprises, some turned to crime to get by, robbing, smuggling, and extorting.

The 18th and 19th century triads are sometimes represented as political rebels who banded together to resist the oppressive Qing regime. But during various periods in Chinese history, the triads have done the bidding of rival governments.

In May 1999, the crime scene is more bizarre and more gruesome than anything officers have seen before. Bags of organs, human skulls sewn in dolls, muscles stored in refrigerators. But it's maybe not as shocking as the explanation given to the officials. According to the three triads, they weren't responsible for Phan Mon-Yi's death.

They abducted her. They tortured her. They dismembered her after she died. But they didn't kill her. They came home one night and found her dead. And that's their defense when they go to trial. This episode is brought to you by SimpliSafe.

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In the fall of 2000, the murder trial of Phan Man-Yi begins. This is the story the defense presents. In March 1999, the three triad members spent the night at a club where Phan Man-Yi worked as a host.

There's not much we know about Phan Man Yee's life before this incident, but according to the men, over the course of the night, Man Yee stole several thousand dollars from one of their wallets. That's when they took matters into their own hands.

They abducted Man Yee from the club, brought her back to their apartment, and held her there in restraints. They reportedly planned to force her into sex work until she repaid her debt with interest. But things went off the rails pretty quickly, and they ended up holding her captive for weeks.

By April 15th, it had been more than a month since Man-Yi's abduction. That night, the men left Man-Yi in restraints at the apartment and went out for a night on the town. When they came home from partying, they said they found her completely unresponsive, dead from an apparent self-induced drug overdose.

Later, when police visited another apartment in their building to investigate an unrelated crime, they panicked. They spent the next 10 hours dismembering her body and then tried to hide the evidence. Any remains police didn't find during their raid, they'd dumped in trash bins around the neighborhood.

It's clear the story is incriminating. It exposes the men for having committed serious crimes, but it also challenges any charge of murder. And because there's no body for officials to examine, a definitive cause of death can't be determined. So the outcome of the trial ultimately rests on the testimony of those involved.

Most significantly, that includes the only known eyewitness to the events: the 13-year-old girl who first approached police about Man Yi's death a year prior. Prosecutors offer her immunity in exchange for her cooperation and testimony. Due to her age, we'll use a pseudonym others have used in the past: Ah Phong.

In conversations with police, Ah Fong says she lived with the three men in the flat on Granville Road. She referred to one of them, 34-year-old Chan Mon Lok, as her boyfriend. But given that the age of consent in Hong Kong is 16, she was a victim of sexual abuse and possibly trafficking as well.

At trial, the 13-year-old sheds light on some of what happened in the apartment during the month Man-Yi was kept prisoner, connecting the dots between her abduction and the gruesome crime scene police walked into. And the picture she paints of the journey is just as disturbing as the ending.

The three triads ruthlessly tortured Man Yi. Ah Feng admits that she would sometimes join in. These torture sessions included beating her with iron bars, burning the soles of her feet, pouring hot oil on her wounds, and restraining her with electrical wires.

Ah Phong says the men would sometimes laugh as they tortured her and afterwards go play video games as if nothing happened. And that kind of lack of regard for Man Yi's humanity continued after her death. At some point, one of the men apparently boiled body parts in a pot on the stove while cooking noodles in another and stirred both with the same spoon.

The testimony is bone-chilling. Hong Kong had seen triad violence before, but never anything quite so disturbing.

South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's major English-language newspaper, spoke to former Chief Superintendent Barry Smith. Smith worked in the Hong Kong Police Special Duties Unit in the 90s. For him, triad violence in the 90s could be directly attributed to loopholes in the system. China and Britain didn't have an extradition agreement when it came to Hong Kong.

This loophole allowed criminals to move freely across borders between mainland China and Hong Kong, bringing drugs, guns, and other trafficked items with them. Hong Kong cinema also glorified the triads. Gangster films became popular, and some triad leaders even made their own movies, sometimes having to strong-arm directors and actors into taking part.

With colorful aliases like "Broken Tooth," "Big Spender," and "Teeth Dog," Triad members were infamous for their exploits. They publicly flaunted their flashy cars and glamorous lifestyles. Chief Barry Smith told the South China Morning Post that "young girls get attracted to the bad Triad guys. They become the girlfriend, and then they get involved with drugs, and so the cycle goes."

This seems to have been the case with Ah Phong. The young teenager had run away from home and fallen in with Chan. He promised her a home and security. Instead, he took advantage of her. Some sources claim Chan coerced Ah Phong into sex work and acted as her pimp. During her testimony, Ah Phong reveals she would sometimes watch porn with her flatmates and that they would often take drugs together.

The use of drugs becomes crucial to the defense's case. They claim that all of the inhabitants of the apartment, including Man Yi, seriously misused methamphetamines.

Chronic meth use can create irrationally high levels of irritability and paranoia. According to reporting by the South China Morning Post, meth use is the only way to make sense of the brutality that happened inside that Granville Road apartment. The only real explanation for how and why the defendant's actions could have spiraled so completely out of control.

Drug use also becomes central to the defense's case for innocence. They argue that because no one can prove Man Yi died as a result of torture and not from an overdose, the three triads can't be found guilty of murder beyond a reasonable doubt. In the end, the jury agrees with them. They dismiss the murder charge.

Instead, they find the defendants guilty of three other crimes. First, unlawful imprisonment. Second, preventing a lawful burial. And third, manslaughter. Meaning the jury believed the men's actions contributed to Man Yee's death, but not that they killed her directly.

Officials make it clear the decision doesn't detract from the severity of the three men's crimes. Psychiatric reports describe them as being remorseless. The judge addresses them, saying, quote, Never in Hong Kong in recent years has a court heard such cruelty, depravity, callousness, brutality, violence, and viciousness.

The public is entitled to protection from people such as you. He sentences all three to life in prison. But ultimately, the jury's decision means the men could spend as little as 20 years behind bars. Per Hong Kong law, that's when they'll be eligible for parole. Unless, of course, they win on appeal first.

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The crimes perpetrated by the so-called "Hello Kitty" killers shook Hong Kong. A cause of death could never be determined for the victim, Phan Man Yee. Due to the state of her remains, there was no body for medical professionals to examine. And in the spring of 2003, that fact becomes central to a new trial, when the three so-called "Hello Kitty" killers appear before a court of appeals.

Their defense is simple: They should never have been charged with manslaughter in the first place. How could a jury decide their actions contributed to Man Yi's death when no one could say how she died in the first place?

Once again, drug use plays a pivotal role in the appeal. The defense claims that on the night she died, Man Yee was seen picking up what looked like sugar crystals from the apartment floor, the implication being she had access to meth that could have caused an overdose. It's the first of many appeals brought by the Hello Kitty killers. But as of this recording, all have been unsuccessful, except one.

Leung Shing-chou ultimately wins a case on appeal. He's released from prison in 2011 after serving only 11 years of his original sentence. He's later arrested and imprisoned again for an unrelated crime involving the indecent assault of a minor, proving that maybe the original judge was right. The public deserved protection from men like him.

As the Washington Post pointed out in 2000, if Man Yi's abductors committed their crimes just a few miles away in mainland China, the outcome would have been completely different. The Hello Kitty killers would have been subject to the death penalty and likely would have been, quote, "speedily executed," which would have been true even if they committed lesser crimes.

So, in no small way, this case could have only played out the way it did in Hong Kong during a chaotic transition period. And over time, the triad's relationship to Hong Kong and to mainland China has continued to evolve.

After the handover in 1997, officials in Hong Kong cracked down on the Triad's illegal activities. But as that was happening, mainland officials reached out to them expressing a desire to present a united front. The idea was, so long as the Triads remained patriotic and loyal to mainland authorities, they could continue operation.

In some cases, mainland authorities even provided members with legitimate, non-illegal business opportunities as a way to support themselves. As a result, triad criminal activity has gone down since 1997. Leaders moved their gambling dens to Macau, where they could operate legally. Others pivoted to focus on other ventures like restaurants, tea houses, and transportation companies.

And as the triads have evolved, they've continued to make headlines in surprising ways. In February 2014, around 10 a.m., Kevin Lau Chun Toh steps out of his car in the Sai Wan Ho neighborhood of Hong Kong and is suddenly attacked. His assailant stabs him once in the back and twice in his legs before jumping on the back of a motorcycle driven by an accomplice and fleeing the scene.

The injuries leave Lau in critical condition.

According to reporting by The Guardian, the police called the assault a "classic triad hit." Lau had recently been let go as the chief editor of a Hong Kong-based newspaper, and his colleagues suspected the move was meant to "muzzle independent-thinking journalists." His removal had sparked protests in the city, led by those who feared the Chinese Communist Party was trying to silence a free press.

Lau's attackers were eventually identified and claimed they'd been paid 100,000 Hong Kong dollars to, as they put it, "teach Lau a lesson."

Lau's assault was one in a string of recent attacks on Chinese journalists. A year prior, someone had driven a car through the front gates of media executive Jimmy Lai's home. Whoever it was left behind two items in Lai's driveway, a machete and an axe, presumably as a warning sign.

A week later, masked men intercepted a delivery van and set fire to bundles of newspapers his company published. The Foreign Correspondents Club released a statement saying, "Hong Kong's reputation as a free and international city will suffer if such crimes go unsolved and unpunished." But similar attacks have continued.

Gangs of men with suspected ties to triad groups assault pro-democracy protesters during the Umbrella Movement at the end of 2014. They sought more transparent and fair elections, free from government intervention.

In the spring and summer of 2019, hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy activists flood Hong Kong again in what quickly becomes the largest demonstrations the city has ever seen. This time, they come out to protest a new bill proposed by China that would effectively end the "one country, two system" agreement. As an expression of peaceful dissent, demonstrators wear black.

On the evening of July 21st, many stand at Yuen Long Railroad Station waiting for a ride home. Seemingly out of nowhere, around 10:45 p.m., dozens of men dressed in white and wearing surgical masks flood the terminal. The mob carries iron bars, clubs, and poles and begins attacking the commuters. Their primary targets are the protesters dressed in black.

but their violence seems indiscriminate. Young, old, pregnant, all fall victim to the attacks, even as they beg for mercy. Dozens of calls are placed to authorities, but police reportedly don't arrive in full force until 35 minutes after the first call. And by the time they do, the mob has already dispersed.

In total, 45 people are injured. 14 need medical attention. That includes pro-democracy lawmaker Lam Chook Ting, who requires 18 stitches for cuts to his face.

To him and many others, the timing of the authorities' response feels convenient, like the police allowed the attack to happen. He tells the New York Times, quote, "...the police and the triads now rule Yuan Long together."

Similar sentiments have been echoed since. But it's not just the police who've been accused of collusion. As we mentioned, the Chinese government made a point to forge relationships with the triads beginning in the 90s. Some academics believe the goal was to tighten China's sovereignty over Hong Kong. But others go even further.

suggesting that the triads have essentially become henchmen for the Chinese Communist Party, deployed whenever they want to quash or intimidate their opposition.

Regardless of where the truth lies, force isn't the only tool out there. Hong Kong police quashed the protest movement in 2020 and passed the new legislation demonstrators hoped to kill. The new law has led to the arrest of 47 pro-democracy leaders, including activists, academics, politicians and journalists, accusing them of conspiracy to commit subversion.

This included Lam Chook Ting, the lawmaker who was beaten in the Yuen Long train station attack. Many experienced lengthy, years-long detentions without trial. 31 ended up pleading guilty and in May of 2024, another 14 were found guilty.

As of this recording, most still await sentencing. They face anywhere from three months to life in prison, which, at the end of the day, is more than what at least one of the Hello Kitty killers served after abducting Fan Man Yi, ruthlessly torturing her for weeks, and dismembering her body until pretty much all that was left to bury was...

A skull. Thanks for tuning in to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. We'll be back Monday with another episode. To learn more about this case, we recommend checking out reporting done by the South China Morning Post, as well as Peng Wang and Sharon Ingrid Kwok's 2023 article on the triads for Cambridge University Press. Among the many sources we used for this episode, we found them extremely helpful to our research.

Stay safe out there. This episode was written and researched by Connor Sampson, edited by TTU, fact-checked by Laurie Siegel, and sound designed by Alex Button. Our head of programming is Julian Boirot. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Vanessa Richardson.

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