The Hello Kitty murder case: Poor Fan Man-yee was abducted, raped and tortured for a month before she died!

The Hello Kitty Murder was a 1999 homicide case in Hong Kong, where a 23-year-old nightclub hostess named Fan Man-yee was abducted by three triads after stealing a wallet, then held in a flat in the crowded Tsim Sha Tsui area of Kowloon and tortured for more than a month before she died.

Fan was forced to drink urine, eat feces, beaten and burned severely in her ordeal. After her death, the defendants dismembered her body, then cooked in pots and stuffed her half-cooked head in a mermaid shaped Hello Kitty doll.

The Hello Kitty murder case

The story goes that, in early 1997, Fan Man-yee met Chan Man-lok, a 34-year-old socialite. The two met at the nightclub and discovered they had something in common. Fan Man-yee was a prostitute and a drug addict and Chan Man-Lok was a pimp and a drug dealer. Before long, Fan was a regular addition to Chan Man-lok’s group, in addition to his henchmen.

Later in 1997, desperate for money and drugs, Fan stole Chan’s wallet and attempted to make off with the HK$4,000 inside it. She hadn’t realized that Chan Man-lok was the last person she should have stolen from.

After Chan found out her, he ordered the second defendant Leung Shing-cho and the third defendant Leung Wai-lun to recover debts from Fan Man-yee.

In order to pay off the debts, Fan continued to pick up guests after pregnancy. But the three defendants increased their interest continuously. Fan was annoyed by the inability to repay. Then Chan hatched a plan to make her work as a prostitute until she’d repaid the money including interest.

Fan Man-yee was abducted

On March 17, 1999, following the order of Chan, Leung Shing-cho and Leung Wai-lun abducted Fan from a unit in Fuyao Building, Liyao Village, Kwai Chung, and took her to his third-floor flat on Granville Road. Things got quickly out of hand and, high on methamphetamine, the trio began their protracted torture.

Fan was tortured for a month before she died

In the room, Leung Wai-lun questioned why Fan did not repay the money and why she refused to call back, kicking her more than 50 times. The three defendants sealed the glass window of the unit with wooden planks so that no one can know what the evils they were doing there.

Within days the torture took on the most heinous form. They splashed chilli oil into the victim’s mouth and applied to the wounds. They forced her to swallow feces and drink their urine. One day, the defendants dropped a melted plastic straw on her lap and ordered the victim to laugh. The victim went into convulsions repeatedly.

The defendant then tied the victim’s hands tightly with electric wires for several hours, and then beat her with steel pipes. A few weeks later, Fan was finally unable to support her and fell into coma.

While in coma, the defendant once burned her feet with a lighter and asked her to move her body. Forensic reports showed Fan was subsequently ingesting methamphetamine, a potent central nervous system (CNS) stimulant that is mainly used as a recreational drug for pleasure, by modifying the perceptions, feelings, and emotions of the user.

It has been estimated that Fan Man-yee died in mid-April 1999. When she died, his face was swollen, his gums were badly bleeding, and his body was covered with blisters, wounds and pus.

Playing with fan’s corpse

When the defendants discovered that Fan Man-yee was dead, they decided to dismember her corpse. They first moved the body to the bathtub to bleed, sawed the bones, took out the intestines and contained it in a plastic bag, cooked other parts with hot water in the bathroom. Then they put all the dismembered parts in multiple plastic bags and dumped at the garbage station.

Chan also used the kerosene stove and pot to cook Fan’s head in the room. In a hurry, they dumped her internal organs in the house and dropped them to the canopy of the building.

They cut a mermaid-shaped Hello Kitty doll and took out some cotton to stuff the half-cooked skull in it. While pulling out the semi-dissolved hair, Chan said, “Oh, please don’t be so depressed, I will help you look good! Don’t move, I’ll help you dress up!”

Afterwards, Chan also ordered the other defendants to feed the cooked meat to the dogs, but whether the instruction was implemented or not, it has not been verified. It is unimaginable that humans can go beyond the limits of atrocity in such way.

A bizarre confession!

Though the torture of Fan Man-yee was horrifying enough, perhaps more horrifying is the tale of the 13-year-old girl who reported Fan’s murder to the police one month later, in May 1999. Not only was she responsible for turning the torturers in, but she was one herself.

Known only as “Ah Fong,” likely a pseudonym given to her by the Hong Kong courts, the 14-year-old girl was a girlfriend of Chan Man-Lok’s, though “girlfriend” was probably a loose term. In all likelihood, the girl was another one of his prostitutes.

At one point, when Ah Fong was visiting the torturous trio in Chan Man-lok’s apartment, she witnessed Man-lok kick Man-yee 50 times in the head. Ah Fong then joined in, hitting Fan in the head.

Following Fan’s death, Ah Fong started to have nightmares about the sadistic torture she and the three gang members had inflicted upon the young mother.

The 14-year-old also became convinced Fan’s restless spirit was haunting her, and she felt the only way she could free herself from her ghost was to confess to the police. Ah Fong went to a Hong Kong police station and told the authorities about Fan’s month of suffering and her resulting death.

Initially, officials found the teenager’s account so disturbing and unbelievable, they nearly dismissed Ah Fong’s story as a bizarre fantasy. However, they decided to search the flat, which the three men had recently vacated, and they discovered a number of pieces of disturbing evidence that corroborated the teenager’s horrifying allegations.

Though the details of the extent of the torture inflicted by Ah Fong were not released, as part of her plea deal, they were no doubt extensive. She detailed the indescribable torture that the three men put Fan Man-yee through. When asked about them, she replied, “I had a feeling it was for fun.”

The men weren’t convicted of murder!

All three defendants were immediately arrested and sent for the prosecution and criminal trials. Ah Fong received immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony against her boyfriend and his two accomplices. While all three men denied killing Fan, during their six-week trial, they admitted to preventing the young mother from receiving a lawful burial, a criminal charge in Hong Kong.

Chan and Wai-Lun both pleaded guilty to false imprisonment, a charge Shing-cho denied, and throughout their trial, the three men accused one another of torturing Fan while minimizing their own roles in the horrific abuse she endured over the last month of her life.

The defence also tried to convince the jury Fan may have died as a result of a drug overdose. While Fan had been a user of methamphetamines prior to becoming pregnant with her son, her husband testified she had stopped using drugs years earlier when she found out she was pregnant.

Because of the way in which the three men disposed of Fan’s body, medical authorities were unable to determine exactly how the young mother died, so a jury refused to find them guilty of murder. Instead, the trio was convicted of manslaughter in December 2000, and they were sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after just 20 years.

Sentencing the three men to life imprisonment, Justice Peter Nguyen said: “Never in Hong Kong in recent years has a court heard of such cruelty, depravity, callousness, brutality, violence and viciousness.”

The hauntings of Hello Kitty Murder case

The heinous tortures and killing methods, in this case, were brutal and received widespread attention from the Hong Kong society and extensive media reports. Following the incident, many unusual incidents, that were regarded as supernatural by the public, occurred.

In 1999, before the case was revealed, the female inspector Feng Xiaoyan of the Tsim Sha Tsui military uniform patrol had received a report from the public, alleging that there was a bad odour from the unit where the incident occurred. Feng Xiaoyan visited the scene and crossed the abandoned corridor but didn’t find anything odd. Later in September 2000, he burned charcoal at his residence, praying for the peace of Fan’s soul.

The forensic doctor in charge of the case revealed that when the court presented evidence including the skull of deceased Fan, Hello Kitty doll, clay pot for cooking Fan’s corpse, etc., the entire court was full of corpse smell, no matter where the evidence was submitted.

At the trial, when the defence lawyer said that the defendants only handled the body illegally, saying that there is no need to talk about it, the lights in the courtroom flashed a lot, and all the people present were stunned.

The judge Ruan Yundao said that he had witnessed countless cases, but never encountered such unusual events like in this case, and the defendant Leung Shing-Cho once told the detention center guards that all the women he saw in the courtroom were looking like same as the deceased Fan Man-yee.

An unusual incident occurred in the building where the murder occurred. A woman, who even did not know about this murder in the building, rented a flat on the 4th floor with one of her friends. She and her female friend said that they often heard women crying at night. The unit was not inhabited, but the women could hear crying. They also experienced ghostly touch while sleeping.

They later revealed that, before them, the 4th-floor guests who had helped the police to identify the victim, Mr. Huang, his wife and children encountered a female ghost while they were on the stairs of the building. Therefore, that scared family moved to another place as soon as possible.

Some readers told the media that staff of the hair salon on the building’s first and second floors had found Hello Kitty dolls of unknown origin in the morning. When they looked at the CCTV footage, they found that after the door was closed at night, there was a shadow behind the person in charge of the salon, while he was walking.

A renowned Hong Kong lady said that during her pastime in the bar of Granville Road, she saw a woman’s head staring at her in the unit opposite the building, and only later knew that it was the unit where the Hello Kitty Murder case took place.

The apartment building was demolished

After the widespread publicity Fan’s torture and death received in Hong Kong, no one wanted to buy or rent the apartment where she endured horrific abuse. Consequently, the flat sat empty for years, and eventually people decided they didn’t want to live in any of the other apartments in the building on Granville Road either.

After purchasing the vacant apartment building, which many people believed to be haunted by the spirit of Fan, an investor demolished the building in 2012.

After reading about the Hello Kitty Murder Case, read another similar true crime story: Junko Furuta, the girl who was raped, tortured and murdered in 41 days of her terrible ordeal!