Warning: The text ahead contains written accounts of scenes of violent and sexual nature. Proceed at your own discretion.
The tragic death of prostitute fan man-yee became known as the Hello Kitty Murder and is infamous in the annals of Hong Kong crime history. Read more about what happened in this article...
Tsim Sha Tsui (Sharp Sand Mouth in Cantonese) sits on the very tip of the Kowloon peninsula, overlooking the stunning Victoria Harbour. Chances are, whenever you’ve seen a photograph of Hong Kong Island lit up at night in all its shimmering electric glory, it was taken from the waterfront in Tsim Sha Tsui. The area is one of Hong Kong’s busiest and most tourism-focused areas. It is packed with regal hotels, designer-label shops, history-packed museums and the finest restaurants. Yet like every major metropolis in the world, there is a darker side – an alternate kingdom hidden in plain sight during daylight hours that comes to life once night falls. It is equally a world awash with dollar bills and a certain sense of glamour, but it’s built on criminal enterprise and illegal activities. Its denizens live violent lives or are victimised by associations with underworld figures and their goons. Many find succour in booze or drug addiction, sometimes both. It’s how they get by and how they survive.
Tsim Sha Tsui is a tourist trap packed with art and culture, but it’s also one with a fair share of brothels, karaoke bars (with extras) and traditional massage parlours. Teenaged girls and women are also known to engage in the practice of ‘compensated dating’. The concept ‘enjo-kosai’ hails from Japan, but it’s made its way across the East China Sea to places such as Taiwan and Hong Kong. Girls offer a range of services in exchange for gifts or money: from keeping blokes company while they get drunk in bars, complain about their home lives and drunk-sing on a karaoke machine, to hand jobs and oral sex to full intercourse.
Hong Kong has incredible sensations on offer. The neon lights above the bars and sex joints burn with mesmerising, guilt-free allure. Yet an environment filled with dazzling signage boasting pleasures of the flesh can also be ugly. It is in Tsim Sha Tsui that one of the most sickening misfortunes ever to befall a street walker occurred. What happened to 23-year-old Fan Man-yee is a cautionary tale of initial foolishness (on her part) turned into one of utter derangement. Drugs and drug-induced behaviour played a major part in what occurred, for sure, but that would introduce the idea of mitigating circumstances for outrageous, pitiless bestial acts.
The human capacity for cruelty and malice should never surprise us, but in the case of what was sensationalised in the media as the ‘Hello Kitty murder’, an unfortunately comical-sounding tag, a nightclub hostess and prostitute died at the hands of tweakers who decided to kidnap and torture a vulnerable woman. High as a kite on crystal meth or not, their lack of conscience and remorse astonished and nauseated authority figures. When put on trial, the three Triads involved remained unrepentant about their activities. What they did to Fan Man-yee beggars belief. She was not only abused and humiliated daily, she was dismembered, her skin boiled off, bones crushed to nothing, and her skull, missing the lower jaw, placed in a Hello Kitty mermaid doll. It is this detail from which the name of the case is derived.
In a seven-room apartment on Granville Road, the name place a reminder of Hong Kong’s colonial past, Fan Man-yee endured a catalogue of abuse and torture. It is unknown whether she died of her injuries or took a deliberate overdose to end her suffering with a desperate attempt at finality. The case, when it emerged, thanks to a witness and occasional participant in the saga, shocked the country and became infamous. The Hello Kitty murder served as a key inspiration for several Category III movies, with titles such as Human Pork Chop (2001) and There Is A Secret In My Soup (2002). Reporters even held seances at the property where Fan Manyee died and detailed the conversations in the papers. As in countless cases of murder, respect for the dead and sorrow for the victim is ignored in favour of revelling in the gory details of the crime, as new details emerged from testimony during the court hearings. The demise of Fan Man-yee is appalling and a recounting of it is not for the faint-hearted.
The path to what occurred at Granville Road was laid in 1997, when Fan Man-yee was unfortunate enough to cross paths, in a client capacity, with Triad member Chan Man-lok. He was a flashy guy, by all accounts, wearing faux Armani suits and a knock-off Rolex, who liked to flash the cash. He was a heavy drug user and a big-time Charlie: a recipe for disaster for any woman he took a shine to. Fan Man-yee was working in a brothel called the Romance Villa, and he became a regular john. Also during the years between 1997 and 1999, Fan Man-yee gave birth to a son and played unhappy families with her drug-addicted husband. Their stormy relationship was beset with domestic violence. The details of Fan Man-yee’s biography read like a cross between a Charles Dickens and Hubert Selby Jr novel. She was left to fend for herself as a child, practically raised an orphan, and brought up in a home for girls. By the time she was 15, Fan Man-yee was involved in criminal activities such as petty theft and prostitution.
It wasn’t until 1999, however, that she made a gross error: stealing Chan Man-lok’s wallet and taking more than HK$20,000. Enraged, he ordered the young woman to pay back every cent, but he kept adding interest upon interest, and suddenly the situation was increasingly desperate. He had pretty much rendered her helpless, despite paying back the money she had pocketed, as well as the exorbitant and ludicrous amounts of added interest. On 17 March 1999, he ordered two fellow Triad members to kidnap Fan Man-yee and take her to his place on Granville Road. The two helpers, 27-year-old Leung Shing-cho and 21-year-old Leung Wai-lun, carried out their friend’s bidding without question. Chan Man-lok’s plan was to hold Fan Man-yee captive, work her as a hooker for as long as he wished and keep all the money she made. It was a lesson in complete and systematic humiliation.
With the three drug-addled Triads out of their minds every hour of the day, they thought it would be a fun way to pass the time by doling out beatings to Fan Man-yee. In between these sessions, they’d play video games or go out to clubs and party hard. When they were bored or just feeling the need, they’d go back to their human punch bag. As Fan Man-yee bruised and her wounds scabbed, her captors realised that nobody would be willing to pay for her services. As she was no longer earning, she was therefore deemed surplus to requirements. But they couldn’t let her go, not with what she’d experienced and what she knew about Chan Man-lok’s setup: his apartment was a drug den, a centre for his loansharking operation and full of stolen goods.
How the crime came to be exposed, and the killers of Fan Man-yee brought to justice, is straight out of a horror film. In this revolting and sordid tale was a fourth person. It is largely from this person’s testimony that the Triad trio were arrested, made to stand before The Man and sent down for life. She was the 14-year-old girlfriend of Chan Man-lok, known by the pseudonym Ah Fong. One day, Ah Fong walked into a Hong Kong cop shop and informed officers she was being haunted by a ghost. Ah Fong went on to say how she had suffered nightmares and feelings of guilt over the death of a young woman in her beau’s apartment and that she had participated in torture sessions. Initially baffled by what they were hearing, the police investigated Chan Man-lok’s home on 27 May 1999 and made a gruesome discovery. In exchange for immunity, Ah Fong was willing to testify against her lover and his accomplices.
Fan Man-yee’s ordeal was described as a descent into a living hell, one that outshone any of life’s slings and arrows she’d endured previously. What Ah Fong described makes for tough reading. The sadists beat, burned, tortured and humiliated her. Ah Fong related how they poured chilli oil into Fan Man-yee’s wounds then forced her to smile and laugh her head off, suppressing the agony and withering pain. The trio took things up a notch by taking turns to urinate on her and in her mouth. With that came the next thing: they thought it would be hilarious if Fan Man-yee ate Ah Fong’s excrement. The girl did her business into a plastic box and they fed it to their captive. Again, they forced her to react as if she was having a good time.
There are two theories regarding Fan Man-yee’s demise. The first scenario is that she took an overdose and deliberately committed suicide. The second is that she died from injuries sustained from repeated torture by the men. The jury accepted the three men did not murder Fan Manyee with deliberate intent, but that they caused her death. Judge Peter Nguyen summed up the feelings of the public and media when he stated: “Never throughout the years in Hong Kong has a court heard such cruelty, depravity, callousness, brutality, violence and viciousness, perpetrated by a human being, or human beings, on another human being. Even an animal would not have been maltreated in the same way as that received by the deceased.”
If Fan Man-yee’s experiences in the month before her death were not vicious enough, how the trio disposed of the body was equally macabre, gruesome and unhygienic. They let the corpse rot for a few days, because they were too busy getting wasted on ice and playing video games. Had a sense of collective madness invaded the trio’s thinking? Chan Manlok was clear-headed enough one day to realise that the body would need to be removed. Cops had spooked them earlier on, when they had entered the building on other business (investigating a rape), so he ordered a clean-up operation.
They put Fan Man-yee’s corpse in a bath and began to saw off limbs. Using the kitchen cooker, they boiled down the body parts and the now-severed head. It was said that while they did this, they cooked noodles on the opposite hob and stirred the boiling head and their dinner with the same utensils. So whacked out of their minds, they didn’t care or understand the insanity of what they were doing. Placing the skull of Fan Man-yee inside the Hello Kitty mermaid doll was to be the last ghoulish touch. The beloved fictional character designed by Yuko Shimizu is an international fashion icon and toy. The brand range has incorporated everything from diamond necklaces to theme parks. The association with an infamous crime has not done Hello Kitty any damage, but it did leave the case with a gonzo sobriquet, by which it will forever be known.
