Hello Kitty Murder in Hong Kong

Do you know that while Hello Kitty is a cute cartoon character, it reminds Hongkongers of one of the most shocking and gruesome murder cases in the city?

Yup, I am talking about the Hello Kitty Murder.

If you intend to read on, I hope you have some strong stomachs.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

The murder took place in 1999. The victim, Fan Man Yee, was a 23-year-old night club hostess. What led her to her miserable end was her monetary dispute over HK$20,000 (~US$2,500) with loan shark Chan Man Lok.

After Fan paying the money, Chan was not satisfied and demanded more. So Chan ordered his two accomplices, Leung Shing Cho and Leung Wai Lun to kidnap Fan and held her in his apartment in Tsim Sha Tsui. Chan was not only a loan shark, but also a pimp. So Chan’s original plan was to make Fan work as a prostitute and pay back the money she no longer owed him.

But things went wrong. Chan and his co were drug addicts. When they were high on drugs, they would torture Fan for fun. They bet her with metal bars, burnt her with cigarettes, forced her to eat feces and drink piss…All of these inhumane things were nothing more than entertaining games to them.

After nearly a month of torture, poor Fan finally died from the abuse. In order to rid of Fan’s body, Chan and his co dismembered Fan, boiled her body parts, put her organs into bags and hide her skull inside a huge Hello Kitty doll! Yuck…The rest of Fan’s body could not be found, and the case might have never been revealed if Leung Wai Lun’s girlfriend didn’t turn herself in out of guilt.

The judge was horrified with the case and commented “even an animal would not have been maltreated in the same way as that received by the deceased”. Since most of Fan’s remains could not be found, police could not identify exactly how she died and it was suggested the trio did not kill her with intent (under the effect of drugs), the three men were only convicted of manslaughter. They were still sentenced to life imprisonment, though.

Hello Kitty doesn’t look so adorable anymore, does it?
I hope Sanrio won’t sue me for saying this.