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In 1999, a teenager stumbled into Hong Kong's police department, telling police officers she'd been having nightmares about a woman who had been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. Officers followed the young teenager back to her apartment, apartment number 31 on Grainville Road.
Upon entering the five-bedroom apartment, officers were immediately hit by the scent of decomposition. But the scent wasn't the only thing officers noticed about the place. The entire apartment was filled with Hello Kitty decor. There was Hello Kitties everywhere. The walls, the decorations, even the furniture was Hello Kitty.
More disturbing than the decor was what police officers found inside of one of those Hello Kitty dolls. A woman's skull had been sewn inside the head of a Hello Kitty mermaid doll. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 57, The Hello Kitty Murder. ♪
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell.
Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast that covers real, bone-chilling true crime stories with a forensic science twist. Some of the cases have been solved by a little help of forensic science, while others have turned cold. The stories we cover each week send a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.
If you're interested in supporting the show and getting early access to weekly episodes, bonus material, ad-free episodes, merchandise, and more, consider visiting our Patreon page at patreon.com slash Forensic Tales. Another great way you can help support the show is by leaving us a positive rating with a review. Now, let's jump right into this week's story.
Hi everyone, happy February and welcome to this week's episode of Forensic Tales. In case you missed it in last week's episode, we have a bonus episode right now up on our Patreon page. The episode covers the Lisa Montgomery story. For many, many years, Lisa was the only female prisoner on federal death row right here in the U.S.,
And just a couple weeks ago from the time of this recording, she was executed. She became the first person executed in 2021 right here in the US. So that bonus episode is up right now on our Patreon page. If you sign up, you'll get instant access to not only this episode, but you'll also get instant access to all of the other bonus content.
The case we're covering this week was sent into the show by one of our very own listeners. If there's a case or a story that you'd like covered and talked about here on the show, I always love to get your suggestions, and I always try to do my very best to cover it on a future episode.
So if you'd like to submit a case, you can go to our website, ForensicTales.com, or connect with the show on Instagram or Facebook at Forensic Tales. And you can submit your story, and I promise that I will do my very, very best to cover it. I'm really excited to be talking about this week's story with you. It's a case that I had never heard of before a listener sent it in.
And it's a case that is equally fascinating as it is horrifying. And full disclosure, there are a lot of very graphic, very horrifying details about this story. And to be completely honest with you, I've left out a lot of the details because it's just too graphic to even share on the show. We're talking about the case that's been become known as the Hello Kitty murder.
And it's one where the forensics failed. The forensic pathology failed. If the forensic pathologist could have been able to determine the exact cause of death, then this story would have had a completely different outcome even all of these years later. In May of 1999, a young 14-year-old girl made her way into the Hong Kong police station.
The girl opened the front door to the station and slowly walked up to the front desk. The police officer who was assigned working the front desk could noticeably tell that something was really, really wrong with this girl. She looked scared. She looked frightened. She looked like she'd seen a ghost. The Hong Kong police officer asked the girl what was wrong, what she needed police assistance for.
The girl told the police officer she needed help. She needed help from the police. The officer says, okay, but I need to know exactly what's wrong. What do you need the police for? At first, the officer is thinking, okay, maybe this girl is a runaway. She's run away from her parents and now she needs some help.
Or maybe she's lost. Maybe she's on vacation and is completely lost and needs some help finding her mom and dad. But that's not what the girl needed help for. The girl told the police officer that for the past couple weeks, she'd been having nightmares. That her nightmares had been filled with the ghost of a young woman who
The young woman had been bound and gagged with electrical tape. She had nightmares night after night watching this woman be tortured, murdered, and decapitated. The officer behind the front desk is looking around like, did this girl really come all the way down to the police station just to tell us she needs the police because she's been having some nightmares?
The officer's first thought was, okay, this must be a practical joke, that this was a teenage girl simply playing a joke on them just like some other teenagers might do. He even thought maybe she was on drugs. A quick search on the computer revealed that this very girl had a record of being associated with gang members after she ran away from her parents' home just the year before.
So he completely shrugs her off. He tells her, look, girl, I'm sorry you're having nightmares, but there's nothing the police can do about it. Maybe try watching or listening to something happy before you go to bed at night. But get out of here. We've got some real police work to do here that doesn't involve trying to solve your nightmare problems. But the girl continued to stand there.
And after a few minutes of complete silence between her and the officer, she told the police officer that she was the one responsible for killing the woman in her dreams, that she was one of her killers. After several moments of silence, the kind of silence that you could hear a pin drop, the police officer thought that maybe this isn't a practical joke.
that maybe this girl wasn't playing a joke on them after all. Maybe she was telling the truth. So a couple Hong Kong police officers followed the 14-year-old girl back to a flat a couple miles away. After the girl opened the front door to apartment number 31 on Greenville Road to let the police officers inside, officers spotted an oversized Hello Kitty doll
with a decapitated skull of a woman inside of it. The officers quickly realized that this girl's dreams were actual nightmares. Over two decades before that 14-year-old girl walked into the Hong Kong police station in May 1999, Fan Man-Yi was born in 1976 to Chinese parents.
Right before the start of her life, her childhood was troubled. When Fan was just a toddler, her parents abandoned her, and she was forced to grow up in a girl's home in Hong Kong. By the time Fan became a teenager, she was already abusing drugs and alcohol.
With no real guidance in her life, she really had nowhere else to turn. She had no role models, no parent figures around telling her what's acceptable behavior and what isn't. So as a teenager who was left completely unsupervised and practically abandoned at a very young age, she turned to drugs and alcohol. But using drugs and alcohol costs money. They don't come free.
So in order to keep up with her drug and drinking habit, Fan needed to find a way to make some money so she could continue this lifestyle of hers. And that's when she turned to sex work. She became a prostitute. Unfortunately, this is all too common. Many young women who become addicted to drugs often turn to sex work in order to feed their addiction.
Prostitution becomes this quick way to make several hundred dollars, sometimes more, in a single night's work. Then they take the money and turn around and pay their drug dealers. Or sometimes they perform these acts in exchange for the drugs themselves. So Fan started prostituting for drug money when she was just a teenager.
Remember, she's got no parents around, no one really checking in on her, and she found that sex work could support her drug habit. When Fan turned 23 years old, she landed a legitimate job working as a hostess at a local nightclub. At this point in her life, she was starting to get tired of using drugs.
She knew her drug addiction was destroying her life and was starting to look for a way to get out of this lifestyle. So the job at the nightclub became sort of her way out. This was the first time in her entire life that she had a legitimate job and she was just about ready to stop working as a sex worker.
At the age of 23, she was really trying to turn her life around. She wanted something better than the life she was living addicted to drugs. In 1996, things started to look up for Fan, even if it was just for a moment. She was newly married and gave birth to a son. Fan's relationship with her new husband was rocky, to put it lightly.
They were both addicted to drugs, and their neighbors were constantly calling the police reporting domestic abuse from their apartment. But still, her marriage and her son provided some sort of light to Fan's life, no matter how dim that light really was. In early 1997, while Fan was working as a hostess at the nightclub, that's when she met 34-year-old Chan Monlock.
Even though Fan was working at the nightclub, she still held on to her work as a sex worker. She still needed that extra money to not only bring in for her family, but she couldn't stop using drugs. So meeting Chan was convenient. Chan just so happened to be a local pimp and he was a drug dealer.
Chan even had his own group of sex workers who worked for him, and he would pimp the girls out. And this was something that interested Fan. She saw this as an opportunity to get additional clients as a sex worker and also have a drug dealer on speed dial. So quickly after meeting at the nightclub, Fan joined Chan's group of girls. She became one of his sex workers.
But Chan wasn't just a pimp to Fan. He also personally paid her for sex, something that I guess was pretty common within this group. Now, on March 17, 1999, Fan was completely out of money. She was broke.
She had already spent all of her money from her last paycheck at the nightclub. She didn't have any money left from her sex work, and she was desperate. She needed drug money, and she needed it now. That's when she came up with a plan. After Fan visited with Chan for one of their quote, business deals,
Fan waited for Chan to leave the room, and that's when she stole his wallet, containing $2,000 in Chinese currency, which in U.S. dollars at the time equated to just about $2,600. Fan knew that stealing money from her pimp and drug dealer was a really, really risky move. This was really dangerous.
But she was desperate. She was completely broke and she needed her next fix. So when Fan found out that his wallet and cash were missing, he was furious. And he had no question as to who stole it. He knew it was Fan. They had just been together. There was no one else who had access to where his wallet was.
And once Chan found out his wallet was gone and then believed that Fan was the one who stole it, she quickly paid the money back, plus interest. She didn't even deny taking the wallet. She admitted to it. She returned it and even threw in some extra couple hundred bucks. But Chan wasn't happy with just being repaid the money she stole, plus a couple hundred dollars.
He wanted more. He wanted to make Fan pay for what she did. In Chan's mind, Fan hadn't repaid her debt to him. After Fan left that apartment, Chan enlisted the help of 27-year-old Liang Xingqiu, 21-year-old Liang Weilun. Also with them was Chan's 13-year-old girlfriend. Yes, 13.
And their plan was to kidnap Pham from her apartment and prostitute her out until they felt like she had paid off her debt. Even though she had already returned the money that she stole within minutes, she gave Chan back the wallet. But Chan wanted more. And in his mind, she was going to have to work to pay it off. On the night of March 17th, 1999,
Chan, with his two accomplices and his 13-year-old girlfriend, left Chan's five-bedroom apartment and headed towards Fan's apartment. Once they arrived, they kidnapped her and took her back to Chan's. This would be the moment that Fan realized she made the biggest mistake of her life by stealing that cash. Now more than ever, we need to take care of our physical and mental health.
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What exactly happened over the next month to this day remains a mystery. But what we do know is that Chan and his two friends, along with his seriously underage girlfriend, took Fan back to his apartment.
The five-bedroom apartment had mostly been used by Chan for drug and gang-related activities. It wasn't really a legitimate place to live, but one of the unique parts of the apartment was that Hello Kitty decor practically made up the entire place.
I mean, every single part of this huge five-bedroom apartment was covered in all things Hello Kitty. Hello Kitty walls, Hello Kitty furniture, Hello Kitty dolls were everywhere. It was pretty much the only thing inside of that apartment. We all remember Hello Kitty from some part of our lives, right?
I know for me, it was really big when I was a kid. I remember going to the mall with my mom and we would go into the Sanrio store. And what's really weird is that I remember buying those multicolored pens, you know, the ones where at the top there was like 10 different colors and you just slid your thumb down and picked out which color you wanted to use. And I also remember buying gum that they had.
And I also remember that for one of my birthdays, I don't know how old I was, but for one of my birthdays, I got a Hello Kitty phone for my bedroom. It was my first landline phone I had for my room. And I remember being very, very excited about this Hello Kitty phone.
Now, something that I don't think many people know is that even though Hello Kitty was created in Japan, the character itself was actually designed to be a British doll. This was because Japanese people at the time were obsessed with foreign countries and
So Hello Kitty was designed as this British doll, but ultimately, of course, became this signature icon of Japanese culture. And the Hello Kitty phenomenon quickly moved to the United States. It moved just about two years after it was designed in 1976. And by 2018, was worth a whopping $42 billion here.
The Hello Kitty empire is huge, and it was clearly even bigger in Hong Kong during the late 1990s. So back at Chan's apartment, the Hello Kitty apartment, the four of them, high on meth, started to beat Fan. Their plan of simply kidnapping her and prostituting her out was
in exchange for what she did by stealing the wallet, seemed to have escalated, and they started beating her. And when the beatings didn't seem to satisfy them, they began torturing her. They knew their plan of prostituting her out was completely out the window because they had already beaten her so bad. She was completely covered in cuts, bruises, marks all over her body, bruises,
There was no way she'd make it as a sex worker. So they thought, why not just torture her? The three men would do meth, go beat and torture Fan for a while, go back, get a little more high, then come back and continue the beatings. They would often leave the apartment, go to nightclubs, go to bars, go out, come back the next morning, and then beat her.
This went on and on and on, not just for days, but for weeks. Over the next four weeks, so over the course of an entire month, Fan was brutally tortured by these three men, while Chan's 13-year-old girlfriend stood by inside of the apartment.
Even though we don't know all the details of what happened to Fan, but the events we do know are bone-chilling. The men would take fire and hot melted plastic to her bare skin. They kept her tied up where they would take turns raping her. Some of the things they did to her are straight out of the worst horror films and are what nightmares are really made of.
There are things that I can't even describe here, many of which are widely available on the internet if you do a quick Google search. So sometime in mid-April 1999, Fan passed away inside that apartment after about a month of torture.
One night, the three men went out to the nightclub, returned back to the apartment the following morning, and discovered Fan dead. It's entirely unclear what exactly caused her death, what was happening in the moments before she died. And this is something that's going to become the very center of this case. After her death, the three men moved her body into the bathroom.
And full disclosure, this is when things get even more graphic. I'm not going to share every little detail because in my opinion, it's just, it's so horrendous. But once they took her into the bathroom, they knew they needed to get rid of the body. So they took a saw and started to dismember her body.
And the entire process took over 10 hours. The three men then boiled multiple pieces of her body to avoid decomposition. And then they stuck other body pieces in trash bags where they were just taken out with the rest of the trash. Chan ordered his two friends to remove most of Phan's skin first.
and place her muscles and some of her organs inside the refrigerator in the apartment. But the one part of Fan's body that they saved for last was her head. The men boiled her head on the stove in some water and then sewed her skull inside the head of an oversized Hello Kitty mermaid doll. And that's where she remained for the next month.
This is where we get back to May 1999, where the episode began with that 14-year-old girl telling police officers about the nightmares she was having about a woman and how they followed her to the apartment and discovered the Hello Kitty doll containing a human skull. The Hello Kitty doll belonged to Chan.
And the human skull inside Hello Kitty was Fan. And the 14-year-old who turned herself into police was Chan's teenage girlfriend who was there the entire time. Chan, his two accomplices, along with his teenage girlfriend, were all arrested by Hong Kong police.
And pretty quickly after the arrests were made, prosecutors approached Afong, the teenage girlfriend, about giving her complete immunity in the case. They wanted to grant her immunity partially because of her age compared to the rest of them. They were in their 20s, close to 30, and she was just a teenager, 13, 14.
But they also wanted to grant her immunity in the case because they knew that if they granted her complete immunity, she would testify against Chan as well as the other two men involved. Ah Fong was very cooperative with police. After she received immunity in the murder, she told police everything.
She provided them with all the details about the night Fan was kidnapped from her apartment, and she provided the gruesome details about the torture she experienced for over a month before she died. Many of the details that I can't even cover on the show because of how gruesome and how graphic they are, Ah Feng was very important for this investigation.
She was the one eyewitness to everything. She saw it all. Everything seemed to be a pretty open and shut case until the trial got started. After police granted Ah Thong, Chan's teenage girlfriend, complete immunity in Phan's murder, Chan and his two accomplices pled not guilty to all charges and went to trial.
This case became a media sensation, not only in China, but also over here in the States. It was dubbed the Hello Kitty murder. The torture and murder of Fan was one of the most brutal, most heinous crimes Hong Kong had ever seen. Hong Kong, although it be crowded, is a relatively safe place to live.
So when the details about the dubbed Hello Kitty murder came out, the details were really shocking for people. Nobody could really believe something so cruel, so callous could happen to someone. So the murder trial against Chan and his two accomplices began in November 2000.
Over the course of the six-week trial, jurors learned all about fans kidnapping, torture, and ultimate murder. One of the biggest star witnesses for the prosecution was Chan's teenage girlfriend, who was inside the apartment the entire time. And she didn't spare any detail, no matter how gruesome.
She told the jurors all about the things these three men did to the victim and all the details about the great lengths they went to in order to dismember and to dispose of the body, how the process took them over 10 hours to complete.
She even told the jury that when she let police back to the apartment, how they found her head sewn into the Hello Kitty doll and how Phan's organs were still inside of the refrigerator. It seemed like this was a pretty much open and shut type of case, especially after the girlfriend took the stand to testify against all three men. But...
The problem for the prosecution began when the forensic evidence was presented by the forensic pathologist about how Fan died. Now, there wasn't a question that Fan was dead. The question for the forensic pathologist was, how did she die? Now, the cause and manner of death is really important to any murder trial.
Jurors want a forensic pathologist to clearly explain to them what caused a person's death and what the manner of death was. If someone is on trial for stabbing someone to death, a jury wants a forensic pathologist to say yes. The manner of death was homicide and the cause of death was multiple stab wounds.
The manner of death is important. Was this person's death ruled a suicide, homicide, accident? Was it by natural causes? Or is it undetermined and we don't have a manner of death? So at trial, the forensic pathologist wasn't able to clearly define to the jury what Phan's cause of death was.
The manner of death is the determination of how the injury or disease led to death. But the cause of death is the specific injury or disease. For example, manner of death is suicide. Cause of death is a single gunshot wound to the head.
In Fan's case, the forensic pathologist couldn't provide enough evidence as to what Fan's exact cause of death was. The jury knows that she died and they know what happened to her after she died based on the girlfriend's testimony. But not knowing what exactly caused her death was, well, problematic.
Not even Chan's girlfriend could testify to what injury Fan may have sustained right before her death. The girlfriend claims that they all left the apartment one night, and when they returned the next morning, Fan was dead. So this left things kind of wide open. Was she technically murdered by one of these men?
Did she somehow manage to take her own life to end the torture? Was she also given drugs and maybe overdosed? No one knew. Even the forensic pathologist assigned to the case didn't know how Fan died. The forensic pathologist didn't even really have a body.
They had some of her organs that were stuffed in the refrigerator. They found a couple of her teeth in the apartment and her skull from the Hello Kitty doll. But that's it. These men had done, I hate to say it, but they had done a pretty good job of disposing every other part of Fan's body that could be helpful when determining a cause or a manner of death.
And what they had just wasn't enough for forensics to really be able to tell what caused Phan's death, except for the fact that, yes, she's dead. So what started as a completely open and shut type murder trial became the exact opposite. Even though police recovered several of Phan's body parts inside the apartment, they
all containing the DNA of all three men, Chan's defense was that Phan died of an overdose inside of the apartment. He claimed that she was doing drugs, just like the rest of them, and that when they left the apartment one night, she must have overdosed on her own, ultimately causing her death.
Now, you and I might sit here, listen to that, and not believe one word coming out of his mouth. But the jury was really troubled by the testimony from the forensic pathologist and all the evidence that was presented about Phan's death, or I should say the lack of such forensic evidence.
So after six weeks of testimony and then deliberation, the jury came back with a verdict that shocked everyone throughout Hong Kong. After the trial concluded, the jury convicted the three men of manslaughter, not murder.
The jury ruled that the remains weren't sufficient evidence to show whether Phan was murdered or if she had died some other way, like a drug overdose, as Chan claimed. The jury explained that they couldn't come to a unanimous decision on whether the men intended to kill Phan or not.
which, if they intended to kill her, would have meant they would be sentenced to a mandatory life sentence and they would have been found guilty of murder, not manslaughter. The jury did, however, believe that Phan did die as a result of these three men's actions, but their intent wasn't to kill her.
which means manslaughter, a much lesser charge, not murder. In December 2000, all three men were sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 20 years. This is a big distinction because had they been convicted of murder, they would have received life sentence with no possibility of parole.
This essentially means that as of 2020, as of last year from the time of recording this episode, these three men are eligible for parole right this very moment. And this decision left many people throughout Hong Kong reeling. They were furious with this jury's verdict and the judge sentences of these men.
The brutality, the callousness, the torture was nothing like they had ever witnessed before. Now, nobody argued that Fan's life was perfect, but everyone agreed that she didn't deserve what happened to her at the hands of these men, and the people of Hong Kong were really let down by forensic science. Because her body had been so brutally mutilated,
And what was left wasn't enough to determine a proper manner or cause of death. The forensic evidence is what led to three men getting off with manslaughter instead of murder. As of 2021, all three men responsible for fans' kidnapping, torture, and murder are all still behind bars.
But because of their sentences, they are currently eligible for parole any time after last year. Now, it's completely unknown whether or not these men will ever be paroled, whether any parole board will ever grant them their freedom back. The Hello Kitty murder has been dubbed one of the most brutal murders Hong Kong has ever seen.
The details of this case, when it comes to the torture that Fan experienced before her murder, many of which couldn't even be described in my show, are exactly what nightmares are made of. You read the details about her torture and murder, and it's unlike anything you'll ever read. You probably won't even be able to sleep that night. It's almost indescribable.
The Hello Kitty murder will be a case that will continue to haunt some of Hong Kong's own residents. After the murder, and well after the trial and conviction, to no surprise, landlords had some trouble finding any new tenants for that apartment where the Hello Kitty murder happened. So the entire building was ultimately demolished in September 2012.
and in 2016 was turned into a hotel. Even though the building itself was demolished, the Hello Kitty murder will forever be remembered as one of Hong Kong's most brutal murders. To check out photos from this week's case, visit our website, ForensicTales.com. If you'd like to share your thoughts and opinions on the Hello Kitty murder,
Connect with us on Instagram and Facebook at Forensic Tales. Thank you so much for joining me this week. Don't forget, if there's a case you'd like covered on Forensic Tales, submit your suggestions on social or on our website, ForensicTales.com. Join me next week for a brand new case, a brand new story.
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