185. Fan Man-yee: Hidden Inside Hello Kitty in Hong Kong

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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(00:24):
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Speaker 2 (00:38):
Hello and welcome to Revere True Crime. I'm your host page.
Hong Kong is known for its bright lights, fast pace,
and being mostly safe for a global city and financial hub.
That's part of why this case took over the headlines

(00:59):
in nineteen ninety nine and into the year two thousand.
It wasn't just the brutality of what happened, but also
where it happened. A very packed, modern city with one
of the lowest homicide rates in the world. People were

(01:19):
stunned that something so depraved had happened right under their noses.
Some stories are so brutal, so beyond our comprehension, that
even investigators who are used to horrible crime scenes and
mind boggling cases struggle to speak of. There are certain

(01:43):
cases that leave a mark not only on the pages
of history, but inside of our minds. This is one
of those stories. The name Fan man Ye may not
be known to every one around the world, but in
Hong Kong, it's connected with a crime so horrific the

(02:06):
media had a hard time finding a way to describe it,
but eventually they landed on something that made it all
the more haunting. The Hello Kitty Murder, Let's get into it.
Fan man Ye was a twenty three year old mother.

(02:27):
She was a young woman who had slipped through society's cracks.
She lived a life that was already the product of
really hard times and survival. Fan had been overlooked most
of her life. Born in Shinjin in nineteen seventy six,

(02:48):
Fan May spent some of her years in a modest
home with her mother and aunt. Fan was quiet, studious,
and smart enough to pursue further a education, but after
finishing Form six, she stepped into the workforce as a
retail sales clerk. Things changed when her mother remarried and

(03:11):
Fan lost touch with the secure life she'd known. She
was put into an orphanage and left offend for herself. There,
the kids were passed around and neglected. At just fifteen
years old, Fan was pushed out of the orphanage she'd
been placed in due to so many younger children coming in.

(03:36):
With no one to rely on, she became homeless and
drifted into a world of poverty, addiction, and survival. She
started using drugs and eventually turned to street prostitution. By
the age of twenty one, she had graduated from street

(03:56):
sex work to a brothel. She was working at a
place known as Romance Villa in sham Shu Pu. In
nineteen ninety six, Fan met Ing she Yuen, a man
she knew from that world who was also struggling with addiction.

(04:17):
Eventually they got married and in March of nineteen ninety seven,
they moved into a small flat and lie Yu estate
with Ng's mother, hoping to build a family. Their son
was born in November of nineteen ninety eight, just as
Fan began a determined effort to change her life. She

(04:40):
left drugs and sex work behind and started working, by
all accounts, as a hostess at Empress Karaoke club. This
wasn't a safe job, but it offered her a chance,
a way to earn money while trying to give her
son a better future. Stabili was still an issue in

(05:01):
her marriage and home life. Neighbors reported frequent fights between
Fan and her husband, and her life was still marked
by a financial struggle fueled by a lingering addiction and
a cycle she couldn't fully escape no matter how hard
she tried. Her son brought her peace, and she wanted

(05:25):
to make a better life for him and herself. Desperate
and struggling with addiction, Fan made a decision that would
cost her everything. She stole one of her customer's wallets.
It was in the spring of nineteen ninety nine when

(05:45):
Fan stole four thousand Hong Kong dollars from thirty three
year old Chan Manlock, which was roughly five hundred US dollars.
Triads are organized crime group, and Chan was a Wo
Shing Woe triad member. He was also one of fans

(06:07):
regular customers who saw her not as a person but
as someone who owed him. Chan had a history of
troubling behavior, such as drug trafficking convictions and ties to
organized crime. She tried to make it right, returning the
money along with an extra ten thousand Hong Kong dollars

(06:32):
in quote unquote interest, but Chan demanded more after she
couldn't pay the additional sixteen thousand Hong Kong dollars that
he wanted. Events spiraled into absolute horror after fans desperate
attempt to settle the debt, the situation turned dark. He

(06:57):
hired two young men, Lung Shing Cho, who was twenty
seven and Leong way Lun, who was twenty one. Since
they both have the same first names, I will be
using their last names going forward. Both of them worked
at a retail store near Granville Road. And there was

(07:18):
someone else in chans circle, a fourteen year old girl
named Lio Ming Fong, known as a Pong. She was
groomed into Chan's world and she was the so called
girlfriend of the youngest three men, wey Lun. She was
called his girlfriend, but of course she was a groomed,

(07:42):
preyed upon child and a victim too. Chan's apartment was
on the third floor of number thirty one Granville Road.
This was a space decorated entirely in Hello Kitty, across kitchenware,
curtains and bedding, with porn, meth and video games scattered alongside.

(08:08):
What came next was a month long nightmare that had
nothing to do with justice or repayment. It was about power,
domination and brutality beyond the imagination. The original plan was
to force Fan back into prostitution until she paid off

(08:31):
her so called debt, but when they got into that
apartment everything changed. Witness testimony and court records tell a
story of methodical torture. From the first night, Fan was
stomped on fifty times, with Chan's associates taking turns. This

(08:53):
torture was carried out behind the closed doors of Chan's
run down apartment. What was done to Fan cannot be
summed up in headlines, no matter how sensational they tried
to be. There was no news alert, missing person, bulletin
or outcry from the public. She was a young mother

(09:17):
from the outskirts, and for two long women like Fan
have disappeared in total silence. They kept Fan imprisoned in
Chan's apartment for over a month, all the while they
were high as kites on drugs, and turned her imprisonment
into a routine of extreme torment. Psychiatric evaluations later described

(09:43):
them as remorseless and cold, having no empathy. For thirty days,
they unleashed that wickedness on Fan I Fong, the fourteen
year old girl, with later test of about one night
early on, when shing Cho kicked Fan repeatedly while Afong

(10:07):
watched and even praised it by joining in with a
slap that was instigated by the others. Fan was beaten
with metal bars and burned with metaled plastic and candlewax
all over her body, even the soles of her feet.
They poured chili oil into her wounds and eyes. At times,

(10:33):
they strung her up to the ceiling by her wrists
with electrical wire, beating her with metal bars and wooden blocks,
using her as their punching bag. They urinated on her
and made her eat feces while they laughed. They burned
her skin and raped her. They would leave her barely

(10:55):
conscious as they went into the next room to play
video games, ignoring her cries of pain. The cruelty was relentless.
Their non stop violence became their entertainment. As time passed,
there were so many open wounds and infection was spreading.

(11:18):
The men's fear that Fan might die or that someone
might notice grew, but it wasn't enough to make them
stop by mid April, Fan succumbed to the torture that
she suffered in that apartment between April fourteenth and fifteenth.
Authorities couldn't say if it was the savage beatings or

(11:41):
the drugs, but her being in and out of consciousness,
the fractures, the burns, all of it pointed to the
torture as the driving force. Once she was deceased, they
began disposing of her body. They dismembered her with a
saw in the bathtub, boiled her body parts on the stove,

(12:05):
sometimes even alongside their own food, using the same utensils.
They got rid of most of her remains by putting
them in garbage bags and throwing them in dumpsters across
Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, but kept her skull. Fan's
skull was boiled down and then sewn inside a Hello

(12:28):
Kitty Mermaid plush. Then they tucked it away inside the
apartment's refrigerator. All of this went unseen and unheard by neighbors,
and police had no idea until May twenty fourth, when
the guilt began to be weigh too much for a

(12:48):
fourteen year old little girl's mind to bear. I Fong
walked into a Hong Kong police station and told them
what she had seen. She couldn't hold it in anymore
because she said she was being followed not by a person,
but by Fan Manny's ghost. At first, they didn't believe her.

(13:15):
She told them of a young woman tied with electrical wires,
a mother tortured until she stopped moving. The police hesitated
because she was a child and her story sounded like
something out of a horror movie. She said the woman's
spirit was visiting her in her dreams, showing her the pain,

(13:38):
the suffering, and the torture that she experienced in that
flat on Granville Road in the Kowloon district. She told
police it wasn't just something she saw, it was something
she had taken part in. That's when the police started
taking her a little more seriously. She said she her

(14:01):
quote unquote boyfriend and two of his friends had held
a woman captive in a third floor apartment and tortured
her until she died. It wasn't a robbery gone wrong
or a quick, impulsive act of violence. It was intentional.
The girl later said, quote, I had a feeling it

(14:25):
was for fun. Ifong was known to have ties to triads.
Way Lun, the young man who groomed her, was one
of them. The officers chalked it up to attention seeking
at first, maybe she was high or mentally ill. However,

(14:46):
once the police thought about it, they decided to send
three officers to the flat just to check it out.
They didn't expect to find what they did. When they
walked through the door, they were hit with that smell,
the unmistakable smell of rotting flesh on the bathtub. There

(15:09):
were traces of human degradation on the stools and kitchen counter,
traces of cooking implements mingling with blood. It was a
place of evil that was so deep even experienced detectives
were shaken. Some of Fan's dismembered parts were found in

(15:31):
plastic bags and dumpsters across several towns, but her skull
was still there and was eventually used as evidence in
the trial. Kept at the Kowlouon Public Mortuary during appeals,
and on March twenty six, two thousand and four, it

(15:52):
was released to her birth family before being cremated. The
three men, Chan, Shing Cho, and Way Lun were eventually arrested.
At the time of Chan's capture, he was living in
Shek Lai estate with his wife and their newborn child.

(16:13):
She was briefly questioned and released, not charged. Way Lun
actually evaded arrest for nine months, sneaking across the border
to Juan she. He was caught there in mid February
of two thousand and extradited just days later. The landlords

(16:35):
that own the apartment had no connection to the crime.
The trial began on October twentieth of two thousand and
For six weeks, the prosecution explained the shreds of evidence,
such as testimonies, dismembered remains, and the voice of a
haunted teenager to piece together the horror of what happened

(16:58):
behind those closed doors. Fan Manne's life was cruelly taken
from this world, her humanity nearly forgotten. A Pong was
offered immunity in exchange for her testimony since she was
a miner. During the trial, there were conflicting stories. The

(17:22):
defense argued that Fan had overdosed on methamphetamine, and they
pointed to the lack of a full body as proof.
The prosecution could not establish intent to kill. The men
admitted to binding Fan and dismembering her body, but denied
that any of them actually caused her death. However, the

(17:47):
jury sided with this that, however it happened, Fan died
as a result of their actions. In the days that followed,
reporters described a tense, almost surreal scene. You could hear
the sobs in the gallery, gasps when psychiatric findings were read,

(18:09):
and moments of stunned silence. At the end of the year,
the ape man one woman jury delivered their verdict guilty
of manslaughter, not murder, because there was no solid evidence
of intent to kill, but it was clear that Fan

(18:29):
did not simply die, She was killed by abuse. The
judge did not hold back, speaking directly to the three men,
He issued a sentence of life imprisonment with no chance
of parole for twenty years. He condemned their actions as
the most depraved, ghastly crimes he had encountered in modern

(18:54):
Hong Kong, saying, quote, never in Hong Kong in recent
years had as a court heard of such cruelty, depravity, callousness, brutality,
violence and viciousness. Even an animal would not have been
maltreated in the same way. He also said the three

(19:16):
men had psychopathic tendencies, were dangerous and unfit for society.
As he handed down the maximum sentence for manslaughter, he said,
what so many were thinking that Fan had been failed
long before her death. She had been failed by the
institutions meant to protect her and a system that never

(19:41):
saw her pain. She was also failed by the people
around her who turned away. How many others might be
suffering right now behind closed doors, unheard and unseen. Fan
Mannyee was a young woman with dreams and a past

(20:02):
that she was trying to escape to make a better
life for her and her son. She deserved so much
better than the violence she suffered, and she definitely deserved
better from the justice system that labeled her case as
manslaughter instead of the cold blooded murder that it was.

(20:25):
Even during the sentencing, the judge acknowledged the collective disbelief.
He also said, quote the public is entitled to protection
from people such as you and Yes. Technically in Hong
Kong life means life, but the possibility of them one

(20:46):
day walking free has never sat right with the people
who remembered what happened in that flat. After the trial,
the apartment building was left empty. Tenants moved out. No
one wanted to live where something so evil had happened.

(21:06):
Some even said fans spirits still lingered there. A few
months after the verdict, Chan and his co defendants appealed,
but on August thirteenth, two thousand and seven, the verdict
was affirmed without change. Beyond the courtroom, this case had

(21:27):
a hold on the public in a different way. It
wasn't just horror, though, it was fascination too. People were
drawn to every new headline and every detail from the courtroom.
Sales clerks and stylists in the city admitted they were obsessed.

(21:47):
They couldn't look away. One woman said, it's horrible, but
it's so interesting. Another said that this kind of thing
might have happened somewhere like New York or across the
border on the mainland, but definitely not in Hong Kong.
It didn't even seem real. It was a crime that

(22:10):
was hard for people to wrap their minds around. Just
to know people were capable of thinking up such heinous
acts was horrifying. Hong Kong's media dubbed it the Hello
Kitty Murder, not just because of the doll, but because
of what that doll represented. Hello Kitty was soft, innocent

(22:35):
and known around the world. Her round face and tiny
bow were everywhere, from bedrooms, backpacks, and in shop windows.
She was and still is a symbol of childhood, of sweetness,
and now of death. That clash of the macabre and

(22:57):
innocence was extremely disturbing to so many that contradiction became
the very reason they couldn't stop following the case. We
all can have moments where we find ourselves drawn to
something dark, something tragic or unsettling, and we wonder why

(23:19):
am I even interested in this? That feeling is morbid curiosity,
and it's actually a very human response. Morbid curiosity comes
from a mix of things like our survival instincts, wanting
to understand the world, and even the way we connect socially.

(23:43):
Our brains are wired to pay attention to potential threats
or things that feel dangerous, not because we enjoy suffering,
but because learning about it helps us feel a little
more prepared or less powerless. Sometimes something is so shocking

(24:03):
or disturbing that we can't look away, not because we're
cold or twisted, but because we're trying to make sense
of something that feels impossible to understand. It might feel
strange or even a little icky, but nobody is alone
in that it's normal to be curious about the darker

(24:26):
sides of life. It doesn't mean we're broken, it means
we're human. In Hong Kong, where homicide rates were so
low one point two three per one hundred thousand compared
to global standards, the brutality of this crime had the
community rattled. Even though Chan shin cho and Way Lun

(24:52):
were convicted of manslaughter rather than murder, the severity of
the torture when it came to fans death started intense
public debate. These conversations triggered reforms in evidence standards. The
Department of Justice placed greater importance on techniques to determine

(25:15):
cause of death even when remains were incomplete. Professionals across
forensic recording and autopsy protocols received funding for enhanced training,
particularly in cases where bodies had been disposed of in
ways that made determining intent difficult. Legal experts acknowledged that

(25:39):
the case exposed a blind spot in Hong Kong's justice
system when intent and cause of death couldn't be clearly linked.
Council lawmakers responded in two thousand and one by amending
criminal procedure Ordinance Section twenty seven to allow more flexible

(26:01):
interpretation of death causes and intent even without a full autopsy.
Though these changes were controversial, they plainly pointed out the
judiciaries need to adapt to forensics as they make new discoveries.
In twenty twelve, that apartment building was bought by a

(26:24):
new investor and torn down completely as an attempt to
erase its place in history. But you can't just bulldoze
away the story of what happened there. Four years later,
a hotel named soor It took its place. Three Buddha

(26:45):
portraits were installed as a memorial to a tragedy that
should have never happened. Chan and Wailan continue to serve
life sentences in Stanley Prison. Shame Show had his term
reduced to eighteen years on appeal in March of two
thousand and four and was released in April of twenty fourteen.

(27:10):
Even then, he had not changed. In twenty twenty two,
he was convicted of child sexual assault and returned to prison.
Fan Manyu's story was never meant as shock entertainment. It
was and still is, a cautionary tale and a call

(27:32):
to look deeper at the systems that fail the most
vulnerable and have for decades. Something has to change. Fan's
story of exploitation, injustice and the haunting of a city
still lives on. We will always remember Fan as a

(27:53):
wonderful young mother who was trying so hard despite the
odds being stuck against her. She was determined to make
a better life for her and her son. If that
chance had not been stolen from her. I wonder what
her life could have been like and where she'd be today.

(28:16):
Let us always remember Fan and keep her son that
she loved so much in our thoughts. I don't know
where he is today. His name appears to have been
kept out of the public eye. This story is not
only about what happened in that apartment, It's also about

(28:37):
the wreckage that violence leaves behind a boy without a mother.
His life totally changed from whatever Fan had hoped for.
But I hope he was well taken care of and
is doing well today. Wherever he might be, we all
send our love out to him. Thank you, Thank you

(29:00):
so much for listening, and until next time, friends, stay
safe out there, take care of yourselves, and let's watch
out for each other.

Speaker 1 (29:11):
Thank you for listening to this episode. As we close,
out let us not forget. Awareness is our greatest defense
in a world that can be dark and grim. Vigilance
is our beacon of hope when it comes to the
cases we have explored together that have remained unsolved. If
you happen to hold a piece of the puzzle, there
to step forward. As author Lois McMaster bouge Hold once said,

(29:36):
the dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a
duty of the living to do so for them until
we reconvene. My friends, stay vigilant and stay informed.

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185. Fan Man-yee: Hidden Inside Hello Kitty in Hong Kong

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