Episode 129:
She Took a Taxi Home. Beaten, Stripped, Dumped in the Sea. Still Alive.
A man fishing off a pier in Ap Lei Chau, Hong Kong noticed something gray bobbing in the water one morning in October 2010. At first he assumed it was abandoned clothing, but the closer it drifted, the more it looked like something else entirely. It was a body, floating face down, wearing nothing but a gray T-shirt.
Marine police recovered the body of a young woman, likely in her mid-twenties, her face and body covered in scratches and bruises, her lower garments and shoes missing. With no ID, no phone, and no fingerprint match in a database that only covers convicted criminals, investigators had almost nothing to go on — until they noticed a small scar on her left forearm and matched it to a missing person's report filed just hours earlier. The victim was 25-year-old Huiyu Yu.
A Devoted Daughter's Night Out
Hui was the eldest of five siblings and had worked non-stop since adulthood — a bakery, a restaurant, a car dealership — to help her parents while her peers were off at college. Her one escape was the occasional night out in Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong's nightlife district, and October 26, 2010 was one of those nights. Late that evening she hailed a taxi home and called her parents along the way. After that call, she vanished.
Ruled an Accident, Until It Wasn't
Hong Kong police initially closed the case as an accidental drowning: Hui had been drinking, they said, wandered onto the pier, lost her footing, and fell in, her clothes stripped away by the current and her wounds explained as scrapes against rocks. No autopsy was even performed. Hui's parents refused to accept it, and pointed out what didn't add up — her body was found more than 12 miles in the opposite direction from the route home she'd described, in October when the local currents were far too calm to strip off a pair of skinny jeans, and bruising itself only forms in a body with a still-beating heart, meaning she'd been alive when she was injured. Under pressure, police finally ordered a full autopsy, which found bloody foam in her mouth, petechial hemorrhages, and clear strangulation marks on her neck. Hui had been assaulted, strangled, and thrown into the sea alive. This was a homicide.
The Taxi Driver's Secret
With no belongings at the scene and Hui found barefoot, investigators concluded she'd been killed elsewhere and dumped by vehicle, matching blurry surveillance footage of a taxi entering the pier that morning. A tip from Hui's family about a "friend" who was a taxi driver — one who had oddly kept checking in on the investigation — led police to 45-year-old Jiancong Wen, a former Marine Police officer who had been dismissed from the force in 1995 after blackmailing and sexually assaulting a woman. Since then he'd driven a taxi while bragging about preying on intoxicated women in Lan Kwai Fong, a practice he and others called "corpse picking." Phone records showed he and Hui had been in contact the night she disappeared.
Jian gave police a detailed, rehearsed-sounding account of his movements that night, but GPS and tollgate records contradicted his story, placing his taxi 25 miles from where he claimed to be — and stopped at Ap Lei Chau the exact morning Hui's body was found. Investigators searched his freshly detailed, spotless taxi and recovered a single microscopic fiber from the trunk, which matched a coat Hui had bought and worn that night. Confronted with his false alibi and the fiber evidence, Jian confessed: the two had been having a secretly paid affair for months, and on the night of October 26, an argument over money and her plan to end things turned violent, ending when he strangled her for two full minutes in a fit of rage.
Final Thoughts
At trial, Jian argued the killing was manslaughter, not murder, insisting he never meant to kill her and painting their relationship as something meaningful rather than transactional. It was hard for anyone to take at face value — particularly given that after the murder, he had calmly driven Hui's own parents to the morgue to identify her body in the very taxi where he had killed her days before. The jury found him guilty of murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison.
Because Hui never got to tell her own side of what happened that night, Jian's account remains the only version anyone has — one built entirely by the man who killed her, and there's no way now to know how much of it is even true.
Jiancong Wen calmly drove Hui's own parents to identify her body in the same taxi where he had murdered her days earlier, and police only reopened the case as a homicide after her family forced a second autopsy the original ruling said wasn't necessary. What do you think it took for her parents to keep pushing back against an official 'accident' verdict that everyone else seemed ready to accept?
WE DOCUMENT.
YOU DECIDE.
Our interpretation is only one possible perspective.
