Episode 79:
"Where is Mom?" The Hong Kong University Campus Mystery

They owned five apartments worth at least $7,000,000. He was a prominent engineering professor, known for thirty years of marriage without once losing his temper. But on the day of the incident, his wife was supposedly on a trip abroad, and Professor Cheung said he fell into the deepest sleep he'd had in years.

What on earth turned him into a monster?

On August 20, 2018, fifty-six-year-old Cheung Kie-chung and his daughter, Cheung Sze-wai, walked into a Hong Kong police station. "I haven't been able to reach my mom for days," the daughter said. "We got into an argument four days ago. She got mad and said she was taking a trip abroad, but it's weird — she's never completely cut contact like this before."

A Family Everyone Envied

The missing woman was fifty-three-year-old Chan Wai-man, a housewife whose family looked, from the outside, close to perfect. Her husband had built a respected career as a professor in the University of Hong Kong's Faculty of Engineering after studying in the UK, popular enough with students to be named dormitory warden — a title reserved for only the university's most highly regarded professors, which came with an entire floor as a private penthouse residence of about 2,000 square feet. Cheung was known as endlessly gentle, never raising his voice, and doting on his wife down to laying out her badminton clothes each morning. Their daughter had become a government investigator and their son a dentist — by any outward measure, elite.

Police traced Wai-man's last known movements to the morning of August 17, when Cheung urgently pointed out a woman on blurry dormitory security footage: "That's my wife! There! In the elevator!" His daughter agreed it looked like her mother. The woman rode down, walked out of the building, and never appeared on camera again — enough for police to initially conclude Wai-man had voluntarily disappeared after a fight with her daughter.

The Sister Who Wouldn't Believe It

Wai-man's younger sister, Wai-yin, rejected that theory outright — she had flown in from the UK just days earlier, on August 13, and was staying in the very same house when Wai-man vanished, making a wordless disappearance implausible. Immigration records backed her up: there was no record Wai-man had ever left the country, and no phone or credit card activity since August 17. The case became a criminal investigation, and detectives went to question Professor Cheung at his university office, finding him in the parking lot moving a large wooden box he claimed was camping gear for an upcoming school event. Asked directly whether his wife had really gone abroad, he said only that she'd told him she was going, but he didn't know where.

When Wai-yin reviewed the same elevator footage, she didn't recognize the figure as her sister at all — and asked, pointedly, whether it was really Cheung who'd identified her. That question was enough to shift the entire investigation's suspicion onto the husband, though his standing as a respected professor had kept anyone from doubting him until then.

The Box That Kept Reappearing

In Cheung's office, police found the same wooden box tucked under a pile of thesis papers — he now claimed it held electronics left behind by graduating students for a robotics competition, directly contradicting his "camping gear" explanation from earlier that day. Flustered, he mumbled that he must have misspoken. Without a warrant, police couldn't force it open, so they brought him in for questioning instead; he denied everything and reportedly attempted suicide, insisting he was being framed. Investigators backed off for two days.

On August 28, the eighth day of Wai-man's disappearance, police returned to Cheung's office and were hit by an unmistakable smell of decomposition the moment they stepped off the elevator, flies already swarming the box and a pool of dark liquid beneath it. Cheung's explanation — dead mice from an experiment — didn't hold. Forensics opened the box to find a thirty-inch blue suitcase, and inside it, Chan Wai-man's body, dressed only in underwear, an electric wire wound around her neck.

Thirty Years Under Her Control

Once arrested, a very different picture of the marriage emerged. Acquaintances described Wai-man as explosive and controlling, with a deep preoccupation with money that turned into what was closer to one-sided abuse of her husband than a marriage. Despite Cheung's roughly $136,000 salary and the couple's five properties worth $7,000,000 combined, Wai-man's aggressive real estate investments left them paying about $21,000 a month in interest, driving Cheung to take on every possible lecture, conference, and dorm duty to keep up — while she still called him inadequate, controlled every dollar he spent by demanding receipts, hurled insults in front of their children, and even wrote a mocking song about him.

Inside the house itself, she held total control: the best of the home's three bathrooms went to her and their daughter, the next to their son, and the shabbiest to Cheung, who wasn't permitted to run the air conditioning even in Hong Kong's brutal summer heat. She forced him to sign fabricated IOUs claiming he owed her $860,000 with $27,000 in monthly interest, despite no money ever changing hands, and extended the same controlling grip to their children's schools and careers — lashing out at Cheung whenever he tried to intervene on their behalf.

Final Thoughts

The breaking point came on August 16, 2018, after Wai-man swapped a tenant's broken toilet seat for one taken from their son's bathroom, triggering a chain of family fights that ended with their daughter storming out of the house. That night, still furious, Wai-man spat out a glass of orange juice Cheung had brought her and began screaming curses at their daughter over the phone. When Cheung finally spoke up, telling her to stop, she kicked him off the bed — and his hand landed on a wire from the pile of hoarded clutter she kept underneath it. He grabbed it, climbed onto the bed, and strangled her until she stopped breathing, later saying he felt strangely calm afterward and slept better that night than he had in years.

He stuffed her body into a suitcase, told the children she'd gone traveling, and eventually hid the box in his university office — where the smell gave him away. At trial in December 2020, prosecutors argued premeditated murder for the inheritance, since Hong Kong law would have passed the couple's joint assets entirely to the surviving spouse; the defense pointed to Cheung's documented depression from decades of abuse and the reckless, unplanned nature of the body's disposal. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison — but public outcry followed, with over 350 people petitioning on his behalf and even Wai-man's own sister defending him. On appeal in 2025, the conviction was reduced to manslaughter, and his sentence cut to seven years and four months.