Episode 153:
A Mistress Cooked a Body Like Barbecue to Take Over a Restaurant
In the summer of 1993, a couple walking through a country park in Hong Kong noticed several black plastic bags floating on a lake. They pulled one out, found it heavier than expected, and opened it. Inside was what looked like meat. Police recovered the bags and found a dismembered human body, each piece wrapped in packaging printed with the name of a barbecue restaurant. The flesh was not red but brown, and the ends had small puncture holes, as if the pieces had been hung on hooks and cooked.
Three days earlier, the owner of that restaurant had been reported missing after going out to shop for groceries in the evening. She was 33-year-old Chung Choi Kuen. DNA identification was not yet available, but the blood type of the remains matched hers. Neighbors knew her as a devoted wife and mother and a sharp businesswoman whose restaurant had done well enough that she had recently opened a second location. Nobody seemed to have a reason to hate her. Then a neighboring shop owner mentioned that her husband was seeing another woman.
The Second Restaurant
The husband, 33-year-old Lo Fuk Sing, admitted the affair. His mistress was Chin Yin Ho, a 46-year-old grandmother who managed the second restaurant. Running the new branch together had turned into drinks after closing and then into a relationship they barely hid, pulling down the shutters during business hours. The branch lost money and fell behind on rent. In April 1993, Chung dropped by unannounced, found the shop closed, let herself in, and overheard the two of them in the kitchen. When she demanded that her husband get rid of the manager, he told her the second shop was no longer hers. He had transferred it into Chin Yin Ho's name. Chung had built the business herself and spent her savings on that branch. She confronted Chin Yin Ho, who said she knew nothing and told her to take it up with her husband. Three months later, Chung was dead. Lo told police that when his wife didn't come home, he suspected his mistress at once and called her. She told him to wait and not to call the police. At dawn she appeared with a letter, supposedly from his wife, saying she was leaving and wanted none of the assets. It carried her signature and ID number, but it was not her handwriting. One side of Chin Yin Ho's face was blistered and much of her hair had been burned off.
What the Granddaughter Saw
Witnesses had seen Chung go into Chin Yin Ho's home on the evening of July 5. Police raided it and found her living there with her 11-year-old granddaughter, Weiming. Chin Yin Ho had burn blisters on her face, hands, and legs, which she put down to working at a barbecue restaurant. Officers found blood and flesh in the bathroom drain, hair in the pipes, bloody towels and clothes in the washing machine, and more remains in plastic containers in the refrigerator. She was arrested and refused to say anything. So detectives gently questioned the girl. Weiming said she had woken in the night to use the bathroom and seen a woman tied to a chair in the living room, her head slumped and blood running from her chest and stomach. Her grandmother sent her back to bed. Toward morning she heard a crackling sound from the bathroom and smelled meat cooking. Her grandmother came out carrying black plastic bags, told her she knew she was awake, and sent her to the park on her bike. Weiming left the bag in the bushes by the lake, looked inside, and ran. Afraid of being abandoned, she had told no one.
A Debt, a Knife, and Boiling Oil
Faced with her granddaughter's account, Chin Yin Ho confessed. That day Chung had told her she was cutting off all support for the second branch. The shop was in Chin Yin Ho's name, it survived only on supplies from the main restaurant, and its debts would now be hers. She took her granddaughter along to win sympathy, found Chung at the market, and begged. To avoid a scene they went to Chin Yin Ho's home, where she pleaded for help with the back rent and promised to stop seeing Lo. Chung refused and headed for the door. Chin Yin Ho grabbed a paring knife and stabbed her in the chest and stomach, then tied her to a chair. She later claimed she had only meant to threaten her and that the death was an accident, but she had also put a rope around Chung's neck. With Chung dead, she reasoned that if the body disappeared, the first restaurant and the husband would be hers too. She fetched a butcher's knife, an axe, and a barbecue hook from the shop, dismembered the body in the bathtub, hung the pieces on hooks, and poured boiling oil over them so they would not be recognized as human. She forged the letter, took it to Lo, and opened the restaurant as usual the next day. One part of the body was never recovered, which gave rise to a rumor that it had been served to customers. It was never more than a rumor.
Final Thoughts
At her trial in 1994, Chin Yin Ho argued that Chung had provoked and tried to attack her and that she had lost control. The judge and jury accepted that the killing was not intentional, and she was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years. After the case broke, Hong Kong media reported an earlier one. In 1982, an elderly couple had been attacked in their home, the wife stabbed to death and the husband left with a fractured skull. Their 22-year-old adopted son and his 17-year-old wife blamed intruders from mainland China and had left their own one-year-old baby bruised in the yard to make it look like a robbery. The husband survived surgery and named them. They were sentenced to life and released about ten years later on a special pardon. The 17-year-old wife was Chin Yin Ho's daughter, and the baby was Weiming. A child used as a prop in her parents' crime at the age of one was, at eleven, sent out by her grandmother to dispose of a body.
Chin Yin Ho stabbed her boss, strangled her, dismembered and cooked the body, forged a letter, and sent a child to dump the remains, yet a jury accepted that she had been provoked and she received six years for manslaughter. How much weight do you think what a killer does after the death should carry when a court decides whether the killing itself was intentional?
WE DOCUMENT.
YOU DECIDE.
Our interpretation is only one possible perspective.
