Episode 95:
Billionaire Uncle Who Wanted to Marry His Own Niece

A reality show featuring the wealthiest heiresses of second-gen Canadian immigrants. One of the women on the show flaunted her father's incredible wealth, driving a Rolls-Royce and living in a luxurious mansion. She was the envy of everyone, of course.

But no one could have imagined the dark secret lurking beneath the surface — not until the day a murder took place.

Late one night, on May 2, 2015, Michael, who lived in Vancouver, got a frantic call from his friend Xiaomei. Her husband, fifty-four-year-old Li Zhao, had killed her cousin, forty-two-year-old Gang Yuan — shocking news, since as far as Michael knew, the two men had always been close. He rushed to meet Xiaomei and her twenty-six-year-old daughter Florence, and together they went to the police.

A Chainsaw in the Garage

Police were dispatched to the family's home in West Vancouver, one of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods — a sprawling white mansion set against the mountains with ocean views, an indoor pool, an infinity pool, and a private tennis court. The first thing officers noticed on arrival was the roar of a chainsaw coming from the garage. Peering through a window, they saw Zhao, unaware he was being watched, dismembering a body.

Warned that Zhao possessed a firearm and was clearly still agitated, police called in a tactical unit and a Chinese interpreter, given his limited English, and surrounded the house rather than risk a breach. Officers announced over a megaphone that his wife and daughter were safe and ordered him to surrender — he ignored them completely, and the chainsaw kept running through the night. At 8 a.m. the next morning, the front door finally opened. Zhao stepped out, expressionless, and surrendered without resistance.

One Hundred and Eight Pieces

Inside the garage, investigators found Gang Yuan's body reduced to 108 separate pieces, bagged individually and stashed around the garage and in the freezer, blood splattered across the walls. The cause of death was a gunshot wound to the neck. For a crime this extreme to happen in one of Vancouver's most peaceful, affluent neighborhoods raised an obvious question: what had actually happened in that house?

Gang Yuan had built a fortune in China through coal and oil before immigrating to Canada in 2007, wary of the risk that doing business under a government that could seize his assets at will. Once settled in Vancouver, he faced a new problem: Canada's aggressive taxation of declared wealth. To shield his fortune, he turned to Xiaomei — technically not a blood relative, since she was his aunt's adopted daughter, but family by every practical measure and someone he'd trusted since childhood. Xiaomei, her husband Zhao, and their daughter Florence were struggling financially at the time, and Gang Yuan offered a deal: buy a mansion in Zhao and Xiaomei's names to shelter his assets from tax, and move the whole family in to live with him. Overnight, they went from barely getting by to living in one of Vancouver's most opulent homes.

An Uncle, An Employer, A Rival

Zhao, meanwhile, worked for Gang Yuan on his business ventures — a relationship that blurred family and employment, with Gang Yuan frequently belittling him in front of others as if he were a subordinate rather than family. He was far more generous with Florence, covering her tuition, designer clothes, and even a luxury car.

As the case made headlines, internet sleuths recognized the mansion from a reality show, "Ultra Rich Asian Girls," which had featured Florence a year earlier driving her Rolls-Royce and living a lavish lifestyle — while claiming on camera that the mansion belonged to her father, Zhao, rather than revealing her uncle was actually funding it all. Behind that image, tension had been building for some time: Gang Yuan reportedly withheld profit shares he'd promised Zhao, citing vague cash flow issues while living lavishly himself, flying on private jets and juggling multiple affairs. Zhao, dependent on Gang Yuan for his family's housing and livelihood, felt trapped — any conflict risked losing everything.

An Invention, an Insult, and a Demand

On the day of the murder, with Xiaomei and Florence out for a walk, Zhao and Gang Yuan were alone in the mansion discussing a sensitive financial matter. Zhao then presented Gang Yuan with a hunting rifle holder he'd invented and patented himself, hoping to secure investment and a one-third stake in a company built around it. Gang Yuan mocked it as a "silly little toy," crushing Zhao's pride — before abruptly reversing course and offering not a third but half the company, on one condition: he wanted to marry Zhao's daughter, Florence, his own niece.

By Zhao's account, Gang Yuan framed it as a legal formality — since he and Florence weren't blood relatives — but also as a way to permanently bind the two families together, given how much of his fortune was already tied up in Zhao and Xiaomei's names. Zhao, furious, called it what it looked like to him: an uncle who had raised her exploiting his position for both money and control. When Gang Yuan wouldn't back down, Zhao grabbed a hammer from a toolbox; Gang Yuan, physically much larger, easily overpowered him and wrestled it away. Cornered, Zhao ran for a gun and shot Gang Yuan twice in the neck, killing him.

"Cousin Gang Yuan Is Gone Now"

What followed was methodical rather than panicked — Zhao dragged the body to the garage and spent hours dismembering it before Xiaomei and Florence returned home to the smell of blood. He told them calmly that Gang Yuan was dead and that he'd handle it, urging them to leave immediately. They fled and called a friend, setting the police response in motion — while Zhao, alone in the house, kept cutting, holding off the tactical unit through the night rather than stop mutilating the body.

At trial in January 2020, Zhao described the killing as a blur, comparing his state of mind to routinely field-dressing a hunted animal — an explanation that sat uneasily against the deliberate, hours-long dismemberment of 108 pieces. He maintained the incest demand had provoked an unpremeditated act of self-defense to protect his daughter. But prosecutors grew skeptical of that story once several of Gang Yuan's former lovers testified: he was known for pursuing tall, young, conventionally striking women, while Florence, at 5'1" and already married and separated at the time, didn't match any known pattern in his romantic history — raising the possibility Zhao's account was constructed to soften the verdict. With only the two men present that day, the truth of what triggered the confrontation may never be confirmed either way.

Final Thoughts

Gang Yuan died without a will, and a separate legal battle unfolded over his estate: a woman in Beijing claiming to be his wife and mother of his child filed suit, followed by four more women each claiming children of his — DNA testing confirmed all five. A Canadian court ultimately split his fortune equally among the five children, about $3.3 million each, rejecting the first claimant's argument that her seven-year-old child, as the oldest, deserved priority as a "legitimate" heir, since the marriage itself could never be verified.

Despite prosecutors pushing for a murder conviction, the court found Zhao guilty of manslaughter, accepting that he had no history of violence and had acted impulsively after being provoked and briefly overpowered. He was sentenced to ten years and six months — a sentence that, combined with credit for pretrial detention counted at one and a half times and years lost to COVID-related delays, meant he had already served the equivalent of eight years by the time of sentencing. He was released in 2023, his whereabouts since unknown. Florence, once the face of a reality show built on borrowed wealth, has similarly disappeared from public view.