u/moondog151

(Thanks to LoydoRedi2910 for suggesting this case. If you'd like to suggest any yourself, please head over to this post, which asks for case suggestions from my international readers, as I focus on international cases.)

Born in 1975 to Guyanese immigrants in Alberta, Canada, Ramgahan Sanjay Ryan grew up in Mississauga, Ontario. He attended Port Credit Secondary School in Toronto, where many of Ryan's former school friends remembered him as the "Joker" of the group, and they said they could never imagine him "without a smile," which made it difficult for his friends to tell if he was ever upset.

Ramgahan Sanjay Ryan

In Canada, Ryan worked a number of odd jobs such as at a muffler factory, as a delivery driver and as a technician at a factory producing ultrasound gel. In 2008, desiring something new in his life, he moved to Taiwan to work as an English teacher at a cram school in the capital, Taipei and also provided private tutoring to some students. But when the school shut its doors, Ryan was left unemployed

During his time in the country, Ryan married a local Taiwanese woman named "Yan". But tragically, on October 8, 2017, while out paddling on the beaches of Yilan, a rogue wave capsized their dinghy, causing Yan to drown, leaving Ryan a widower.

Ryan continued living alone in an apartment in the Yonghe District of Taipei, keeping one of the couple's dogs. Tragically, the other dog was on their capsized boat and was never found. Clinging to the hope they may survived the rogue wave, he offered a reward of $3,000 for its safe return and was constantly sifting through newspapers, looking at images of stray dogs people had found in case they were the missing one. Tragically, they were never found, so with that in mind, Ryan deeply cherished the last bit of family he had left: the couple's other dog, a 3-year-old named Lulu.

With the family he had built gone, Ryan was planning to move back to Canada sometime soon. He would make regular visits in the summer to see his mother in Toronto, and he was now intending for his next visit to likely be a permanent one.

Ryan's criminal history was also quite extensive. After losing his wife and one of the two dogs whom the couple viewed as their children, something seemed to change in Ryan. He developed a foul and short temper and often got drunk in the neighbourhood, which resulted in him getting into fights with his neighbours and once puncturing the tires of their motorcycles and smashing their flower pots. This resulted in Ryan being arrested for assault and property damage. But the world of drugs was the main reason the police were familiar with him.

In March 2018, he was placed on the police's wanted list for his suspected involvement in trafficking marijuana and was eventually arrested based on this notice. Ryan got himself in further trouble when he gave the police tap water, which he tried to pass off as his urine for his urine test.

Then, in May 2018, the police arrested a man for being in possession of marijuana, and he named Ryan as his supplier, saying that he bought it off of him at a park in the Da'an District for 120,000 New Taiwan Dollars.

The police executed a search warrant on his apartment and seized 105 grams of marijuana cigarettes and 80 grams of marijuana paste. They also found ten packets of marijuana hidden in the pipes of his car. During the search, Lulu kept barking and even bit one of the officers' arms, prompting the police to force Ryan to lock Lulu in the bathroom until the search was over.

In exchange for avoiding jail time, Ryan was instead ordered to undergo drug rehabilitation in a state facility.

After the death of Ryan's wife, his social circle became more limited, and he hardly even interacted with any Taiwanese locals; instead, his social circle consisted almost entirely of fellow expats, most of whom were also former or current English teachers. They were also Ryan's typical clients, as he rarely sold marijuana to the local Taiwanese population.

He would have regular meetings with them and his friends at nightclubs, bars and outdoor spaces across Taipei that typically involved heavy consumption of alchool and marijuana. If they had no money, they would just drink and smoke on the same riverbanks where Ryan typically walked Lulu. He also typically invited the few friends he had to play video games at his apartment since he had many friends who had no idea he sold drugs on the side.

On August 22, 2018, two of Ryan's friends who had joined him in Taiwan went to his home after being unable to contact him since August 19. They arrived at his apartment and found Lulu outside the building barking. Disturbingly, Lulu's snout was clearly cut and bleeding.

Lulu was distressed and kept trying to lead the two friends somewhere. The two men let Lulu run free and followed her, bringing Ryan's friends to the riverbank beneath Zhongzheng Bridge, a location where Ryan regularly walked Lulu as part of his daily routine.

Once they reached the area, Lulu stopped and started barking at the mudflats. When the two investigated what she was barking at, they discovered a human torso and called the local police. As they waited for the police to arrive, they couldn't shake the feeling that the torso seemed to be wearing Ryan's clothing.

Upon their arrival, the police searched the surrounding area and spared no expense. They called the fire department to aid them. The fire department flew their drones, typically used for locating missing persons over the river, to instead look for body parts.

After two hours, they discovered three white plastic bags not far from the torso. When the police opened those bags, they were greeted by a severed head, right arm and left leg. Ryan's friends identified the body as his once they saw the head.

One of Ryan's friends who discovered the body identifying his remains

The police and forensics at the scene

The police expanded the search radius to the Xindian River and continued searching into the night, and discovered portions of the left arm, left leg, hands, and feet still in the shoes until eventually recovering the entirety of Ryan's body, which had been dismembered into around 10 pieces.

30 meters from where the torso was found, the police discovered a stairwell leading down to the riverbank. On the steps of the staircase, forensic technicians detected a large amount of human blood covering approximately 640 square centimeters, and 100 separate points of blood traces were detected on the railing as well.

As this stairway wasn't in plain view of the public and with all the blood recovered, the police believed that Ryan had been dismembered right then and there, not far from where his body parts were found. Traces of blood along the bicycle path near the crime scene were also found, indicating that Ryan's body had been moved.

After the news broke, a local fisherman came forward to provide a statement to the police. He had been out fishing along the riverbank approximately 200 meters downstream from the crime scene when he heard a loud "thud" and splash from something heavy hitting the water.

Hearing the noise, he directed his gaze toward the source and saw two people moving along the riverbank, tossing objects into the water. He also saw the same two men moving back and forth between the river and the staircase.

Meanwhile, local residents told the police that they saw a white and black man with Lulu shortly before and after the murder. The police asked around to see if anyone else saw these men and, as it turned out, they had been caught on camera shortly after the murder.

The two captured by the CCTV footage

Divers were dispatched to scour the bottom of the Xindian River, bringing with them two machetes with the blades measuring 30 centimeters in length to the surface. In addition to the machetes, a fruit knife measuring 20 centimeters long and believed to be the murder weapon was found buried in the mud.

When Ryan's remains were sent away for an autopsy, the medical examiner noted that Ryan had sustained two stab wounds to his back and that the left side of his face had a laceration 10 centimeters long, cutting through to the bone.

Ryan's remains being taken away for an autopsy

He also suffered severe blunt force trauma to the right frontal region of the skull, leaving severe bruising; one of the more gruesome injuries was to the rear portion of the skull, which had been hacked with a bladed weapon so severely that brain matter had spilt out. Finally, Ryan had been stabbed in the head as well; it looked like the killers tried to disfigure him as much as possible so he couldn't be identified.

When it came to the dismemberment, the cuts were irregular and showed clear signs of the killer having struggled with them. Additionally, there were severe signs of hacking to the points of separation, as if they swung the machete down over and over, indicating that the killer lacked the proper tools or anatomical knowledge and experience, instead just relying on the brute force behind their swings to separate Ryan's body parts.

Tracing Ryan's footsteps wasn't really of much help. The police did find CCTV footage of him at an ATM withdrawing a large amount of cash, roughly $4,241 CAD, which, while it might help point to motive, did not shed much light on the identity of his killers. None of the cash he withdrew was found at the crime scene or in his home

Ryan's last moments as captured by the CCTV footage

The police's first theory was that Ryan's involvement in the drug trade was what led to his death; after all, the murder seemed way too brutal for a robbery gone wrong by complete strangers.

And if the police were correct about Ryan's murder being drug-related, well then there were suspects aplenty. Most of Ryan's customers did get arrested by the local police, typically not long after purchasing the cannabis, and that was a fact people were beginning to take note of.

Prior to his murder, Ryan was besieged by texts on all his messaging apps asking why he was "betraying his friends" or asking if he was a police informant. The fact that Ryan wasn't in jail after his house was raided and the 103 marijuana packets were seized did little to take the heat off of him.

The police did try using all that evidence seized to pressure Ryan to cooperate with them, but he refused and didn't play a role in any arrests, though his new reputation as a rat/snitch wasn't one he could ever shake off.

While the police looked into Ryan's latest clients and social circle, it would be those machetes that were the key to solving the case. The two machetes had a unique design and were not the ordinary machete anyone could purchase at their local hardware store. That made them easy to trace down and very recognizable, so the police visited various hardware stores in Taipei, asking any of the shopkeepers if they recognized them.

The police eventually arrived at a hardware store on Xining South Road in the Wanhua District where the shopkeeper remembered selling those exact machetes to a young man on August 18. The shopkeeper then showed the police the store's CCTV footage, and the man who made the purchase wasn't who they were expecting; rather than being an older, middle-aged foreigner like Ryan, the man was a young Asian man, likely a local.

A still from the hardware store's CCTV footage

However, despite this one exception, the police's suspect pool was almost exclusively foreigners. The police found Ryan's mobile phone destroyed after being exposed to the mud and water. However, he owned a second phone he left at his apartment and on it, he was mostly discussing future drug deals, engaging in fierce arguments over how much money he either owed or was owed, as well as defending himself against accusations that he was a police informant.

Going through his text history enabled the police to have 20 suspects right off the bat, which they further narrowed down to just 6 Russian and American men who worked as English teachers in the Da'an District and whose whereabouts couldn't be ascertained after their last meeting with Ryan. An immigration hold was placed on all six, barring them from leaving the country.

On August 24, they voluntarily presented themselves for questioning, where the police later ruled them out due to their airtight alibis.

However, the police dug deeper through Ryan's phone records and saw two other foreign men whose cellphone data showed the two were in the Yonghe District at the same time as Ryan. And based on Ryan's text messages with the two, they evidently had plans to meet up.

The first man was 37-year-old Mayer Oren Shlomo, a dual national with both Israeli and American Citizenship.

Mayer Oren Shlomo

Unfortunately, Mayer had fled the country, departing from Taoyuan International Airport on a budget airline to Manila, Philippines. His ticket had been booked shortly after the murder, and he left at 1:00 a.m. on August 24, mere hours before landing on the police's suspect list.

The police informed their Filipino counterparts, and while they waited for them to hopefully find Mayer, they decided to look into Mayer's past.

Mayer was born in Israel, but after completing his mandatory military service with the IDF, he left Israel and moved to the United States, hence his dual citizenship. Much like Ryan before him, Mayer had moved to Taiwan several years ago, also finding work as an English teacher at a cram school in Taipei. He was also pursuing a master's degree in English for international business management at National Chengchi University at the time.

But unlike Ryan, who became unemployed after his stint as an English teacher ended, Mayer still had a job, transitioning from teaching to running his own tattoo shop in the Zhongzheng District, a business that received glowing reviews from both locals and expats alike. Ryan's late wife used to be one of Mayer's employees, which was how the two men came to meet.

The similarities with Ryan begin to resurface when one looks at Mayer's activities outside of his business, since he also distributed marijuana and was known by the locals to have a short temper. When he first met Ryan in 2016 and learned that he was also a marijuana dealer, it didn't take long for the two to form a partnership.

Next was 30-year-old American national from Maine, Ewart Odane Bent. Unlike Mayer, he didn't flee and was still in Taiwan.

Ewart Odane Bent

The police were able to track Ewart down quite easily and arrested him at a cram school in Xinzhuang where he worked.

Ewart's arrest

Ewart was a former US Marine stationed in Japan. After his discharge, Ewart stayed in Asia, eventually settling in Taiwan, where he found work as a security guard at a nightclub in northern Taipei. According to that nightclub's manager, Ewart had an "odd and rude personality," leading to his dismissal.

So with that, Ewart switched to a very easy job for an American expat in Taiwan to obtain: he became an English teacher at a cram school in Taipei's Xinzhuang District. Unlike Ryan and Mayer, this was actually a job that Ewart still held at the time of the murder.

Ewart met Ryan when he was a customer at the nightclub he used to work at. Ewart learned that Ryan was a marijuana dealer. Ewart would purchase some of the product from Ryan, and then, rather than using it, he would supplement his own income by reselling Ryan's product.

Their business relationship soon became a personal friendship, with Ryan and Ewart regularly meeting up to share a drink, sometimes at the same riverbank where Ryan was found dead. Ewart was the one who sent Ryan the message reading "Why do you betray your friends?"

Despite all the obvious evidence against him, Ewart denied any involvement and said he was elsewhere at the time of the murder.

In the meantime, the police identified the man who purchased the two machetes. He was a 21-year-old university student named Wu Hsuan.

Wu Hsuan

Hsuan lived in a brand-new upscale apartment building in the Wanhua District. Despite his youth and current student status, Hsuan had made many friends among expats who were, at the youngest, a decade his senior. Hsuan met Ewart specifically via his job as a host at a nightclub.

The police arrested Hsuan on August 25, and unlike Ewart, he was a lot more talkative.

Hsuan's arrest

He said that on August 14, he was contacted by Ewart and offered 7,000 Taiwan dollars to purchase two machetes. Hsuan spent several days visiting various stores, carefully weighing his options. On August 18, he purchased two distinctive-design machetes from the hardware store in the Wanhua District and then delivered them to Ewart. But Hsuan denied any knowledge of the murder and said he was just trying to help a friend.

After Hsuan's arrest, Ewart, who had already been confronted with his cellphone data and his text messages to Ryan, was then told that Hsuan had testified against him and told the police of his involvement, but he refused to budge and continued denying any involvement.

Ewart and Hsuan had their first court hearings on August 26, where Hsuan was released on bail of 300,000 New Taiwan Dollars and ordered to report ot the police weekly. As he left the court, Hsuan, while being ambushed by the media, denied any knowledge of the murder and insisted he was being framed by "a foreigner".

In fact, the media was Hsuan's biggest enemy, as he changed his mind about going to the police station for a polygraph test upon realizing that a bunch of reporters were following him the entire trip there.

Meanwhile, Ewart, being a foreign national with his registered address being Mayer's tattoo shop, the judge obviously saw him as a flight risk and ordered him held without bail.

In the meantime, the police ramped up their efforts to track down Mayer. Initially, the police were worried about what would even happen if he was arrested.

Being a dual national, Mayer had two governments that may weigh in on his extradition. Israel specifically would oppose one of its nationals being extradited to a country where they could face the death penalty. However, during his time on the run, the United States revoked Mayer's passport, which left him stranded and gave the local police cause to detain him should they ever find him.

But even then, there was still the fact that the Philippines and Taiwan technically don't even have any diplomatic relations with one another. However, in May 2018, only three months before the murder, the Taiwanese police arrested Ricardo Parojinog, a former city councilor from Ozamiz, whom the Filipino government, including President Duterte, personally accused of being a drug kingpin.

Since the Taiwanese authorities extradited them back home, they figured the Philippines would owe them the same courtesy of extraditing one of their fugitives. And sure enough, they were right. Wanting to pay them back for Ricardo's extradition, the police were determined to make every effort to locate Mayer.

Luckily, since he was now an undocumented alien due to his passport now being revoked, the Filipino police had an excuse to put even more resources into the manhunt. They learned that he had moved from hotel to hotel across Manila and only went to stores that accepted cash.

The manhunt also grew more urgent when the police spoke to those who had conversations with Mayer, where he hinted at fleeing once again, making statements about how he wanted to "go to Okinawa or somewhere else" after finding a way to smuggle himself out of the country via boat.

The "somewhere else" in question was Israel, a nation Mayer told people he wanted to return to. This belief was well founded as Mayer paid a visit to the Israeli embassy in Manila to try to seek asylum but was unsuccessful as the embassy was closed for a holiday.

On September 5, the police raided an apartment in Cainta, in Rizal Province, only a few kilometers east of Manila, after receiving a tip that he might've been staying there. Mayer was arrested at the apartment, and the police searched the premises, seizing everything of Mayer's found within. At the time, Mayer was staying with 5-6 friends who all denied any knowledge of what he had done.

Mayer's after his arrest in the Philippines

Even without making any statements, Mayer's search history betrayed him. The Philippine police went through the search history on the two separate phones he had in his possession, revealing that he looked up things such as Taiwan's prison system, how the Death Penalty worked in Taiwan and the most recent executions carried out by Taiwan (which happened to be only a month before his arrest), making it clear that Mayer knew exactly why he was being arrested and what was likely in store for him next. Additionally, neither of those two phones was his original one, as he threw it away upon arriving in the Philippines.

Speaking of his search history, in July, prior to his arrest, he had also been researching human anatomy and sent a picture of a map of the Yonghe Riverside Park to Hsuan.

Mayer was held by the Philippine Bureau of Immigration at a detention facility while they began issuing a deportation order. Luckily, the issue between Taiwan and the Philippines technically not having any diplomatic relations was settled when the police announced they would simply extradite him to Taiwan.

Mayer's family did ask the Israeli government to intervene and stop the deportation because Taiwan still practiced capital punishment. As Mayer was currently stateless with his U.S Passport revoked, his family tried to get him Israeli documents to force the Philippines to have to deal with Israel's government, even travelling to the Philippines themselves to lobby for his extradition to Israel instead of Taiwan.

On September 17, Mayer was escorted onto a China Airlines flight from Manila to Taipei. During the flight, Mayer, although denying being a murderer, kept asking if he would be allowed to smoke in prison, if his family could send him money and, most of all, about the death penalty.

Upon landing in Taipei, he was greeted by additional Taiwanese police officers waiting for him at Taoyuan Airport. This marked the first time a foreigner was extradited to Taiwan for murder.

Mayer upon his return to Taiwan

While Mayer denied any involvement, exercised his right to remain silent and got a lawyer provided via the Israeli representative office in Taiwan, once Ewart heard the news of Mayer's extradition, he was ready to confess that same day.

In May 2018, both Mayer and Ewart were arrested for drug trafficking; much like Ryan and also like Ryan, the two were somehow released, and the two both came to suspect that Ryan had sold them out to the police.

Mayer's friendship with Ryan had already deteriorated owing to financial disagreements over how to split the money they made from selling the marijuana to their customers and also from Ryan saying that he wanted to leave the drug trade and go back to Canada to be with his mother, which Mayer already saw as a "betrayal" and grew to hate him even more when he refused to surrender his "client list" to him. But his arrest was the final straw for the two men who now sought to punish Ryan.

The two men rode rental bicycles to the riverside to gauge how obscured the area would be from the general public, so they could determine his daily routine. It didn't take long for the two to notice that Ryan walked Lulu by the riverside almost every morning at the same time, and visibility from the nearby roads was severely limited, so if the two were to kill Ryan while he was walking his dog, there was a decent chance no one would see them.

In addition to Mayer and Ewart, there was one other man involved, a 46-year-old American national and former English Teacher named Jason Eugene Hobbie, who assisted the two with "logistics and bought materials for the two, such as clothing.

Before moving to Taiwan, Jason was a paratrooper in the United States Military. Jason had been living in Taiwan for 8 years and met Mayer back when they both worked as English teachers in the same school.

Jason Eugene Hobbie

After Hsuan delivered the machetes to Ewart, he and Mayer began their surveillance on Ryan as soon as they received them. Hsuan insisted that he had no idea they planned on using them to kill Ryan.

Both Hsuan and Jason were also instructed to set off fireworks along the river to signal when Ryan was approaching and when to attack, while also creating an extra bit of noise to obscure the sounds of the murder.

On the evening of August 21, Mayer sent Ryan a message asking him to meet him at the Yonghe Riverside. Ryan, not believing he had anything to worry about from his former friend and business associate, was quick to accept this invitation.

Reading that response, Mayer got to work gathering the necessary materials, including the two machetes, a chainsaw, and a fruit knife. Equipped with these implements, Mayer and Ewart drove down to Yonghe and waited for Ryan's arrival.

Ryan arrived after leaving his apartment at around 8:00 p.m. At first, the meeting appeared to be a fairly casual one as the three made small talk. But then fireworks exploded in the distance.

Afterward, Mayer, from behind, wrapped the chain part of the chainsaw around his neck, using it as a garrote to begin strangling him. Ryan struggled, but Mayer forced him to the ground. Mayer tried to interrogate Ryan about whether he was a police informant but soon forwent getting answers and just continued strangling him.

Afterward, Ewart joined in, taking control of the chainsaw so he could continue strangling Ryan while Ewart retrieved the fruit knife and used it to slash Ryan's throat, cutting through his trachea and then stabbed him repeatedly.

Lulu was present during this attack and tried desperately to defend her owner, barking at and trying to bite one of the two, leading Mayer to haphazardly swing his blade at the dog. The knife slashed off a piece of tissue from Lulu's snout, prompting her to flee, running back to Ryan's apartment.

Eventually, Ryan passed away from a combination of blood loss and strangulation. After verifying his death, Mayer and Ewart dragged his body into some nearby tall grass so nobody would see them and then from there snuck down to the stairwell with Ryan's body in tow.

Now with some much-needed privacy, Mayer got to work dismembering Ryan's body using the machete he had brought, although the task was a lot harder than he was anticipating. He started by decapitating Ryan, with his head being severed quite easily, but the trouble came with the rest of his remains.

He tried severing Ryan's limbs, but his machete, despite how sharp it was, struggled to cut through the bones no matter how much he hacked away (he did not try cutting through the joints). It got to the point where Mayer ordered Ewart to brandish his own machete and help him cut up Ryan's body.

This predictably produced a lot of noise, so Mayer ordered Jason to set off more fireworks to mask all the extra sounds.

It took the two men hours, but eventually, they dismembered Ryan's body into 10 separate pieces, those being the head, torso and each arm severed at the shoulder and then cut again to separate the forearm from the upper arm and then the hands cut off. They followed a similar pattern with the legs, with cuts at the hips, knees, ankles and feet.

With their inexperience and choice of location, this shed a large volume of blood, most of which flowed down to the river and spattered their clothing, the staircase and the railing.

With no witnesses, the two didn't bother cleaning Ryan's blood from the crime scene and instead focused on disposing of the evidence. They placed Ryan's body parts into three large plastic bags and threw some of them, as well as the machetes, directly into the river, while some pieces, like the limbs and torso, were simply left on the mudbank. They were too exhausted to carry the heavier body parts into the river, so they just abandoned them and hoped the tide would come in to wash them out to sea.

When the two finally fled the scene, they met up with Jason, who provided them with clean clothing to change into. Jason also provided the two men with gasoline, which they used to pour all over their blood-stained clothing and then set them on fire.

Now with the clean-up complete, the two rode their bicycles away from the crime scene, cycling down to Mayer's home where they both had a shower and changed clothes once more just for good measure.

Now confident that no traces remained on their persons, the two men went down to a nearby convenience store and purchased a pack of beer to drink at home, toasting to and celebrating the successful murder.

Mayer's celebratory mood was short-lived and approached Ewart, telling him that they should flee Taiwan; however, Ewart refused, saying, "The police won't catch us so quickly, don't worry". Not reassured, Mayer left for the Philippines on his own.

Ewart defended himself, saying that Mayer was the mastermind behind everything and that he had only gone along with him out of fear. He said that watching Mayer brutally murder and dismember somebody he had known for two years based on just speculation made him shudder to imagine what he might do to him if he actively acted against him.

He also added that he knew Mayer to have several gang connections back in the United States that Ewart feared he would send after his family in retaliation and that he didn't confess earlier because he said a syndicate was monitoring him and would "silence" him if he confessed.

He also said he felt remorse, and when the police brought Ewart to the crime scene to tell him to reenact the murder, he began shedding tears and said, "Please don’t make me think back to such a terrible thing"

Based on Ewart's confession, the police arrested Jason while he was still asleep on October 18, now bringing the last man involved into custody.

Jason after his arrest

The four went to trial before the New Taipei District Court on May 8, 2019. Hobbie and Hsuan were charged with aiding and abetting homicide, while Mayer and Ewart were charged with premeditated murder and desecration of a corpse.

Mayer being escorted to his trial

The prosecution wanted to punish Mayer and Ewart severely, though, likely to Mayer's relief, they did not seek the death penalty.

Ewart stuck to his confession and even testified against Mayer; he again repeated that he feared for his family and started crying during the trial, saying, "I really wish I had had enough courage to stop Mayer from killing him!" He also added that he was drunk at the time, so his reaction time had suffered too greatly to try and save Ryan.

Meanwhile, his co-defendant denied any involvement and questioned the credibility of the witnesses, such as the fisherman who saw them dumping the bags into the water, who admitted he couldn't positively identify the two due to the late hour and distances involved. Mayer also questioned the chain of custody for the evidence against him and even proposed "alternative" scenarios for how Ryan might've died.

However, he was also quite inconsistent; one moment he'd say he was on the other side of the river when Ryan died, only to then say that he and Ewart simply smoked marijuana before parting, that he actually had Hsuan and Jason's role of being a lookout, before finally saying that Ewart was the only perpetrator and was trying to bring him, who had nothing at all to do wtih Ryan's murder down with him.

Mayer claimed that he only left Taiwan because his visa was about to expire and didn't return because of rumours and gossip he had heard about the case, but that he was also looking for a local lawyer to help negotiate turning himself in.

He also complained about the prison not providing him with Jewish foods and religious texts, as well as how he had to sleep on the floor due to a recent surgery that left him feeling severe physical pain, with the emotional pain coming from his family being unable to visit him.

Of the four on trial, Mayer was the only one claiming innocence; both Jason and Hsuan also confessed to their roles in court and testified against Mayer, so suffice it to say that with all the evidence and every single one of his co-defendants testifying against him, he was fighting a losing battle.

Meanwhile, Jason also had a difficult time; aside from being held in a prison with zero bilingual staff, making it difficult to prepare for the trial, during one of the hearings, procedings were interrupted so his lawyer could tell him that his 19-year-old son back in New Jersey suddenly died in his sleep. Jason had to be led out of the courtroom because he couldn't stop sobbing upon hearing the news.

On February 15, 2020, the court returned with its verdict, finding Mayer Oren Shlomo guilty of the murder of Ramgahan Sanjay Ryan. Mayer was slapped with life imprisonment just as the prosecution was seeking.

In the event that he was ever pardoned or let out for any other reason, Mayer would be deported to Israel and barred from ever returning.

Ewart Odane Bent was treated more leniently. While he did take part in the murder, the court ruled that Mayer delivered the fatal blow and that Ewart mostly acted under his instruction. His cooperation and testimony against Mayer only further contributed to his lenient sentencing. So when all was said and done, Ewart got off with 12 years and 6 months' imprisonment. Ewart will also be deported upon completing his sentence.

Jason Eugene Hobbie was given 1 year and 6 months in prison. The court acknowledged that he played no direct part in Ryan's death and wasn't even present, simply launching fireworks to obscure whatever the two were doing. "Whatever the two were doing" is the important part, as they also showed Jason some grace and assumed he likely didn't fully understand what he had agreed to help them with until they presented him with their bloodied clothing. After all, according to Jason, he only brought the gasoline over because Mayer told him he was out of fuel.

Wu Hsuan was given the lightest sentence of all, at only 6 months, since the court concluded that he had no knowledge of the impending murder when he went to purchase the machetes at Ewart's request.

All four were also charged with drug trafficking and potentially money laundering relating to Mayer's tattoo shop, but the judges acquitted the four on those charges since the prosecution failed to prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt.

Mayer and Ewart were quick to appeal their verdicts while Hsuan and Jason accepted their sentences, with the two having pleaded guilty during their trials.

As for Mayer and Ewart, it became obvious from the start they wouldn't get off any easier with their appeal; of all the judges that could be assigned to their appeal, they got the one most determined to get to the truth.

https://preview.redd.it/4anhxxvy6bkh1.png?width=800&format=png&auto=webp&s=edf686bc9a0d503f153d5433f21968941ec22244

Ewart and Mayer being brought to their appeal

The presiding judge even went out of his way to make five separate visits to the crime scene on his days off to get a feel for what likely happened.

Mayer was not a fan of this judge and, in one instance, complained that his religious rights were being violated, as the hearing was taking place on April 16, 2020, the Jewish Sabbath, instead of being delayed.

In response, the judge pulled out a traditional Chinese calendar and said, "The 15th was Mazu's birthday, and I worked overtime until 9:00 p.m. that evening," before telling him to respect Taiwan's laws.

Then, in another instance, Mayer complained about the American Institute in Taiwan, arguing that they had provided evidence helpful to Ewart and Jason but had withheld evidence that might prove his innocence, and demanded that the court investigate the institute. To which the judge said, "I am a judge of the Republic of China, not a member of the U.S. Congress"

Mayer also argued that he was in a custody battle regarding his son, who also lived in Taiwan with him; therefore, the deportation aspect of his sentence should be overturned cause if he was deported, he'd never get to see his children again. The judge pointed out that by the time the possibility of release could ever be considered, the issue of custody would have been resolved long ago and so denied this request as well.

On September 11, the judge decided to have everybody involved, from the killers to even the witnesses, brought down to the river to reenact the murder so the judge could once more get to the bottom of what had likely happened. This re-enactment lasted for three hours.

The judge regularly got mad at Mayer during the re-enactment demanding he tell the truth. Meanwhile, Jason was interviewed by the press when he showed up and said that while he used to like Taiwan, he was "very disappointed" in the country because of this incident.

Mayer and Ewart at the reenactment

On January 13, 2021, the Taiwan High Court rendered its verdict, upholding all the sentences. After hearing that his sentence was upheld, Mayer verbally abused and insulted his interpreter, blaming him for his conviction before complaining that the Taiwanese judiciary was being unfair.

But the court didn't just stop there; they ruled that Ewart was more involved than he let on, that he premeditated the murder to the same degree as Mayer and wasn't subservient to him like the lower court ruled. That being said, however, his sentence was not increased because he still confessed and cooperated proving testimony against Mayer during the appeal as well, so they determined that leniency was still warranted.

When giving his final remarks, the judge admonished Mayer, Ewart and Jason for being given an opportunity to live a better and successful life in Taiwan only to squander it instead of cherishing their second chance.

Mayer filed one final appeal to Taiwan's Supreme Court, which immediately struck it down on May 12, 2021, rendering his sentence final.

Mayer would go on to be an unruly inmate. He would routinely complain about religious accommodations, regularly refused to follow any of the rules and got into regular conflicts and fights with the guards and his fellow inmates.

On December 7, 2024, while held in the Hsinhe First Dormitory of Taipei Prison, Mayer began verbally abusing a guard without any prompting. As the guard was doing his rounds, Mayer shouted insults at him from his cell, such as "catfish" (a slang term meaning con artist or deceiver) and "Dumb fuck" before finally spitting on him once the guard walked past his cell.

Because of this, Mayer was charged with "insulting a public official in the performance of their duties". His trial on this new charge has yet to begin.

Sources (Should be in the comments)

Lai Huili was born on January 16, 1969, in the city of Hangzhou, the capital of China’s Zhejiang province. Huili worked a series of odd jobs throughout her life before retiring. In her retirement, she enjoyed growing flowers and caring for small animals. She did suffer from insomnia and often struggled to sleep. Those who knew Huili described her as warm and easy to get along with.

Lai Huili

Before her marriage, she met a man named Xu Guoli in 1988 when he rented a property her father owned.

Xu Guoli

The two dated for three years and even got engaged. However, the engagement was broken off because Huili's parents didn't approve of their relationship since Guoli came from a poorer family.

After the dissolution of their engagement, the two went their seperate ways, with Huili eventually marrying and having a daughter. Huili was the one to manage the finances of the household and was said by her husband to be the one who was largely in charge.

But during his marriage, Guoli re-entered Huili's life, tracking her down through a mutual acquaintance. The two renewed their relationship, and therefore Huili wanted to begin the process of divorce so she could be with Guoli.

Both Huili's and her husband's families strongly opposed divorce, so Huili resorted to spending their savings and threatening to take on additional loans to force the divorce to go through. This ploy worked, and the couple separated in 2007 with her daughter living with her father.

Guoli went through something similar, divorcing his own wife, with whom he had two sons, and by 2008, Guoli and Huili were married and had a daughter of their own. So who was Guoli, the man Huili went out of her way to be with, and what life did he live?

Guoli was born on June 2, 1965, in Zhuji County in Zhejiang Province. He grew up in a village called Qiushan, the second of three brothers. Unfortnuately for the brothers, their mother died when Qiushan was only 4 years old.

Guoli received a middle school education but beyond that, nothing else. Rather than going to high school, Guoli instead enlisted in the People's Liberation Army in 1983, where he served three years as a pontoon bridge engineer in Fujian Province.

After his discharge in 1986, it was time to try and find permanent employment. In 1987, after a brief stint at a glass factory, he started working in the fishing industry, then as a farmer and finally ran a duck farm of his own in the Nanhui District of Shanghai, where he also worked as a butcher at a slaughterhouse. However, in January 2004, an outbreak of avian influenza struck, causing heavy losses to the local farmers, the first of many financial losses Guoli would incur.

Guoli then decided to invest his money in the stock market. However, his investments were made poorly, and he lost a substantial amount of money, around 700,000 Yuan.

With his business in Shanghai now dead, Guoli moved to Hangzhou in 2018, where he worked as a driver, specifically driving engineering vehicles for the Hangzhou Metro. As part of a relocation program, the local authorities assumed ownership of Guoli's farm in 2010 and paid him millions in compensation. The two decided to move into the Sanbao Beiyuan Residential Complex in Hangzhou's Jiangan District.

Needing more money than her pension provided, Huili decided to come out of retirement and took a job at the Hangzhou branch of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu as a member of the cleaning staff. Her workplace was only 2 kilometres from home, and she typically enjoyed walking to work, making her daily routine essentially a straight line between work and home.

At first, the two lived comfortably in their new home, having a shared savings account of 7 figures. Their marriage also appeared to be a good one, again, at first. (A disclaimer: take everything said below with a grain of salt, as it's mostly Guoli's account)

Most of their disputes were financial and property-related, with Huili refusing to co-sign the paperwork that would make them co-owners of the apartment while insisting that Guoli handle all financial matters related to the paperwork. Meanwhile, all the utilities, such as water, electricity and gas, were in Huili's name alone.

Guoli also said that he had access to another home that was just in his name, which he wanted to arrange for his adult son from his first marriage to use as a marital home, but Huili put a stop to it, demanding he not follow through with it. Huili's family, though, denied that any conflict arose over this property.

One thing that was true, however, is that whatever strain was building between the two, they still pretended to have a happy marriage for appearances' sake with their neighbours and for the sake of their daughter.

However, their strife only escalated, especially when it came to Guoli's reckless spending. As mentioned, he lost a lot of money due to stock market speculation and losing lottery tickets, something Huili didn't care much for at all.

Guoli said that she frequently criticized him as being "useless," and whenever there was an argument, he would curse at him and then grab nearby objects to throw at him, even if their daughter was present. Guoli claimed that Huili once injured the bone around his eyebrow by throwing objects at him. Being an outsider to Hangzhou, he also didn't feel like he had anywhere to go.

One of the few witnesses to the couple's domestic situation was their daughter, who stated that her education was another issue they argued about constantly. Recently, her grades had been suffering, with Guoli and Huili blaming one another. Mostly, Huili blamed Guoli, as whenever he tried to get involved in her studies, she would stop him.

Guoli also wanted to take out a loan to pay for a renovation to their apartment, another thing that Huili rejected, which would incite even more arguments between the couple. Especially when Guoli decided he would go ahead with the renovation anyway.

On the morning of July 4, 2020, Guoli and Huili both went to the Hangzhou Red Cross Hospital so Guoli could get a tooth extracted and for Huili to collect her prescription for high blood pressure.

They then returned home for lunch, after which Guoli left to check out the renovations in a new apartment, while Huili and their daughter went to a department store to buy books and a birthday cake for their daughter's birthday.

The two were then captured at 5:04 a.m. by the CCTV camera on one of the apartment building's elevators on their way back home from their shopping trip. This was the last time Huili was ever seen alive.

The last time Huili was seen alive

When Guoli woke up at 5:30 a.m. on July 5, Huili was nowhere to be seen. At first he wasn't worried; Huili's phone, identification documents, and shoes were still inside the apartment, so he figured she'd be back soon. However, one odd thing was that despite the heavy rain at the time, their umbrella was also left behind.

But as the day went on, it became clear that something more concerning had occurred since she hadn't contacted her workplace or family for the duration of the day. This was something that had never happened before, and when Guoli asked their daughter if she saw her mother, she said she hadn't.

On July 6, their daughter received a phone call from Huili's workplace explaining that she had never shown up for her shift. Then a package that Huili had ordered online for some sleep aid medication she had purchased arrived at their doorstep, with Huili nowhere in sight to retrieve her package. When the sun set once more with still no sign of Huili, her family went to the police and reported her missing at 8:07 p.m.

The police went to the apartment to question Guoli about what was shaping up to be a truly perplexing case. Everything of Huili's remained, but there were no signs of any kind pointing to where she might have gone.

Guoli said that he briefly woke up at 12:30 a.m. to use the washroom and saw Huili asleep next to him, but when he woke up again 5 hours later, she was just suddenly gone; she had truly vanished without a single trace.

Although baffling at first glance, the police assumed they'd still solve it easily; after all, CCTV cameras covered almost the entire building, so they just had to trace her steps. They examined the footage, watching Huili return home at 5:04 p.m. on July 4...and then nothing. Over 100 police officers were called in to review 6,000 hours' worth of CCTV footage, but after July 4, not so much as a single pixel from any frame of those 6,000 hours captured Huili.

On July 16, 11 days after Huili went missing, this very small local story soon became a China-wide affair when reporters for a local Television Program showed up at the apartment to interview Guoli, and some of what he had to say were among some of the most infamous words ever spoken on Chinese TV in recent memory. First, he said "one nightgown was missing" from the apartment before then saying this: "She definitely didn't leave alone. She couldn't get out alone, not with her intelligence"

Guoli during one of his many TV interviews

Aside from insinuating she may have left with another man, as well as insulting his missing wife out of nowhere on TV, this statement, above all else, made no sense. Despite claiming that Huili was too stupid to leave the apartment building, she did so on an almost daily basis, regularly walking to and back from her workplace, so obviously she knew how to exit the building. And even if she did leave with a lover, there still shouldn't be any way for neither to appear on any of the building's many cameras.

The next day, July 17, another reporter arrived to interview him again. He was asked if he ever had any conflicts or thoughts with Huili, to which he said, "The most recent was maybe half a year ago. It was not a life-or-death matter. There's nothing to resolve." When the reporter asked for details, Guoli lost his composure and said, "Don't call anything abnormal. There was nothing abnormal about any of it".

Another reporter returned on July 18 and discovered a possible way someone could've left while avoiding the CCTV cameras. They discovered that the basement of the apartment building contained an unlit passageway leading to the street with no CCTV covering it. So for now, it seemed like Guoli might've had an out if anyone suspected him again.

Upon this tunnel's discovery, some were speculating that Huili may have exited through it during an episode of sleepwalking where she wandered into and drowned in a nearby lake or canal. However, Huili's family were quick to refute this, denying that she ever had any history of sleepwalking.

During all of this, Guoli, despite making pleading statements such as "What will become of my daughter? What will become of my life? When is my wife going to come back?" he never actually tried looking for her aside from these TV interviews and simply went to work and back.

With Guoli's sudden bout of apathy, the actual search effort fell largely to Huili's family, who had posted several missing persons notices in the Jiangan District, offering a reward of 100,000 Yuan for anyone who came forward.

One of the missing person notices

This was a search Guoli oddly disliked. On July 19, he told her family that "If she can't be found, just don't bother looking. She's probably gone out to relax for a few days. She'll be back". Some family members Guoli didn't even speak to; one of Huili's relatives had to learn of her disappearance while browsing social media and coming across one of Guoli's many interviews.

He then complained to Huili's family that the police kept coming to the apartment building and kept wanting to speak with him.

And speaking of the police, despite the case seemingly being an impossible mystery, their investigation was still going strong. They went door-to-door, questioning all of the building's 1,075 other residents, but none of them heard or saw anything.

The police also turned the apartment upside down, searching the basement, rooftops, elevator shafts, storage units, AC vents, the cars in the underground parking lot, and the water tank.

The police searching one of the storage units

But that wasn't enough; they entered all the units in the building and searched the residents' refrigerators, washing machines, and safes and also checked under their beds or in the ceiling plenums in case they were hiding her body or body parts in their home.

Not putting all their eggs in one basket, the police also searched outside the building as well, using police dogs to scour the ponds and parks in the surrounding area and even drained an adjacent lake and canal only to be left with nothing.

It became clear to the police that the likelihood of Huili having left the building was, at this point, basically 0, and they also held a similarly dim view of her still being alive. With foul play in mind, they looked toward suspects and, based on sheer probability alone and his behaviour during all the TV appearances he had been making during their investigation, Guoli was the police's suspect, and his own family seemed to agree.

Their now 11-year-old daughter also came forward, telling the police that when she woke up to find her mother missing, she also saw scratches on her father's arm, in addition to Guoli mentioning "a mistake" Huili had made in the past that he was never fully able to move past.

One of Guoli's neighbours also met him in the elevator while Huili's disappearance was still fresh, and he asked about his wife's disappearance, to which Guoli stated she couldn't have left on her own. But the strange part was that he kept covering his face with his arm as if trying to prevent his neighbour from seeing his expression.

The police also checked up on their unit's water records and saw that over two tons of water had been used the night Huili went missing, likely for a truly extensive clean-up.

Despite how strong a suspect Guoli was, the police still had no strong evidence against him or even proof that Huili was dead, so the priority remained recovering her body. The police had basically torn the entire building apart in their search for Huili, with the exception of the building's septic tank and sewage system, the only place where anything could, in theory (ignoring that secret basement passageway), leave the building without being seen by the cameras.

On July 22, when the weather finally improved enough for work to begin, the police got to work. Dressed in full hazmat suits and working in temperatures nearing 40 degrees, the police drained the entire septic system, spending 25 straight hours pumping all the building's sewage into 38 seperate tanker trucks.

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The sewage being drained

Once the complex was entirely relieved of its sewage, those trucks were then driven to a processing site for a team of officers to use wire mesh screens to seperate the liquid sewage from whatever solids were mixed in. The first 37 truckloads contained nothing of note, but when the police sieved through the contents of the final truck, they discovered a gooey mass of what looked to be flesh.

The material amounted to several pieces of skin tissue, which the police assembled together, with the quantity coming to hundreds of square centimetres in total area. Additional, small amounts of tissue from an internal organ were also recovered. When sent for testing, the skin and bits of organ tissue were confirmed to be human.

However, proving that this human was Huili wasn't quite as easy. The remains, already of such a small amount, had been submerged in human sewage in summer heat for around 17 days, which had essentially dissolved the cell nuclei, making it nearly impossible with their current capabilities to extract any usable DNA.

On July 23, the police noticed Guoli walking past the tanker trucks on his way to work, glancing twice at the now-open sewage system before leaving. The police, still suspicious of Guoli, weren't any less so after this episode either and decided they'd finally place him under arrest.

After his arrest, the police searched the couple's apartment and noticed the meat grinder had been cleaned extra thoroughly compared to everything else. This made them take a closer look at it, and they noted a single fragment of organic tissue, smaller than a grain of rice, lodged in the turbine of the machine.

The police interrogated Guoli overnight. Guoli held out for a long time, denying any involvement, but as time went on, he started to crack and eventually confessed. Guoli gave five different confessions that night in which he only briefly described the actual murder itself but went into great detail on how he disposed of Huili's remains.

Guoli said that on the afternoon of July 4, while cooking meatballs for their daughter's birthday, Huili was cleaning some cutlery and an electric saw in the bathroom when she accidentally cut her finger on the blade and immediately blamed him for it, verbally abusing Guoli. The argument continued into their daughter's birthday dinner without seeing an end.

After their daughter went to bed, Guoli was still angry and decided he would kill Huili, with all the love he once had for her now being gone. Huili had a habit of drinking milk before going to bed, so he took some of the sleeping pills the couple had been prescribed due to both of their histories with insomnia and dissolved them into the milk.

In the early morning hours of July 5, after Huili fell unconscious due to the drugged milk, Guoli covered Huili's mouth with adhesive tape and then placed a towel and pillow over her nose and mouth and pressed down to try to suffocate her.

Huili woke up during this process; her eyes went wide, and she tried to call out Guoli's name through the tape. Guoli said that he hesitated afterward but kept pushing until she finally passed away from suffocation.

After her death, Guoli sat next to her body for 1-2 hours pondering what to do next. Eventually, he dragged her body into the bathroom's shower stall and decided his best bet would be to dismember Huili's body.

Guoli, utilizing his experience as a butcher, made use of a utility knife, the electric saw Huili cut herself on, and their meat grinder.

Guoli was very thorough when it came to destroying Huili's body. After dismembering the corpse, he cut off the skin and used the meat grinder to reduce her soft tissues into small pieces, which he flushed down the toilet. Eventually, all that was left were Huili's bones, which he hid to dispose of later.

When their daughter left the apartment for an extracurricular training session her school was doing, Guoli was left with total privacy to deal with Huili's bones. Guoli used the electric saw to saw through the bones until they were reduced to much smaller pieces. He then placed the bone fragments into his backpack and disposed of them in the garbage bins near his former workplace and the apartment in separate trips over two days, mixing them in with household garbage so if anyone ever did find the bone fragments, they'd have no reason to suspect they were human.

In addition to the bone fragments, he also threw out the saw and the knife he used in the dismemberment.

Using detergent, he then cleaned the shower and bathroom several times, which accounted for the very heavy water usage. Afterward, he finally reported Huili missing.

Based on his confession, the police assembled another task force of around 200-300 officers to search the Tianzi Ridge Landfill on the outskirts of Hangzhou in an attempt to recover Huili's bone fragments.

Officers spent three days once more dressed in hazmat suits and sifting through the filth, but with over 7,000 tons of garbage and only looking for a few small bone fragments and tools, they left empty-handed despite their efforts.

However, on July 24, they did find the now-dirty clothing that Huili had been wearing the day of her murder, which, evidently, Guoli also tried to dispose of. (Where they found the clothing is unknown).

Without any additional remains discovered, that left the human tissue as the only remains recovered, and even with Guoli's confession, the police still needed a positive identification. The local authorities had to call in help from the Shanghai police, who had a more sophisticated and advanced forensic team.

Although it was still very difficult and took many tries, the Shanghai forensic team finally extracted enough mtDNA from the tissue to compare to Huili's daughter, with the results coming back as a match.

After news broke of Guoli's arrest, a woman came forward to the police asking them to take another look at him. In 2002, her 16-year-old daughter, named Lou Mojie, had been found lying dead on the bathroom floor with a cut on the left side of her neck after her mother returned from a shopping trip.

There were no signs of forced entry, so the police at the time believed that the killer was familiar with the household, if not outright let in by Mojie. A witness at the time had reportedly described seeing a male figure leaving the building, and in hindsight, his build and height were believed to be consistent with Guoli. One thing known for sure is that Guoli knew Mojie and the family, as he had attended her funeral.

The Hangzhou police announced they would reopen Mojie's murder to see if they could link it to Guoli or prove that he was involved, but they eventually closed this investigation with no new findings. The murder of Lou Mojie remains unsolved.

The case also became an immediate sensation in China, and a few people were quite distasteful and began making memes about the case. For example, the phrases "two-ton water warning" and "get to know the septic tank" began appearing on the Chinese internet even in conversations that had nothing to do with Huili's murder.

Meanwhile, some online vendors began exploiting Huili's murder, hoping shock value may boost their sales. For example, one man, while trying to promote and sell a meat grinder he owned, did so by using a picture of Guoli taken from one of his TV interviews as a promotional image for his product.

The trial began at the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court on May 14, 2021, and when the prosecution read out the details of Guoli's confession, Guoli interrupted the prosecutor to say, "Don't read it anymore, don't read it, I admit it, it was me, there's no need to keep reading".

Guoli during the trial

The prosecution persisted and argued that the murder occurring on their daughter's birthday and his overall callous attitude when appearing on TV should be viewed as aggravating factors.

That last part about his callous behaviour was important since it was their way of countering what Guoli's actual strategy was in light of all the evidence, to get a lenient sentence. Guoli addressed the court by saying, "The word 'regret' is inadequate to describe what I feel. Right now my mind is full of her face, and the scenes of our life together, and all I can think of is her good side. If there is a next life, I still hope to be with her," and then began crying when he said, "I want to tell my daughter: both your mother and father love you. Father is sorry. I hope you grow up fast". However, despite supposedly regretting his actions so much, he also said that he was hoping people "wouldn't see me as a monster"

However, both he and his attorney vehemently fought back against any accusations that the murder had been premeditated. Something the prosecution was arguing for based on the sleeping pills and the fact that the tools used to dismember her body were purchased back in early 2020.

He said that the sleeping pills also belonged to Huili as part of a prescription for their shared insomnia and that, once more, the saw and meat grinder were purchased months prior for both Huili and Guoli to use as intended; it was an innocent purchase, he claimed. Guoli's story was that the murder was a crime of passion he committed in the heat of the moment after an argument and that he simply made use of what he had on hand.

Guoli's attorney requested that his client be given a psychiatric evaluation, but the court refused, stating that his family had no history of mental illness and that Guoli's actions and calmness during his TV interviews alone proved that he was mentally capable and that any such evaluation would be a waste of time.

The court reached its verdict on July 26, 2021, finding Xu Guoli guilty of the murder of Lai Huili. That much was a foregone conclusion, so sentencing was where both parties focused their efforts. In a letter she had written, Huili's daughter said she forgave her father and asked the court not to impose the death penalty. However, the court paid this latter no mind.

In their ruling, the court determined that the murder had in all likelihood been premeditated based solely on his actions after the fact and how thoroughly he had destroyed Huili's body.

Therefore, they sentenced him to death with immediate execution rather than death wtih two-years reprieved (or suspended death sentence, as they are commonly called), and in addition, he was ordered to pay Huili's family 200,000 Yuan in compensation, quite a ways short of the 2.71 million they had been asking for.

When the trial first opened, Guoli said that he promised not to appeal, but hearing that sentence must've changed his mind upon the death sentence being read out; he leapt up and shouted at the judges and prosecutors, "That's not how it happened! This is false!" prompting him to be removed by the bailiffs. Despite the words "immediate execution", that's not really how the death penalty works in China, so the only thing that was "immediate" was Guoli filing his appeal.

Guoli's appeal opened before the Zhejiang High People's Court on January 25, 2022, and Guoli now wanted more than just a lenient sentence.

Guoli during the appeal trial.

Guoli now retracted every single statement he had ever made and was instead demanding an outright acquittal, arguing that there was enough reasonable doubt that his initial conviction was a miscarriage of justice. Even his confession, he said, should've been disregarded as it was the result of the police denying him any sleep during their overnight interrogation.

The defence also argued that the police and prosecution saying that Guoli used over two tons of water to clean the crime scene was misleading. The apartment complex only measured water usage on a monthly basis and according to the defence's own measurements, the apartment's maximum plausible water usage on any given day only amounted to 0.6 tons.

On April 8, the appeals court made its decision, upholding the initial conviction and sentence. They argued that Guoli's confession was reliable no matter how sleep-deprived he may have been, since it still matched up with the evidence and the fact that he kept repeating it and details of it after his initial interrogation. He was also advised of his rights before he made each statement, so the appeals court ruled that coercion was out of the question.

In China, all death sentences are automatically presented to the Supreme People's Court for review so they can approve the sentence and ensure that nothing questionable happened during the trial that could create a wrongful execution; think of it as an automatic appeal that is launched without the defendant having to appeal. The only exception is if the defendant waives this right.

On March 21, 2023, the Supreme People's Court reviewed Guoli's case, where they decided to uphold that sentence. With this judgment now in place, Guoli was brought to the execution grounds and put to death via lethal injection.

As a result of the murder, the apartment complex it all took place in became a "stigmatized property" overnight. Despite adding more CCTV cameras, hiring extra secruity guards, and even converting the septic tank into a parking lot, most of the residents moved out, having to heavily discount their properties sometimes at a rate of 60% just to get them to sell. By the time reporters revisited the property in 2024, the entire building was essentially unoccupied.

Sources (Should be in the comments)

Liridona Ademaj was born on July 24, 1993, in the village of Rracaj in Southwestern Kosovo, a small village of only 195 residents.

Liridona Ademaj

Liridona's family history was a tragic one; they had fled from Albania into Kosovo, then a part of Yugoslavia during the 1950s, moving from village to village. And when I say fled, I mean fled for their lives. Liridona's distant relatives who stayed in Albania faced severe persecution under Enver Hoxha's regime. One had been hanged, the other executed by firing squad, and many more spent the 1970s and 1980s in the notorious Burrel prison.

However, by the time Liridona was born, the worst was behind her family, and she spent the first 17 years living a peaceful and carefree life in Rracaj. But in the village of Cërmjan lived a man named Naim Murseli.

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The two eventually met while they were both teenagers and fell in love with one another, having their wedding on December 11, 2011.

Shortly, very shortly after their marriage, at Naim's suggestion, the couple eventually left Kosovo, moving to Sweden and settling in the town of Uddevalla, with both obtaining Swedish residency. Children were also something the two wanted, with Liridona giving birth to her first son, followed by a second son in 2019. As a mother, Liridona was described as being dedicated and devoted to her sons.

In Sweden, Liridona worked at a café frequented by both locals and members of the Albanian diaspora community. She also co-owned a café and a cleaning business with another Albanian national, while Naim engaged in "political activities". Activities that included being the advisor to former President of Kosovo, Behgjet Pacolli. Overall, Naim spent his entire career working as a politcal advisor.

Both Liridona and Naim had incomes of approximately 300,000 Swedish kronor per month but also several loans and debts in Sweden, including personal loans and business loans connected to their businesses, which had slowly become inactive.

With that financial situation in mind, the couple was considering leaving Sweden and returning home, with Liridona visiting Kosovo in June 2023 to purchase a home. The purchase went through, and so on October 11, 2023, the family finally returned to their homeland.

On the evening of November 29, 2023, Liridona and Naim had gone out for dinner with their two sons and on their drive back home, they found themselves travelling along a road going through a village called Bërnicë on the outskirts of Kosovo's capital, Pristina.

At around 8:25 p.m., a man wearing a mask and carrying a revolver jumped in front of the vehicle and, without warning, pulled the trigger, killing Liridona. In the immediate aftermath, amidst the confusion and screaming, the masked shooter ran off while Naim grabbed their children and ran away for safety until he finally found a phone where he could call the police and told them that they had fallen victim to a roadside robbery gone wrong, that the man stopped their vehicle and demanded that everyone inside hand over everything.

But right away, the police couldn't help but be a little skeptical; after all, none of Liridona's belongings had been stolen, such as two gold bracelets and a gold ring she was wearing, and she had been cleanly executed via a single gunshot wound to the neck fired at close range.

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Police and forensics at the scene

Liridona's family also felt put off by Naim and his behaviour; for example, he was not very forthcoming with details and refused to even tell the rest of Liridona's family which morgue her body was sent to. He was also just evasive in general and wouldn't pick up the phone when they called him, although Naim claimed that his phone had been stolen.

But once the couple's sons had collected themselves after the traumatic event they had just witnessed, they told the police something very disturbing. According to them, they witnessed their father grab hold of their mother's arm and physically restrain her in place so that Liridona would have no way of avoiding the gunshot. But if they were recounting what they saw accurately, then why?

Looking into the couple's history in Sweden, the police believe they found that answer. On June 25, 2022, a Swedish life insurance policy was issued in Liridona's name for 3,000,000 Swedish kronor with Naim as the beneficiary. And since Naim had recently fallen into debt, that was money that would've looked very tempting.

However, suspecting and proving were two different things; however, proving Naim's guilt would be surprisingly easy. Although the crime scene had no CCTV cameras, meaning the police were unable to witness the shooting for themselves, they could still check the footage from cameras along the route. And they were extensive, grabbing footage from every private residence and business they could find with a camera, although in the rural area that still amounted to just 22 cameras.

The most important piece of footage the police reviewed was from the restaurant the family ate at before the murders. They saw a man in the restaurant's courtyard watching the family enjoy their meal.

A still from the CCTV footage

After they left, he got into another vehicle and followed them closely, stopping to swap vehicles before the first man began driving toward Bërnicë.

The police were able to identify the man in the footage as Granit Plava and very easily at that.

Granit Plava

Granit hailed from the village of Cërmjan, the same village as Naim's family. Granit had been arrested before on April 15, 2013, for "Grievous Bodily Harm," but whatever sentence he received, it wasn't severe enough to keep him off the streets long-term. That is, if he was even convicted at all.

Granit was arrested on December 1 and confessed immediately, telling the police that Naim met him on November 22 and said he knew of "a case where both of them could make money," and told him that the target "a Serbian woman who is a businesswoman and has a lot of money," Naim then finished the proposal by saying "After you kill this girl, I will give you 30,000 euros, because this girl has a lot of money". He also had no idea anyone else would be present; according to Granit, Naim told him he would go to Albania for an alibi and only return to Kosovo after the murder.

Granit admitted to accepting this offer and confessed to being the gunman, though he insisted he had no idea who Liridona was at the time. Granit also told the police that Naim had planned every last detail, including the murder taking place in Bërnicë because its main road into and out of town had street lamps so he could operate under total cover of darkness.

Granit never received a single cent of the money, as Naim decided to pay him 30,000 euros in monthly installments of 1,300 euros.

With that, Naim was arrested that same day, as soon as the funeral, which he attended, was over. And speaking of that funeral, at Naim's insistence, it and the burial were held in his family village. After his arrest, Liridona's body was exhumed so it could instead be buried in her home village.

Granit also identified the second man seen in the CCTV footage as Kushtrim Kokalla, also from Cermjan, a private in the Kosovo Security Force since 2019, and the son of Naim's maternal uncle, who also confessed once arrested.

Kushtrim Kokalla

Together with Naim's later confession, this is what the police put together.

Apparently, Naim had been planning his wife's murder for a long time. Almost as soon as the life insurance policy was finalized, he began seeking out a gunman, with his first choice being Kushtrim.

According to Kushtrim, Naim had spent an entire year begging him to carry out the murder, only for him to refuse each time, telling him, "This is out of the question, don't ever tell me this again". But while he refused to be the triggerman himself, he still spoke with Naim despite knowing that he had planned it and never reported anything to the police.

Eventually, Kushtrim caved, not enough to kill Liridona but rather enough to find somebody for Naim who would. That being Granit, and just to make sure the plan would go off without a hitch, Naim made sure to restrain Liridona, so Granit could have a clear shot.

Finally, the pistol, which came with 20 bullets, was owned by a man named Tom Dodaj, who illegally sold the weapon to Naim, who then handed it to Granit. Tom was arrested for the unauthorized sale of a firearm, and he confessed and admitted everything.

His case was charged and tried separately from the other three, so I'll state his punishment now. On January 31, 2025, after pleading guilty (the only defendant to do so), he was sentenced to 5 years' imprisonment and ordered to pay a 5,000 Euro fine for arms trafficking. On January 14, 2026, upon appeal, the Court of Appeals of Kosovo reduced his sentence. Tom expressed remorse and said he was deeply sorry for what the gun he sold was used for.

Tom Dodaj during the trial

Back in early December 2023, the police conducted several door-to-door raids in both Granit's and Naim's home village, hunting for the murder weapon and eventually recovered a Zastava pistol and 19 rounds of ammunition. More than satisfied, the police held their first press conference on the murder, announcing that they had successfully solved it in only two days.

A welcome bit of news, as Liridona's killing was one of the most shocking Kosovo had seen in recent years and one that sparked several protests by various women's rights groups who saw it as the final straw in a string of femicides that had plagued Kosovo. It was Liridona's case in particular which made many start advocating for Kosovo to introduce the death penalty.

The prosecution also announced that they would not offer a single plea deal, deeming this case serious enough that a full trial with the maximum sentence was the only option. However, the trial would not come quickly, as the Kosovar police had to work with the Swedish police to gather a lot of evidence, as well as transfer the couple's two sons to Sweden, where they would live with relatives up there.

Their trial finally opened on January 26, 2025, before the Basic Court in Pristina's Department of Serious Crimes.

Naim said that during their time in Sweden, Liridona filed for divorce, which he refused. Not long afterward, Naim said that Liridona "betrayed him" by being with a foreign man at a gathering in Malmö, Sweden. He said that this act of infidelity left him devastated and believed it was her taking revenge for refusing the divorce. However, the prosecution reminded the court that the two had submitted a joint application for divorce in Sweden, rather than Liridona filing for divorce on her own and being rejected.

When it came to the murder weapon, Naim seemed to behave as if Tom didn't exist, denying purchasing the gun or even already owning it. He told the court that the gun came from Granit directly, having been told by him that he could then sell the firearm for double the price the following day; he denied having any knowledge that it had been or would be used to murder Liridona.

Finally, as for motive, Naim said that the life insurance policy shouldn't be treated as anything suspicious since he said every citizen in Sweden has a life insurance policy in their name.

Naim during the trial

Kushtrim's attorney said that on the night of the murder, he had been at home playing cards with friends when somebody told him about Liridona's murder, having seen it on the news. He said he spent the next 20-30 minutes trying to call Naim but that his phone was unreachable. Afterward, he left for Pristina so he could be close to and support Liridona's family.

Speaking of Kushtrim's attorney, he would be slapped with a 500 Euro fine by the judge for disrespecting the presiding judge and court during the trial.

Kushtrim during the trial

According to the prosecutor, on the morning of November 29, Kushtrim and Naim had met, with Naim saying, "Today this must be done,". Furthermore, regardless of where he was that night or not, the prosecutor still said he was culpable for his role in recruiting the real gunman. Naim's defence was to simply say that he didn't believe Granit actually had the courage to murder anyone.

When it was Granit's time to testify, he also changed his story, completely retracting the statement he had given to the police, claiming that the police had pressured him into making it. According to him, the real agreement was that, in exchange for a substantial cut of the money, Granit would take the fall for him while he worked to get him released, with Naim's exact words supposedly being, "You know what power I have. I will get you out of prison. I offered you money and work".

Now, he said that upon stopping his vehicle approximately fifteen to twenty meters from the Liridona and Naim's car. He heard a gunshot, and then, a few minutes later, Naim approched him and tossed him the pistol, telling him to "Go, disappear from here, quickly". Implying that Naim had personally killed Liridona while using him as his scapegoat.

Granit during the trial

However, the prosecution was quick to counter this narrative, producing footage from at least 22 seperate CCTV cameras showing all three meeting shortly before the murder and that, based on the footage and forensic evidence, it was only possible for Granit to be the shooter.

In January 2026, nearly a year after the trial began, Naim reserved course and denied any accusations that there had been even a single problem with his and Liridona's relationship; he said that Liridona was perfect in every regard and that their marriage was absolutely harmonious. And even more bizarrely, he claimed that neither he nor the children were even in the car when the fatal shot was fired.

A notion challenged by his co-defendants, with Kushtrim saying, "The couple's problems were known not only to me, but also to the Ademaj family, the Murseli family. Everyone, young and old, knew about these problems." This also contradicted an earlier statement from Naim, who said that Liridona's brother once said that his sister never complained about anything in their relationship.

On April 21, 2016, the court handed down its verdict against the three accused for the murder of Liridona Ademaj; all three were found guilty.

Naim Murseli and Granit Plava were sentenced to life imprisonment for aggravated murder, while Kushtrim Kokalla received a sentence of 30 years' imprisonment.

As of this write-up, none of the three have appealed their convictions or sentences.

Sources (Should be in the comments)

(Thanks to LoydoRedi2910 for suggesting this case. If you'd like to suggest any yourself, please head over to this post, which asks for case suggestions from my international readers, as I focus on international cases.)

On August 12, 2011, a truck driver was parked at a rest area beside the A24 autobahn in the Havelland district of Brandenburg enjoying his break when suddenly, a badly burned man emerged from the forest adjacent to the road, stumbling toward him. The man spoke in badly broken German or English; it was so slurred the truck driver honestly couldn't tell, but he could piece together that the man was trying to say that there had been an accident and that children were dead in a car.

The truck driver called emergency services, and the injured man pointed first responders to an area along a dirt road off the autobahn into a wooded area near the small village of Börnicke.

Although an ambulance arrived, his injuries were so severe that a helicopter was dispatched to airlift him to a hospital in Berlin in critcal condition with severe burns to his face and hands.

As he was being loaded into the helicopter and flown to the hospital, he told the paramedics that he had stopped to smoke a cigarette, and a spark had fallen onto a petrol canister which had been accidentally left inside the truck of the car and that his children had been unable to escape in time and that his own injuries were caused by the fire's backdraft when he tried to save them.

However, chillingly, one of the paramedics heard him say something along the lines of "It is all done." Upon his arrival, the attending physicians found his injuries so severe that he was placed into a medically induced coma.

When the emergency services arrived at the location 2 kilometres away, they saw a burnt-out Suzuki with Danish license plates, and to say he had been in an "accident" would be underselling it. There had been a fire so intense that it burnt the car completely down to its frame, with its paint job entirely melted away. In the backseat, the first responders discovered the charred bodies of two children still strapped into their seat belts.

Since there was obviously nothing that could be done for them, the paramedics soon contacted the police, who then contacted the Potsdam Public Prosecutor's Office, with both arriving to investigate the cause of this tragic "accident". And then, just for good measure, the Brandenburg State Criminal Police were also called in. You see, right from the start, this "accident" didn't seem very accidental.

https://preview.redd.it/agta1ak0yxgh1.png?width=1840&format=png&auto=webp&s=6dbf8d648f2d35879fb762214763da149befce13

https://preview.redd.it/2puzuxj1yxgh1.png?width=1904&format=png&auto=webp&s=efa2586e9458759626dce926974921a92bec62a0

the police at the scene

According to the father, a spark from his cigarette accidentally ignited a canister of gasoline left inside the trunk, and yet, all the signs of the accelerant were found in the backseat of the vehicle and even on the bodies themselves, as if that had been the source of the fire rather than the trunk.

The autopsies also revealed another disturbing discovery. While the cause of death was smoke inhalation and the pathologist determined that the two children had been alive when the fire was set, just as their father had claimed, that didn't mean they were conscious. The pathologist detected large amounts of sleeping medication in their bloodstreams that had entered their system shortly before the fire.

The police also found a kitchen knife discarded, thrown into the woods. The police concluded this knife had to have come from the vehicle for the simple reason that its handle had been melted. This also cast doubt on the father's story because if he stumbled over to the motorway for help first thing, why had that knife very clearly been tossed away from the vehicle after the fire started?.

Meanwhile, across the border in neighbouring Denmark, a woman ventured to her ex-husband's farm in Øster Hurup. Her two daughters had left for a summer trip with their divorced father, and they were supposed to be back by now. But nobody was in sight; the door to the farm was locked, no one would answer the doorbell or her knocks, and her husband wouldn't pick up the phone.

Eventually, she gave up and went to attend a music event in the nearby town of Hadsund, one she was supposed to spend with her daughters but was now going to alone. But just as she went to leave, she heard someone else ring the doorbell. Walking around the farm, she saw three police officers with a fourth just pulling in.

At first, she assumed her husband was still inside and called the police to try and get her arrested for trespassing, so she tried hiding from them, but once they saw her and spoke to her, it became dreadfully clear that something far worse had happened.

The police also wanted to know where her children were, and when she told them that she had been trying to reach their father but was unable, that's when they informed her that a charred vehicle matching her ex-husband's was found in Germany with the severely burnt bodies of two children inside and that the only reason they were at the farm is because the German police contacted them wanting to identify the bodies and to uncover more about the family background.

The father was named Peter-Thue Rudgaard, and he was born around 1971.

Peter-Thue Rudgaard

He spent the majority of his life in his native Denmark, graduating from the organic agricultural school in Vendsyssel in northern Jutland with a specialization in ecological farming.

He met his wife in Aalborg through a mutual friend in 1996 when the two of them were both 25. At the time, his wife worked as a laboratory technician, but both dreamed of living a quieter and more rural life.

In 1999, they purchased an old and dilapidated farm in the village of Øster Hurup, restoring and renovating the property into a functional farm that allowed them and their family to live a comfortable life from the money they made at a shop they set up on the property.

Well, at least it did at first, but the farm, however much money it was bringing in at the moment, was not financially stable long-term, and so he began seeking other work. Rudgaard attempted to start a commercial landscaping and horticulture business, which he later had to sell at a severe loss.

Then he worked at a social care institution for young people and then at a residential school for at-risk teenagers, but he was later dismissed from these jobs. He then enrolled in a training program for teachers but left after just six months, while his wife went down the same path, only she completed her training and got a job as a primary school teacher.

Rudgaard's ex-wife would later go on to describe his personality as "contradictory"; he would seem funny and intellectually curious one day, having conversations she described as consisting of "high-level humour," only to then show deep jealousy and fall into an unstable emotional state.

His first bout with depression began when he was 20, and he had been referred to many psychologists and prescribed antidepressants on multiple occasions, but it was an uphill battle to convince Rudgaard to take them, and he regularly abandoned therapy sessions, telling the therapist he didn't wish to talk about anything "painful," and eventually stopped showing up. Sometimes, Rudgaard would also struggle to get up in the morning.

Their two daughters, Marlene Marie Rudgaard and Line Sofie Rudgaard, were born in 2000 and 2002, respectively, on the farm in Øster Hurup that their parents purchased. Marlene and Line grew up in the fields and woods of Himmerland and attended primary school in the area.

Marlene Marie Rudgaard and Line Sofie Rudgaard

In the spring of 2009, their mother approached Rudgaard and told him that she wanted a divorce. Wanting to avoid such an outcome, Rudgaard asked to consider couples therapy. She agreed, but the sessions bore no fruit, and by mid-summer of that year, she moved out of the farm and into an apartment in Als.

At school during the spring and early summer of 2011, things were not going well; their teachers noted that the girls seemed anxious and were getting involved in several verbal conflicts with their classmates, leading their teachers to suspect that things were not at all peaceful at home.

The two maintained a shared custody agreement when it came to Marlene and Line staying at each parent's home for 7 days at a time, but once their divorce was finalized by the courts, primary custody was awarded to Rudgaard, making the primary residence of the two children with him.

As for his ex-wife, she moved on and began dating a new partner only months later, something that made Rudgaard furious. He started to act more outwardly hostile toward her, considering her new boyfriend to be an "intrusion" on their daughters and that she was trying to engineer Marlene and Line's sympathies against him. In addition to the fact that he just couldn't stand the idea of another man having any role in his children's upbringing.

In the autumn of 2010, Rudgaard announced his intention to move to Fredericia, roughly 230 kilometres to the south, taking both girls with him, stating that he had no future in the area since the farm was declining and the courts had recently ordered him to sell it, citing unpaid debts.

Initially, his ex-wife didn't believe he would actually go through with it, but when she learned that they had spent Christmas Day looking at apartments in Fredericia, she applied to the court to have custody transferred to her.

On May 1, 2011, Rudgaard finally moved out, and Marlene initially went along with it, moving out of the farm to join her father, spending several weeks in the spring of 2011 at a new school there. Meanwhile, Line refused to leave, fearful that it would make it hard to ever see her mother again due to the distances and now clear dislike Rudgaard had shown toward her. However, Rudgaard believed that the only reason she didn't want to leave her was that she had been manipulated against him.

For roughly 6 weeks, the two sisters were now living on almost opposite ends of Denmark until the family court made its ruling in June 2011. Now their mother would have primary custody. In response, Rudgaard cancelled his move and went back to the farm, asking to go back to their prior shared custody arrangement. She was relieved and agreed to his proposal.

All seemed well until the summer of 2011 when Rudgaard, now unemployed and living on a farm in foreclosure after his failed move Southward, had his mental state deteriorate further. He started to barrage his ex-wife with a series of threatening phone calls, saying things like"You'd better watch out," "look over your shoulder," and "You know this will end badly"

His anger only intensified when Line refused to accompany him on a summer trip to Paris even though he had bought tickets for the two of them. Rudgaard eventually went to Paris with just Marlene, but he remained angry; once again, he believed the only explanation for why Line wouldn't want to go with him was if her mother had manipulated her against him.

Rudgaard also said that the only reason he never went to a therapist or sought psychiatric help during this spiral was that he feared his ex-wife would use any visit to a therapist against him to have any and all custody revoked. The only medication he had been prescribed was sleeping pills.

The last time anyone in Denmark had seen Rudgaard and the girls alive was on August 10, 2011; it was Rudgaard's week, and he had another summer trip planned this time to Germany. Marlene and Line got into his car, and Rudgaard began the drive south. Although nothing about the vacation was planned, Rudgaard talked to a colleague about the Snow Dome Bispingen, an indoor ski slope in Bispingen, Germany, in the weeks leading up to the fatal trip.

Marlene and Line's bodies were charred so badly that the only way to positively identify them was through a days-long process of DNA testing and Dental Records. The Danish police had to go to their family home to collect toothbrushes and hairbrushes, which were then shipped to Germany to assist with DNA testing. A search of the farm by Danish police found nothing, such as a suicide note or anything that seemed to indicate the fire, if it had been arson, was premeditated.

Everyone was shocked when the news broke, even the girls' mother. By all accounts, Rudgaard was a devoted father who went to great lengths to ensure his daughter's safety and happiness, making sure to watch over them as they played outside, participated in the scouts and cooked for them.

While Rudgaard and their mother had vicious arguments over who would assume primary custody once the divorce was finalized, she never once assumed Rudgaard would ever harm the children; she more so feared for her own safety, and even then, Rudgaard never abused her either. To everyone involved, Rudgaard's actions seemed completely out of the blue, even with his prior mental health.

Back in Germany, wanting to put the final nail in the coffin before they made their arrest, the police secured two Suzukis of the same make and model as Rudgaard's. They then set them both on fire, one using the way Rudgaard said the fire had begun and the second car was torched the way the police believed it happened, by dousing the back seats with gasoline. The second test was nearly identical to how the real crime scene appeared.

On August 26, the police, together with a judge, approached Rudgaard in his hospital bed and announced that he was now under arrest on suspicion of double murder.

Although it would be a long time until he could make a coherent statement or be taken into custody. Rudgaard's injuries were so great that he required surgery and several skin grafts, medical procedures he would now be forced to undergo while under police guard and handcuffed to his hospital bed.

The procedures were all successful, and Rudgaard made a full recovery, which meant the German police could now put him through an intense interrogation, point out every inconsistency in his story and insinuate that he was a murderer all they wanted since he was now in a position to actually respond or try to defend himself. After several weeks in the hospital, Rudgaard finally admitted that the fire was no accident.

Rudgaard said that again, nothing about the trip had been planned and that it was more of a sightseeing tour across Northern and Central Germany. When they crossed the border, he mentioned the Snow Dome Bispingen, and the girls felt it sounded fun, so Rudgaard decided that would be their first activity.

By the time they arrived in Hamburg, the business was closed, so they spent the night at a hotel. They then woke up bright and early, spending almost the entirety of August 11 skiing and playing in the snow; they stayed there until 9:00, when the establishment closed.

As Rudgaard drove back to the motel, he began telling Marlene and Line about German history, which gave him an idea. He would drive to Berlin to show the girls the remains of the Berlin Wall.

He began the drive until he realized that it wouldn't be possible. He wouldn't be able to go to the Berlin Wall and then get them back in Denmark in time to have them handed off to their mother for her week of custody. He started driving east, then turned the car around, then changed his mind again and turned the car back around.

Rudgaard said he was "completely frustrated" and now feared that if he was even a second late, then Marlene and Line's mother would never let him see his daughters again, so for him, it was truly unfortunate that with the route he had taken, it truly would be impossible to make it back to Denmark in time.

This caused Rudgaard to think, "The whole thing can just be meaningless," which was where the evil idea finally began to form. That idea being that if he couldn't have full custody of Marlene and Line, well then nobody else would have them at all.

On August 1, only a week before departing Denmark, he was prescribed sleeping pills, which he brought across the border with him. He saw the girls in the backseat fighting and already tired. So while they were distracted, he crushed up the sleeping pills and put them into their food and drink.

After they fell asleep, he kept driving until he found any dirt road off the side of the Autobahn and upon reaching the village of Börnicke, he finally found what he had been looking for, turning off the Autobahn and driving down the dirt path until he was a decent way into the forest.

By the time he parked between the trees, it was completely dark out, and nobody even lived in this area, giving Rudgaard the utmost privacy for what he had planned. While still out cold from the sleeping pills, he opened the trunk to retrieve a spare fuel canister he had also brought with him from Denmark.

Rudgaard proceeded to pour its contents all over the vehicle, making sure the bulk of the gasoline was spilled onto the back seats and Marlene and Line's sleeping bodies. Rudgaard said that as he did so, he tried to avoid looking directly at the girls as much as possible.

Rudgaard kept pouring until he had emptied the entire canister, after which he got back in the car, sitting in the front seat. He then brandished his cigarette lighter and ignited the gasoline, planning on staying in the car to die with them. He hoped the vehicle would just explode, and that death would come instantly, but that wasn't quite the case.

The fire spread throughout the car's interior almost immideately and while Rudgaard claimed he tried to stand still as long as possible, once the fire burned his forehead and legs and hands, the pain grew too great, prompting him to open the car door and jump out of the vehicle and roll over on the grass until the fire was completely extinguished.

Once he turned his gaze back toward the vehicle, it was completely ablaze, and before he could even think of approaching it, there was a loud bang, likely an airbag or the engine exploding, which propelled the vehicle forward by several meters.

While he had second thoughts about ending his own life, Rudgaard, however hopeless it may have been, made zero attempt to save the lives of his daughters and instead wandered around the car aimlessly until the fire naturally burnt itself out.

As he waited, he noticed a kitchen knife in a bag on the front seat and attempted to use a stick to retrieve it from the fire, but the handle had melted. He tried to hold it against a tree and push himself into it in a second attempt to end his own life, but found this method impossible, so instead he threw the knife into the woods and wandered back to the autobahn to tell the first other person he saw that he had been in an accident.

When Rudgaard's medical treatment was finally complete enough for him to be discharged, the prosecution began preparing for Rudgaard's double murder trial. Although Rudgaard said nothing about the trip being planned, the prosecutor argued that the reason for that is that it was never meant to be a real trip and instead just a plot.

On February 21, 2012, the trial opened before the Grand Jury Chamber of the Potsdam Regional Court, and on the very first day of the trial, it had to be postponed because one of the judges fell ill. Once Rudgaard finally did appear, he covered his face with a file (something common in Germany) and was visibly trembling during the procedings but otherwise showed no emotion.

Rudgaard being taken to court

A large majority of the witnesses were also from Denmark and had to be flown into Germany to attend the trial.

Rudgaard said that the murder hadn't been premeditated and that the idea just came to him out of the blue, but the prosecution argued that since he brought his sleeping pills over, and more damining, two spare five-liter fuel canisters for what was only meant to be a short drive and vacation, it led him to believe that the one and only purpoes behind Rudgaard's trip to Germany, was just so he could kill his daughters.

The prosecutor also dismissed the claim that the girls' deaths were the result of a bungled murder-suicide arguing that the forensic evidence at the scene seemed to indicate that Rudgaard had only been inside the vehicle for 1-3 seconds and that he had no gasoline on his clothing or the driver's seat, therefore the prosecutor believed he left the car as soon as the gasoline was ignited and that the backdraft from the flames after exiting the vehicle caused his injuries.

The prosecution was seeking a life sentence with "particular severity of guilt" attached to make it, in effect, a permanent life sentence.

Meanwhile, Rudgaard's attorney classified the case as a failed murder suicide attempt but also that Rudgaard wasn't in the right state of mind at the time owing to his psychiatric history and should therefore get a lenient sentence of around 5 years at least for manslaughter. However, during his psychiatric evaluation, Rudgaard was determined to have a full awareness of his actions and wasn't suffering from any form of diminished capacity.

Rudgaard, even after confessing, always called the fire an accident, which even his attorney called him out on. When asked to explain himself, he said: "It was an accident inside my head."

On March 22, the day Marlene and Line's mother was supposed to testify, Rudgaard was coincidentally found lying on the bed of his cell, unable to be woken. A nurse had to be called, who determined that he needed to be evacuated and rushed to an outside hospital.

As part of his prescriptions, Rudgaard was provided with antidepressants and sleeping pills, which the prison now knew he had been hoarding, and he took them all at once in another attempt to take his own life, though he once again survived and made a full recovery and therefore wouldn't escape his trial and eventual sentence. Afterward, his pills were replaced with liquid medication. The guards were then stationed to watch him take it so nothing could be stockpiled.

The trial resumed on May 3, with the girl's mother finally giving her testimony, speaking for four hours and staring directly at Rudgaard the entire time.

On May 31, 2012, the court finally delivered its verdict, finding Peter-Thue Rudgaard guilty of the double murder of his two daughters, Marlene Marie Rudgaard and Line Sofie Rudgaard. The court agreed with the prosecution that the murders were planned, with his only reason for travelling to Germany being to kill his children; therefore, Rudgaard was handed down a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 15 years.

Rudgaard as the verdict was being read.

Before he was taken away, Rudgaard was given a chance to speak, where he said, "It was not an act done in hate. It was an act done in love. You cannot punish me more than I have already been punished. I am not asking for forgiveness, because I cannot even forgive myself." He said that he felt immense remorse and wished he could "rewind time" to undo what he had done; in responce the judge said, "If you really mean these words, then you will accept the punishment." Rudgaard was then taken away.

Rudgaard served his sentence at the Potsdam Prison and spent almost the entirety of his time there on suicide watch, making several additional attempts to take his own life. He also largely kept to himself in prison, refusing to go outside to the exercise yard and opting out of any work programs. Instead, he opted to stay in his cell watching TV or doing puzzles; his only visitors were one journalist and his mother whenever she could afford to travel to Germany.

When interviewed by the journalist who visited him, despite confessing and saying he could hardly live with himself, it seemed taking responsibility was just a bridge too far, as when asked if anything could've made a difference or prevented the tragedy, he said that the mother of his children "should've given in more" or apologized for her "provocations" and that he saw her as complicit in the deaths of their children because she "pressured me knowing I was mentally weak".

Likewise, he denied any visitation requests from her, stating that there is no reason why anyone should expect him to see her or to expect anything to come of it.

On January 11, 2016, after 5 years in a German prison, Rudgaard was transferred to serve his sentence in his native Denmark instead. However, as is the law, this resulted in an automatic hearing, a hearing, not a trial, taking place to convert the German life sentence into a Danish one, which opened before the Aalborg City Court on February 8, 2016.

This hearing was much smaller in scale, with only 11 people present, including Marlene and Line's mother, who was seated directly behind Rudgaard, separated by only a few meters and a single row of chairs.

Rudgaard's new attorney argued that his life sentence in Germany should instead be reduced to just 16 or perhaps even 14 years, arguing that the German courts were wrong about premeditation and that the fire had actually been set impulsively.

The hearing lasted only 22 minutes before the presiding judge decided to keep the life sentence intact.

Although Rudgaard had seemingly accepted his sentence in Germany, opting not to appeal, hearing the Danish courts hand down the same sentence greatly dissatisfied him, so now, for the first time, Rudgaard appealed his conviction.

His appeal was heard on July 4, 2016, before the Western High Court of Denmark, which upheld his life sentence. In response, Rudgaard said that he regretted ever coming home and said he would rather die than serve his life sentence, stating that spending the rest of his life in a Danish prison was "completely unmanageable"

Rudgaard said he would appeal his life sentence to the Danish Supreme Court, but that appeal doesn't appear to have materialized.

Rudgaard is one of only 55 people in Denmark to be serving a life sentence.

Although she labels his actions as such, Marlene and Line's mother said that it wouldn't be productive to dismiss Rudgaard as just being pure evil and with that in mind, she currently works at a residential centre for young criminals, hoping to guide them onto a better path.

Sources (Should be in the comments)

On May 15, 2019, a man was making his way to the rural district of Bàu Bàng, located in what was then Vietnam's Bình Dương province. He had recently purchased a long-since disused and unoccupied home and was going to meet the previous owner, who would formally transfer the home to his name and let him begin the house cleaning in preparation for his move.

But once the two men arrived at the property, they were confronted by something very odd: the door was locked from the outside via a padlock. Confused, the two knocked on the door and called out from the outside, but nobody answered. Eventually, they had to call in a locksmith to cut the padlock so they could finally enter.

The two ventured to the bedroom and noticed two plastic containers sitting on the floor. One was quite small while the other was a large blue industrial-grade plastic drum with a capacity of 1,000 litres, typically used for storing water and chemicals.

The two tried moving the drum; however, they found it to be quite heavy. In fact, it was so heavy that they couldn't even make the drum budge slightly. Opening the drum revealed it was completely filled with hardened concrete. So the soon-to-be homeowner began chipping away at the concrete, and as soon as he broke it even slightly, the foul odour of decomposition began engulfing the house, and it didn't take long to uncover the source of the scent. Peering through the crack he had just made, the man discovered clothing and what looked to be a human body.

The police and a forensic team were quickly dispatched to the property, cordoning it off. They confirmed that what the homeowner had discovered was indeed a human body, and the police were fairly certain it was murder, considering he had been stuffed into a drum, sealed in concrete and abandoned in a disused home.

The police, onlookers and an abulance outside

But recovering the body was no easy task; the concrete was so thick that it took until the morning of May 16 to finally remove the body from the drum, having to be careful not to damage the corpse while breaking up the concrete.

The concrete being broken up

As they did so, the police searched the rest of the home and also the surrounding area and decided to check out the smaller plastic container that had been largely overlooked. The officers removed the lid, where they were once again hit with the foul odour of decomposition, stemming from a second dead body.

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The contents of the second container being examined

Unlike the first victim, this individual had not been encased in concrete; rather, they had been wrapped tightly in plastic sheeting, sealed with industrial adhesive tape and silicone sealant, and packed in alongside loose tea leaves that were likely intended to mask the smell of decomposition. Based on the rate of decomposition, this victim had been dead considerably longer than the body found in the drum.

The police then questioned all the neighbours who unfortnuately knew very little of the prior tenants. They told the police that the people who had been living on the property were recluses who hardly spoke to any of the neighbours and covered the perimeter of the property with heavy plastic tarpaulins, preventing anybody from seeing into their yard. Whenever they were outside, they'd often run and retreat back into the house if any of the neighbours tried speaking to them and would never answer if anyone came to the door.

Nobody the police spoke to knew their names. Not even the landlord who rented the home to them.

And for the time being, nobody knew the name of the victims either, although the medical examiner determined that the two bodies were both men.

Starting with the first victim found encased in the concrete, his cause of death was ligature strangulation, and he had sustained several post-mortem stab wounds. The forensic team estimated him to be between the ages of 30-35.

The second body retrieved from the plastic container had also met a violent end, with bruising and hematomas throughout and with blood pooling in the skin of the chest area indicating a severe beating had taken place.

While identifying the victims seemed like it would take some work, the crime scene provided investigators with much more to work with. First, a lot of chemical bottles were left at the scene, indicating they made some attempt to clean the crime scene before fleeing.

The chemical bottles.

While the residents, who were also the police's main suspects, had vacated the apartment long ago, they left behind several personal effects and documents in the weeks before the sale.

Such items recovered were a metal nameplate engraved with the title and name "Thạc sỹ Nguyễn Thị Tâm Huyên, Trường Đại học Nông Lâm", indicating a Master's-degree holder associated with Nông Lâm University; four photocopied identity cards issued by the Ho Chi Minh City police in the name of 66-year-old Trịnh Thị Hồng Hoa. Photocopied household registration documents were also found in Hồng Hoa's name.

Trịnh Thị Hồng Hoa

Four additional photocopied identity cards and photocopies of a passport and birth certificate in the name of her 31-year-old daughter Phạm Thị Thiên Hà, Nông Lâm's daughter, were also found.

Phạm Thị Thiên Hà

The police also recovered a large number of books and fringe religious texts. According to the documents, the two were living in the Tan Phu District of Ho Chi Minh City, but neither had returned to their home.

Unfortunately, due to heavy decomposition, identifying the victims would be impossible without help, so on May 17, the police distributed descriptions of the two bodies and took a few select photographs as well, urging those with missing male relatives to come forward.

That same day, the police put Thiên Hà and Nông Lâm on the wanted list, distributed their photographs as well as pictures of their vehicles and distributed them across the internet and also put up physical flyers and pamphlets across Ho Chi Minh City, asking the public to report the mother and daughter if they saw them.

For the first body identified was the second one discovered, the one in the container, enough of the man's fingerprints remained for the police to identify him as a man born in 1969 named Trần Đức Linh. Suffice to say, Linh was quite far from home, hailing from a town called Thai Hoa in the Nghe An province.

He left Vietnam in 1999 to run a fashion clothing store in Ukraine before returning to Vietnam in 2014, where he made his living selling fruit such as oranges, tangerines and melons. Linh was married with kids, but that marriage later ended in divorce. He was overall described as kind and hard-working.

Sometime after his return, Linh came across Falun Gong and began taking it seriously, teaching it to others and trying to introduce the practice to his family members and neighbours. This led to him being briefly detained by the police in late 2017 for distributing "unauthorized books"

And speaking of his family, although they didn't know the names of the groups in question, Linh started to become indoctrinated into more extreme and fringe groups and started speaking with his family less and less, as once the locals drove the group from town, Linh accompanied them. The last they heard from him was in February 2018, after he abruptly sold his house and left. Even when his son was about to be married, they were still unable to contact Linh.

On May 5, 2019, only 10 days before his body was found, Linh's family back in Nghe An received a text message from a number they didn't recognize telling them that Linh had "gone down the wrong path" and was no longer in contact with their religious group.

As for the second victim stuffed into the drum and encased in the concrete, DNA testing identified him as Trần Trí Thành. Thành was a little bit younger than Linh, being born in 1992. But one thing he did have in common with his fellow victim was that he, too, wasn't a local; Thành's residence was registered as being in the Phu Nhuan District of Ho Chi Minh City. A lot less was known about his background, and his family said they hadn't heard from him in quite a while.

On May 18, four women approched the front desk receptionist at a hotel in Thủ Dầu Một, 50 kilometres away from the crime scene. They told the receptionist that they wanted to check out. However, having just watched the news, the staff recognized two of the four as Thiên Hà and Nông Lâm and quietly informed the hotel's security, who closed the gates, locking everyone inside and then waited for the police to arrive.

The 4 shortly after their arrest

Half of the group were confirmed to be Thiên Hà and Nông Lâm, with the other two women being identified as 29-year-old Lê Ngọc Phương Thảo, from Tiền Giang Province. Phương Thảo was a university graduate who had studied abroad, worked as an interpreter and was given the name "Thanh" by Thiên Hà.

The second woman was 40-year-old Nguyễn Ngọc Tâm Huyên. Tâm Huyên hailed from Quảng Ngãi Province. Tâm Huyên held a master's degree and worked as a lecturer at the University of Agriculture and Forestry until she abandoned that job to join Thiên Hà's sect.

Tâm Huyên was one of Thiên Hà's most loyal followers and was regarded as her "most important lieutenant" who abandoned her husband and children just to follow Thiên Hà. The group named her "Hiệp".

The police also located Thiên Hà's SUV nearby, and a search of the vehicle turned up 1.125 kilograms of gold, 20,000 USD in cash, 300 million Vietnamese đồng in cash, and household items including cooking equipment, bedding, and cushions.

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Investigators going through the contents of Thiên Hà's SUV

When the 4 women were interrogated, they were at first unresponsive. Whenever they did respond, such as when Thiên Hà was questioned about all the money in her vehicle, she said that she made it via selling a property she used to own. But as the evidence mounted, such as the fact that they left their identification at the crime scene, one by one they began to crack and confessed to the police.

Thiên Hà's parents separated during her childhood, leaving her to live with her mother. Neighbours and acquaintances of the family said that Thiên Hà grew up mostly spoiled by her parents but still showed genuine talent at school. Thiên Hà was also said to present herself in a manner considered masculine by Vietnamese standards, for example, by how short she cut her hair.

After graduating from secondary school, Thiên Hà went to Japan to study abroad, returning to Vietnam in 2016, now able to speak Japanese and with a university-level education. The first job Thiên Hà landed upon returning to her homeland was to work as a Japanese interpreter while doing some trading on the side and was the manager of a cafe. In addition to Japanese, Thiên Hà also spoke English and Mandarin, making her quadrilingual.

Thiên Hà running one of her various buisnesses.

Thiên Hà had a steady clientele and was held in high regard for being outgoing and warm-natured. But what they didn't know was the extent of Thiên Hà's activities when off the clock; she had been running a cult.

In 2013, she was introduced to Falun Gong, known locally in Vietnam as Pháp Luân Công, via social media. Although the Vietnamese government still brands Falun Gong as an unauthorized organization with its public activities branded as illegal, with police typically breaking up their gatherings, they aren't singled out and persecuted to nearly the same extent as in neighbouring China, and over 8,000 are estimated to practice it in Vietnam, with Thiên Hà now one of them.

Thiên Hà took on various roles with the local branches of Falun Gong, such as a coordinator or "instruction facilitator," until eventually deciding to start her own group. Whether or not Falun Gong itself is already a cult or not is already subject to some debate, but Thiên Hà's offshoot of it was undisputedly one.

After gathering and recruiting a bunch of practitioners, Thiên Hà started to teach not Falun Gong but rather her own independent beliefs that she had developed and began imposing on her followers, creating a mishmash of Falun Gong, traditional Chinese folktales and stories and other religious texts.

In addition to the religious texts, they also included fictional novels such as Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," "Inferno," and even the Harry Potter series. Naturally, with all these influences, Thiên Hà's cult would stray far away from Falun Gong until there was hardly any resemblance remaining.

Gradually, Thiên Hà's new religious group began to take over her life, and she began to abandon her successful job and the cafe she was managing, causing it to fall into severe finanical difficult and eventually be handed over to new owners.

Hồng Hoa was also indoctrinated into her daughter's belief system and agreed to sell their family apartment to pay off Thiên Hà's debts and purchased a smaller, cheaper apartment as well as cutting off all ties to her prior social life.

Where was Thiên Hà's father during all of this? Well, her interactions with him grew rarer and rarer until he was finally cut off. Every time her father did speak to her, he tried urging her to reconsider what she was doing.

By 2018, they had mostly abandoned the new apartment, now opting to live a "nomadic" lifestyle, with the two travelling from province to province and accompanied by Thiên Hà's followers.

At its height, Thiên Hà's cult (which doesn't seem to have a name) consisted of eight members, six women and two men. Those two men being Linh and Thành. Unlike with Linh, Thành's family had no idea he was involved in any religious group until after the police informed them of his death.

In October 2018, two of the members left, finding the expectations to be too demanding, meaning that when the police arrested the four at the hotel, that was the cult's entire membership. One of these ex-members was briefly arrested but later released. As for the demanding expectations that prompted them to abandon Thiên Hà..

Well, they weren't too extreme at first; they practiced traditional Falun Gong at Hồng Hoa's apartment in Ho Chi Minh City and in other private residences, but the local police would always find them and demand they stop, deeming their activities illegal.

This was when Thiên Hà and her followers determined that if they wanted to practice undisturbed, they had to uproot their entire lives and constantly move across Southern Vietnam, seeking unoccupied properties in rural and remote communities.

In July 2018, the group rented a house in the Bàu Bàng district, the future crime scene. The area was rural without a permanent police presence, but Thiên Hà had plastic sheeting placed around the property to prevent anyone from the street from seeing them.

Now for what exactly Thiên Hà had her followers do. The internal regime that Thiên Hà had created involved two seperate phases, with phase #1 being called "tẩy tịnh"/"purification". Those who underwent the purification ritual were required to consume only plain white rice with soy sauce and raw vegetables, to abstain from alcohol and tobacco, to slap themselves across the face as a form of self-correction, and to cease any and all contact with those outside of their in-group, including severing ties with their family members, a hypocritical requirement considering Thiên Hà's mother was key member of her cult.

The second phase was called "tịnh cốc"/"pure valley". This was when it got really difficult; during this phase, you were expected to fast, to not eat or drink anything at all for 14 days straight, while at the same time constantly meditating, reciting religious texts, traditional Chinese folklore and studying all the material written by Thiên Hà.

And one more rule: their real names; they were expected to forget about them. It was mentioned how Phương Thảo and Tâm Huyên were named "Thanh" and "Hiệp" respectively; well, those weren't just nicknames; they were to be their real names going forward. They were expected to only go by those names, and anyone else in the group was only allowed to call them such. Thiên Hà named herself "Hoàng," while Hồng Hoa was called "cô Hai".

Finally, as implied, Thiên Hà was their leader and her authority was absolute. She used the archaic pronoun "Ta," which in English would mean "I/me" but only by those of "elevated status," and addressed others as "you" with the word "Ngươi," which is used to address one's subordinates or those of a lower social class.

Thiên Hà felt she had earned such respect and titles because she had achieved "the highest tier of spiritual cultivation" and was inherently superior to all her followers. So superior in fact that the only possible reason for anyone to oppose would be if they had been "invaded by demons," and Thiên Hà also had plans for how to "exorcise" them. Furthermore, after the two defections in October, she was determined to make sure nobody else escaped.

On December 27, 2018, Thiên Hà drove the entire group, now consisting of just 6 members, to another vacant home for a "tịnh cốc" retreat, which meant for everyone present, another two weeks with no food, water or contact with the outside world.

On January 20, 2019, 50-year-old Linh was the first to crack; living off of nothing but the air he could breathe was taking a toll on him. His body was starting to fail, which broke through his devotion to Thiên Hà and made him realize that he had to get out of there.

Linh climbed out the window of his room, fell to the grass below, limped away, and weakly called for help. His voice unfortunately went unheard by the locals, but he was heard by everyone else inside the house, tipping them off that Linh was trying to escape.

Thiên Hà and Thành rushed outside and dragged the severely weakened Linh back inside, and when he resisted, they both started beating the starved and dehydrated man with their fists and feet. With how weakened the lack of any food and water had left him, these blows were enough to kill him quite easily.

Thiên Hà and her followers did not attempt to call the police, an ambulance or Linh's family. Instead, they kept the body exactly where it lay, with the AC stunting decomposition as much as it could.

Thiên Hà then instructed everyone to resume their religious exercises and fast only with Linh's dead body in their presence as they did so.

On January 23, Thiên Hà decided it was finally time to address the body. They loaded Linh's body into Thiên Hà's SUV and drove to the empty home in Bình Dương. Once there, Linh's body was placed in a small plastic container, which was then packed with dried tea leaves to mask the odour of decomposition.

They then wrapped the container in plastic film, sealing it with silicone adhesive and industrial tape; all of these materials, including the container, were purchased by Thành under Thiên Hà's orders. Afterward, they continued their practices, religious activities and fasting in the very same room, living alongside Linh's body.

In March, they returned to Bình Dương for a second "tịnh cốc" ritual and during the course of this ritual, they directed their attention toward Thành. Although Thành had been loyal, even killing and disposing of a body for the cult, his loyalty had fallen into question.

Thiên Hà accused Thành of secretly eating food at night, which Thiên Hà deemed an unforgivable transgression, as it proved that Thành "had not shed the attachments of the ordinary world". The accusations didn't stop there; Thiên Hà accused him of secretly watching the 4 women as they bathed.

At first, Thành was locked in the room, and after a while, he started to scream and destroy stuff in the bedroom, which, to Thiên Hà, confirmed her worst fears.

Thiên Hà's explanation for this behaviour was that Thành had now been possessed by a demon and that letting him leave their group would put society at large in grave danger; therefore, they had to kill him, and she ordered the other 3 women to take part.

The three women went online and ordered a 1,000-litre plastic drum and quantities of cement, sand, and aggregate. While they waited for it to be delivered, others went into town to purchase a battery-powered electrical shock device consisting of a car battery and a power inverter, an illegal device commonly used in Vietnam for shock fishing, as well as electrical wire, rope, and safety pins.

Before she followed through with the murder, Thiên Hà said, "If Thanh deserves to die, then let God send a heavy rain"

March 15, 2019, just so happened to be a day marked by heavy rain. The four approached the room Thành was staying in and asked him to extend his arm out the door so they could administer some acupuncture treatment. Thành complied, and once he did so, they administered the electric shock device to Thành's arm continuously until he fell unconscious.

After he passed out, Thiên Hà entered the room and used a cord to strangle Thành before he could wake up and recover from the electric shocks. Just to make sure he was dead, the women used the electric shock device to check if there was a reaction. When he didn't respond, they closed the door to his room and locked the body inside.

They left the body there until March 18, when the foul odour of decomposition became overwhelming, forcing Thiên Hà to address it. She grabbed a knife and made some incisions in Thành's corpse to relieve the bloating caused by putrefactive gases being released and to fit it inside the drum. Once Thành's body was forced into the plastic drum, they stirred and mixed the concrete before pouring it into the drum until the entire thing was filled completely to the top and then solidified.

Finally, they abandoned the home for good in early April and began their rituals at the hotel in Thủ Dầu Một. When they arrived, Thiên Hà told them they'd be doing "tịnh tâm"/"mental purification" to offer prayers for the dead. It was in this hotel that they saw on the news that the two bodies had been found and that they were the suspects.

On April 24, 2020, the Bình Dương Provincial People's Procuratorate concluded the investigation, charging Thiên Hà with murder, Phương Thảo with murder and covering up a crime, and Tâm Huyên and Hồng Hoa both with murder and failure to report a crime.

On June 25, 2020, the trial began at the Bình Dương Provincial People's Court, and as soon as the procedings began, Thiên Hà refused to refer to herself as "tôi"/"I" instead of "bị cáo"/defandant dispite the judge and prosecutor constantly pressuring her to refer to herself as "defendant". She also gave articulate answers and was perfectly composed, which set her apart from her co-defendants.

A scene from the trial.

When asked about Thành's murder, she confessed, saying, "I am the person who decided to kill Thành. He was no different from a demon. If he had gone out into society, he would have affected society". When asked if she regretted the murder, she refused to answer.

Linh was a different story. Thiên Hà denied killing him and instead insisted that "I gave him two slaps" and even then said the slaps were an attempt at first aid and to revive him before saying that his death was his own fault for trying to escape.

When Thiên Hà made her first statement to the police, she initially said that Linh had died from jumping out the window rather than being beaten, and now, she was trying to revert back to that claim in court, arguing that Linh's death was a suicide and they had simply hidden the body.

She also said that she stuffed Linh's body into that container not to try and conceal the murder but to try and preserve his body in hopes of using her cultivation power to "revive" him. She also mentioned reading news articles about people who had been pronounced clinically dead by hospitals only to still come back, and believed Linh was in a similar condition. When asked why she still kept the body after he began to decompose and therefore past the point of any revival, she again refused to answer.

As for why Thành's body was encased in concrete, she also said that her intention wasn't to cover up the murder but simply because the odour of decomposition was disrupting practice since they required an environment of purity and silence. Something the prosecutor disputed was that everything needed was bought while Thành was still alive, indicating premeditation.

Thiên Hà being brought to court.

Phương Thảo was evasive when asked a single question and showed no signs of remorse.

Phương Thảo being brought to court.

When it came to the co-defendants, Tâm Huyên retracted her confession, arguing that she played no part in Thành's murder and simply stood outside as a lookout. When asked why she confessed the first time, she said that it was simply an act of loyalty toward Thiên Hà.

And finally, Hồng Hoa, now elderly and in poor health, had to sit during the entirety of the procedings, unable to stand long-term. Hồng Hoa admitted that she had followed her daughter and helped her form her cult but insisted that she did not take part in any murders and knew nothing in advance.

Hồng Hoa and Tâm Huyên during the trial

In one shocking moment, Thành's mother pleaded for the 4 defendants to be acquitted because he said her son had survived, was still alive and that the body must've been someone else. The judge believed this statement to have been made out of a mix of denial and grief.

But when asked why she felt this way, she said that the police never let them actually see the body and just had them show up to take their DNA to compare to the body. When they finally were allowed to see the body, it was right before the cremation, and she said that the corpse had three broken teeth, a trait her son did not share and that the initial very first reports written by the forensic team had a height and age estimation for both victims that didn't match once finally identified.

Meanwhile, Linh's family demanded the death penalty be handed down for all four.

The only family member of the defendants to appear seemed to be Thiên Hà's father, who apologized to the Thành and Linh's families for not doing enough to stop his daughter from going down this path saying quote: "I admit I failed to properly raise my child, leading to a crime against society," but also pleaded with the court not to give her the death penalty.

In her closing statement, Thiên Hà admitted that she was guilty exactly as charged and apologized to the victims' families. However, she also said that the death penalty was a disproportionate punishment and asked for both clemency and for the charges against her mother to be reduced, telling the court that she was not an accomplice.

On July 3, for the double murder of Trần Đức Linh and Trần Trí Thành, all four defendants were found guilty, with Phạm Thị Thiên Hà being sentenced to death.

Lê Ngọc Phương Thảo was sentenced to 22 years' imprisonment.

Nguyễn Ngọc Tâm Huyên was given 19 years' imprisonment

And finally, Trịnh Thị Hồng Hoa was treated the most leniently, being given a sentence of 13 years' imprisonment.

In addition, the four were ordered to pay 262,280,000 đồng in compensation to Linh's family 180,000,000 đồng to Thành's family, as well as to pay the ongoing monthly child support payments to Linh's daughter, 3,000,000 đồng a month until she reached the age of 18 and then 1,500,000 đồng per month in ongoing support to Linh's elderly mother with these payments lasting for the rest of her life.

While Phương Thảo accepted her sentence, the remaining three sought to appeal with Thiên Hà again arguing that she had only murdered Thành and was innocent of Linh's death. However, now she was claiming that Thành's murder shouldn't be considered murder at all but rather an act of self-defence.

She told the court that Thành was planning to sexually assault them and also wanted to steal Hồng Hoa's property, and that believing he posed an imminent threat, lethal force was therefore permissible.

Although details on what exactly was afflicting her haven't been made public, during the rest of 2020, Thiên Hà's health fell into a period of severe decline that lasted nearly a year. Because of this fact, the appeal had to be delayed several times to give her time to recover, since in the earlier hearings, she was unable to walk straight and had to be literally dragged into the court.

When the High People's Court in Ho Chi Minh City finally reconvened on December 31, 2021, Tâm Huyên demonstrated her intense loyalty to Thiên Hà, demanding that she be handed down the death sentence in Thiên Hà's place, prepared to lose her life so her leader could go on living. This request was denied.

The defandants being brought to their appeal.

Instead, the court rejected Thiên Hà's new claim of self-defence and upheld all four of their sentences without any modifications, bringing an end to the case.

Sources (Should be in the comments)

(Thanks to LoydoRedi2910 for suggesting this case. If you'd like to suggest any yourself, please head over to this post, which asks for case suggestions from my international readers, as I focus on international cases.

As for why I'm doing a Canadian case, I more so focus on cases that are also locked behind a language barrier and well, Quebec is a French-speaking region, so when it comes to covering cases from Canada, I'm open to true crime for that province)

Grande-Rivière is a small fishing town of 3,384 located in the Le Rocher-Percé County Municipality right on the tip of Quebec's Gaspé Peninsula. One of this fishing community's residents, one known by all, was 37-year-old James Dubé.

James Dubé

James had lived in this town all his life, making a living as both a lobster fisherman and from the revenue brought in by the Grande-Rivière fish factory, of which he was a co-owner. His brother also ran an auto body garage in Grande-Rivière, meaning that his family was quite well off.

James's life as a fisherman also held a certain sentimental value since his father had died a gruesome death when he hit the sea. On one fishing voyage, he became entangled in a net that was dragged into the winch of his boat, killing him instantly. So perhaps to honour his father, James not only chose fishing as his profession, but he also used the same exact boat his father had been killed on.

When he wasn't fishing, James went moose hunting in the woods instead and rode snowmobiles through the countryside during the winter. Owing to his demanding lifestyle, James was noted to be very physically imposing, strong, and if anyone tried to physically confront him, they found it difficult to knock him off his feet.

James had long been planning to formally marry his long-time common-law wife, 37-year-old Johanne Johnson, a woman with whom he had already had two daughters.

Johanne Johnson

At 3:00 a.m. on April 30, 1998, James got out of bed, careful not to wake up Johanne or the children. He joined his fishing partner for a trip out at sea to retrieve their lobster traps, a long and demanding process that resulted in all 250 cages being brought back to the surface, emptied and cast back into the sea, leaving both men exhausted.

Once they arrived back on land, James drove to the fish factory to sell them before then making his way back home. He picked up Johanne, and they had lunch together, which consisted of two sandwiches purchased at a convenience store. Then that afternoon, they had sex before Johanne told him that she had to go to work at the local lobster factory. After she left, James went to sleep on the couch.

This was only intended to be a short nap, as James had more business to do later that day. He had been scheduled to go to a solicitor to sign documents that would dissolve his co-ownership of the fish factory, which, upon signing the papers, would also nullify his life insurance tied to said factory. James would never sign those papers, as this was a sleep he never woke up from.

James was discovered dead on the couch by his eldest daughter, who was screaming, crying and panicking in the kitchen when paramedics and the local police arrived. They announced James was dead at the scene from a single gunshot wound to the back of his neck. James's brother and Johanne were both informed over the phone, and Johanne appeared shocked and distressed when she arrived to see the police and paramedics surrounding the house.

The investigation was handled by the Sûreté du Québec, with a senior investigator driven from Rimouski to Grande-Rivière, a drive that would take around 5 hours. When he and personnel from the Sûreté du Québec began their investigation, the initial assumption was that it had been a robbery gone wrong; it appeared as if the home had been searched, and pots and other objects were strewn across the floor as if the property had been ransacked.

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The Sûreté du Québec at the scene

But something seemed odd upon closer inspection, such as the valuable television set being untouched, every hunting rifle normally kept in the basement all accounted for, none of the valuables actually missing and the fact that James was still lying on the couch, still in his work clothes, as if he had never woken up to even see the intruder. The Sûreté du Québec searched the entire home, but no shell casing could be found.

Furthermore, very little blood was actually found anywhere else in the home aside from the sofa where James's body lay. There were no signs of any cleaning either, so it wasn't as if the blood was washed away.

According to the autopsy, the bullet that killed James entered through the back of his neck and belonged to a 22 calibre. Just as the Sûreté du Québec had suspected, the pathologist determined that James had been fast asleep based on the bullet's angle of entry.

Although they couldn't find the bullet, the Sûreté du Québec still believed they knew where it had come from. One week before his murder, James had reported a 22-calibre rifle that he kept on his boat stolen. If that rifle was the murder weapon, then it seemed even more likely that rather than a robbery gone wrong, James's murder had been premeditated.

The Sûreté du Québec interviewed James's co-workers, family and neighbours, but at first suspects were in short supply.

The Sûreté du Québec also set up roadblocks on every road leading out of Grande-Rivière and searched every car that approched the roadblock for the missing rifle, but each car came up clean.

The Sûreté du Québec then questioned all the other fishermen in the area in case James had been killed due to a dispute over the proceeds of their latest catch, but nothing was found to link James's murder to his fellow fishermen.

Grande-Rivière hadn't seen a murder in many years, so having one of its residents shot dead in his sleep came as a shock and shattered their sense of secruity.

So when only a few days later James's neighbour accidentally tripped and fell in the basement, cutting his neck on the wall of an aquarium and bleeding out on the floor, many were afraid that it couldn't have been a coincidence and therefore made the community even more uneasy, with the residents now keeping their lights on even in the dead of night.

As the investigation seemed to be at a standstill. James's brother came forward to present the authorities with their first real suspect. He felt concerned and put off by just how quickly his sister-in-law seemed to move on from James's death.

James's brother took Johanne and his nieces in, and Johanne didn't show much sadness, asked no questions about her husband's murder, and returned to the crime scene to have a shower.

She also seemed very eager to spend the money she was paid out. She began telephone shopping for a car for her daughter, a purchase James opposed before his murder and was also talking about building a house, all of this within the first few days of the murder.

The Sûreté du Québec decided now was a good time to look into Johanne. She had been co-owner and shareholder of the fish factory, which meant she was a beneficiary of the life insurance policy that James was mere hours away from voiding. After his death, Johanne inherited his fishing boat, which she subsequently sold for 175,000 CAD, and she was also paid 30,000 CAD in life insurance.

With all this in mind, the Sûreté du Québec asked Johanne to take a polygraph test, but she refused, insisting it was unnecessary because she was innocent. Johanne was interrogated, continued to deny any involvement, and was later released.

Johanne remained their only suspect, but since they failed to find any new evidence against her, the Sûreté du Québec eventually left Grande-Rivière, with James's murder going unsolved.

After the case was shelved, Johanne took her two daughters and moved to Rivière-du-Loup, a city on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, 520 kilometres away from Grande-Rivière, where she remarried.

In 2012, after 14 years without any new leads, the Sûreté du Québec's cold case unit decided to employ a new strategy, something called "Mr. Big".

This was not something they invented. Mr. Big was developed by the RCMP and had been used 350 times across Canada. Here's how it worked: an officer would go undercover to approach a suspect in a Cold Case, start a relationship with them and pretend to be a member of some criminal organization.

They would give the target of the operation a series of tasks, either completely innocent or small petty crimes and pay them cash in exchange. This would keep going until they saw the undercover officer as a friend or were financially dependent on them.

Then, when the time was right, the officer would introduce the target to "the big boss" of the organization they claimed to be a part of, aka "Mr. Big". who would then tell the recruit/target that there was a problem with their past that the organization needs to know about in order to protect them and that to join their group, they would need to be honest about their past, if the target does confess, everyone involved would later reveal themselves to be police and arrest them for the murder in question.

This technique was not without its controversy; many confessions had their reliability questioned due to the pressure placed on the targets of these operations, while there were also fears that financial dependence or false friendship could be so strong that an innocent person might confess to maintain it.

But it also produced many successes, with several cold cases solved with "Mr. Big" sting operations netting several convictions for cases once believed to be unsolvable with no other evidence.

So, with co-operation from the RCMP and the Montreal police, the Sûreté du Québec decided to deploy its own Mr. Big operation with Johanne as the target.

Although initially it seemed like it was destined for failure, 2 weeks were spent trying to get an officer close to Johanne, but due to her movements, they were never able to make her acquaintance.

On December 5, 2012, Johanne stepped out of her car in front of her husband's home in Rivière-du-Loup shortly after 3 p.m. She noticed a woman standing near a vehicle parked in the street that she didn't recognize. Johanne approched her, and the woman said she was lost and looking for a sister she had not seen in a long time, as their mother had recently died.

Johanne offered to help, so she got in her car, and Johanne began driving her around town and the neighbourhood in search of this missing sister. The woman showed Johanne a photo of her "sister" and offered her a $50 bill as thanks, but Johanne declined the money, saying she was glad to help out for free. What Johanne didn't know was that this woman was law enforcement, the sister didn't exist and that she was the Sûreté du Québec's eighth attempt to pull a "Mr. Big" sting on her.

The officer placed the bill in a glass in the middle of the console while she spoke with Johanne. The two built a rapport within just two hours, with Johanne speaking openly about her daughters, the grandchildren she now had and her health problems, which resulted in her being on sick leave from her job caring for the elderly at a community health center.

At 5:00 p.m., Johanne returned home, obviously having not found the fictitious sister. The officer offered Johanne another 50 Dollar Bill, which Johanne again refused, although once out of her sight, the officer silently hid it next to the first bill.

She then told Johanne that 500 CAD would be awarded to whoever found her sister. The two women exchanged phone numbers, and Johanne told her that she would be free to continue helping her on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Just like that, she finally found a way to be consistently close to Johanne.

The two went on more and more drives with Johanne opening up even more to who she thought was a friend. She talked about her past struggles with gambling and alcoholism and mentioned that her "ex" had died in an accident some years back. And she told the officer that for years she had been a victim of domestic abuse at the hands of this unnamed ex.

She also said that she was in need of money but that her new husband was controlling her finances, including her widow's pension. 

In the ensuing days and weeks, their relationship grew stronger, with the two going out to eat at restaurants with the officer usually paying the bill. She also kept giving her 50-100 dollar bills, which Johanne was now beginning to accept, saying that she would use the money to "spoil her grandchildren".

On December 20, the officer surprised Johanne with a gift of perfume and a Celine Dion CD. Johanne grew so close to this officer that she told her that she was a "godsend". That was exactly what she needed to hear, now knowing that Johanne trusted her enough for her to move on to the next phase of the operation.

The fictional story that she told Johanne was that her husband ran a "transportation company" and, since Johanne told her that she wasn't getting any hours due to her sick leave, asked if she would like to drive city-to-city, a paid job as part of this company. Johanne agreed and was soon introduced to the "husband" who, in reality, was another undercover police officer. Johanne was paid in cash for every job and joked to the officer, "You'll make me rich,".

However, the jobs began to escalate with Johanne now tasked with transporting a suitcase by bus from Rivière-du-Loup to Sainte-Foy, then putting that suitcase in a car and transporting further. Johanne was paid 400-500 CAD for this and was assured the suitcase didn't contain drugs but was otherwise barred from inquiring as to its contents...The suitcase contained weapons.

Johanne was also given tasks by them that had nothing to do with driving vehicles or transporting suitcases but still netted her a decent profit regardless; for example, they would have Johanne sell cloned SAQ gift cards, mobile phones and counterfeit hockey jerseys. 

Johanne kept doing these jobs, making anywhere between 400 to 500 Canadian dollars a day, and after each successful job they celebrated with high-end meals at prestigious restaurants such as La Bête in Québec City. And during these outings, Johanne was promised that one day she might get an even bigger reward like a nice car or a home in Montreal.

Then on January 29, 2013, Johanne was awarded further when she went to Montreal for a delivery and got to watch a hockey game live at the Bell Centre, a first for her. When all was said and done, Johanne got paid 20,400 CAD over the course of the operation. And speaking of that operation, the Sûreté du Québec decided it was finally time for Johanne to meet "Mr. Big".

On June 19, 2013, she was told that a "big job" was available to her if she could prove herself, but that first she needed to meet the "big boss" of the organization. The meeting was to be held at a cottage in New Richmond, a seaside town 500 kilometres on the Gaspé Peninsula not that far from Grande-Rivière.

On their drive there, they stopped at a Tim Hortons in New Richmond while Johanne watched her self-described "Godsend" leave to go make a phone call. When she returned, she looked visibly distressed and told Johanne that the "big boss" was not in a good mood and something had come up.

Johanne asked if any harm was going to come their way, to which she was reassured that nothing physical was going to happen but that they had "better not screw up". This interaction was designed to try and build up as much anxiety in Johanne as possible without making her think she was in danger and flee.

When they arrived at the cottage, the "boss" confronted Johanne. He told her that their organization was facing some heat because of something from her past, specifically, that "ex" she had mentioned.

His exact words were, "I made some phone calls. Before helping you, I want to know if it's worth it. And I'm telling you, if I don't help you, you'll lose it all... If I don't help you, your grandsons won't ever see their grandmother because you killed their grandfather."

Everyone else vacated the cottage, leaving Johanne alone with the "big boss", in reality, yet another undercover officer.

Despite the intense contents of his speech, this officer made sure to speak in a calm and non-confrontational manner, saying, "If you want me to help you there, you're going to start telling me what happened that day from A to Z. The truth, no lies, because if you tell me a lie, that's it. What happened?" Johanne replied with: "The day James died...I killed him"

She was asked to elaborate, where she described the murder as "like a flash" and that it was the first time she had ever told anybody. She confirmed that she shot James in the back of the head with a rifle she had stolen from her boat while James was asleep on the couch. Afterward, she threw pots on the rug to make it look like a struggle had occurred.

She then rolled the rifle up in a rug and left the home through the back door, drove approximately fifteen minutes to a wooded area near Chandler, where she disposed of the rifle.

Johanne said that the money she got due to James's death didn't benefit her much in the long run. She said that the proceeds from selling James's fishing vessel and from the insurance policy were partly used to fund the drug habit she picked up after James's death, with the rest of the money going toward her daughters. She also said she paid an extra 30,000 CAD to pay off her father's debts.

Seeing as she didn't really see barely a cent of the money she gained from his death, Johanne stated that the motive was not financial in nature. Johanne wasn't just confessing to being a murderer for the first time; it was also the first time she said in detail the true nature of James's character.

James had spent almost their entire marriage subjecting Johanne to domestic abuse, beating her regularly; one time, he abused her so badly that she had to spend 32 days in the hospital recovering from a shoulder injury, which left her unable to work.

Speaking of work, whenever things weren't going well for James on the job, such as with the fish factory he managed, Johanne was always his scapegoat to throw under the bus if something went wrong.

James also kept trying to pressure Johanne into having sex with him even when she said no.

On the afternoon of April 30, 1998, she and James had gotten into an argument over their oldest daughter being in the home after she dropped out of school, with this argument being the final straw for Johanne, who said she "I was so fed up, I couldn't take it anymore".

Johanne thought that killing her abusive husband after years of abuse and humiliation would be liberating, but she said that James's death had, in fact, left her destroyed after all, causing her to cope by spending the following two to three years doing drugs in an attempt to suppress the memory.

Every summer, she feared the Sûreté du Québec were going to come to her door having discovered the rifle.

She also said that her drug use was only intensified by feelings of paranoia, as she felt as if the police had been stalking and following her everywhere she went, unaware of the irony. She was also unaware that her confession was being recorded since the Sûreté du Québec had bugged the cottage prior to the meeting.

Rather than removing the mask right away and arresting Johanne on the spot, they kept the charade going a bit longer. "Mr. Big" ordered two of his "men" back into the cottage and instructed them to make their way to Chandler, locate the rifle and make it "go away," with Johanne told to join them.

They drove to the wooded area next to the road, but neither of the three could find the rifle. With the passage of 15 years, it's entirely possible Johanne forgot the exact location or that a resident discovered it and kept it for themselves, unaware of its significance.

On the way back, they stopped at the local IGA grocery store, and Johanne asked to go in to buy some Diet Coke and chocolate chip cookies for the big boss. Johanne did so, and as soon as she left the store with the items in question, she was finally arrested.

Johanne's mugshot

Johanne's trial opened on January 18, 2016, before a 12-member jury of 5 men and 7 women at the Palais de justice de Percé.

Johanne arriving to court for her trial.

The Crown's main piece of evidence was the result of the Mr. Big operation; the prosecutor argued that Johanne's confession was too precise, specific, and consistent with the forensic evidence to have made the story up on the spot. Additionally, Johanne's daughter testified that her mother had confessed to her before her arrest, though the defence objected, calling that statement hearsay evidence.

For motive, the Crown also relied on her confession but with one deviation. Although they argued that Johanne did kill James after years of abuse and humiliation, they argued that it was murder she had premeditated rather than just snapping one day, owing to the fact that the rifle used to kill him was stolen over a week in advance.

They also argued that Johanne wasn't being honest with the undercover officer when talking about how the murder left her traumatized, using her behaviour in the immediate aftermath of the murder as evidence of such, such as how she showed no outward signs of distress and returned to the crime scene to have a shower.

Which also prompted the Crown to argue that there was a financial motive to the murder after all, seeing as she was immideately talking about buying a house and a car, and the timing of the murder just seemed impossible to ignore, the fact that James was mere hours away from dissolving his ownership of the fish factory.

When it was Johanne's time to speak, she denied any involvement and said that her confession was a false one. She said that she had been scared during the encounter with the "big boss" and had told him what she believed needed to be said to protect those she came to view as her closest friends and to maintain her position in their organization.

Johanne's defence also used the trial to attack "Mr. Big" stings in general, arguing that any confession obtained through them were inheritely illigitmate. She argued that the Sûreté du Québec exploited Johanne's history as a domestic abuse victim and poor financial situation to coax a confession out of her rather than the truth. In her attorney's words, "Mrs. Johnson is a citizen, and in front of the whole machine, she was no match".

On April 16, 2016, after three days of deliberation, the jury returned with their verdict, finding Johanne Johnson guilty of the murder of James Dubé.

But instead of first-degree murder like the Crown had charged her with, the jury instead convicted her of second-degree murder, rejecting the Crown's assertion that the murder had been premeditated.

Sentencing took place two days later on April 19, where the presiding judge handed down a sentence of life imprisonment with the possibility of parole after 11 years. Johanne was also slapped with a lifelong ban from owning any firearms and would be required to provide DNA samples for Canada's DNA database.

Johanne appealed her conviction to the Québec Court of Appeal, and they had a strong argument.

You see, one year after Johanne's arrest and two years before Johanne's conviction, Canada's Supreme Court ruled in R. v. Hart that the probative value of these Mr. Big stings was outweighed by their prejudicial nature and potential for false confessions, arguing that they should be given a much higher bar to be considered admissible evidence unless the accused gives an overwhelmingly reliable confession such as knowing details only the killer could.

According to the ruling, this would apply retroactively to all cases that mostly hinged on confessions obtained this way, and Johanne's attorney argued that the judge in the first trial had failed to instruct the jury on both this fact and the hearsay statement given by Johanne's daughter, leading them to take her confession at face value without much scrutiny of the process to obtain it.

On August 3, 2020, the three justices made their decision and agreed with the defence. On the grounds that the jury received inadequate instructions concerning unreliable evidence, they had Johanne's conviction overturned, released her from prison and ordered a second trial to be held.

Johanne's retrial began on March 17, 2021, and took much longer than her initial trial did, as various pre-trial motions were held to determine what evidence would be admissible.

Johanne during her retrial

In October 2021, 5 months after the trial began, it was finally ruled that Johanne's confession would not be accepted into evidence.

This effectively destroyed the Crown's case, as without that confession, the Crown didn't have much left to put forward and so lacked any additional evidence to support their arguments.

On December 12, 2021, the presiding judge returned with his verdict, finding Johanne not guilty based on a lack of evidence and reasonable doubt. Johanne burst into tears upon hearing the verdict; 8 years after her arrest, she got to leave court a free woman.

On January 21, 2022, her freedom became permanent when Quebec's Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions announced that they would not pursue a third trial.

With that decision, it meant that in a legal sense, the murder of James Dubé remains unsolved.

Sources (Should be in the comments)

(This case was a lot more convoluted and hard to follow in places than I expected it to be, and with Finnish privacy laws, I did experience some difficulty in trying to link which acts to which defendant.

In a lot of cases, I just had to guess which of the 12 arrested did what. I apologize if you also find the case hard to follow; I tried my best. Outside of the three killers, I can't even say with certainty which of the 12 arrested even went to trial.

Since I now work on two cases at once, one being a case on my backlog and another being a suggestion, this write-up was basically already finished by the time I uploaded yesterday's case)

On the evening of July 28, 2020, the police in the Finnish capital of Helsinki received a few anonymous tips that narcotics were being consumed and sold at a motorcycle club called the Apache MC in the Metsälä district of Helsinki, Finland.

The club's entrance

A police car was sent to circle the club's perimeter, where it discovered a car parked near the club with two men already known to the police. The police didn't have to wait for a warrant to search the car, as they could see a bag of what looked to be amphetamines in plain view through the windows.

The police then stationed themselves outside of the Apache MC itself and placed the club under surveillance for a brief while. Nobody was seen coming in or going out, but it was obvious people were inside because the music was blaring so loudly the police could hear it from the street.

Not knowing what might be waiting for him and owing to the late hour, the two police officers deemed it unsafe to enter; they returned to the station and alerted their higher-ups that the tips were credible.

In the meantime, some background on the MC Apache. It was small, and the club owners didn't even own the property; they were simply renting it. The club stood at only 10 members and was so unnoteworthy that the Finnish police hadn't even branded it an outlaw organization, unlike many other biker groups.

Though that wasn't for lack of trying. The members of MC Apache regularly reached out to the other major biker gangs in Finland, hoping to join them or enter into some partnership, but none of them wanted to be associated with the group. One of the biggest reasons was that its members regularly took narcotics instead of strictly selling them, something forbidden among the motorcycle gangs in the area.

On July 29, the police returned in droves with an entire team of officers soon forcing their way into the club to conduct a surprise raid. The police didn't get very far before all those inside froze in their tracks. As soon as the police entered the room, they were in, they bore witness to 9 heavily intoxicated people in possession of garbage bags and a suitcase containing a dismembered human body.

The club being cordoned off

The 9 were all arrested alongside 3 other members of the club who were picked up at a mall after causing a public disturbance. In total, 10 men and 2 women ranging from the ages of 22-46, all of whom were familiar to the police due to prior drug crimes.

Additionally, the tip was later proven to be true when the police found 41 grams of amphetamine on just one of their persons. The police also saw that they weren't just selling or taking drugs, but also manufacturing them in a room marked as "nursery" in the floor plans.

As for the victim they had just discovered, he was male, and his body had been dismembered into five pieces, and there was still a fair amount of blood in the club, indicating that death had occurred very recently despite some attempts at heavy cleaning; how recently exactly, only mere hours before the police made entry. According to the medical examiner, the victim had been subjected to severe torture prior to his death, but the cause of death was ultimately a single stab wound to his chest.

The police were able to identify him quite easily as they found another man in the club stripped naked and asleep on a padded chair with an injured leg. The man was woken up and told the police that one of the 12 people had assaulted him and threatened him into staying silent about what they had done to his friend. His friend was the victim, and he had brought him to the club.

The 12 individuals also encompassed the entire membership of the Apache MC. These 12 individuals were

Henry Ian David Roth, a practicing jew and supporter of Zionism.

Henry Ian David Roth

One of Henry's closest friends was Juhani Starczewski, a politician, kindergarten teacher and city council member from Jyväskylä who was expelled from his own politcal party for making a comment on the sudden death of the wife of the Speaker of Finland's parliament, saying that her death was divine punishment for them supporting LGBTQ rights.

Aside from the people Henry associated with, he also had a conviction on his record. In 2018, he was sentenced to three years and two months in prison for aggravated assault and theft, together with an accomplice beating another man with a hammer, slashing him with a knife, beating and kicking him and pouring vinegar and other liquids straight into his eyes before forcing him to consume cannabis and stealing 44 Euros from his person. The two had filmed this entire act. The victim suffered fractures to his face and bruising so extensive that his kidneys stopped working.

In court, when asked for their motive, they said the victim had threatened to spread false accusations about him being a pedophile and ruin his upcoming meeting with his local rabbis and tarnish his reputation.

Afterward, Henry was involved in a robbery at Kaisaniemi Park where he followed his victim after they left a restaurant and, when nobody was around, chased them and beat them after bringing them to the ground and then held a machete to the victim to force him to transfer money to him through their online banking app.

Next was Kyösti Armas Dimitri Nyman. Kyösti once appeared as an expert guest on a TV show in 2016, saying that he was using a music career, rap in particular to help the youth of Finland avoid going down the same bad path as he had. At the time, he said he had spent 12 years of his life in prison for murder (Note that the source doesn't exactly say murder just that he was serving a life sentence, but aside from murder the other crimes that carry life sentences in Finland are crimes like Treason, genocide, crimes against humanity, etc, etc so I'm just assuming it was murder he was previously convicted for). Although Kyösti didn't practice what he preached, having been to court over 70 times since his release.

Kyösti Armas Dimitri Nyman

Terno Armas Åkerlund was another member, as was a 23-year-old mother-of-two, Satu Anceliga Nyman; Nicholas Rickard Löwenhild, who openly boasted about his membership in MC Apache on his social media; and Nora Jasmin Aaltonen, who was Kyösti's wife and another member; and Antti Oscar Salo.

Back to the more notable members, we have Nikita Legion Åkerlund, who changed his name from Niklas Nikita Niko Jormakka after he was convicted in 2017 for his role in a massive Subutex trafficking ring where he personally sold and distributed 7,000 Subutex tablets. He was given a sentence of 4 years and 8 months, which was treated fairly leniently because he helped the police arrest the remaining members of the ring.

Lassi Pekka Palokangas ran a company that sold cars to people with bad credit. According to his company's information, he operated out of the same address as the MC Apache club. Something not unusual, as some of the others would also own businesses listed at the club's address.

Now for one of the more infamous members, Christian Jesse Juhani Airikkala, a self-proclaimed anarchist.

Christian Jesse Juhani Airikkala

Christian was a sex offender, having been convicted of aggravated sexual abuse of a child by the Western Uusimaa District Court. Then he received another sentence of three years after he wandered into a party, where he had sex with a 60-year-old man and then beat and assaulted him when it was over before finally tying him up and burglarizing his home. It wasn't clear whether he had raped the victim or not, so he was only convicted of assault.

For his defence in court, Christian said that it was actually he who had been raped and that he only attacked the man when he woke up to see him inserting a vibrator into his anus, though the court didn't believe him and still convicted him of assault.

Christian was also a suspect in another murder, although this time he wasn't guilty. In late March 2020, a landlord went to an apartment in the Koivukylä district of Vantaa to inspect his property. Upon entering, he discovered the body of the apartment's 35-year-old tenant decomposing on the bathroom floor, having clearly been dead for some time.

According to the autopsy, the victim had been incapacitated with a heavy dose of ketamine before sustaining dozens of stab, cut, and slash wounds all across his body. The police arrested the victim's wife and her lover and determined the murder was a result of a drug-fueled love triangle (the victim and his wife were also involved in drug trafficking)

The police arrested Christian for this murder as well, but he was later released after the police discovered that the two killers had staged the scene and fabricated evidence in an attempt to frame Christian, as the two knew that he and the victim knew each other.

Going back to the 12 arrested for the murder, Christian would actually go on to commit 4 months later; there was Paul Aki-Oscar, who had a history of petty crimes and used to be a skinhead during his teenage years, though his convictions were never for crimes as severe as some of the others or what he had just been arrested for.

And finally, there was Juha Erik Nick, who owned a car rental company with a listed address out of the MC Apache club. All that is known about him is that he used to work as a hockey and football coach.

In addition, they all had convictions for drug crimes and varying degrees of assaults, drunk driving, robberies and thefts, fraud, traffic offences, firearm offences and violating restraining orders. One of those arrested had even been to court on 76 seperate occasions; there were also 20 convictions between them from 2016 to 2020 alone.

The most recent conviction prior to the murder was from October 2019 when he was convicted of 18 crimes including aggravated and basic drunk driving while under the influence of Subutex, benzodiazepines, and cannabis, theft, drug offences relating to amphetamine, MDMA, and lactone, and various car-related crimes.

Here are a few other crimes outlined in the newspapers but that I was unable to trace to a specific individual due to their names being withheld in those articles.

The youngest in the group, a 22-year-old woman, received another drug trafficking conviction as she and an accomplice had agreed to sell the victim amphetamines; however, she also received an assault conviction as the sale went wrong. The victim was hit on the head with the hammer end of a multi-tool while she held the victim at knife point and went through her backpack.

She was given a sentence of 1 year and 8 months imprisonment.

The least violent and least extensive criminal history belonged to the club president himself, a 46-year-old man. He was an entrepreneur and businessman, with his two convictions being one traffic crime and one conviction for fraud, where he and his brother were given a six-month suspended sentence for pension insurance premium fraud.

The man also had been an investor in a property management company before they ceased operations. He told the court that he had been an entrepreneur since 1999 and that he and his brother owned and managed four seperate companies, two in Finland and two in Estonia.

Overall, when you combine the entirety of the criminal history for all 12 members, you arrive at a whopping 245 convictions total. Or, perhaps 246 convictions once you include the victim.

As is customary in Finland, the victim's name was never publicly revealed, only referred to in the newspapers as a "34-year-old man" and scant details about him were released, such as how he was separated and had children, and that he was on the fringes of Helsinki's "criminal underworld" without being an actual member of the MC Apache, and that he had no stable employment and struggled with a drug addiction, housing and finances.

However, online sleuthing by users of Finland's "Murha.info" managed to identify him. They noticed that two of the suspects in this case shared the same last name: Nyman. Seeing the extensive criminal histories of all the suspects, and how a few of those arrested were Romani, they assumed the victim was connected to them.

This was further confirmed when the police also revealed that the victim used to be one of the accused's boyfriends, which also made it even easier for the users to track him down. They went through their friend lists looking for anyone they knew who had a criminal history, had once dated one of the suspects, and had abruptly gone inactive in late July 2020, matching the victim's brief description.

Within hours of the first press release that divulged this information, the users of the forum managed to find a perfect match for the victim, identifying him as Tim Sebastian Nyman after coming across his social media accounts, all of which were now inactive, a post on Finland's leading online marketplace "Tori" where he was seeking a landlord willing to rent for him ad in his listing he mentioned that he was homeless because his ex-wife divorced him and wouldn't let him back in and said "My credit information has been lost sometimes because of stupid things when I was young" and finally, they found a newspaper with Tim for a prior crime he committed where he was 26 at the time which would make him 34 by the time he was murdered.

Normally, I would not actively go out of my way to try and uncover the identities of those not formally made public, especially the victims, but the reason I'm making an exception is that aside from already being a figure who had appeared in the media before, it's also due to the prior crime that Tim committed, a murder he carried out prior to him eventually being killed himself.

In September 2012, the police in Espoo received a call reporting a stabbing at an apartment in the city's Tuomarila district. The police arrived to find two individuals in that apartment: a woman and a 29-year-old man lying on the kitchen floor having been stabbed in the neck. The police attempted CPR on the victim, but their efforts were unsuccessful, and he passed away at the scene. The victim had been released from prison on parole only three weeks prior and had been staying at Tim's apartment in the meantime, which was the crime scene.

While the victim had been stabbed in the neck, the cause of death was a stab wound to the chest, causing heart damage, bleeding into the pericardium, and blood in the chest cavity, with the victim's heavy use of medication and alchool hastening his demise. The murder weapon was a Marttiini brand sheath knife, found on the kitchen table.

The apartment was fairly tidy, aside from some clothes and used diapers on the floor; there was no sign of a struggle, meaning the murder had likely been quick and sudden.

The woman was Tim's wife, and she said that the two were "like brothers" and Tim often discussed things with the victim that he wouldn't even tell her. However, the two were both jealous of their respective partners, and they had agreed to look out for the other to make sure nothing "extra" happened.

That night, the two, after all their drinking, began to hurl insults at each other and would sometimes say something like "Your wife’s been cheating on you." as a "joke," since the two men would always laugh it off. Or at least it seemed like a "joke" at the time, but then Tim left the apartment to go to a thrift store, returning with the murder weapon he had purchased.

Upon returning home, Tim began arguing with his wife, and when the victim said, "You guys are always fighting," Tim turned around and snapped at him, saying, "You have to go and meddle in my love life, too,". During this argument, Tim ended up slapping his partner, which elicited a horrified reaction from the victim, who intervened to confront Tim. Afterward was when Tim finally stabbed him.

Tim had fled the scene after the stabbing but was picked up by the police a few hours later. Tim denied intending to kill the victim and argued that it was just a "wild swing". He said that after the man collapsed, he rushed over to him, holding his head in his arms and said, "Don’t play around," after he pulled down his shirt and saw where the knife entered the body.

On January 26, 2013, the Espoo District Court convicted Tim of manslaughter, driving under the influence, and driving without a license and sentenced him to 8 years and 10 months in prison.

After his release on parole, Tim moved from city to city, moving from Espoo to Vantaa and later the capital, Helsinki, having remained unable to find steady housing or employment.

Because some of the accused, especially one of the direct killers, Kyösti was of Romani descent, there was some speculation online that Tim had been murdered as part of a Romani blood feud or vendetta owing to his 2012 murder, but by all accounts that wasn't the case since neither Henry nor Kyösti were related to his victim and soon, the police were quick to reveal the true motive.

While most, especially the three the police believed carried out the murder, exercised their right to remain silent, others, including the club president himself, acknowledged their reality and knew that they couldn't talk their way out of this one, seeing as the police walked in on them stuffing the body parts into the garbage bags. So this was the story the police managed to piece together.

Tim crossed the MC Apache's path in the spring of 2020, when he, together with his new girlfriend, had stolen several thousand Euros worth of amphetamine from Henry, which was quick to make Tim an enemy of the club. Tim then grew to despise the club himself after his girlfriend broke up with him and began a new relationship with Christian.

In response, Tim began spreading rumours that Christian was sexually assaulting and abusing his new girlfriend. He then used the drugs he stole to try and blackmail the rest of the club, threatening to turn them over to the police, which then resulted in his now ex-girlfriend sending a voice message to Tim threatening his life and saying, "You will never see your child again," while promising to "send everyone" after him.

She also sent a message in the club's group chat saying, "It sucks to be penniless when that asshole is partying," to which one of the other members responded with "Well, it won't last long." you see, when she told Tim that she would send everyone after him, she and the MC Apache had every intent to make good on that promise.

They made their first attempt on July 21, 2020, when three members of MC Apache attempted a drive-by shooting, with Henry firing two shots at him with a handgun he retrieved from the glove compartment while Tim was riding a bicycle; both shots missed, and Tim was entirely unharmed.

He went to report the shooting to the police, and mere hours before he stepped into the club on July 28, he was, in fact, being interviewed at the police station in relation to the attempted shooting.

After leaving the police station, he went to Vaasanaukio, a square in central Helsinki, where he met an acquaintance. Together they travelled by bus, which eventually dropped them off at the Metsälä district and then walked to the club.

This was their second plan to kill Tim; one of the club members had met Tim on a commuter train on July 27 and invited him to the MC Apache to resolve the dispute with diplomacy, or rather to "talk things through". Tim took him completely at their word.

But before Tim arrived, the club president had sent a message in the group chat alerting all the other members that he was coming. One of them asked, "Is the guy a problem? Should I take the weapons away?" to which the club president told them that he was not going to be leaving their club.

According to the acquaintance who arrived with him, he waited behind at the bar while Tim went into the back room. Things seemed normal at first, but Tim soon left that room seemingly panicked and told the other man, "We're leaving now", but instead, Tim was brought back into the back room with the door shut behind him. This is important because the back room was a restricted space only members could access.

Only three of the members, Henry, Kyösti and Christian, actually took part in the murder, and they made sure to make it last for Tim. The other 9 members simply watched and did nothing to intervene.

First, the three used a forge hammer to strike and beat Tim across his body, delivering a series of blunt force blows with the instrument, targeting areas such as the shoulders and the head.

The hammer

Then they all took turns with an air rifle, firing the pellets really anywhere they pleased but usually aiming for Tim's neck, penis and testicles.

The air rifle

And of course, the club had its music blaring as loud as possible so nobody from the outside could hear the sounds of Tim's agonizing torture. There were several times when those present believed Tim to have already died, and whenever that happened, they would shoot him with the air rifle to prove he was still alive when he reacted with visible pain from the pellets.

Henry, Kyösti and Christian then grabbed a circular saw and put it to use while Tim was still alive. Two of them held him down while another began sawing through Tim's pinky finger.

The saw

They had nearly completely severed the digit when suddenly they were told to stop. Somebody had peeked outside and seen the police in the parking lot and also pulling up on the building's CCTV footage after receiving that anonymous tip; they were in the middle of examining the car that had the amphetamines inside and were speaking to the two who were at the car.

The police had absolutely no idea what was going on within those walls, but one member felt that they would kick down the door any second, so they tried to flee before that happened, only for the club president to physically block anybody from leaving.

Those tense seconds ultimately passed with the two police officers leaving for the night, prompting Tim's torture to continue now that the only chance to save him had left, unaware of his plight.

Meanwhile, Tim's friend who accompanied him to the club remained in the front lobby, having never left to alert anyone outside, such as the police, who were just there because he was apparently "too intoxicated". However, he was far from an accomplice, as he would have to endure some torture himself.

He was going to use the phone to call his girlfriend, and somebody from behind the back room door must've heard him go for the phone as Christian emerged from the back room, forcing him to strip naked before aiming the air rifle at him and shooting him right in the knee. This injury left him with permanent limited mobility and chronic pain in his legs.

Christian then caused him additional pain by using pliers to try and dig the pellet out of his knee and then shot a second pellet from the airgun directly past his head, warning him that they would come for him if he told anybody about the last time he saw Tim.

Now, with the leg injury and knowing he was being watched, he didn't want to take his chance leaving the club and limping his way back home due to both his intoxication and his now wounded leg, so he simply put his clothes back on and passed out on a sofa in the bar room. (He only managed to sleep for 30 minutes before the police raided the club).

Meanwhile, the three decided that it was finally time to end Tim's suffering, and they did so by stabbing him in the right side of the chest with a 20-centimetre knife. Although Henry, Kyösti and Christian all eventually confessed, they would never say who actually delivered the fatal blow, always remaining silent whenever that subject was brought up.

Regardless, Tim was now dead, and the members of MC Apache now had to figure out what to do with his body. The only thing known for sure was the obvious: the club president ordered them to make sure the body didn't remain in the club.

Eventually, one of the newer and younger members was eager to prove himself, so he volunteered to dismember the corpse. First, Tim's body was stripped naked so his clothes could be burnt and then, using an axe, knife and the same circular saw used to torture Tim, he divided his body into 5 parts, which they then put into black garbage bags and a suitcase. The garbage bags were hidden under a sauna bench while the torso was wrapped in foil and placed in the suitcase, which was hidden under the sofa.

Meanwhile, someone else went to delete the club's CCTV footage.

Dismembering a corpse and cleaning up all the blood of the man they just murdered must've built up quite an appetite, as Christian had ordered multiple family-sized pizzas to be delivered to the club while they were in the middle of dismembering Tim's body. When the pizza delivery driver arrived to drop off the pizzas and was greeted at the front of the club, Tim's body was still being cut up in the backroom.

Meanwhile, a seperate group, led by Kyösti, left the club and went to the Kaari shopping center in Kannelmäki to purchase cleaning supplies they would use to wash Tim's blood from the club. Unluckily for them, the three never even got to make the purchase.

First, they drove erratically the entire way since Kyösti was high at the time, so people were alerted before they even arrived. Then, once they did show up, they did so heavily intoxicated and with the police waiting for them in the parking lot after a concerned bystander called to report a suspected drunk driver.

Their troubles only grew worse when their car was searched, turning up a submachine gun that belonged to Kyösti. Kyösti also didn't have a driver's license, which only added to his mounting legal troubles. Kyösti's wife, Nora, had accompanied him and was arrested for resisting arrest as she screamed at the officers and threatened to kick them in the head if Kyösti wasn't released.

So all three were arrested, coincidentally at nearly the same time as the raid on the club, so even if they hadn't been arrested at the shopping center, they certainly would've been upon their return.

After slowly filtering out who was a murderer and just an accomplice, even dropping the charges against some of those arrested at the scene, the case ultimately moved to trial at the Helsinki District Court on January 4, 2021.

Henry, Kyösti and Christian in court.

The prosecution's main witness, aside from all the officers who discovered the body, was Tim's friend, the one that Christian shot in the knee. He was, in fact, the only witness, however indirectly, to Tim's murder that wasn't among the officers who raided the club.

As for their defence, Henry argued that the group text foreshadowing Tim's arrival had nothing to do with the murder. That was as civil as it got. Henry got annoyed and agitated by the prosecution cross-examining him and eventually exploded into a barrage of curse words before swearing that Tim's murder hadn't been planned in advance. Eventually, Henry was calmed down but still complained about the prosecutor's "offensive" questioning.

When finally calmed down, he admitted that he had attacked Tim. He argued that Tim's presence at the club was spontaneous and that he hadn't been informed that he would be there, so he was shocked and angry when he saw him in the club. Having been both drunk and high at the time, he angrily shoved Tim to the ground.

He then said that Tim reached for the hammer, which only enraged Henry further, prompting him to take the hammer and strike Tim on the shoulder.

However, he again denied being a murderer, claiming that he dropped the hammer and left the club afterward. When asked why he and the MC Apache were suddenly so willing to resolve the issue peacefully, Henry said that he simply didn't want to add any more problems to Tim's already difficult life.

Apparently, he was, apparently so magnanimous that he proceeded to say he had no motive for the murder. Henry also claimed that he and Tim had already reached an agreement, that Tim would simply leave Helsinki until the whole thing blew over, despite just saying he was still mad with him and had already assaulted him.

When Henry was asked about how he had already made an attempt to kill Tim a week earlier, he defended himself by saying that he was only trying to scare Tim and warn him what he was getting into. He said that Tim was only 1.5 meters away, meaning that it would've been impossible to miss him unless it had been intentional. Henry also claimed that Tim was an abusive partner and that he had stabbed somebody before, so he also wanted to make him afraid for a change as well.

Christian also denied being a murderer and likewise tried arguing that he had no motive. According to him, he had not the slightest clue of the drug debt between Tim and Henry, claiming that "Other people's affairs are none of my business".

Christian denied having any confrontation with Tim that night and instead claimed they had a "normal conversation", denied sawing off Tim's finger while he was still alive and went a little further and denied having any prior violent criminal history either, despite two violent offences on his record.

Kyösti, while still denying being a murderer, came the closest to confessing. He simply said that his memories were "not completely clear" because he was impaired. He simply said that he saw Tim lying on the floor just fine one moment and then the next time he passed by, one of his arms had already been severed.

On February 7, 2021, Christian Jesse Juhani Airikkala was found guilty of the murder of Tim Sebastian Nyman, aggravated assault and torture. Kyösti Armas Dimitri Nyman was convicted of murder and possession of an illegal firearm. Henry Ian David Roth was convicted of murder and attempted manslaughter over the prior attempt on Tim's life a week before his murder.

All three were handed down a life sentence and ordered to pay 10,000 euros in compensation to Tim's children, as well as paying the ongoing child support payments.

The co-defendants all received lesser sentences, starting with MC Apache's president, who was handed down a sentence of 1 year and 10 months in prison without the possibility of parole.

The man who dismembered Tim's body was slapped with a lenient sentence of 5 months' imprisonment.

The remaining two accomplices, a man and a woman, were both convicted of sheltering a criminal and for other drug offences. The male offender was handed a 9-month suspended sentence while the female offender was given 5 months' imprisonment.

Nora Jasmin Aaltonen was made to pay only a fine for resisting arrest.

Although their co-defendants accepted their sentences, Henry, Kyösti and Christian appealed to the Helsinki Court of Appeal. The main argument they tried making was that because the court could never establish which of the three inflicted the killing blow, they all should've been acquitted of murder since they couldn't prove which of them was the killer.

The court obviously disagreed; on November 9, 2022, all three of their sentences were upheld, with the judges deeming all three to be equally culpable. With this failed appeal, their three life sentences were final.

Sources (Should be in the comments)

(Thanks to LoydoRedi2910 for suggesting this case. If you'd like to suggest any yourself, please head over to this post, which asks for case suggestions from my international readers, as I focus on international cases.

Also, I got very angry during the course of this write-up; this is possibly the most enraged anyone I've done a write-up on has ever made me)

Shimon Kuperschmidt, later shortened to Shimon Cooper, was born in the very small community of Eyal in central Israel. If you were to ask Shimon about his past, you would likely be told the same story he had told the women in his life: that he was a decorated and senior Mossad agent or a senior IDF officer who held a degree from Bar-Ilan University and that he was once captured during a mission in Syria, where they held him in a prisoner of war camp before he made a grand escape. Although curiously, other times he'd tell people he was held prisoner in Lebanon instead.

Shimon produced framed plaques and commendations to support his claim. However, none of this was true. The only kernel of truth to be found was his enlistment in the IDF, and that's only because it's mandatory for all Jewish Israeli men to serve, making his background still less high-profile than he wanted others to believe; he simply served the mandatory amount required and then was discharged without experiencing any action.

Little is known about his real background, aside from the fact that he made a very small living as a taxi driver.

Though even his employment was something he would lie about, instead telling everyone that he had a decent salary from his cozy position at a print shop, an industry he never worked a single day in. He'd also sometimes claim to work as a secruity guard or psychologist, both also lies.

In July 1983, Shimon married his first wife, Orit Doron and the two then moved into an apartment in Tel Aviv. During the marriage, the couple had two children.

Orit Doron

Shimon and Orit on their wedding day

But in 1992, Shimon met another woman, Sharona Bodenstein, and began dating her, while, of course, telling her he was single. Sharona was recently divorced with two young sons of her own and made a living occasionally working as a secretary. Shimon wanted to make extra sure that Sharona believed his story, once meeting her bloodied and with an injured leg, claiming he had been thrown from a helicopter on a mission abroad, as well as approaching her wearing fake uniforms.

To maintain this lie, he also had to lie to Orit to find opportunities to meet Sharona, and that is when we see the true depths of Shimon's depravity.

Shimon was, at heart, a fraud and a con artist. He told the story of his time with the IDF and Mossad in hopes of impressing women into dating him, when, in reality, he was once again a taxi driver. But that job wasn't glamorous enough, so he made up various lies about what his employment truly was to all the women he met, such as the aforementioned print shop, as an excuse to leave them alone for hours on end. Sometimes, he'd even say Mossad had called him back to duty and that he wouldn't be able to see them for a while because he'd been given another mission.

What Shimon would really be doing was to court other women and, hopefully, lure them into a false sense of secruity so he could take control of their assets. When he returned to one of the women he was now stringing along with a lot more money in his possession, he would tell them that Mossad had simply paid him in cash for his latest mission to try to keep things discreet.

Orit and Sharona were the first real threats to his deception when, in November 1993, Sharona learned that she was Shimon's mistress rather than girlfriend. Shimon considered this especially bad as he wanted to move into her much larger home.

To try and soothe things over with Sharona, Shimon told her that he had tried divorcing Orit but that she had refused to grant him the divorce, was depressed, neglected their children and constantly threatened suicide to keep him from leaving her.

In reality, Orit was only now beginning to suspect her husband's infidelity and was even considering hiring a private investigator to catch him in the act.

Shimon signed a mortgage-cancellation document stipulating that if Orit died, the bank would receive insurance money, the mortgage would be extinguished, and the apartment would pass fully to him.

On the night of January 17, 1994, Shimon told Sharona that he needed to sleep over at Orit's to look after their two children. That night in their apartment, Shimon drugged Orit with some sedatives and then suffocated her with a pillow, ensuring no marks would be left on her body. Afterward, he scattered pills and some empty pill bottles across her body and bed to make it look like she had taken her own life.

With his plan now complete, Shimon called Orit's father and then an ambulance, pretending to be shocked and stricken by grief. The paramedics showed up with Orit's father, who announced her death at the scene from what appeared to be a suicide and removed her body from the apartment.

That would've been that; Shimon would've gotten away with murder very easily, but Orit's family were in disbelief at her "suicide". She was perfectly healthy with no known physical or psychiatric ailments or any other reason they could think of why she would take her own life, and so they made it known that they were disputing the official conclusion.

Orit's father requested that his daughter's body be given an autopsy to get to the bottom of her death. Shimon initially objected vehemently; however, realizing this made everyone suspicious of him and further doubted his story, he relented and allowed an autopsy to take place, lest the police start second-guessing him as well.

The autopsy revealed that Orit had experienced cerebral edema, pulmonary edema, and old ischemia in the brain tissue, but no substance was found in her system that may have caused her death. As a result, the cause of death was simply ruled as "unclear".

After a seven-day mourning period, Shimon inherited the apartment, which he sold immideately and moved himself and his children into Sharona's home. Refusing to let Orit's parents see their grandchildren.

Shimon and Sharona would then marry in short order. Even though Shimon told Sharona that Orit had threatened to kill herself and now, legally, as far as anyone knew, she did in fact commit suicide, Shimon still saw fit to lie and would tell his now second wife that Orit had passed away from cancer.

But that deception would be the least of her worries once Shimon showed her his true colours. He regularly subjected Sharona to manipulation, abuse, and, on at least one occasion, he raped her. But Sharona never came forward; she was terrified, and with the fictitious background Shimon had told everyone in his life, she assumed that nothing would come of any reports she made and that the powers that be would intervene to cover up the crimes of their agent.

However, in May 1995, Shimon was arrested while driving a stolen car, and his passenger was his latest mistress, the woman he had been cheating on Sharona with. Afterward, Shimon tried to implicate Sharona in the stolen car, and soon both were arrested for fraud. While Sharona was eventually released, this would be the final straw.

She mustered up the courage and told her parents about Shimon: that he was a lying con-artist who never had any job in the Israeli government and that he was abusive. As this happened in his presence, Shimon screamed and got angry, grabbing Sharona's phone and smashing it into pieces while her father called Shimon's mother and demanded she "take her son away"

These reactions were quite unusual, seeing as Sharona's parents were equally abusive toward her; she grew up with a father who openly talked about "it was a shame she was born", that she was "worthless," and that if she ever got hurt she "deserved it," and alongside her mother, regularly beat her. (Although Sharona has since said she forgives them because it was "a different time" and that they had a difficult life themselves)

Afterward, Sharona tried to divorce him, but Shimon remained resistant and started threatening her and sometimes tracking her down, cursing at her and attacking her. Sharona went to the police several times, and eventually a restraining order was issued against Shimon, which finally caused him to relent and accept the divorce.

When Sharona's family began moving out Shimon's belongings, they began in a basement and a storage shed Shimon was building and forbade Sharona and her family from entering. Inside, they found a large quantity of pornographic videos and military attire.

Then, inside the attic, they discovered a surplus of shovels and gardening and construction equipment such as Ladders, picks, pipes, lintels, and window screens.

As for the most alarming discovery, that could be found in Shimon's bedroom. There, when going through Shimon's dresser, the family discovered six new packs of sleeping pills and tranquillizers. Valium, Asivel, and other drugs. The drugs were placed behind the dresser, meaning they could only be seen if you pulled out the drawers.

Sharona was deeply traumatized by her brief marriage, especially after uncovering proof that he was likely planning on murdering her. Sharona lived in constant fear that Shimon might return and try killing her again. In one moment, Sharona was beginning to move on, even getting a job as a medical secretary at Meir Hospital, when, much to her horror, she saw Shimon enter the ER for a completely unrelated matter. Fortunately, Shimon never saw her.

After his divorce, Sharona stayed in Tel Aviv with his children, where he had several new relationships with women, though they were all short-lived, as one way or another, Shimon would discard them for another, or one would uncover his deception. Eventually, Shimon left Tel Aviv and returned to Eyal.

After his return in 1999, after posting an ad in the dating page of a newspaper, Shimon met Jenny Mor-Haim, a divorced woman living with her two daughters from her prior marriage.

Jenny Mor-Haim

He told Jenny the same story he told everyone: that he was once a POW, had a high-ranking position within Mossad and that Orit had passed away from cancer. Eventually, Shimon and his two children would move into Jenny's home, and then the two had their wedding on August 13, 2007, in Cyprus.

After the marriage, Shimon applied for kibbutz membership, where those already on the kibbutz did something no one else had done before: they actually ran a background check on Shimon. Once they saw that he had lied about nearly every aspect of his past, his membership was swiftly denied, and they made it clear they now held him in low regard.

Shimon, however, protested, accusing the kibbutz of trying to exile him and Jenny from Eyal, leaving Jenny torn between her community and her husband, with this division being a constant in her life going forward.

In October 2006, Shimon met a matchmaker who got Shimon in contact with Dr. Maria Zakotsky, an anesthesiologist at Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba who immigrated to Israel from Eastern Europe in 2000. Shimon told Maria that he was single and had a high-paying job working once again in Israel's security services. Shimon and Maria began a relationship, with Shimon now lying to both her and Jenny so he could meet up with them without the other knowing.

After meeting Maria, Shimon, starting in 2007, did much the same as he did with Orit; he drafted a document that would give him the right to inherit Jenny's home in the event that she died and then began hounding her to sign a will leaving all of her assets to him even though she was only in her 40s and still in perfectly good health.

However, Shimon's chronic lying knew no bounds. He then approached Jenny's parents, telling them that their daughter's health was declining, that she suffered from sleep apnea, and wasn't in good shape. He said her health was so bad that he had to quit his job just to watch over Jenny at night. He also claimed that she was suffering from depression and had even attempted to take her own life on several occasions

He then went around Eyal to repeat this claim to all of Jenny's friends in hopes they would try pressuring her into signing the documents he had drafted. Shimon went so far as to forcibly bring Jenny to a hospital for her "difficult breathing". She was discharged after just two hours when her test results came back normal.

One more thing: Jenny's parents lived in an apartment in Jaffa, but it was registered in her name, so in the event of her death, Shimon would inherit that as well.

Then in August 2009, Shimon approched Maria asking for "fatal medical substance that would leave no trace in a toxicological examination"; when asked why, Shimon explained that Mossad had called him back to duty to assassinate a target he described as pushing 50 and being slightly overweight, a description that came close to asking Jenny. He then added that this would be his final mission before he retired and would settle down with her.

Like always, nobody ever questioned Shimon on anything, so instead of asking something like why his handlers wouldn't provide him with everything he needed for this "secret mission", Maria just accepted his story at face value. Not only did she accept his story, but also his request, stealing some succinylcholine from her workplace and telling Shimon how to administer it via a syringe.

On the night of August 20, 2009, Shimon finally acted on his plan, injecting the succinylcholine into Jenny's body as she slept. Then, exactly as he did so with Orit, he staged the scene by placing sleeping pills and empty bottles of sleeping pills around Jenny's body before calling the police and pretending to have found her like this.

Once again, Shimon tried to prevent an autopsy from taking place, only to later relent. The pathologist determined that Jenny had passed away from heart failure, with undigested pills found in her stomach. But ultimately, they found no evidence of foul play being involved in her death and accepted Shimon's account.

Just like with Orit, Jenny's family protested and were deeply skeptical of her very sudden death. But regardless, the police once again closed the case as either a suicide or natural causes in the face of protests from her family. Then, once the 7-day mourning period passed, Maria was quickly moved into the apartment.

As if that wasn't bad enough, Shimon, rather than having Jenny's property and belongings moved out, instead acted like he inherited not just the apartment but everything within it, refusing to let her daughters take possession of her letters, photo albums, childhood albums, and home videos she had recorded. When they persisted, Shimon responded by burning the photo albums. He then completely renovated their childhood home/apartment so it would look unrecognizable.

In fact, during his time as their stepfather, Shimon constantly found excuses to punish or ground them after they stood up to him one time due to all the unnecessary rules he started imposing on the children; in one case, he even let his son sneak into their room to steal their money. Shimon had also put so much pressure on Jenny and her parents that when the will was finalized to his liking, only one single shekel worth of inheritance was to be given to her daughters.

And so that was how the case remained; Shimon had now gotten away with double murder with practically zero scrutiny from the authorities, and he likely would've continued evading justice if not for a single journalist named Omri Assenheim.

One day, Omri was picking up his son from a kindergarten in Eyal when he was recognized by one of the mothers also picking up their children. Knowing he was an investigative journalist, she approched him and told him that a local woman named Jenny had recently died very suddenly, and she also knew that Shimon's first wife, Orit, had passed away in near identical circumstances.

So Omri, together with a colleague, spent months investigating and speaking to the women in Shimon's life, including Sharona and then looked into Shimon's background as well, which was when they learned that everything he told people about himself was but fiction.

On March 25, 2010, the Investigative program that Omri was known for, "Uvda" (literally meaning "Fact"), finally released a report entitled "The Mystery of the Double Widower," where they exposed Shimon's fabricated past on the national stage, questioned the near identical circumstances of his wife's deaths and even aired an interview with Sharona about her brief marriage with him, albiet with Sharona silhouetted. Sharona's mother also appeared on the program to back up her daughter's account.

Obviously, Shimon was watching, and he was furious. In August 2010, he filed a libel lawsuit against the Keshet broadcasting company, which broadcast Uvda and every single cast and crew member who worked on that episode. Initially, he sought five million shekels in damages before reducing the amount to 750,000, claiming that the program had implied his guilt in a "distorted and manipulative way".

Shimon also sought less than legal retaliation against Omri. One day while walking down a sidewalk, a white Punto car pulled up beside him and inside was Shimon, shooting the journalist a piercing glare and staring at him in silence for several seconds before finally driving off. Omri naturally saw this as an attempt to intimidate him.

And conveniently enough, Shimon began suffering "damages" almost immideately after filing the lawsuit. For example, he reported the kibbutz to the police, accusing its members of stalking and harassing him.

Then, he accused the kibbutz of distributing flyers of his face with a picture of him and a swastika they were distributing across Eyal in an effort to frame him. The police searched his home and found dozens of such flyers clearly brand new and unused. Shimon claimed that he simply tore them down and collected them, but there were no signs of tearing on the paper either; Shimon had likely printed the flyers himself to frame the kibbutz for defamation.

Next, the route Omri took to his son's kindergarten was blocked off by the police one day because, apparently, Shimon just so happened to have his car parked on that route and "discovered" a bag under his car with electrical wires coming out of it. The bomb squad later determined that it was a "dummy device" and posed no threat to anybody. Shimon spent the entire time recording anyone who drove by from his balcony, including Omri.

Next, Omri went to give a lecture to a group of lawyers in Nazareth when he noticed one of the attendees looked out of place and was also recording him during the lecture. After the lecture was over, this man approched him to ask about Shimon. After he answered, Omri asked him which office he worked for, causing the man to stammer and leave. Omri did some digging and discovered that he was a private investigator hired by Shimon.

Furthermore, while the general public was unaware of Sharona's identity due to the silhouette, Shimon was able to deduce her identity quite easily. He reached back out to her after 15 years to send her a "warning" and even hired a private investigator to follow Sharona.

Shimon then went to the home of Sharona's parents armed with a recording device; however, her mother wasn't home, and by now her 94-year-old father was blind and required a caregiver. That caregiver was home and demanded Shimon leave. When Shimon resisted, the caregiver, described as "big and strong," stood up and glared at Shimon until he was intimidated into leaving.

However, the real damage to Shimon had already been done; the police, albiet completely in secret, had reopened the investigation, and the lead investigator on the case was said to sometimes work day and night on the case completely by himself, even when everyone else involved was asleep or on their days off. And just to stop Shimon from fleeing, the police made no public statements; they had reopened the investigation completely in private.

On October 29, 2012, after a two-year investigation, the police finally made their arrest, albiet it wasn't Shimon; instead, they arrested Maria. At first, Maria was arrested under the belief that she was a co-conspirator in Jenny's murder and knew full well what Shimon was going to do with the drugs. However, the prosecutor convinced Maria that she too was a victim who had been manipulated, and so she agreed to testify against him, later going on to say that if not for her arrest, she would've likely been killed by Shimon later on.

Maria was later convicted of reckless endangerment, negligence, theft and dispensing medication without a prescription. She was later sentenced to just six months of community service and had her medical license suspended for 8 years.

Another purpose her arrest served was that when she was brought to her first court hearing at the Kfar Saba Magistrate's Court on October 30, it allowed the police to easily arrest Shimon when he went to show up to the hearing on behalf of his girlfriend.

When Shimon was interrogated, he said that he was innocent of all charges and was completely calm and composed. His demeanour led the detective interrogating him to conclude that he was an "absolute psychopath" and that he never managed to "break" him and would even go on to say that such a thing would be impossible; rather, all the police could do was just catch him in a few contradictions and simply hoped they'd have enough physical and forensic evidence to use instead, especially since Shimon made extensive use of his right to remain silent.

On November 26, Shimon was indicted for Jenny's murder and then, on March 19, 2013, was indicted for Orit's murder nearly 20 years prior.

Shimon being taken to his indictment

Naturally, in the face of the indictments, Shimon reluctantly withdrew his lawsuit against Keshet, paying them 30,000 shekels in legal costs.

Although Shimon did withdraw his defamation lawsuit, that was not an admission of guilt, legally speaking, as Shimon continued to deny any involvement every step of the way. One of his sons even appeared at court to support this claim and insist his father was innocent. When asked about all the evidence against him, his son said that "The police just so happen to find another murder every day"

Shimon's trial dragged on for three years; with good reason, it was still hard to prove 100% that Shimon had committed murder. At least in Orit's case, the case was closed quickly, and 20 years had passed. All they had was motive and Shimon's odd behaviour; for example, he forbade his sons from ever speaking about their mother and never took them to her grave.

He conveniently made sure to isolate his sons from anybody who didn't believe him when he said their mother committed suicide. Although it's not like he could've taken them anyway, Shimon was so callous that he not only didn't attend Orit's funeral, but all this time, he didn't even know where she had been buried.

He was also hardly seen at Jenny's funeral, being too busy moving Maria into what had once been her home instead.

There was also the fact that he completely ignored any of the dispatchers' requests or instructions to provide basic first aid or CPR on Orit, sounding less like he wanted to save his wife and more like he was just calling the paramedics to collect her body. When the paramedics did arrive, Shimon handed him a bag of all the pills he scattered around her body, telling them that he took it upon himself to collect them.

Jenny's murder was a bit more straightforward since the prosecution had Maria testify against Shimon and tell the court exactly how he wanted her to provide her with some "untraceable drugs" for the express purpose of killing only days prior to her death. Albiet when confronted with this fact, he accused Maria of lying because he planned on breaking up with her.

One of Jenny's daughters also testified that the last she heard from her mother was during a phone call on August 19, 2009, where she sounded "sleepy and apathetic" and said that Shimon had ordered her to take tranquillizers.

Another thing the court could easily prove was Shimon's M.O and lying nature. The prosecution called as many women as he knew to the stand to testify about Shimon's manipulative nature and how he always told them the same lie to convince them he was a person with great power and influence.

One such witness called was Sharona, who told not only the entire story of the abuse and torture endured at Shimon's hands, but also told the court that leading up to their divorce, she felt increasingly ill and that the stash of drugs found in what used to be his room.

Meanwhile, Shimon's defence attorneys argued that the case against him was entirely circumstantial, that Orit and Jenny both died of either natural causes or suicide and that the prosecution was trying to convict him just on the basis of his "unorthodox romantic life" and the fact that he received a life insurance payout.

They also argued that Shimon had been mistreated by the police, who allegedly interrogated him for 24 hours straight, withheld medical attention for an illness Shimon was suffering from that required hospitalization, and even lied to Shimon, telling him that his lawyers had abandoned him and wouldn't be coming to meet with him.

However, on the accusation of withholding medical treatment, Shimon had apparently refused to go to the hospital because he worried he would encounter Maria's colleagues.

Additionally, Shimon's defence also tried to stop the release of a follow-up episode Uvda was going to broadcast about Shimon featuring even more interviews with the various women he manipulated, even obtaining an emergency injunction from the Tel Aviv District Court arguing that the broadcast would completely destroy any chance of Shimon getting a fair trial.

But on January 16, 2013, the production team appealed straight to Israel's Supreme Court, where it took exactly one year for them to overrule the injunction and allow the broadcast to go to air.

But perhaps the most baffling defence that Shimon made was when he tried to claim that he barely even knew Sharona and denied being in a romantic relationship with her while also married to Orit. When Shimon was asked why she was regularly seeing and even having phone calls with a woman he didn't know while still being married, Shimon said, "Do you really expect me to remember?" to which the prosecutor cross-examining him said, "Yes! The answer is yes."...Shimon said he didn't remember. "I don't remember" was Shimon's go-to phrase whenever asked about something that made him look bad, like a liar or callous.

Shimon then went so far as to say that Sharona was a psychopath who abused his two sons. When the prosecutor pointed out that she was actually depressed because of the abuse he had put her through, Shimon responded with "As depressed as a psychopath can be."

In reality, Sharona, for the 1 year she knew them, treated his sons like they were her own, taking them to the hospital when they were ill, risking being late to her own job to get them to school on time and staying up late to help with their homework. Meanwhile, Shimon told more lies about having to do more work for Mossad just so he could go outside and meet more women. It is quite disheartening to know that Shimon's sons still stand by his side to this day.

Shimon also made attempts to still maintain the lie about his background even though everyone knew they were all lies now. When asked about being in a Syrian POW camp, Shimon said: "I don't even remember if it was the Syrian captivity., I inserted a lot of details in order to inflate and embellish that evening" so when the judge responded if that meant his stories were fake, Shimon contradicted himself immediately, now saying "I didn't expand, I didn't add, I didn't embellish," only to then admit that he had lied but defended himself by saying "Just like everyone else, just a little more,"

As the prosecution kept pointing out his lies and contradictions during his cross-examination, Shimon eventually grew enraged and snapped at the prosecutor, calling him a liar and complaining that he was portraying him as a murderer, telling the judge that it was taking everything in his power not to "lash out".

On June 28, 2016, after a three-year-long trial, the Lod District Court finally returned with its verdict finding Shimon Cooper guilty of both the murders of Orit Doron and Jenny Mor-Haim.

Shimon being brought into the courtroom

Shimon upon hearing the verdict

The case still remained mostly circumstantial, but the court concluded that it was still good enough, especially since Shimon's behaviour was suspiciously identical before and after the two deaths while trying to obstruct an autopsy in Orit's case and asking for a fatal drug that would leave no traces in Jenny's death.

Meanwhile, the judges delivered a scathing rebuke toward the police for not putting much effort into investigating the case earlier while praising Omri and his team for their efforts in unravelling the case.

On July 24, Shimon was slapped with two life sentences and ordered to pay 258,000 shekels each to Orit's sons and parents, and 258,000 shekels to each of Jenny's daughters and her parents.

Meanwhile, Shimon, midway into the hearing, refused to listen to any statements from the families of his victims and instead stormed out of the room, yelling that "I didn't commit any crime. The whole truth will come out". He then demanded that he be brought to the holding cell right then and there rather than being kept for the rest of the hearing. Even after his sentencing, Shimon still tried fighting to hang on to "his" inheritance as long as possible just to spite Jenny's family.

One of the first things Shimon did while in prison was to petition the court in December 2016, complaining about how the prison wouldn't let him be alone with any women unsupervised. This complaint went nowhere.

While Shimon was serving his sentence, he only made it one year before he was arrested on July 17, 2017, for a brand new crime. Shimon had begun another relationship while still behind bars. His new girlfriend's job on the outside was that of a caregiver for a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor. When Shimon heard this, he got an idea that his new partner agreed to.

She would tell the elderly woman that he boyfriend was not a double murderer locked away in a prison at home but rather that he lived in the United States and that his son was suffering from cancer. They hoped she would be sympathetic toward them and gradually become close enough with the woman that she would name them beneficiaries of her estate. Unfortunately, she passed away before the investigation concluded, and the police were only able to question her once. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear as if much came from this arrest.

But we do know what became of Shimon's appeal. On May 19, 2022, his appeal was denied, and Shimon was made to serve the two life sentences without any modification.

Shimon being taken to the appeal hearing

The decision was almost unanimous, save for one of the three judges on the panel voting only to convict Shimon of Jenny's murder, arguing that the evidence just wasn't there for Orit's; therefore, he believed Shimon should be acquitted on the grounds that there was reasonable doubt. He was, however, outnumbered in this opinion, so both of Shimon's convictions stood.

One good thing to come from Shimon's actions was what his near victim, Sharona, did with her experience. At first, Sharona spent the rest of her life living in total fear; even after Shimon's conviction, she remained afraid that he would one day find a way out of prison and seek revenge on her, especially since she was one of the prosecution's star witnesses. Sharona shared her concerns with the police and prison services, who laughed at her and said: "He's in prison for life, what can he possibly do?"

However, she used this experience to make a positive impact. She has gone on several speaking tours across Israel and given lectures, bringing awareness to domestic violence and other people like Shimon.

In 2022, she published her memoir "Living with a Murderer and Staying Alive," and rather than making it an autobiography, the book served more as a tutorial and guide, giving any women reading it in a similar situation she once found herself in the necessary tools, tips, instructions and resources needed to escape and even get justice.

Meanwhile, Shimon Cooper will spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Sources (Should be in the comments)

(I'm a big contributor to the Unidentified Awareness wiki and I am always on the lookout for international doe cases to share add there. So I figured I would share some of the Doe cases I've added to the Wiki onto this subreddit to help bring further attention to them. I'll be mostly copying my work and moving it over to this subreddit

If you know of any good international doe cases, please let me know so I can add them to the wiki

To clear up some confusion, by international I mean cases outside the anglosphere entirely, unless we're talking about African, Pacific Islands or Caribbean nations

I guess I'll include this brief message at the start of all my posts here.)

On 5 December 2019, residents of Punta Santiago in Talisay, Philippines, discovered the headless body of a woman lying on the ground near the national highway. The decedent's body was found only 100 meters from the local cemetery in Punta Santiago. Her body lay in a pool of fresh blood, and when the police arrived, they quickly concluded that the decedent had been killed very recently.

The decedent's upper body had been stripped completely naked, leaving her in just a pair of denim pants. Both of her hands had been tied behind her back, and the police noted that she had sustained three stab wounds to her back. The decedent's head was also nowhere to be found. When the police turned her body over, they saw her left breast had been cut off.

A search of the crime scene turned up empty shell casings, various nondescript items, and a bloodstained piece of black and red cloth, which the police believed had been used to transport the decedent's missing head. As for the victim herself, the police believed she was between the ages of 20 and 39 and that she stood at 172 cm.

The police questioned the locals, who told them they had seen 21-year-old Lloyd Supera Bagtong running away from the crime scene before the police arrived. Other witnesses said that Bagtong had been walking together with a woman along the road in Punta Santiago mere hours before the murder and that he had a sanggot tucked into his waistband.

The police arrested Bagtong at his home, where he still had the bloodstained sanggot on his person.

Bagtong's arrest

Bagtong confessed to the murder and led the police to a hole near his house, which he told them was where he had buried the decedent's head. The police recovered the head, which had been skinned, and the brain, eyes, nose, and ears were missing. The skull was bloodied, with barely any hair or flesh clinging to it.

Bagtong gave inconsistent accounts of how he first met the decedent, other than the fact that it was mere hours prior to the murder itself. He claimed he killed her because she kept speaking to him in English, which irritated him as he didn't understand English. He also stated that he was intoxicated and hungry during the murder. Eventually, after the two were at the cemetery, Bagtong struck her on the head with a steel bar or metal object.

https://preview.redd.it/cnniwbhhp7fh1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=dca0a83051837f7c3446cbf6d50bd486f8a25e5e

Bagtong in prison

After making sure the decedent was dead, he proceeded to strip off her upper clothing and perform a series of postmortem mutilations, such as stabbing her three times in the back, cutting off her left breast, tying her hands behind her back, and then decapitating her. He then dragged her body a few meters away from the cemetery to ensure it would be found more quickly. He wrapped the decedent's severed head in the discarded piece of cloth and carried it back to his house because he "had no food at his house".

Once home, he cut open the decedent's skull to eat her brain and use it as a topping for some cooked rice he had prepared. He then gouged out the decedent's eyes so he could consume them, peeled off all the skin, and ate her nose and ears, while eating some of the skin completely raw. Once satisfied, he threw what remained of her head into a small hole left on his property.

Bagtong, who was unemployed at the time, had no prior criminal record, but he did have a long history of mental health issues. Neither the police nor most of the local population believed Bagtong was in his right mind when he committed the murder.

On 6 December, Bagtong was being transported to Cagayan de Oro so he could be charged and indicted for murder when the police car transporting him suffered a flat tire in Jasaan. Bagtong asked to relieve himself while they waited for the tire to be fixed, so the police removed his handcuffs so he could urinate.

Once his hands were untied, Bagtong lunged for the nearest officer's firearm, successfully grabbing the weapon and managing to fire a shot. This caused a struggle with the other officers, which ended only when Bagtong was shot four times. Bagtong was rushed to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead upon arrival. Bagtong's death was a source of relief for the residents of Talisayan; even the inmates at the prison, which would've likely housed him on a more permanent basis, expressed relief that he wouldn't be joining them as a fellow inmate.

Since Bagtong was now deceased and unable to tell the police anything more about the decedent, the police no longer had any leads regarding her identity. As none of the locals recognized or knew of her, the police issued public appeals asking those with missing loved ones to come forward, but none did.

On 9 December, the decedent was buried without ever having been identified.

Sources

https://unidentified-awareness.fandom.com/wiki/Talisayan_Jane_Doe (I wrote this article)

https://kami.com.ph/101391-karumal-dumal-babaeng-nag-ingles-pinugutan-ng-ulo-ng-isang-lalaki.html

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/man-nabbed-for-beheading-woman-eating-her-brain-in-philippines

https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/topstories/regions/718039/man-allegedly-chops-woman-s-head-off-in-misamis-oriental/story/

https://www.sunstar.com.ph/cagayan-de-oro/local-news/talisayan-cannibal-killed (NSFW)

Other International Does

Teddybjørnmannen (Norway)

Chaoyang Jane Doe (China)

Vestskoven John Doe (Denmark)

Man A (Taiwan)

Izmir John Doe (Turkey)

Sergei (Russia)

Bor Jane Doe (Czech Republic)

Malanzhou Jane Doe (China)

Bolands John Doe (Antigua and Barbuda)

Faxaskjól John Doe (Iceland)

The Stranger of Lipari (Italy)

Split John Doe (Croatia) (He has since been identified)

The Man of Somiedo (Spain) (He has since been identified)

5 Unidentified Does in Hong Kong (Hong Kong)

The Izhora Maniac (Russia)

Taiping John Doe (China)

Tokyo Station Jane Doe (Japan)

Tonari Yamamoto (Japan)

Bak Kheng Leu John Doe (Cambodia)

Kassim (Singapore)

Beau Vallon John Doe (The Seychelles)

Setiabudi 13 (Indonesia)

Gyeyang District Jane Doe (South Korea)

Uljin Jane Doe (South Korea)

Islas Sisagas Jane Doe (Spain)

The Mysterious Blonde From Itu (Brazil)

Sunny Tang (Singapore)

Oettingen Jane Does (Germany)

Lung Kwu Tan John Doe (Hong Kong)

Solundmannen (Norway) (He has since been identified)

Puzzellijk (The Netherlands)

Tân Uyên John Doe (Vietnam)

Inocencia Flores (Bolivia)

Zhonghe Jane Doe (Taiwan)

The Nameless Girl (Brazil)

Clarinha (Brazil)

Málaga Jane Doe (Spain)

The Faceless Man of Carabanchel (Spain)

Kambomannen (Norway)

Kungsängen Jane Doe (Sweden)

Střížovice John Doe (Czech Republic)

Bejes Jane Doe (Spain)

Engel van 't Meer and Sterre van de Laarakker (The Netherlands)

Caotun Jane Doe (Taiwan)

Vajza Pa Emër (Albania)

Umut (Turkey)

Like, when you walk, do you still feel yourself push the movement keys? Do you even have to use the mouse or movement keys, or can you just walk IRL and your character will move that way instead?

Are the characters still pressing the button to fire the weapons, or do they just try manually pulling the trigger irl? When Aaron hit that sniper with The Disciplinary Action, did he just press the key to use the melee weapon or actually physically try swinging his arm, with that translating to his Soldier doing the same? I mean, I don't see their models constantly pushing their fingers down or moving their hand back and forth because they're pressing the movement keys to move their mouse irl.

When you're this deep and immersed in the game, do you even still see it as a game with the HUD and everything, or are you basically seeing through the POV of your class?

But basically, the main question is how, in-universe, do they do the normally impossible movements in-game? Do they just think of doing them or just try it IRL, and then their character Model will instead do it?

(I don't normally include the names of those who are not directly the victim or the perpetrator, but I did make a bit of an exception here. I thought it could avoid some confusion or redundancy when writing about the initial investigation. Fortunately, for privacy's sake, most of them aren't provided with their full names anyway.

Since I now work on two cases at once, one being a case on my backlog and another being a suggestion, this write-up was basically already finished by the time I uploaded yesterday's case)

Metin Büyükşen, born in 1963, was well respected by those in his life and community, earning him the title "Metin Hoca" for decades of work as a civil servant and the many acts of generosity he displayed towards those he met. He also met his wife, Necla Büyükşen, born in 1964, through his job, as she also worked as a civil servant. After Necla was diagnosed with breast cancer, the two decided it was finally time to retire.

The couple, now in their mid-50s, settled in their rural hometown of İsmil, a farming community outside Karatay, a relatively small city in Konya Province in Central Turkey. The home they had built was a humble single-story dwelling with few valuables inside, not even a couch; the two made do sitting on a mat. The two would regularly make trips into the city for Necla's cancer treatments, and she wound up beating cancer.

Metin and Necla Büyükşen

During the course of their lifetime, the couple had three children: a son named Osman who had become a pediatrician, another son named Uğur who was living in the same neighbourhood as them with his family and their 24-year-old daughter Fatma Büşra, who lived with them.

At around 10:00 p.m. on September 3, 2018, Metin, Necla and Fatma were sitting in the living room; they had left the front door unlocked, something most of their neighbours did in kind as the area was rather safe, but that night, somebody opened the door.

The man who then helped himself into their home was tall and heavily built, standing approximately 175 centimetres tall, wearing a balaclava that completely covered his face, a black short-sleeved T-shirt, black trousers, and black gloves. But the most alarming thing of all was the shotgun he was carrying in his hands, fitted with a homemade suppressor.

Without a single word, the shooter opened fire, striking Metin first and then Necla, killing the couple instantly. Their daughter Büşra was with them and directly in the killer's line of fire, but when he pulled the trigger on her, the weapon jammed. Seeing her oppertunity, Büşra threw a teapot at the killer and tried to run away, with the gunman giving chase. Eventually, he caught up, striking Büşra across the head with the butt of the shotgun.

The killer chased Büşra into her bedroom and held her against the bed, repeatedly striking her on the head with the butt of the rifle. The blows almost knocked Büşra unconscious, but still alive, she decided to play dead until the killer stopped striking her. Eventually, convinced he had beaten her to death, the shooter then left their home the same way he came in.

With the killer gone, Büşra escaped through an open window, jumping from the window onto the street below, where she broke some bones in her foot from the impact but through sheer adreline alone continued limping away.

She flagged down a passing car, which took her to the nearest police station, where she told the officers what had happened. While Büşra was taken to the hospital, police were dispatched to the couple's home in İsmil, where they found Metin and Necla's bodies.

The police began their investigation absolutely stumped; the living room was covered in blood, but only the victim's, and while two spent shotgun shells were recovered, the police found themselves unable to trace their origin. Robbery was ruled out not just because of the swift execution style of the murders or the lack of any valuables missing, but also because the family weren't wealthy at all and had barely any material goods someone would want to break in to steal.

https://preview.redd.it/cp0bc7okvydh1.png?width=682&format=png&auto=webp&s=e8ae7128e9826c898fd9f0d9039501c765ee85b6

Police and onlookers at the scene

Additionally, the crime scene had been disrupted prior to the police's arrival by the other locals who discovered the bodies on their own. Many walked inside the home carrying drinks like tea and soda, and others tried to put Metin and Necla's bodies into body bags on their own without either of them calling the police despite with 5 phones being present at the crime scene.

The only conclusion the police could reach at the scene was that, based on the manner in which the murders were carried out, the couple had likely been targeted in a professional hit, which only raised further questions, as initially, there seemed to be no convincing reason why one would want to contract a hitman to murder the family.

The first suspects were their son, Uğur, and daughter-in-law, Betül Büyükşen. The police detected gunpowder residue on Uğur's hands and clothes, so just like that, case closed? Well, no, despite how damning that seemed at first, he had an excuse; he said the gunpowder came from when he hugged his sister after hearing the news. His alibi was eventually verified. But that didn't mean the police dropped all suspicions against Uğur; in fact, looking into the family's background made them suspect Uğur had recruited the gunman.

Uğur's parents were not the biggest fans of Betül, with the dispute stemming from a mehr, a mandatory marital payment under Islamic tradition. In other words, a dowry. Neither Uğur nor Betül were willing to make this payment, which was the source of fierce arguments in the family.

On August 14, only 20 days before the murders, Betül had temporarily driven her in-laws from their own house, telling them they had no claim to the property and instead she and Uğur were entitled to it due to the dowry. During this period, Metin and Necla lived in Istanbul and told the relatives hosting them that they were scared they might be harmed. They returned to İsmil 20 days after their temporary exile and less than a full day later, the two were shot dead.

Despite the circumstantial evidence now stacked against them, such as Betül deleting more than 200 messages off her phone the day of the murder, a phone that was never seized or examined, no hard evidence implicating Uğur or his side of the family ever emerged, though everyone in the community now believed them responsible.

Meanwhile, the couple's other son, Osman, resigned as a pediatrician in April 2019 and left Istanbul, almost as soon as he opened his practice, so that he could devote his time strictly to seeking justice for the murders of his parents, launching a never-ending public campaign on social media and whatever television station he could get on as a guest, petitioning to the police to reopen the case.

In 2020, Osman appeared on the TV show Müge Anlı ile Tatlı Sert, a program for relatives of victims of unsolved crimes or missing persons, to discuss their cases with a live audience and draw more attention to the crimes that had befallen their relatives.

While on the show, Osman broke down into tears, stating that because the investigation had gone cold, he could never look at his family the same way, as he had no way of knowing if they were truly innocent of his parent's murders or not. In an emotional display, despite COVID-19 measures technically forbidding it, Müge Anlı teared up herself and embraced him.

However, Büşra defended herself and her siblings, arguing that they would have no reason not to come back and finish the job if she had just watched them kill their parents and therefore be able to identify them.

Betül called into the show herself after Osman brought up the 200 messages she had deleted in an effort to defend herself and give her side of the story. And her side of the story was as follows

"I never did anything like that. I wasn't like that; she's the one who did it. I know how many boyfriends she's had. I myself gave two of my phones to the gendarmerie. I was 11 years old when my aunt's son was born; he's my cousin. Actually, Büşra was messaging much more than me. How shameful. I deleted the messages on my phone from the day before. Then funeral messages came, and I deleted those too. It was Büşra who cleaned up the messages. She was also boasting to us, saying, 'If you don't sign, no one can access your phone.'"

This became one of the most-watched episodes in the show's history. The publicity from that episode prompted the police to reopen the case in November 2020.

This new investigation began simply enough: they reviewed all the interviews and reports from the initial investigation to see if they had missed anything, and sure enough, they did. Living 500 meters away from Metin and Necla, Tuğba Dayanır was their closest neighbour.

When the police questioned Tuğba after the murders, she gave a similar description to everyone else: that there was a single masked assailant. But on April 13, 2019, when she was being interviewed as part of a TV show, Tuğba now claimed that there were two masked attackers and he was the only individual questioned to give such an account. So the police were quite interested in why he changed her story.

The police also looked into Tuğba's background and discovered that back in August 2018, he walked into the police station to file a report against Emre E., accusing him of having created two different social media accounts to send her a barrage of messages of a sexually harassing nature. In these messages, Emre threatened to "put two idiots on her trail".

It looked like the police found out why she said there were two gunmen, but it begs the question: if she was the target, why was the Büyükşen home attacked instead? Well, one curious fact that immideately jumped out at the police is that Tuğba later changed her phone and SIM card immediately after reporting these threats. She was also allegedly in contact with Betül's father the day of the murders, a fact she never told anyone.

The police then put Tuğba under surveillance and also dug a bit deeper into her background. She had worked alongside a man named Beyazıt Y. and had been in a relationship with a man named Tacettin S.; however, Tacettin had ended the relationship only a few days prior to the double murder.

On November 9, 2019, Tacettin would go on to marry a woman named Feride S. Feride and a 28-year-old woman named Esra Taş both shared the same great-aunt's husband's sibling as a common relative, and the police started looking into Esra, her associates and the call and phone records of all of them, and in so doing believed they had finally solved the case after being unsolved for three years.

On July 13, 2021, multiple raids were conducted across Konya, leading to the arrests of 25 people, ranging from those suspected to be directly involved in the murders to others who were innocent and later released.

The police then searched the homes and workplaces of those arrested, seizing 2 ski masks, 2 pairs of gloves, 31 mobile phones, 11 external storage devices, 8 shotguns, 3 computers, 42 SIM cards, 8 memory cards, and 2 tablets.

Among those arrested were Esra and her current partner, who would both confess, leading the police to finally paint this picture of what had likely gone down.

Esra's arrest

Esra worked at a cafe in İsmil and had begun a relationship of her own with a man named Hüseyin Kalınkayış, who was the son of a neighbouring family located only 500 meters away from the Büyükşens', or rather, the two began an affair with one another as both parties were already married at the time.

Eventually, after just one year, Hüseyin would break off the relationship of his own accord after mounting pressure from his family. Esra was furious and blamed his parents for bringing their relationship to an end and preventing her from being with him and only them, as Hüseyin himself was never the recipient of any threats over breaking up with her.

Eventually, Esra began a new relationship with a married father of three and firearm enthusiast, 45-year-old Abdullah Başdemir, who worked on a farm outside of Konya.

Abdullah Başdemir

Abdullah's arrest

However, Esra was still enraged over her initial break-up and continued blaming Hüseyin's parents for it, and eventually she wanted to see them dead. She told Abdullah about this desire, and he agreed to help her make it come true. Unfortunately, neither Esra nor Abdullah knew the home address of Hüseyin's parents, which they needed to pass along to whatever hitmen the couple would hire.

To get that address, Esra telephoned a 40-year-old friend of Hüseyin's named Zekeriya Okşen on August 31, 2018, and told him, "I am pregnant with Hüseyin's child. His family won't let him see me. He won't answer my phone calls. I need to reach him. Can you give me his address?" Seeing no reason to doubt this claim, Zekeriya freely gave up his friend's address.

The problem, it wasn't really an address. Rather, Zekeriya, not actually knowing the exact address itself, such as the numbers and street name, had instead given Esra just the general location where Hüseyin's home could be found.

Mustafa Okşen, another friend, gave Esra additional information as well but still fell short of an actual address. Esra also called Mustafa shortly before the murders to ask if Hüseyin's parents were home, to which he said yes.

With every home in the area looking mostly the same, this was a far-from-helpful description, but regardless, Esra passed it along to Abdullah, who then recruited a 47-year-old secruity guard and friend of Abdullah's named Ertuğrul Çelik and according to their confessions, an Afghan national named Abdulhamid Uzbek, a shepherd who worked on Abdullah's farm.

Ertuğrul's arrest

On September 3, 2018, Ertuğrul obtained a shotgun, likely form Abdullah, which he fitted with a homemade suppressor and then denned some black clothing and black gloves before making his way to the address he had been given, or rather lack thereof. He wandered the streets until he found the first house that matched the description he'd been given, which, unfortunately, happened to be Metin and Necla's.

After Ertuğrul reported back to Abdullah, he told Ersa, "I had those who were bothering you dealt with. I had them killed," and then said, "You're getting away with it today." Ertuğrul, having also not been given a description of his targets, just their phone number, had no way of knowing he had killed the wrong people and therefore Abdullah erroneously believed Ertuğrul was talking about Hüseyin's parents.

On July 18, based on this confession, the police later arrested Abdulhamid in the Turkish capital, Ankara, and why was he in the city, well because he quit his job three days after the murder, though when the police began their interrogation he vehemently denied any involvement. When asked why he ran away so abruptly, he said that he was in Turkey illegally, having hopped across the border in 2015 and therefore feared being deported when the police began swarming the countryside in response to the double murder.

Abdulhamid's arrest

When Abdulhamid had his phone searched, the police saw pictures of him and Abdullah posing with firearms; however, Abdulhamid claimed those pictures were old and taken elsewhere and therefore not evidence implicating him before then exercising his right to remain silent.

Eventually, Büşra was brought in to point out the killer from a line-up, with everyone involved made to wear ski masks, just as Büşra would've seen the killer.

The police line-up

One might wonder how she'd be capable of identifying the shooter, and the answer was simple: although the gunman's face was obscured by the masks, his eyes were still distinctive and recognizable. Although she didn't recognize Abdulhamid, she confidently identified the eyes of the gunman as belonging to Ertuğrul.

Zekeriya and Mustafa Okşen were also arrested, accused of being accomplices to the murder as they were accused of providing Esra with the address. However, Mustafa passed away on August 17 while behind bars of a heart attack at the age of 39.

Meanwhile, Abdulhamid continued to profess his innocence; he said that Abdullah approched him and asked, "I have enemies. Would you kill them?" and offered him 100,000 Turkish Lira. Abdullah said he refused, so Abdullah simply went to one of his other shepherds, also an Afghan national, and made the same proposition. Abdullah admitted the interaction took place but claimed he was simply joking when he said it.

On October 22, due to a lack of evidence implicating him, Abdulhamid was later released, with Ertuğrul going on trial as the only man accused of carrying out the murder.

That trial began before the Konya 5th High Criminal Court on September 21, 2022, with only 4 of those arrested being brought to the court as defendants, those being Ertuğrul Çelik, the suspected murderer, Esra Taş and Abdullah Başdemir accused of inciting the murders and Zekeriya Okşen, accused of being an accomplice and helping Esra obtain the address of Hüseyin's parents.

Ertuğrul also denied any involvement. He told the court that he had never met the Büyükşen family, had never been to their home and that he was simply a scapegoat to cover up for one of Metin and Necla's sons, whom he claimed to be the real murderer. He said that the police "Put the family's own internal actions onto me".

He also told the court that he would confess if the police were able to use the cell towers to track his cell data and put him at the scene of the crime that night. They couldn't; his phone was nowhere near, but this wasn't the bulletproof defence Ertuğrul thought it was, since the prosecutor said he could've easily kept his phone at home.

Ertuğrul's defence attorney also attacked the credibility of Büşra's identification, arguing that her initial description of the assailant, from everything to the height, build and clothing, was provided after having gone through a traumatic event and therefore unreliable. Ertuğrul also said that he had aged considerably in the three years after the murders and even more by the time of the trial, questioning how anyone could confidently identify him based on a brief encounter 3 years prior in near total darkness with all but the eyes obscured.

Zekeriya was also brought to trial for his role, and he denied any involvement or knowledge of Esra's plan. He said that he sincerely believed Esra's pregnancy story, and as evidenced by the call, he didn't even know the exact address to begin with.

Abdullah retracted his confession and told the court that he had only met Esra recently and that the two were never in any serious relationship, only sometimes meeting her at parties or events; therefore, he said he had no motive to arrange a murder on her behalf. To quote Abdullah himself, "Why would I do something like that for a woman I've only known for three days?"

He argued that the prosecution's main evidence against him, his phone records, didn't show what the prosecution claimed and argued that his initial confession was given under duress. Finally, Abdullah repeated Ertuğrul's claim of being a scapegoat, addressing Osman directly by saying he had no desire to see the real murderers face justice and simply wanted a scapegoat instead.

Esra said much the same; she denied ever having a grudge against Hüseyin's parents and argued that her confession should be deemed inadmissible. She went on to accuse the police of bringing in her brother to instruct him to tell her to say that Abdullah was the culprit.

Esra was a believer of many superstitions and black magic which led to a bizzare devlopment during the trial. During a phone call she made made from prison, Esra instructed her mother to take a piece of cloth tied to the chin of a deceased person and pray on the day of the trial and to say while praying "May the judge's mouth be tied, may the prosecutor's mouth be tied." and then instructig her to tie and untie it three times hoping it would cast a spell preventing the judge or prosecutor from speaking.

On May 5, 2023, the court passed down the following sentences for the double murder of Metin and Necla Büyükşen. Ertuğrul Çelik was handed down two life sentences for the double homicide alongside 4 years' imprisonment for trespassing into their home and 9 months' imprisonment for non-fatally assaulting Büşra.

Esra Taş was also given two life sentences for the incitement of two murders as well as 4 years' imprisonment for inciting a home invasion. Abdullah Başdemir was handed down an identical sentence on the same charges.

The final defendant, Zekeriya Okşen, would be found not guilty after the court ruled the prosecution had submitted essentially no evidence that he knew what Esra was planning. That meant that Mustafa Okşen hadn't suffered from that heart attack and lived to see the inside of a courtroom; he'd likely have been acquitted as well.

As Metin and Necla's son, Osman, walked out of the courthouse after the verdicts to address the press, members of Abdullah's family verbally confronted him and the rest of the Büyükşen children before they began to assault them, forcing the police to separate the families and then provide Metin and Necla's children with protection as they escorted the three away from the court.

A scene from this confrontation

Zekeriya's acquittal ultimately went uncontested, but Ertuğrul, Esra and Abdullah all appealed their convictions, and on December 5, 2023, the 1st Criminal Chamber of the Konya Regional Court of Appeals upheld their sentences, prompting the three to then appeal to Turkey's Court of Cassation.

On July 20, 2025, the Supreme Court's 1st Criminal Chamber issued a final ruling in the case, upholding all convictions and sentences.

One aspect of this case that remains continuous is if there was another man who accompanied Ertuğrul to the home owing to Tuğba's statement. However, after Abdulhamid's release, no further investigations into the possibility of a second man were conducted.

With the case now over and the truth revealed, the three siblings, Osman, Büşra and Uğur, have all repaired their relationship, resolving their disputes and apologizing and forgiving one another for suspecting each other of being involved in the murder of their parents. The three have also stated that they were satisfied with the sentences.

The three posing for a photograph outside of the Büyükşen family home

Sources

https://pastebin.com/beHrE0Ye

(Thanks to LoydoRedi2910 for suggesting this case. If you'd like to suggest any yourself, please head over to this post, which asks for case suggestions from my international readers, as I focus on international cases.

This is another example of me describing the crime using the killer's confession before the investigation, something I usually do only when the case is solved fairly quickly and there's little in the way of an investigation.

I'm hoping that this write-up won't come off as too slanted in the killer's favour, but the only series of events that have been outlined come from the killer's words himself, who would naturally want to try and defend himself, so if it seems that way, that's why.

There's also just not a lot of information on the victims or their stories either)

Thijs Hermans was born in 1992 and raised in Brunssum, a small mining town in Limburg, the southernmost province of the Netherlands. As a child, he was described as cheerful, and as a teenager/young adult, he was described as intellectually driven and curious, though unfortnuately, he had poor motor skills, which led to him being bullied at school, with the bullying so severe that his parents eventually transferred him.

He also didn't have much interest in sports like the rest of his classmates. His mother ran an advocacy firm in southern Limburg while his father worked as a lawyer.

Thijs Hermans

Unlike many serial or spree killers who are said to torture animals in their youth, Thijs was instead seen as "overly sensitive" toward them and would put captured beetles and insects safely back in the grass outside if he saw any.

At secondary school, Thijs tried going the ambitious path, enrolling in the highest and most demanding level of the Dutch secondary school system before scaling back to a lower level. Thijs also studied abroad as an exchange student in Gqeberha, South Africa, on at least two seperate locations. Thijs would later describe his time in South Africa as liberating, allowing him to live free of his parents' shadow and expectations. He also did charity work in South Africa, teaching some local children and helping prevent them from becoming homeless.

In 2012, Thijs obtained his propedeuse in Social Work in Sittard. He then pivoted and got another degree in Cultural Anthropology at Leiden University, where he studied from 2012 to 2016. During his time in Leiden, he was a member of the student association for cultural anthropology and lived in or near The Hague, as that particular city was close to the sea and Thijs was said to be a passionate surfer. In addition, he also enjoyed jogging and playing the piano.

From 2016 to 2017, Thijs worked as a data analyst at a startup in Amsterdam until the company went defunct, prompting him to pursue a Master's programme in Industrial Ecology at TU Delft. This was the last institution he studied at, and he never got another job either.

With all of this out of context, Thijs seemed to have a bright future ahead of him, but it was not to be. Thijs's first exposure to drugs came when he smoked a joint of cannabis when he was 15; after that, he expanded to taking a bunch of other drugs during his studies at TU Delft, such as cocaine, speed, ecstasy, DMT and psilocybin truffles; and on top of this substantial hard drug abuse, he also smoked two joints daily.

Predictably, this completely destroyed Thijs's mind and only exacerbated the psychosis that was starting to take hold.

Thijs became convinced that the world was controlled by psychopaths who communicated through a system of coded language that the average person was incapable of seeing. He reached this conclusion upon looking up psychopathy, fearing that he might've been a psychopath, only for the search results to convince him that he was in fact perfectly sane and everyone around him was the psychopath instead.

He then believed that innocuous things such as license plates, news broadcasts, and other mundane occurrences actually contained coded messages giving him orders. Even when he watched TV on Netflix, citing the shows BoJack Horseman and That '70s Show as examples, he stated that their content seemed to change and was now tailor-made for him, giving him coded messages.

On September 8, 2018, he was staying at his sister's home when, after consuming alcohol and cocaine, he became convinced that his sister's boyfriend was planning on murdering him that very night. The outburst from this event prompted his parents to try to commit him, but they were unable to get him to a psychologist until November due to the long waiting lists and even then, he would be committed to any institution as it was deemed "unnecessary"

Upon meeting with said psychologist, he found Thijs unnerving almost immediately, noting that his facial expressions and smiling were out of place relative to what he was describing during their interview.

Shortly after his intake at Mondriaan, Thijs's paranoid episodes grew stronger, and he now believed that every single friend he had made was planning on kidnapping him to torture and later murder him. This time, Thijs would cut deeply into his own wrist and even his own neck, where he managed to survive and call emergency services 11 hours after inflicting these wounds.

Upon arriving at the hospital, Thijs told the staff that this was not a failed attempt at suicide; in fact, he never wanted to die. Rather, he said he simply wanted to try and prepare for the inevitable "torture" his friends would subject him to, and that he was so scared that he needed to know what he would be in for so he wouldn't be blind sided by what he imagined was to come.

One would probably expect that Thijs would be institutionalized after this, or at least held for observation, but instead, the doctor merely gave him dexamfetamine, a medication meant to treat those suffering from ADHD, advised him to stop his drug use, and then simply sent him on his way. As you might expect, this did nothing to impede the downward spiral his mental state was undergoing.

However, externally, few would know this was going on. At university, his fellow students said he was withdrawn, quiet, and rarely spoke to them. His neighbours also said that Thijs would never say anything whenever he walked by them.

Thijs's parents continued to try to get him institutionalized; the two psychiatrists they spoke to told them that Thijs's symptoms were just side effects of the ADHD medication they had given him and that they once again would not admit him as an indefinite patient.

In April 2019, Thijs's maternal uncle, one of the relatives he loved the most, passed away and losing him proved to be the final domino before Thijs had a complete psychosis induced breakdown.

He returned to his student dormitory after the funeral and called his father on May 1, asking to be picked up. Thijs continued to believe that news broadcasts and the license plates of any car he saw were delivering him coded instructions, and this time, he interpreted those messages to mean he had to kill two people, or his own family would be murdered, and they were telling him he had to carry them out immideately.

On May 4, 2019, Thijs turned off his phone, took a kitchen knife and left his family's apartment in The Hague. His destination was Scheveningse Bosjes, a forested park where dogs and other animals were allowed to run off-leash, making it popular not just for hikers but also for local dog walkers.

Thijs wandered the park looking for a victim and eventually came across a Japanese woman, a 56-year-old named Etsuko, who had moved to the Netherlands.

Etsuko

As she was walking her dogs through the park, Thijs suddenly rushed toward her, stabbing her 30 times, including repeated stabs to her head. Long after Etsuko had died, Thijs used his knife to sever Etsuko's pinky finger because, in his mind, the messages encoded in the license plates also wanted him to bring back proof of his kill. However, as he fled the scene, he threw the pinky finger away, finding it "too horrifying" to keep in his pocket.

Not long after Thijs's departure, a passerby also hiking through the park discovered Etsuko's body lying next to her cargo bicycle, where he dogs were also present. The passerby called the police.

As the murder was completely random and in a wooded area, the police didn't have any evidence or suspects to speak of; there was CCTV from the surrounding area, but it never showed Thijs approaching, and the actual crime scene wasn't covered by the cameras. Prospects of solving the case seemed dim right from the get-go. Believing the killer had likely lain in wait for his victim, all the police could do was simply ask the public to come forward if they saw any suspicious figures and if anybody saw anything.

Tragically for the police, the killer was right under their noses; Thijs hadn't ventured very far. He went straight home, where his neighbours heard a loud banging noise coming from Thijs's home. When they entered to investigate, they saw a dishevelled Thijs standing next to the bathroom door, which he had kicked down. He looked confused when asked what had happened to the door and simply answered that he had lost the key.

Afterward, he texted his mother to let her know he had been catching up with his ex-girlfriend and asked her to pick him up at the train station, which she did. However, once she arrived, Thijs's mother would, in hindsight, describe her son's facial expression as "demonic" and stated that he even hissed at her.

Instead of driving Thijs to her home, she took him to the Mondriaan psychiatric institution Thijs had been visiting regularly for his check-ups. There, the physician said his answers were coherent that day but said he looked "unrestful and verbose". Since he never showed anything more alarming than usual to those present even after committing the murder, Thijs remained a voluntary patient who was allowed to come and go as he pleased.

Thijs exhibited many strange behaviours this time; he hissed at his mother, shook his head violently back and forth, seemed distressed, and often fell onto his face, losing balance from how violently he shook his head. Again, his mother insisted, practically demanded that he be held overnight, but the clinic again declined to do so and gave him a sleeping pill and sent him home.

Two days later, on the evening of May 6, Thijs was watching TV when once again, he believed the TV spoke directly to him, telling him that he had to claim another victim the following morning or his mother would die and then one by one his other relatives until ultimately ending in Thijs's own murder.

On the morning of May 7, he set out to fulfill the order he believed he had been given. He left the psychiatric facility telling the staff he was heading to Brunssummerheide, another dog park in The Hague, of course neglecting to tell them about the kitchen knife he was still carrying.

Thijs was going to kill the first person who walked by him, but he ended up sparing him because he needed to "gather courage". The second person he encountered was not so lucky: a 63-year-old grandmother and volunteer at a local nursing home in Heerlen, Diny Meeuse, who was walking her dog through the park. Since nobody was looking, Thijs stabbed Denis in the back and then repeatedly to the front of her body.

After the murder, Thijs stepped away and hid in the tree line to "compose myself," as he would later go on to tell the police and courts that he was "Crying hard on the inside" after what he had done. But whatever distress Thijs was feeling wasn't enough to stop him as he began searching for a second victim because "the assignment," as he called it, required two kills.

This second victim would be a 68-year-old resident of Hoensbroek named Frans Verhees who was walking with his dog toward Thijs. Much like with Diny before him, Thijs allowed Frans to pass him before he turned around and stabbed him in the back. Frans actively struggled against Thijs, receiving several additional stab wounds, with even his dog Kyra receiving a wound to her neck as she tried protecting her owner.

Ultimately, Thijs prevailed and kept stabbing the elderly man until he finally passed away. There were some parked cars nearby, and when Thijs looked toward them, he claimed the license plates were sending him another message, a congratulatory one, cheering him on for what he had done.

It didn't take long for another hiker to discover Diny's body and call the police. The police arrived and, after speaking briefly with the caller, allowed him to leave as they began their investigation. The caller only made it 100 meters before he found Frans' body and frantically ran back to the police to alert them of the second corpse.

With the same M.O and same location, the police quickly connected these two murders and then connected them to Etsuko's murder three days earlier; the police now had a spree killer on their hands.

The police at the dog park

When Thijs fled the dog park, he went back to Mondriaan, where the staff saw that he was covered in blood from the two brutal murders. Thijs insisted there was an innocent explanation for this, and while none of the staff believed him, when they heard about the murders on the news, they knew Thijs to be responsible.

However, they didn't call the police right then and there; they were under the mistaken belief that Dutch law prohibited them from alerting the police without absolute proof that he had committed a crime or posed an active danger to anyone else, because of confidentiality.

He left Mondriaan and went home to his parents, who later drove him back to Mondriaan. Upon his return, the staff placed Thijs into a secure ward; however, Thijs would pull the fire alarm to cause a distraction while he made his getaway, which finally prompted the staff to alert the police. That same day, Thijs's name and face were published across the Netherlands, with the public warned not to approach him.

CCTV Footage of Thijs escaping Mondriaan.

The manhunt was short-lived, lasting only two hours, before the police found Thijs wandering down a public street in southern Limburg with his hands in his pockets, where he was arrested without incident. According to the passerby who saw him and called the police, he said of Thijs, "He immediately struck me as not being entirely 100 percent." Once brought to the police station and interrogated, Thijs denied any and all involvement in the triple homicide.

Unfortnuately, Thijs's parents weren't any more cooperative and, at certain points, were outright obstructive. When the police searched their apartment, they found not just the entire apartment cleaned, but that the clothing Thijs was wearing on the days of the murders had been washed, as was the backpack he used to carry the knife and the knife itself, although a second knife, also one of the murder weapons, was found which hadn't been cleaned and contained Etsuko's DNA.

Thijs's parents denied any knowledge of what their son had done, and the two were never charged for cleaning all the blood off the evidence, as under Dutch law, direct family members of a suspect are not legally obligated to cooperate with the prosecution of their relative, because of that, when the trial started, neither Thijs's parents or his sister would ever show up to testify.

Mondriaan's staff was also uncooperative, at one point refusing to share CCTV footage with the prosecution or other materials not covered by doctor-patient confidentiality.

On August 16, when Thijs was brought to his first formal court hearing, he finally changed his tune and confessed to the murders, apologizing to the families of his victims. For his defence, he told the court that he heard voices and saw what he thought were coded messages commanding him to kill and that he was prepared to cooperate with the psychiatric evaluation.

In October, Thijs wrote letters to the victims' relatives; however, none of them opened or read them. Not wanting to hear his apology aside, they doubted it was genuine when they learned he had also sent letters to journalists.

His psychiatric evaluation was concluded in December and concluded that Thijs suffered from "a decompensated psychotic state," experiencing severe delusions, paranoia, and hallucinations. In the professional opinion of those who examined him, Thijs did not have a guilty mind and should therefore be acquitted.

When they received the report, the prosecution was unconvinced; they still believed that Thijs suffered from a severe mental illness, just not so severe as to render him incapable of understanding his actions; rather, they sought a sentence of 24 years in prison with mandatory treatment, opting not to seek a life sentence on grounds of diminished capacity.

A courtroom sketch of Thijs during the trial

The evidence they had in favour of Thijs having more sense than it seemed was the fact that he left his phone behind before committing the murders so he wouldn't be traced, left his own dog at home and waited for the younger of his potential victims to pass him by and only targeted the more elderly dog walkers.

His search history turned up searches for "how do I act like a psychopath", "how do I deceive aid workers", and "Why do some good people become evil?". Outside of Google, he told somebody before the murders that he wanted to "impale someone with a knife "

Also, the day before his evaluation, Thijs said in a phone call with his mother, "Exciting tomorrow, isn't it, with Jan?" Jan being the doctor who examined him.

On July 30, 2020, the Court of Limburg found Thijs Hermans guilty of the triple homicide of Etsuko, Diny Meeuse and Frans Verhees; they rejected the defendant's claims of manslaughter or that he wasn't liable and instead convicted him of premeditated murder. The court also concluded that Thijs's deteriorated mental state was his own fault for excessive drug use despite several psychologists advising him not to and sometimes not taking the medication prescribed.

However, even if not criminally insane, they accepted that Thijs still suffered from diminished capacity, so he was handed down an 18-year sentence with mandatory treatment attached. Additionally, he was ordered to pay 103,498.08 Euros to the families of his victims. The relatives of the victims said they were satisfied with this sentence.

Both parties appealed to the Palace of Justice in 's-Hertogenbosch, with Thijs's lawyer seeking an acquittal while the prosecution demanded a harsher sentence. They presented 4 seperate expert opinions stating that Thijs could not be held responsible for his actions and also argued against the court's opinion that Thijs contributed to his own spiral by refusing to take medication. They argued that he did, but because the professionals misdiagnosed him and therefore erroneously prescribed him dexamfetamine, meaning it would've made no difference if he had taken his medication or not.

Eventually, the court ordered a second psychiatric evaluation, and the results were disappointing for both parties. The two doctors assigned to it declined to reach a conclusion on whether Thijs was in a state of psychosis at the time of the murders and therefore didn't state an opinion on whether he was culpable or not, leaving it open-ended. This report was criticized for being contradictory, disorganized, and incoherent, offering little to no insight.

Naturally, this haphazard report did nothing to convince the court of the defence's point of view, so on March 17, 2022, they not only upheld Thijs's conviction but also increased his sentence to 22 years, once again stating that even if his sense of reality was muddied, he still possessed enough personal agency to plan the murders.

Thijs's defence team filed another appeal, this time to the Dutch Supreme Court, where they essentially made the same argument: that he was incapable of being held responsible for his actions, while now also arguing that the appeal court had improperly ignored their 4 expert witnesses attesting to Thijs's insanity.

On October 17, 2023, they made the same ruling, upholding his 22-year sentence with mandatory treatment attached, affirming their belief that he was delusional enough to meet the criteria for acquittal on grounds of insanity.

The verdict was actually controversial among mental health professionals in the Netherlands, with one saying that the court had "put on a white coat" and overstepped their boundaries by judging Thijs's mental state themselves. But regardless of how they felt, the matter was now closed.

However, civil procedings were still ongoing. Thijs actually sued Mondriaan, the clinic he was occasionally treated at, arguing that they should bear some of the responsibility for his actions, arguing that if they hadn't misdiagnosed him and given him the ADHD medication, dexamfetamine, his delusions could've been kept in check.

Mondriaan's legal and PR Team denied his allegations in full, arguing that Thijs had lied about and hidden certain details from him during his time as their patient and that his heavy drug use was a choice he made that they had nothing to do with.

However, they did not address the severe misdiagnosis, why they didn't inform the police earlier, or their repeated refusals to hold Thijs for observation. Furthermore, showing that they were poorly run, there were other issues unrelated to Thijs.

For example, on May 8, 2019, a 51-year-old patient of Mondriaan who was supposedly left in a secured ward attacked and injured 5 people, including staff and patients, with a knife. At the time, the police had to clarify that Thijs was not involved in this incident due to the timing.

As of now, Thijs's lawsuit is still ongoing. However, he wasn't alone in seeking legal action against the clinic; the relatives of his victims have also considered suing Mondriaan for negligence.

On March 23, 2026, Thijs's attorney submitted a request to reopen the case and potentially order a retrial, arguing that "The real Thijs should not have been punished for the acts of the then seriously ill Thijs."

The report presented at his appeal trial was the crux of her argument. The fact that it was so disjointed and the noncommittal answers the two doctors gave were so controversial that the two were, in fact, put on review for submitting such a report, let alone as evidence for a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation, and later suffered reprimands from the Medical Disciplinary Board.

She argued that it was improper for the judges to use it as evidence that Thijs was in control of his actions and that it warranted a new trial. Her stated goal was never to put Thijs back on the streets, though; rather, she simply argued that he should be held in a mental hospital instead of prison.

As of today, the Dutch Supreme Court has yet to make a ruling on her request.

Sources

https://pastebin.com/AyTPwXbi

(Thanks to u/Jealous_Track9402; he made a brief post about this case a month ago, and I reached out to him after seeing it. We spoke about some Finnish cases, and overall I decided to give this case a full and complete write-up.) In addition, he also provided the English translation of the call made to the police by the killer

With Finland's privacy laws, a lot of people in this case are unnamed, including some of those involved in the murder)

On the morning of October 18, 2018, a man was out hunting hare in the woods outside of Matinvuori, Finland. The hunter made his way to a remote forest track when he encountered three men. He would've disregarded them, but these men felt very out of place, despite the fact that it was raining, in the middle of the woods and with winter fast approaching; the three were wearing light clothing with nothing to protect themselves. And speaking of the clothing, there were visible bloodstains on their shirts and pants.

In addition, the three were holding boxes of wooden logs and heading deeper into the woods. Two of them had started walking toward the tree line with the boxes in their arms while the third appeared to be trying to stay out of sight behind the van they had evidently driven to this location.

As he approched, the hunter heard one of them say, "Can't we be left alone anywhere?" and when he called out to ask what they were doing, they introduced themselves as ornithologists and deer spotters who were looking for an adequate location to set up a campfire, something odd as it was again, even if slightly, raining outside.

The hunter gave the three directions toward a better location for their campfire and then left. Cutting his hunting expedition short, he got into his vehicle and, during the drive home, called a fellow hunter to tell him about this strange encounter and that he believed they were doing something illegal. He would soon be proven right.

Hours later, a 112 call came into the Finnish police from a woman frantically reporting that her 24-year-old son had killed a man. The police tried to get more information from her, but unfortunately she didn't know much; her son had not been very forthcoming with details, and his confession was rather bare-bones.

Luckily, the police didn't have to wait long, as they'd soon hear from the son himself when he called just two hours later. Here is a transcript of the fairly casual 112 call he initiated.

"Emergency center."

""Good evening, I'd like to report a homicide".

"And when did this take place?"

"I don't know, between yesterday and today."

"Okay, so what has happened?"

"It seems that someone has died."

"Okay, where?"

"So we figured with my friend that we are gonna surrender ourselves."

"Okay."

"I have the dead body with me, it's chopped into pieces."

"Okay. And what's your name?"

"And I'm gonna leave the pieces of the body a bit to the side at the parking lot, I'm at Kuorttis ABC right now, so maybe the police can come pick them up."

"And what's your name and last name?"

"Who is your friend? What's the name of your friend?"

"He doesn't want to say his name right now, probably when the police comes he'll say it."

"Who have you killed?"

"I don't know his name."

"Okay, and what happened?"

"So, it's been a lot of drinking, I can't really remember that well, the guy was being a bit aggressive, atleast hit me and so on, and then at some point we just realised he doesn't have a head anymore."

"Okay. So you dismembered him?"

"Yeah something like that, during the night."

"And where did this happen?"

"At Leivonmäki."

"And you don't know who the victim is?"

"Uh, he's like a friend of a friend, I don't really know him."

"And now you're at Kuorttis ABC?"

"Yea, how long is it going to take them?"

"Probably not long, but where do you have the body now?"

"Uh, it's wrapped in sheets sort of, it has all of the pieces left."

"So you have it in the car with you, right?"

"Yeah, yeah (He then says something else, but it was unintelligible), my friend didn't know anything about this."

"Yeah, what's the name of your friend?"

"I don't want to say it because he doesn't want to."

"Yeah."

"So he wasn't aware of what I had in the trunk, but I told him, so now he doesn't want to drive anymore."

"Okay, what kind of car do you have?"

"So I'm gonna leave it there at the parking lot."

"Yeah, but what kind of car do you have?"

"What does it matter?"

"Well, if you're at the parking lot in a car, the police have to recognize you."

"Yeah, but I figured I'm gonna stay here so my friend can go to work and so on because he doesn't want to drive the body around anymore, so he can go."

He then says something else, but that is also unintelligible

"Are any other people involved in this?"

"Uh, me and my friend who are surrendering now."

"So your friend is also surrendering but doesn't want to say his name?"

Yeah no, he doesn't want to for some reason."

"And you're at Kuorttis ABC?"

"Yeah, about there. I was just wondering how long it's gonna take them."

"Just wait for a minute, don't close the call."

"What the fuck, what kind of fuckery is this?"

"So what's happening?"

"Just wait a moment."

"So am I waiting for the police to come here?"

"Yes, wait a moment."

"Well, I don't want you to blame my friend." He then says something else also unintelligible

"Can you hear me, I'm gonna change spots right now if there's some foolery, do you understand?"

The caller didn't hang up despite how abruptly it seemed to end; rather, the killer's phone simply ran out of battery, and soon that same man called from a different number and, after the same dispatcher began the call with

"Emergency center"

He cheerfully went, "Hey again, calling about the homicide, if you're the same lady I was talking to earlier. So we are here at ABC Kärsämäki, oh what was it, ABC Kuortti."

"Yeah, what's your name?"

"I've been waiting for the police here, but my phone battery ran out, so they can't contact me, so so"

"Is this your own phone you're calling from?"

"No, it's my friend's number."

"Does he have battery left?"

"Yea"

"Okay, I'll transfer this information that you are there at Pertunmaas, I mean Kuorttis ABC."

"Yea, around the back at the truck park"

"At the truck park, okay."

"Yea, two guys standing around."

"Are there any other people there?"

"Just me and my friend."

"Alright, can you give me the friend's name?"

"No, he doesn't want to; he'll give it to the police when they get here.

"Yea, you can give it to me so I can give it to the police."

"But he doesn't want to give it here, so he'll give it to the police."

"Yea, alright, I'll forward this information. Keep your phone with you; the police will be there soon."

"Roger that"

"Thank you. Bye bye."

"Bye"

This finally marked the conclusion of the 112 call, and sure enough, the caller was being truthful. Kuortti ABC is a gas station and truck stop in, well, the village of Kuortti, Finland. The police, alongside some extra men from the Finnish military, descended upon the gas station and arrested the caller and his friend. Before even arresting them, the police had a feeling it wasn't a prank call, seeing as the caller's and his unnamed friend's clothing were completely stained with blood.

https://preview.redd.it/rmjbkffpgmch1.png?width=666&format=png&auto=webp&s=d2133a5b912210e39efb6dbfc8ed4823dd89d053

The police and military at the scene.

Upon his arrest, the caller directed the responding officers to the "sheet" he used to wrap the victim's body, or rather, it was a tarpaulin he had placed next to a gravel pile at the edge of the parking lot of the truck stop section of Kuortti ABC.

Upon lifting the tarpaulin, the police were greeted by exactly what the caller had promised: a dismembered body. The victim, an adult man, had been cut into around six pieces, with the arms, legs and head all cut off the torso. At the time, the police were unable to determine the victim's cause of death, though based on the knife wounds to the palms of his hands, he had clearly tried defending himself.

They had killed and dismembered the victim at an apartment 65 kilometres away in the Leivonmäki district of Joutsa, and they had loaded the victim's body into a van they were loaning and drove down to the Kuortti ABC. The driver of the van was a 37-year-old friend of the two, and the police called him, asking him to return to Kuortti ABC; he did so and was arrested upon his arrival.

The apartment belonged to the caller's 26-year-old friend, and before entering, they spoke to the neighbours who didn't have much to say. The tenant moved in nearly a year ago, yet nobody had really spoken to him, only ever seeing him in passing, with the neighbours describing the tenant as "pretty unknown to us".

But even as an almost total stranger to the rest of the neighbourhood, he remained a nuisance all the same, as the neighbours regularly complained about constant loud music on weekends and the displays of intoxication by the tenant's guests. Sometimes the people in that property were so loud that the neighbours started buying earplugs just so they could sleep.

On the night the police believed the murder occurred, some of the neighbours overheard somebody shouting either "don't get smart with me" or "don't make fun of me" in addition to an arrhythmic thumping sound from the apartment during the early hours of the morning.

Upon entering the apartment, the police encountered a scene of pure horror.

A forensic technication about to step inside

Blood was quite literally everywhere; the walls, floors and ceilings were all saturated with blood; barely any surface was left unspattered. The quantity of blood was so large that even with DNA testing, it was impossible to tell who did what.

However, a large majority of that blood was the victim's, and forensic testing revealed a blood alcohol content of 3.5 per mille and a large amount of amphetamines in his system, which would've made it next to impossible for him to defend himself.

Venturing into the bathroom, which was where the caller said the dismemberment had taken place, the police found two kitchen knives, one of which was a 35-centimetre serrated kitchen knife and a handsaw which had been used to dismember the victim's body.

One of the more grotesque items the police recovered could be found in the kitchen. Opening up the kitchen's rubbish bin, the police retrieved a margarine container, and when opened up, they were greeted by the victim's severed genitals.

A search of the entire home also shed a lot of light on what likely fueled the murder, i.e the copious amounts of alchool and narcotics the police found littering each room. A lot of the alchool, drugs and even blood were found near a chess set with the pieces indicating a game had recently been played, and the murder occurred not long afterward.

Through all the blood found at the apartment and the testimony of some of the four arrested, the police identified the victim as a 35-year-old man who lived 20 kilometres from the center of Joutsa. The victim's name is not public knowledge, nor is most of his background, but we know that he wasn't an only child, that he had a son, and that he had spent his entire life in Joutsa, which made him at least somewhat known in the local community.

The victim also had a criminal record, being convicted in March 2013 for assaulting a man with a walker.

As for the three suspects, the caller's 26-year-old friend and the 37-year-old driver were also unnamed, with little biographical information to speak of aside from several court appearances for various petty crimes. The caller was 24-year-old Mirko Micael Forsström, and he does provide us with at least a little more.

Mirko Micael Forsström

He was born in 1994, and although he did not originate from Jousta, it was familiar to him because of the friends and connections he had maintained there. To be close to said connections, he ultimately left his home in Päijät-Häme, having previously lived in Helsinki, and moved to Leivonmäki.

Mirko also had a prior criminal record in September 2016, while at a friend's apartment in Lahti and on parole for a previous assault; the two spent the night drinking heavy amounts of alchool and once the intoxication set in, Mirko began acting aggressively.

After a heated argument with his friend, Mirko punched him several times in the head, kicked him in the legs, hit him several times with a crowbar, including on his limbs, and slashed one of his upper limbs with a butterfly knife. His friend, or rather victim, now suffered contusions, bruises and fractures, as well as a 10-centimetre-long wound from the knife that reached the muscle layer, requiring several stitches.

He only spent a few days in jail before being released pending his trial, where he then attacked another man in Vantaa, knocking him to the floor and punching him on the head several times.

On August 8, 2017, the Päijät-Häme District Court finally found Mirko guilty of aggravated assault and one count of assault and sentenced him to 2 years and 4 months in prison. With time served and parole taken into account, Mirko was not only released in no short order, but bafflingly, he and his victim remained close friends in the aftermath.

This was nothing new to Mirko, who described himself as a very impulsive man and cited this as the reason why he was taking anger management classes at the time of the murder. Classes that weren't doing him any good, as shortly before the murder Mirko committed another violent assault.

On June 16, 2018, Mirko and a friend had met a man in front of a bar in Mäntsälä and suggested that they go to his apartment to smoke some cannabis. Once there, the parties got into an argument which eventually ended up with the victim being pushed to the floor where Mirko and the other man jumped on her head, kicked him across the head and body and slashed him on the left thigh and foot with a bladed weapon.

When all was said and done, he had suffered a fractured lower jaw, broken teeth, liver damage, broken ribs, and a brain hemorrhage. They then abandoned the victim and fled the scene. He woke up to find the apartment empty and with little memory of the assault, hence why Mirko wasn't arrested and awaiting trial at the time.

However, shortly after the assault, Mirko did go to a neighbour's home with his clothes covered in blood and asking for a needle and thread to stitch somebody up.

Since Mirko was the caller, that also meant he was the self-confesssed murderer, and he, alongside his friend, soon told the police what happened. Three men had gathered at the Leivonmäki apartment during the evening of October 17: Mirko himself, his friend the 26-year-old tenant, and the victim.

The three men spent the evening drinking alcohol and smoking cannabis until eventually a chess set was brought out and the three began to play a game. The victim ultimately won, and to say Mirko took his loss poorly would be a massive understatement.

He already said he felt as if the victim had been acting aggressively before, and when he allegedly continued that behaviour after his victory, Mirko delivered a punch directly to his head, which brought the victim down to the floor. While the victim was on the ground, Mirko went to the kitchen to retrieve a knife and was quick to return, now armed with the blade.

He used that blade to slice at the victim's throat with enough force that the blade stopped at the cervical spine. Despite this wound, the victim continued to resist the best he could, trying to defend himself by pushing away or grabbing the knife with his hands. But as the victim lay bleeding, Mirko beat the man, punching and kicking him across the face and head.

The fatal "blow" that finally killed the victim was truly grotesque. Mirko grabbed either the same knife or a second one and used it to basically just saw through the victim's neck, sawing back and forth until, through pure brute force alone, he finally used the kitchen knife to fully decapitate the victim.

Mirko's method was directly compared to what was seen in ISIS beheading videos, and the prosecutor compared it to "Satan worship," citing a previous dismemberment case in Finland in which the killers were described as Satanists.

Mirko reenacting the beheading

Still angry, Mirko chucked the now severed head at the wall with all his strength before savagely stabbing the head and across his body and inflicting a few additional blows post-mortem. Shortly afterward, Mirko's friend, the tenant who had witnessed the entire murder but never intervened, decided to join in, grabbing a second knife to slice off the victim's genitalia and then placed them in the margarine container in the kitchen. Because they left so much blood on the floor, the two slipped in the puddles a few times, getting their clothing stained with the victim's blood.

After several hours, the two finally moved the victim's body into the bathroom, where they used the two knives they already had to begin dismembering the body but found the task harder than expected, so they called for some help.

The two called a 37-year-old man, the owner of the van found at the gas station. The man, having just arrived home, was trying to sleep because he had to work early the next morning, but he agreed to arrive at the apartment regardless. He arrived with the handsaw he had taken from home and assisted in dismembering the victim.

Together, the three cut his body into an additional five pieces: the four limbs and torso, which they placed into plastic bags and wrapped in a sheet. Before they left, the three wiped the memory off of their cellphones and removed the SIM card from the victim's home.

Now with the dismemberment complete, the three loaded the sheets and bags into the van Leivonmäki that morning, looking for a place to dispose of the body, either by burning it or burying it.

They drove for hours, making several stops to refill the van's gas tank and buy some food as it took them that long to try and find a place to dispose of the victim's body.

Mirko caught on the gas station's CCTV camera.

Eventually, they decided they would burn the body, so they went to another friend's house to collect firewood, a fuel canister and some cash.

They drove to a forested area in Heinola, trying to find somewhere isolated to burn the victim's remains; however, the ground was wet, and it had started to rain, so no fire they started would actually burn, so they left and went to a forested area in Matinvuori where they were eventually discovered by the hunter from the beginning of his case.

After the hunter left, the three drove to the Kuortti ABC and waited for around an hour, wondering what to do. Mirko eventually called his mother to confess. After that call, the three men opened up the back doors to the van and unloaded the victim's remains, placing them in the gravel mound behind the gas station and covering it up with a tarp.

The 37-year-old driver soon left while Mirko and his friend stayed behind at Kuortti ABC. At 4:30 p.m., Mirko decided he would simply give up and called the police to turn himself in for the murder.

On December 4, the prosecution dropped the murder charges against the 26-year-old tenant and the 37-year-old driver, simply charging the tenant with doing nothing to prevent the murder as well as charging both of them with desecration of a corpse, aiding and abetting and all three of them were charged with various drug offences and at least one firearms charge. Mirko would be the only one actually charged with murder.

Mirko's trial began on February 12, 2019, before the District Court of Central Finland in Jyväskylä, and when called to testify, Mirko tweaked his story slightly and now claimed that the victim was the aggressor and that he had merely acted in self-defence and even if he was criminally responsible, that he should be convicted of manslaughter instead of murder.

Mirko being escorted to the courtroom

Mirko during the trial

This was his new story word for word.

"We started drinking beer, kilju, and liquor on Wednesday during the day. At least the man who lived in the apartment and I were there when we started drinking. I don’t know what time a friend of his came over, nor how he got there. I also don’t know that friend’s name. This friend also took alcohol and maybe something else, because he became aggressive in the middle of a chess game I was playing in turns against that stranger and the man who lived in the apartment. Everything was fine at first. Then, as I recall, when I was playing against that friend, he became aggressive. I don’t know why he got angry, since he even won that game.

I have a memory that the friend started hitting me and that I got a fist to the eye. My right eyebrow was cut open. After that, I don’t remember the events properly. I also don’t want to tell anything I don’t properly remember. At some point, I came to, and some kind of panic struck me: "What do we do now?" We were still in the apartment at that stage. I don’t remember if the man living there was in the apartment, but that stranger was there. The friend’s head, arms, and legs had been cut off. I don’t remember who had done it to him, nor any of those events.

My next memory is that either the man living in the apartment or I called his friend asking for a ride. I don’t want to mention what kind of car the man came in, because he isn't related to this act in any way. The man living in the apartment or I threw the man’s parts into the trunk. I can't say why we wanted to get moving by car. It was just panicking and hasty work. The man was aggressive and thus attacked me. We both got up. The man got up first. As soon as I had gotten up, he hit me. The blow hit my right eyebrow. As a result, I started hitting that man. I hit him a couple of times with a fist somewhere on his face. I hit his nose, his eyes, or the area between his eyes. If he has any orbital fractures, they most likely came from those fist strikes.

As a result of my blows, the man fell to the floor. He might have lost consciousness. I’m not entirely sure if he was on the ground or already getting up when I grabbed a knife from somewhere. I think I got the knife from the kitchen, and in the meantime, the man started to get up. I can’t say this for sure, but I remember him being about to get up. However, I had a kitchen knife with a serrated blade in my hand. I went in front of the man and slit his throat. So, I was standing in front of the man, and he was getting up, perhaps on his knees. I used a lot of force to cut, slicing with the entire length of the blade. I think it only caught the spine. So, I cut almost the entire neck through at once. The man died from this cut.

After this, I may have vented all my anger at that man by hitting him in the head many times. Immediately after this, I continued cutting the neck with the knife so that I cut the entire head off. I don’t remember what happened immediately after that. After the head came off, I may have kicked or thrown the head. Kind of like, "this, too, had to happen." I was the only one who participated in killing that man. I can’t say where the man who lived in the apartment was during this act. However, I believe I did the dismemberment myself afterward as well. I don't remember it properly, but I am quite sure the dismemberment happened in the bathroom. In my opinion, I did it alone. I would guess it happened with a saw and that same knife. My memories of this are quite hazy. I moved the deceased by dragging him by the leg to the bathroom."

Mirko's friend had a much shorter confession and testimony, but he essentially told the court he didn't remember anything about that night whatsoever.

However, based on Mirko's initial confession and the autopsy showing the victim had several defensive wounds and had survived for a period after the initial stabbing and throat slit before falling victim to several other stab wounds, completely contradicted Mirko's claim of a spur-of-the-moment case of self-defence.

On August 7, 2019, for perpetrating the "Joutsan paloittelumurha", Mirko Micael Forsström was found guilty and given a sentence of life imprisonment. They argued that even if his confession was true, even if the victim was the aggressor, a life sentence would still be warranted as Mirko's actions were a grossly disproportionate response that went far past self-defence. In addition to his life sentence, Mirko had to pay between 43,000 and 51,000 euros to the victim's son, mother and siblings.

As for Mirko's two co-defendants, the driver was given a suspended sentence of 7 months and 15 days for helping dismember the body, transport the remains and a seperate charge of cannabis cultivation and use.

Meanwhile, the tenant of the crime scene who cut off the victim's genitals was acquitted of desecration of a corpse as the court believed he had only handled the remains rather than take part in the dismemberment. Because of that, he was only convicted of drug charges and had to pay a fine.

Mirko appealed his conviction to the Vaasa Court of Appeal, where he once again argued that he should've been charged with manslaughter instead of murder. He especially argued against the murder's classification as "particularly brutal or cruel," stating that, however gruesome the aftermath was, the victim's death was fairly quick. An argument the court rejected, upholding the sentence on March 2, 2020.

Mirko declined to appeal to Finland's Supreme Court, making the sentence final.

On top of this sentence, in 2021, Mirko was brought back to court for the assault from June 2018. There he was found guilty by the Eastern Uusimaa District Court, where he and his accomplice were both given a sentence of 1 and a half years for aggravated assault, although the sentence was purely symbolic with no extra time added to the sentence Mirko was already serving.

Regardless, the two still appealed the sentence, and on November 11, 2022, the sentence was upheld, with Mirko and his co-defendant both ordered to pay their victim 8,000 euros in compensation for his injuries.

Sources

https://pastebin.com/vjDNYS4i

(Thanks to LoydoRedi2910 for suggesting this case. If you'd like to suggest any yourself, please head over to this post, which asks for case suggestions from my international readers, as I focus on international cases.)

On July 21, 2017, a resident of Rincón de los Sauces in the very North of Argentina's Neuquén province was out for an evening run along the unpaved road with his two greyhound dogs. After his walk took him approximately 6 kilometres outside of the city limits, the dogs broke off from their owner and ran ahead. They ran toward the darkening scrub off the highway, seemed focused on something in the underbrush, and refused to move away, no matter how much he called for them.

Eventually, he went to the underbrush himself and was greeted by logs of álamo, broken wooden pallets, and several tires. The collection of rubble and debris had mostly collapsed, but he could still see something beneath the debris, and albiet only barely, the man recognized the figure as a human body and rushed to call the police.

When the police arrived with a forensic team and cleared away the makeshift pyre, there was not much left remaining. Over 90% of the body had been burnt and charred so severely that the victim measured in at approximately just 1.10 meters in length. At the crime scene, the police found multiple footprints and tire tracks which indicated more than one person was involved, and based on the overpowering smell of an accelerant, the fire had obviously been set intentionally.

Because it was now the dead of night and the body was found on an open, unlit rural track, not much in the way of an investigation took place that night. Rather, the police cordoned off the area and simply waited until 10:00 a.m. on July 22, as they deemed that having the forensic technicians work under such conditions would be both impractical and potentially damaging to the evidence.

https://preview.redd.it/u3y4bw8fi2ch1.png?width=900&format=png&auto=webp&s=5c001fb79d972696efd1a8590fb12005ef170eb4

The police and forensis at the scene come sun rise.

When work resumed, nothing was left intact; nobody could even determine the body's gender. The only clue that did survive was a chain necklace found among the ashes, a pink pearl pendant which likely belonged to the victim.

The victim's gender was finally determined during the autopsy, and the reason was quite tragic. The medical examiner described what remained of a fetus inside her remains; the victim was pregnant, and by the coroner's estimation, she had been pregnant for approximately 6-7 months.

However, that only answered one question; the cause of death was practically impossible to pinpoint due to the fire. Identifying the victim seemed like it would be an uphill battle as well; her fingerprints were destroyed, and the level of damage was so severe that not even dental records would be immideately available. The only hope would be DNA, but at the time they had no one to compare it to. So the police went through the local missing person reports, and with that, the victim was identified immideately.

On July 21, around the same time the police began cordoning off the crime scene, the family of 26-year-old Fernanda Pereyra walked into the police station to report her missing after she failed to return home from an outing on July 20. Normally, they wouldn't be so quick to report her missing; Fernanda was known to leave home for days at a time, but this time she had a young son at home she had to come back to care for, and most importantly for the police, she was pregnant with a son she named Mateo.

Fernanda Pereyra

The last time anyone heard from her came from a text message to her friend at 8:03 p.m. on July 20, which read, "Try not to be too late, because maybe tomorrow I won't be here anymore," an odd and unnerving message, as prior to it being sent, her friend was simply talking about their plans to celebrate Día del Amigo. Furthermore, before leaving for Rincón de Los Sauces, she hugged her family and said, "This might be the last time you see me"

This report was the very first thing the police saw once they began cross-referencing missing-person reports, and, with it matching the mostly vague description of their Jane Doe exactly, the police had them come in. Obviously, looking at the body wouldn't be of much help, so instead the police had them look at the pink pearl pendant necklace. They positively identified it as Fernanda's, distinctly recalling that her grandmother had personally put it around her neck just days earlier.

Shortly afterward, a second autopsy was conducted. This time their luck was finally turned around as the medical examiner noted that Fernanda had sustained five stab wounds; one wound entered from the front of the body in the area of the left hemithorax; four entered from the back, also in the thoracic zone; three of the zone wounds punctured her lungs. Based on the wounds, the coroner believed that the stabbing began during some sort of confrontation, with the stab wounds continuing after Fernanda turned away.

A DNA sample was also taken from the remains and compared against Fernanda's family, definitively identifying the body as her.

Fernanda Pereyra was originally from San Rafael, 700 kilometres away from Rincón de los Sauces in the Mendoza Province. She arrived in Rincón de los Sauces while still a teenager, and during those years she had her first son, becoming pregnant at just 15. The father of her son was a boxer named Ademar Orlando Marangel, known locally as "Becho." They met in late 2012 and by early 2013, the two were already living together.

Ademar Orlando Marangel

Ademar treated Fernanda horribly, was regularly abusive and tried isolating Fernanda from her family. It was so bad that Fernanda's go-to method for raising her son to be a good person was simply to instruct him to do the opposite of whatever he saw his father do.

In November 2013, before her child was even born, Ademar saw her at a party at the school her older daughter attended, where Fernanda's father was also in attendance. This infuriated Ademar, who punched her across the head, back and stomach. In response, a restraining order was issued against Ademar, which only angered him more.

On March 12, 2014, while a friend was driving Fernanda to a store to buy diapers for her son, Ademar suddenly intercepted their vehicle, driving his motorcycle directly into its path, forcing it to a stop so he could dismount and then, right in front of his infant son while he was being breastfed, climbed into the car and begin beating Fernanda on her face and body.

The police were called, and Ademar was still actively attacking her as they arrived to drag him away and force him into a police car. But before they reached him, Ademar leaned in and told Fernanda that he would kill him if she tried moving forward with any cases against him. Fernanda was not afraid of this threat, reported him anyway, and intended to go through with the charges.

Ademar spent only 5 days in jail before he was released. Afterward, Ademar told Fernanda every time he saw him that he would make her pay, albiet he never attempted to make good on such a threat because the police maintained an active presence outside her home to protect her. Thanks to the testimony of Fernanda herself and the other witnesses, Ademar was eventually convicted on May 20, 2015, albiet he was only given a suspended sentence without any jail time attached.

With such a history, it was no wonder that Ademar found himself the police's first suspect, but he ultimately had an alibi and was ruled out early on.

Although unrelated to Fernanda's murder, in 2021, Ademar was sentenced to 9 years imprisonment for kidnapping his ex-girlfriend, whom he started dating after Fernanda, holding her captive for two days and sexually assaulting her.

Ademar in court for his unrelated crimes.

Another potential explanation for Fernanda's murder was to silence her; while this ultimately would be revealed to be true, at first the police were wrong about who was responsible for said silencing.

At 7:00 a.m. on November 19, 2016, after celebrating his brother's birthday, 16-year-old Franco Orellano was shot in the chest at a street corner in Rincón de los Sauces by someone driving a white car. Franco was rushed to the hospital but tragically passed away from the gunshot wound. For this murder, the police arrested an individual named Mauricio Maximiliano Tapia.

One of the witnesses to this murder was Fernanda, and the lawyer who represented her in her case against Ademar had approached her about testifying in Mauricio's upcoming trial. Fernanda had initially agreed but then reported her attorney to a judicial oversight committee, accusing him of offering her money and protection in exchange for her testimony in that case, which led to her identity as the prosecution's witness being exposed.

This caused a lot of bad blood between the attorney and Fernanda's family, who accused him of painting a target on her back and causing those she was associated with to look at her as a "snitch"

Could Mauricio have orchestrated her murder, possibly paid for it from behind bars to prevent Fernanda from testifying against him? If so, it wouldn't be something out of character, as Franco's family had also reported receiving several threats before, during and after the trial. Whether Fernanda's death had anything to do with it or not, Mauricio was eventually acquitted.

With all that theorizing, what did the police know for a fact? Well, at the time Rincón de los Sauces boasted only 10 CCTV cameras, so tracking Fernanda's movements was far from easy. One of the cameras that caught her walking through the streets also recorded two vehicles: a Renault Kangoo van and a Hilux pick-up truck. The last confirmed sighting of Fernanda alive was at a street corner in the center of Rincón de los Sauces, as captured on CCTV.

On the afternoon of July 20, she had returned from San Rafael, where she had visited her father and daughter. She left her young son in the care of a friend while she went out, explaining her reason for being there.

The police believed that at this street corner, once out of the camera's view, her walk was intercepted and she was forced into the Renault Kangoo. Inside that van was where the killer likely stabbed her to death as the vehicle was in motion.

While Fernanda was never caught on camera again, the police did follow the vehicle's route as best they could. Around 5 people exited the vehicles after arriving at a boarding house at around 9:10 p.m., carrying a large duvet, which they took into the building and placed on top of a washing machine. Clearly the duvet had been used to wrap up Fernanda's body.

Through the license plates on the vehicles and the faces of those inside, the police identified one of the individuals as Luciano Hernández, who was neither a stranger to the police nor to Fernanda herself.

It was shortly after Ademar's arrest that Fernanda met Luciano, and he became Fernanda's second boyfriend. Unfortunately, Luciano was hardly an improvement, being a heavy drug addict and having a volatile temper.

However, Luciano wasn't just a drug user; he was a trafficker as well, being a part of the network connecting the northern Neuquén oil fields to supply routes running back through Mendoza, and Luciano decided that he and some of his friends could employ Fernanda as a "mula" while they kept most of the profits. Unfortnuately, being dragged into this world had an even bigger negative effect on Fernanda when she developed an addiction to Cocaine.

In the weeks and months before her death, Fernanda had grown determined to try and escape this environment. She broke up with Luciano only a few months earlier, and on July 17, she spoke to her father and told him she feared for her life. When her father asked who she was afraid of, she gave a list of names, including Lucita. Then, two days later on July 19, she called her mother and said, "Mamita, I'm going to get away from all of this. You were so right. I don't want anything more to do with any of them. Luciano is a demon, the most evil person I could have known."

It wasn't just Fernanda's word they had to go on; while she was in San Rafael, Fernanda's maternal grandmother overheard a phone call between her and Luciano where Luciano said: "If you come back to Rincón, I'm going to kill you. You are not going to live another day." Fernanda assumed he was bluffing, to which he said: "Come back, and you'll see what I'm capable of."

On July 27, the police raided both that boarding house and another house owned by one of the four men in that video. While one man was detained, he was later released due to a lack of evidence; the police did arrest and hold Luciano, alongside two other men, Osvaldo Castillo and Diego Marillán.

And speaking of Osvaldo, the police seized his and the rest of the defendants' shoes, and they matched the shoe prints found next to Fernanda's body; their vehicles were also a match for the tracks found leading toward and away from the body as well.

After their arrests, the police searched the boarding house where they discovered wooden poplar poles, tires, a handsaw and a container of combustible fuel, all used to set the fire which destroyed Fernanda's body. This proved that Luciana, Osvaldo and Diego were likely responsible for Fernanda's murder; it was not what made this one of the more sensational crimes Argentina had seen.

During the search, the police also discovered a makeshift shrine, complete with black, white, and red candles ritually arranged around images of San La Muerte. This was hardly the extent of the ritualistic, almost occult-like objects the police discovered.

Part of the shrine

In one room, the police found "satanic music", a small corral of sheep, which the police believed they wanted to use in a sacrifice, and a paper doll of approximately the same height as Fernanda Pereyra, wearing a wig of the same hair colour as Fernanda's, which appeared to have been offered in ritual to the shrine.

When Osvaldo had his shirt removed during the intake process, the investigators noted that he had six tattoos depicting women in flames spread across his chest and back, which was the method they'd use to destroy Fernanda's body permanently etched onto their own. In addition to the women burning, he also had tattoos of tridents, the devil, dragons, and other images associated with Satanism

The Tattoos

When their shrines and altar first reached the media, all of the media outlets were reporting that Fernanda had been murdered as part of a satanic ritual inside that very building, possibly even falling victim to human sacrifice.

However, the police already knew that Fernanda was likely killed inside of Luciano's van. But just to be safe, a full forensic sweep was conducted on the property, which turned up no signs of any violent crime, such as even a single drop of blood.

Unlike Luciano's Renault Kangoo, the police's theory was confirmed when the forensic team conducted a sweep of the vehicle, uncovering blood stains and hair in the cargo area and on the ceiling, as her stabbing had caused the blood to spray upward. Although Luciano had cleaned the vehicle, those traces of forensic evidence remained.

But that's not to say ritual and satanism played no role; for example, Fernanda was 6 months pregnant, and the killers drove her 6 kilometres out of town to dispose of her charred body off of Route 6; in other words, the number 666 seemed to be intentionally chosen to be a part of the murder.

After Luciano's arrest, the police decided to conduct a paternity test and learned something shocking. Mateo was not his son. The real father was another man, Kevin Carrasco, who was serving time in prison, and he admitted he was the true father. So, on top of threatening to expose his drug trafficking operation, the police had Mateo's paternity as another potential motive. Although whatever his exact motive was would remain unknown for now, as all three denied any involvement.

Since the police only had three in custody and yet 5 suspects were seen arriving at the property after the murder, the investigation was still far from over. On September 21, the police identified and arrested the other two who appeared on the CCTV footage: Osvaldo's wife, Andrea Peruca, and Diego's brother, Fabio Marillán.

https://preview.redd.it/hjfefszqj2ch1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=e212e01e33411796dd36df70cb93212bf8f0bb1b

Fabio and Andrea being arrested.

Andrea was accused not only of failing to turn her husband in despite knowing he was the murderer, but also of actively going out of her way to help cover up the murder. On the morning of July 21, Andrea and Osvaldo had driven the Renault Kangoo to a car wash in an attempt to destroy the evidence.

Meanwhile, Fabio had been accused of much the same, knowing full well that the murder took place but refusing to come forward and doing nothing to turn any of the guilty parties in.

Fabio and Diego would prove to be among the most difficult suspects, not because of anything they had personally done, but because of their family members. When all five suspects were brought to court for the first preliminary hearings, Diego and Fabio's father was seen taking notes on the names and addresses of the witnesses while attending the procedings and then posted threatening messages on his social media account, which prompted the prosecution to have every single witness placed under police protection while having Diego and Fabio's father arrested for criminal harassment.

But death threats were hardly one-sided in this case. During one of the preliminary hearings, Fernanda's mother pushed over a police officer guarding the defendants, charged toward one and managed to land a blow on one of their heads, screaming, "You bled my daughter to death and took my grandson from me, I'm going to kill you, you son of a bitch!"

Another almost fatal blow came the prosecution's way when the tests from the blood found in Luciano's van came back as negative. The report came back stating that it was "non-human blood,". Both the prosecution and Fernanda's family rejected this conclusion and ordered a second DNA test, arguing that the excessive cleaning of the vehicle rendered the result unreliable.

The police continued their investigation, sifting through all of the call logs and cellphone records, both from before their arrests and the outgoing calls the suspects made from prison, and it was truly fortunate that the five didn't seem to realize their calls would be recorded. One such call was between Osvaldo and Diego, where one said that if "Nicolás", the owner of the boarding house, talked to the police, "the six of us will be in trouble". Something curious since the police knew of only five suspects.

But one of the most damning strings of evidence came from Diego and Fabio's phone records. On their phones, the brothers maintained a "blacklist" consisting exclusively of women living in Rincón de los Sauces whom they referred to as "las boconas," meaning "the big mouths" that were aware of their drug trafficking network. Fernanda's name was among this "blacklist".

The case moved to trial before the Oficina Judicial in Neuquén capital on June 21, 2018, heard by a 12-member jury, and this case would go on to be the longest jury trial in Neuquén's history; the 5 were charged with murder, aborting a fetus and femicide.

The 5 during their trial

The trial lasted for 11 days, with the prosecution showing the jury the CCTV footage, evidence from their phones, the defendants' history with drug trafficking and Fernanda's desire to leave that environment as their potential motive, the blood found inside Luciano's Kangoo and the matching shoe prints.

On the 5th day of the trial, Fernanda's ex-girlfriend, the one he had before Fernanda, took the stand as a witness for the defence. Luciano's alibi was that he had spent the day with her, and she was summoned to support said claim. However, once she actually arrived at the court, she told the jury that Luciano had called her and instructed her to tell the investigators he was with him, before clarifying that she had never been with him and had no idea where he had been that night. Suffice to say, Luciano's ploy had backfired massively.

But regardless, all five took the stand to tell the jury they were innocent, with Andrea likening Fernanda to a sister while Luciano insisted he was home all day and never did wrong by Fernanda even once, while Diego and Fabio's attorneys stated the prosecution hadn't proven their involvement beyond a reasonable doubt; however, their pleas fell on death years.

On July 1, 2018, after deliberating for 2 hours and 15 minutes, the jury returned with its verdict. For the murder of Fernanda Pereyra and her unborn son Mateo, Luciano Hernández, Osvaldo Castillo, Diego Marillán, and Fabio Marillán were all found guilty. Meanwhile, Andrea Peruca was also convicted for her role in hiding the murder.

However, they were all acquitted on the femicide charges, as the stated motive was to cover up their drug trafficking operation; the jury felt the prosecution failed to prove that Fernanda's gender or prior relationship with Luciano played a role in her murder, much less a bigger role than covering up their drug trafficking network. Their logic was that if Fernanda had been a man, she still would've been killed in such a manner for wanting a different life and for knowing what they were doing.

Sentencing arrived on July 13, where Luciano, Osvaldo, Diego, and Fabio were all handed down a sentence of life imprisonment with the possibility of parole after 20 years. Meanwhile, Andrea was ordered to serve 12 years in prison, despite the prosecution and even the defence asking for 15 years, though naturally the defence was still satisfied either way. All defendants were also ordered to pay 318,000 Argentine pesos in legal costs. When speaking to the media outside the court, Fernanda's mother said she was completely satisfied with the sentences.

Naturally, given how insistent all were that they were innocent, it should be unsurprising that they eventually appealed their sentences, and on September 26, 2018, a Tribunal de Impugnación agreed with Andrea's appeal, arguing that the judge had improperly directed the jury and had her released. However, on December 19, the life sentences of Luciano, Osvaldo, Diego, and Fabio were all upheld.

They appealed once more to Argentina's Superior Court of Justice. On April 16, 2019, their appeals were ultimately rejected, making their sentences final, as they had never appealed to any higher court. The prosecution also appealed Andrea's acquittal to this same court, but her acquittal was upheld. She remains a free woman to this day.

Unfortnuately, Andrea was never recharged; no other suspects were arrested, leaving it still unknown who they were talking about when they said "the six of us will be in trouble," and the drug trafficking network that led to Fernanda's death was never disbanded; rather, Luciano's competition simply took over the route.

Sources

https://pastebin.com/MN7dkymB

I have asked this question before on other countries' subreddits (I'm going to finish up asking for the last few countries I'm interested in in short succession), and I do so because I'm an amateur writer who frequently does write-ups on crimes from foreign and non-English-speaking countries to raise awareness of incidents that aren't well known abroad. I do my best to ensure that I'm purely objective (first-person terms like "I, me, my, I'm," and whatnot rarely appear) and respectful of the victims and their families.

I am mainly looking for obscure cases that foreigners are unlikely to have heard of, so cases that don't have English Wikipedia articles. 

Anyway, with that in mind, I was wondering if anyone here knows of any true-crime cases from Romania, solved or unsolved, that I could look into. It doesn't have to be restricted to just murder cases; it could be other crimes as well. Obscure cases are the most appreciated. Things that are crime-adjacent, like wrongful convictions for deaths that weren't criminal, or missing/unidentified people whose cases have not been deemed suspicious, are also welcome.

I'm also okay with and prefer sources that aren't in English, as I'm more likely to find local cases that way.

I have asked this question before on other countries' subreddits (I'm going to finish up asking for the last few countries I'm interested in in short succession), and I do so because I'm an amateur writer who frequently does write-ups on crimes from foreign and non-English-speaking countries to raise awareness of incidents that aren't well known abroad. I do my best to ensure that I'm purely objective (first-person terms like "I, me, my, I'm," and whatnot rarely appear) and respectful of the victims and their families.

I am mainly looking for obscure cases that foreigners are unlikely to have heard of, so cases that don't have English Wikipedia articles. 

Anyway, with that in mind, I was wondering if anyone here knows of any true-crime cases from Finland, solved or unsolved, that I could look into. It doesn't have to be restricted to just murder cases; it could be other crimes as well. Obscure cases are the most appreciated. Things that are crime-adjacent, like wrongful convictions for deaths that weren't criminal, or missing/unidentified people whose cases have not been deemed suspicious, are also welcome.

I'm also okay with and prefer sources that aren't in English, as I'm more likely to find local cases that way.

For cases I know already, I've already done a write-up on Laajasalon murha and am working on a write-up for Joutsan Paloittelumurha

Cases on my list to do also include Metsälän paloittelumurha, Alaa Kadhim Mahdi Albu-Salih murha/Itäpuiston murha, Lauri Oskari Johansson murha/Natural Born Killers and Musta Kolmio/Vasaratien palkkamurha/Tampereen palkkamurha

I have asked this question before on other countries' subreddits, and I do so because I'm an amateur writer who frequently does write-ups on crimes from foreign and non-English-speaking countries to raise awareness of incidents that aren't well known abroad. I do my best to ensure that I'm purely objective (first-person terms like "I, me, my, I'm," and whatnot rarely appear) and respectful of the victims and their families.

I am mainly looking for obscure cases that foreigners are unlikely to have heard of, so cases that don't have English Wikipedia articles. For example, I am well aware of, say, The Order of the Solar Temple, one of the more infamous cases just in general, not just in Switzerland.

Anyway, with that in mind, I was wondering if anyone here knows of any true-crime cases from Switzerland, solved or unsolved, that I could look into. It doesn't have to be restricted to just murder cases; it could be other crimes as well. Obscure cases are the most appreciated. Things that are crime-adjacent, like wrongful convictions for deaths that weren't criminal, or missing/unidentified people whose cases have not been deemed suspicious, are also welcome.

I'm also okay with and prefer sources that aren't in English, as I'm more likely to find local cases that way, cases from all communities at that, cases from the French, German and Italian regions

(Since I now work on two cases at once, one being a case on my backlog and another being a suggestion, this write-up was basically already finished by the time I uploaded yesterday's case)

Born around 1970 in Hong Kong, Chan Fung-han was the oldest of three children and the only daughter. Her father was a former government official who also ran his own business, while her mother was a retired executive from a securities company. Fung-han lived a pretty easy life. She excelled in school, and because her appearance was described as beautiful, she was constantly shown affection and had many admirers.

Chan Fung-han

Her graduation should've been a happy time, but instead it was marked by tragedy when her father passed away not long after. However, she used the inheritance from his death to open a clothing store in Mong Kok. After several years, she began operating a high-end herbal tea and aromatherapy beauty business in Causeway Bay.

In early 2002, Fung-han and her mother jointly invested HK$2.05 million to purchase an apartment in Happy Valley. The purpose of the purchase was so the entire family could live close together, even if in seperate residences. But also to make family gatherings easier to arrange, since every few days, Fung-han would call her mother and every weekend she would make time to visit and have dinner with her mother and brother.

While her family usually adored her, they grew concerned about Fung-han's love life. Over the course of an entire decade, she had several boyfriends, but all of those relationships ended fairly quickly and never led to a marriage, which was what her family wanted. When she started dating Soo Chun Sou in late 2006, few were expecting that he'd be any different.

Soo Chun Sou, born in 1973, came from a well-off family and studied abroad in Montreal, Canada. he returned to Hong Kong in 1998 and worked as a computer procurement officer for a major company. So what was the problem? Well, Chun Sou was already married and even had an infant daughter with his wife.

The problem, he didn't want to be. That marriage came about in 2004 when his parents pressured him to marry his current wife because she was wealthy; in other words, they introduced him to her, and it was an arranged marriage.

It also did not look as if their marriage would last. They were never happy together, but after the pregnancy, Chun Sou and his wife began sleeping in other rooms. Then, in July 2006, Chun Sou was dismissed from his job, and the two often fought over money and the cost of raising their daughter, with arguments that often led to the two coming to blows.

In September 2006, after losing his job, Chun Sou was introduced by a friend to a position as an instructor for first-aid courses at the St. John Ambulance Brigade. Fung-han decided to enroll in the same course, which was how the two met.

After a few weeks, Fung-han accepted Chun Sou's advances, and soon the two began their relationship. A relationship Chun Sou didn't have to hide because he and his wife finally separated on November 25.

However, Fung-han had no idea Chun Sou was even married, and his dramatic divorce, combined with the short temper and controlling behaviours Chun Sou was starting to display, led Fung-han to consider ending the relationship already.

However, by now things had changed, and everybody else wanted Fung-han to stay with Chun Sou. Fung-han's own mother was especially fond of the two and was now encouraging her daughter to marry him. Because of this, Fung-han didn't believe she had much of a choice, so the relationship continued with Fung-han even renting a bachelor apartment nearby to make it easier for Chun Sou to meet her.

Chun Sou also wasn't willing to end the relationship and seemed to be looking forward to its future, often proposing to Fung-han that they go on a trip to Southeast Asia and frequently brought up the possibility of marriage. However, being busy with her work and simply not wanting to, Fung-han would always decline or just straight up try to avoid any discussions about marriage altogether.

On February 7, 2007, at around 8:00 p.m., she called her mother and said that she was planning to go to Lau Fau Shan in Yuen Long, Hong Kong, with Chun Sou, for dinner at a local seafood restaurant. Fung-han asked her mother if she wanted her to bring home any for her. Her mother wanted some oysters, so Fung-han agreed to buy some for her, and with that, their call ended.

When she woke up on the morning of February 8, she was shocked to see that Fung-han hadn't returned. When she went ot call her, she was directed straight to voicemail. However, considering that she was a busy woman running her own herbal tea and aromatherapy shop, and often had to travel to Guangdong, China, to purchase supplies and handle business orders, she didn't think anything of it at first and, in fact, went days before trying to contact her daughter a second time.

On February 11, Fung-han’s younger brother happened to run into Chun Sou and decided to ask him about their date. According to him, the oysters his sister bought for their mother were still in his car, but since he had been unable to contact Fung-han and worried they'd start to rot and produce a permanent foul stench in his vehicle, Chun Sou asked if he'd like to join him to retrieve the oysters and bring them to Fung-han's mother.

He followed Chun Sou to his rented flat to collect the oysters. However, despite that being the purpose of the visit, to retrieve some food for her, he had completely forgotten to tell his mother about them. Then, on February 12, Fung-han's mother went to her daughter's home, and while her daughter was still gone, clothes, shoes, toiletries, and belongings remained, having never left that apartment with her.

Obviously, this made no sense if she had gone to China to purchase supplies. Now concerned, she called Chun Sou, and he didn't know where Fung-han was either. In fact, he told her that their relationship was over, and their latest date had actually been a "break-up dinner"

On February 3, Chun Sou told Fung-han that on November 25, 2008, the 2nd anniversary of his and his wife's separation, he would formally marry Fung-han, even offering to cut off all contact with his wife and daughter so nothing would come between them. Chun Sou was actually shocked when Fung-han was less than thrilled, telling him that she didn't want to be viewed as a "homewrecker"; this absolutely infuriated Chun Sou.

However, when Chun Sou calmed down, he believed that Fung-han's words were just born of the heat of the moment and that she didn't actually mean them, so he left the apartment to give her some space.

Much to his surprise, Fung-han arrived at his apartment on February 7 after taking a taxi, only to resume their earlier discussion about breaking up. Chun Sou proposed that they have one final dinner, and she agreed.

After the date ended at 10:30, the pair prepared to return to Happy Valley. However, just after getting into the car, Fung-han told him she had another arrangement, so Chun Sou would have to go home by himself. Chun Sou drove her to a Minibus terminal, and from there, the two parted ways.

The next day, Chun Sou noticed that the oysters Fung-han had bought for her mother had been forgotten in his car. He spent several days trying to contact Fung-han to pick them up, but after meeting with no success, he gave up and had her brother take them off his hands instead.

In hindsight, Chun Sou said that he wasn't too surprised by the breakup because, in January, he had taken a trip to the Philippines and, upon his return, noticed that Fung-han appeared to be in a relationship with another man and was simply using that as an excuse to end her relationship with him.

Fung-han's mother asked Chun Sou to help her find this other boyfriend in case he knew where her daughter had gone. The two searched extensively, but when neither could find him, Fung-han's mother went to the Happy Valley Police Station on February 15 to report her missing.

The investigation was handled by the Hong Kong Island Regional Missing Persons Investigation Unit, and right from the get-go, they concluded that Fung-han had met with foul play. The police felt that it was essentially impossible for her, in a place like Hong Kong, to have gone missing for over a week with no immigration or bank records left behind.

On February 16, the police reviewed her phone records and found that her last call was made on February 7 at 10:44 p.m., lasting about 30 minutes. The caller turned out to be Fung-han's first boyfriend, whom she broke up with in 1996.

The police tracked him down, and he confirmed that he had spoken with Fung-han and that they had planned to meet, although the meeting never took place because he was in the middle of a birthday party.

When asked why she reached out to him, he said that they had still been friends even after their break-up and that she wanted to wish him a happy birthday, talked about the good times from their relationship and then Fung-han told him about the recent troubles she was experiencing.

At 3:00 p.m. on February 8, he tried to call Fung-han, but the call went straight to voicemail. Much like her mother, he simply assumed Fung-han had taken another trip to Guangdong, paid her absence no mind, and made no further attempts to contact her. He was completely unaware that she had even been missing.

At first, the police didn't believe him. The party he was attending ended only shortly after the phone call, so it wasn't something he could easily use as an excuse to get out of seeing Fung-han, nor was it something he could use as an alibi, either, since CCTV footage at the apartment complex he lived in did not show him returning until around 3:00 a.m. on February 8.

They also looked into his financial situation and saw that since 2006, he had lost nearly one million Hong Kong dollars in stock trading. This is important because Fung-han's brother recalled her saying she had once lent a "large sum" of money to an "old acquaintance."

Also, albiet conveniently, when Chun Sou was questioned and saw a picture of Fung-han's old boyfriend, he started to claim that he was the man she had been dating and, again, the man he had taken Fung-han's mother out to try to find.

Realizing he was becoming a suspect, he decided to come forward himself and explain himself to the police. He said that after his birthday gathering ended, he went to a nightclub and stayed there until 2:40 a.m. The only reason he withheld his alibi was that he was already married and therefore wouldn't know how to explain himself when asked why he went alone. After returning home, he wasn't seen leaving again until 7:00 a.m., which in effect ruled him out.

He was also lacking in the way of motive. Although he did suffer substantial financial losses in the stock market back in 2006, he made that money back in short order and was not struggling as others had suggested to the police, having netted a substantial profit from the two businesses he had a hand in running.

Now that they ruled him out, the police returned to viewing Chun Sou as their primary suspect. They confirmed that on the evening of February 7, he and Fung-han had dinner together at a seafood restaurant and left around 10:30 p.m. The owner of a noodle stall in Yau Ma Tei confirmed that at around 12:30 a.m. on February 8, Chun Sou went to his stall, ate alone, and bought two magazines.

To drive from the seafood restaurant to Yau Ma Tei would take around 35 minutes, and Fung-han was known to be alive until at least 11:15 p.m., so if Chun Sou did murder her, the timeline appeared to be a little bit on the tight side unless he killed her at the roadside and kept her body in his car. Regardless, due to that timeline and the absence of any additional evidence, Chun Sou was ruled out for the time being.

However, not long after they ruled him out, they looked back at him regardless; on February 13, Chun Sou suddenly terminated his apartment lease and moved to the Kennedy Town neighbourhood without even claiming the HK$12,000 security deposit he had prepaid to the landlord. His sudden move naturally made the police interested in him all over again.

Checking Fung-han's phone location data, they discovered that the last location where her phone signal was detected was Pak Nai Village, about 7 kilometres from the seafood restaurant, and that the signal abruptly ended at around 11:22 p.m., shortly after her call with her ex-boyfriend.

Pak Nai Village is about as rural as a city-state like Hong Kong could get, surrounded by mountains on two sides and the sea on one, making it one of the most secluded areas in Hong Kong. It is no easy task to get there with only one road, and it is on the opposite side of where Fung-han lived, so why was she there in the middle of the night? And why didn't she just have Chun Sou drive her there? Chun Sou said he dropped her off at a bus stop, but Pak Nai Village has no bus service; she couldn't have taken a taxi either, as no cabs were recorded picking up passengers bound for Pak Nai.

The police then got to work retrieving the CCTV footage from the route Fung-han likely took. The footage showed that Fung-han had already left home at around 4:00 p.m. on February 7, not at 7:00 p.m., as Chun Sou had claimed. At the time, she was carrying a camouflage handbag and a large black bag, and wearing black leather boots. But once she arrived at the seafood restaurant, the CCTV footage now showed her wearing a pair of new orange sneakers. Obviously, she had been elsewhere prior to the restaurant.

So the police retraced their steps and looked for more footage. Sure enough, prior to the restaurant, she and Chun Sou had visited a sports store in Tuen Mun, where they each bought a pair of sneakers. According to the shop assistant, the shoes they purchased were the same style of orange sneakers, seemingly deliberately chosen as “couple shoes." something that didn't make much sense if they were supposed to be on their way to a farewell dinner and an odd detail for Chun Sou to withhold from the police.

Some of Chun Sou's favourite hobbies since returning to Hong Kong have been diving and fishing, and he occasionally visits fish farms in Lau Fau Shan. Chun Sou was familiar with Pak Nai Village and had even purchased a house near the village once. Suffice to say, he was once again a suspect.

Still without any hard evidence against Chun Sou, the police decided they'd go get some themselves and went to Pak Nai Village. The telecom company was only able to give a location since her phone pinged based on the strongest signal rather than her exact location, so the police didn't know exactly where she was when that ping came in, which meant they didn't exactly know where to look either; even searching Chun Sou's home in Pak Nai turned up nothing.

On February 24, the police finally secured a warrant to search Fung-han's home, and what they found was quite illuminating indeed. found 24 love letters written by Chun Sou from January 24 to February 3, where he addressed Fung-han by the nickname "Piggy" and signed the letters as "the one who loves you"

The contents of the letters included promises that he would "never again buy anything or maintain contact with his ex-wife and daughter, and could sever the father-daughter relationship" that he would "never have relations with other women"; and also threatened to disown his father if he opposed their relationship and in another letter declared that "after death, I wanted to be buried together with you"

But by far the most valuable thing the police found was in Fung-han's drawer. They found a set of photographs of several nude men and personal photos of her and Chun Sou together. One of them was taken while fishing at a fish pond, with trees in the background.

A digital recreation of the photo in question

That last photo piqued their interest more than any of the others, as the scenery looked familiar, as if they had been there before. And sure enough, they did; the police managed to match the location in the photograph to the Bak Diao Fishing Ground in Pak Nai Village.

Immediately, the police went to the Bak Diao Fishing Ground and decided to speak with some nearby residents. There, they confirmed that they had seen a woman matching Fung-han's description at the fishing ground on the night of February 7. The owner of the fishing grounds also stated that Chun Sou was a regular customer of his and that at 11:00 p.m. on February 7, he had seen him bring a tall woman with shoulder-length hair and wearing brand-new orange sneakers to the fishing ground. After the police showed him a photo of Fung-han, he confirmed that she was Chun Sou's acquaintance.

The police now believed the fishing grounds to be the crime scene, and since there seemed to be no signs of conflict prior to their arrival in Pak Nai, perhaps the motive was jealousy from Chun Sou stemming from the phone call she had with her ex-boyfriend, which the police now believed had likely taken place in his presence.

The police's working theory now went as follows: After dinner, Chun Sou took Fung-han to the fishing grounds for a leisurely round of night fishing. However, as soon as she got out of the car, Fung-han remembered that it was her first boyfriend's birthday, and since Chun Sou wasn't paying attention, she decided to give him a call and even arranged a meeting with him. Chun Sou likely overheard part of this conversation and flew into a rage and killed her right there at the pond.

Then, after committing the murder, he likely hid the body somewhere in the area. Then, to give himself an alibi, he drove to the noodle stand and then, on February 11, told Fung-han's mother about her disappearance to try and take suspicion off of himself.

On February 26, six members of an elite police diving unit were dispatched to the fishing grounds. They spent the morning sifting through the pond but came back empty-handed. They then called for a helicopter to fly above the area and aid in the search for Fung-han's body. By around 6:00 p.m., they finally identified a possible burial site within a forest 500 meters from the fishing ground.

At 9:00 a.m. on February 27, 60 officers, complete with sniffer dogs, were dispatched to the aforementioned forest to begin the search. At around 10:00 a.m., a police dog picked up the scent of decomposition nearby. After officers used shovels to clear away branches, they discovered a freshly dug pit. Once the debris covering it was removed, the body of a woman lying face down was at last discovered.

Forensic technicans at the scene after recovering Fung-han's body.

The victim was wearing a long-sleeved jacket on the upper body and suit trousers on the lower body, along with a pair of brand-new orange sneakers. There were multiple puncture wounds on the upper body, and valuables such as a bracelet and ring worth several thousand dollars, as well as cash in her trouser pockets, were still intact. However, aside from her belongings, the police were empty-handed in terms of a murder weapon or any evidence pointing to the killer.

On February 28, the autopsy revealed that the victim was 171 cm tall and weighed 57 kg. Her entire body had undergone severe decomposition, rendering her unrecognizable, and there were cut marks on her clothing, but no evidence of sexual assault. The police identified her as Fung-han based on her dental records, and the estimated time of death was indeed around February 7.

Fung-han's body being rremoved from the scene and taken to the morgue

When it came to the cause of death, the medical examiner noted 10 stab-like injuries on her ribs, shoulder blades, and throat, one of which had even pierced her throat and penetrated into the spine and based on the wounds, the likely implement was a ballpoint pen.

At around 4:00 p.m., that same day, the police heard that Chun Sou was shopping in Western District. The police lay in wait, and as they saw him walking down the sidewalk carrying a shopping bag with a blank expression, they rushed to ambush him. Upon seeing the police, Chun Sou grew agitated and even tried to headbutt the officers. It took many of them to subdue him, but eventually Chun Sou was arrested and brought to the police station for formal interrogation.

Chun Sou stood firm and denied any involvement in her murder. He said that after the dinner, she had arranged to meet a friend in Tin Shui Wai, and that the two of them parted ways at the bus stop. However, he now admitted that before the dinner they went to a store to purchase the "couple shoes" since it was almost Valentine's Day.

While being questioned, Chun Sou complained to the police that Fung-han was supposedly engaged to a man named Song from Guangdong and accused Fung-han of "playing with his emotions", that she was involved with multiple men at the same time, possessed as many as nine SIM cards, and had several other "ambiguous relationships" with men.

Chun Sou also insinuated that one of Fung-han's many alleged boyfriends killed her, then hired a lawyer to assist him in dealing with police questioning, leaving them to simply go after Chun Sou just to blame anyone.

The police were quite disgusted and angry at Chun Sou for making such an insinuation, especially the fact that he was now so quick to try and smear her reputation once he became a suspect despite claiming to love her dearly, so on March 1, the police charged him with murder out of pure disgust despite still lacking a confession or physical evidence.

Fortunately, a few days later the police discovered that when Chun Sou went to the noodle stall, he had changed both his jacket and shoes, so why would he have been in such a hurry to change his clothes before arriving home?

They also found that at around 7:45 a.m. on February 8, Chun Sou went to Sha Tin to wash his car. The car wash had not yet opened, so he waited outside for nearly 50 minutes. Once again, why would he be in such a hurry to wash his car the morning after Fung-han's disappearance? Based on these facts, the police searched his car and apartment. The clothing he was wearing that night was missing. Although, in this case, the absence of evidence only strengthened their suspicions.

On the other hand, some evidence remained intact, such as in Chun Sou's car, where forensic technicians discovered a red stain on the right side of the passenger seat that looked to be blood. Immideately the sample was sent for forensic testing. The results came back on March 29, confirming that the stain was not human blood, meaning the police still had nothing and they would never uncover anything more.

Regardless, they felt their circumstantial case would be enough; Chun Sou was the last person to see her; he went to change and get rid of the clothes he was wearing that night before arriving home; he only slept for five hours before rushing to a car wash first thing next morning, and abandoned his apartment and security deposit only 6 days later.

With that, Chun Sou's trial began before the Hong Kong High Court on June 27, 2008. The prosecution played a recorded statement to the court that he made prior to Fung-han's body being discovered, which proved he was lying, but Chun Sou pleaded not guilty and insisted he was innocent, instead saying that Fung-han was an independent woman that he didn't fully understand and that one of her many other male friends had to be the killer instead.

Chun Sou being brought to court

The trial had 19 hearings before the jury was sent to deliberate on July 22. The jury of 6 men and 1 woman spent 7 hours deliberating before returning with their verdict. They unanimously found Soo Chun Sou guilty of the murder of Chan Fung-han; in response, the judge sentenced him to life imprisonment. Fung-han's mother was seen in tears, embracing the detectives and thanking them for their tireless work on the case. Fung-han's brother also said he was satisfied with the sentence.

That satisfaction was not shared by Chun Sou, who immideately appealed the sentence. When explaining the grounds for his appeal, he argued that the judge prohibited the defence from providing character witnesses or any other evidence attesting to his good character, which prejudiced the jury; that he improperly directed the jury; and that the evidence against him did not prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Court of Appeal heard these arguments on December 4, 2009, and on January 20, 2010, it dismissed Chun Sou's appeal, holding that the circumstantial evidence against him was sufficient to warrant his conviction.

The Murder of Chan Fung-han was Hong Kong's first homicide of 2007.

Sources

https://pastebin.com/FwRYLsRQ

(Thanks to LoydoRedi2910 for suggesting this case. If you'd like to suggest any yourself, please head over to this post, which asks for case suggestions from my international readers, as I focus on international cases.)

The FV Tiro II was a 70-ton Chinese-owned fishing vessel operating out of Suva, Fiji. Many boats that fished in the waters of the South Pacific were typically crowded and had a wide array of nationalities aboard, usually including locals from the nations whose flags the vessel flew, as well as Chinese and Indonesian nationals.

The boats typically spent weeks out at sea, and unfortunately, when it came to the foreign workers, they typically suffered from human rights violations such as abuse, withheld wages, debt bondage, long working hours, physical violence, and unexplained deaths at sea. While there was no documented history of such abuse occurring aboard the FV Tiro II, its sister ships were a different story.

On May 8, 2021, the FV Tiro II departed from Millers Wharf in Suva, Fiji, for a 14-day fishing expedition, hoping to catch some albacore tuna and shark bait in the waters of Lomaiviti and Kadavu. However, stronger winds and rougher seas than had been expected caused the vessel to go off course. Instead, it made its way into the Yasawa waters off Fiji's western coast.

Aboard the vessel for this trip were three Indonesian men by the names of Benjamin Semuel Mattaputty, the vessel's 40-year-old captain; their chief engineer, Eme Warma, also in his 40s;

And finally, the vessel's chief officer and cook, Alfat Kodri. Benjamin, in particular, had spent the last 15 years working in Fiji, with 8 of those years spent as a chief engineer before his promotion to captain and chief officer.

Alfat Kodri

The 5 remaining crew members were all local Fijians: a deckhand named Samuela Sukera, who had an 11-month-old son waiting for him at home.

Samuela Sukera

Qiritavabea Cagilabakomeli, another deckhand.

Qiritavabea Cagilabakomeli

The 49-year-old boatswain Mitieli Cama.

Mitieli Cama

Another deckhand, 47-year-old Kaminieli Tucama, who had been working aboard fishing vessels in Fiji and the Solomon Islands since he was 16;

Kaminieli Tucama

And finally, the youngest member aboard, 26-year-old deckhand Tevita Qaqa Kapawale.

For Tevita in particular, it was his first time working aboard a ship, a job he only got because his cousin, who also worked in the industry, offered it to him. Prior to netting the job, he had sat for 6 exams after school, then worked as a farmer and had several brief stints at other jobs to support his wife and three children. However, he also had two prior assault convictions from 2020 and 2021.

Tevita Qaqa Kapawale

On May 17, after about 9 days at sea, the men were working the longlines at the back of the vessel after hauling in a bigeye tuna. Kaminieli was approched by Tevita, who offered him some tobacco. Kaminieli accepted and directed him toward where the tobacco was kept. Shortly after, Kaminieli heard his fellow deckhand Qiritavabea shouting out, "What is wrong with you?" Kaminieli turned around and saw Qiritavabea on his knees with blood coming from his nose, and Tevita standing over him armed with a half-metre wooden axe.

Kaminieli ran to the front of the vessel in terror, climbing the railing to reach the top of the boat. With all three floodlights turned on and from his vantage point, he could see Tevita attacking the rest of the crew, striking Samuela with the axe before forcing him to jump overboard even though he wasn't wearing a life vest. Then he saw Tevita dragging Qiritavabea by the T-shirt and throwing him overboard.

The chief engineer, Eme, had become tangled in the large fishing lines in his attempt to flee, hanging from the vessel and was stuck at the back by the axe. Tevita threatened Eme with the axe, demanding he jump overboard. When he either refused or was unable to do so, Tevita cut the lines with the axe, sending him plummeting to a watery grave.

As for the captain, Benjamin Mattaputty, he came late to the stern, and Kaminieli could only hear them briefly speaking to one another but never saw Benjamin's final fate.

When all was said and done, 5 men had gone overboard in the dark, open and choppy waters 143 kilometres west of Nadi without any life jackets.

The only surviving victim left aboard appeared to be Kaminieli, and Tevita was well aware and began approaching the only survivor, holding two 30-centimetre knives. Kaminieli ran to a room to hide, and as Tevita attempted to force entry, he said to him, "Wait there, I'm coming." He heard Tevita walking away and seized the chance to run toward the engine room and lock himself in. Once there, he hid under the captain's bed.

Tevita said he was coming, but he never did; not knowing that, Kaminieli stayed in the engine room for two days, surviving on only one bottle of water and having to urinate in the same confined space. Heat stroke was also something he had to fend off, as the only small AC unit in the room was far from sufficient.

Kamineli didn't know it, but there was also another survivor, Mitieli. Mitieli never witnessed any of the murders directly but did see Tevita standing over his bloodied crewmates holding an axe. Tevita actually showed Mitieli some degree of mercy by putting him in the fish hold and telling him, "If you want to live, you stay there; if you want to die, you come up." Mitieli spent the next 30 hours in the fish hold. Once again, Tevita never came for him.

What Tevita had done was deploy the vessel's one lifeboat and make his escape. On May 19, Kamineli and Mitieli finally emerged from their hiding spots, found each other, and saw that the lifeboat was gone. Realizing what Kamineli had likely done and that the two were stranded, they searched the boat for anything to aid them.

The two survivors found a satellite phone in the captain's quarters and received a call from a man at Green Tuna Fisheries, the company whose fleet the vessel belonged to. He was inquiring about their status since the vessel had gone dark on all tracking systems. After hearing their explanation, he contacted the Fijian navy. Meanwhile, Kamineli also used the FV Tiro II's radio to contact an aircraft from New Zealand and another fishing vessel, the FV Samyeung, where he told them both what had happened and their current situation.

The search began immideately with the Fijian Navy dispatching the RFNS Kikau from Suva, and as they sailed toward their reported position, a Lockheed P-3 Orion from the Royal New Zealand Air Force was also dispatched to the area to aid in the search.

Since the location of the FV Tiro II was known and the survivors seemingly in an okay condition and the vessel not at any immediate risk of sinking as far as they knew, the search and rescue team decided to leave them to their own devices for the time being as they searched for the victims and Tevita, who was now believed to be a murderer on the loose. Especially because the weather, while finally calm now, was due to become rough again soon.

On May 20, the New Zealand aircraft located the overturned life raft with Tevita still aboard. They dropped a survival kit containing a beacon, radio, and food to Tevita, relayed his position to the Fijian navy, and hovered and flew above him for as long as its fuel supply allowed before returning to New Zealand.

Because of this, Tevita was unable to escape or hide, and once the Fijian navy arrived, he was taken aboard. The RFNS Kikau returned to port in Nadi at 9:00 a.m. on May 21, where the police placed Tevita under arrest.

Tevita's rescue.

Meanwhile, Kamineli and Mitieli made a second call, a much more distressing one. The FV Tiro II was sinking and had begun taking on water on the night of May 20.

That same day, the crew of a fishing vessel flying under the Fijian flag, the Sam Weon 11, noticed a flare from a flare gun being shot into the air. The crew sailed to the location where they discovered Kamineli and Mitieli on a makeshift raft fashioned from the fish cage at the stern of the boat, which they filled with buoyant material. The Sam Weon 11 then transferred the two survivors to the RFNS Kikau, which also dropped them off at Nadi, where the police were waiting to question them.

https://preview.redd.it/sjzlrmcne7bh1.png?width=800&format=png&auto=webp&s=a2915a2d53ca13b22c1360691c2dd5574adeefde

Kamineli and Mitieli's rescue

As for the bodies of the victims, the RFNS Kikau conducted a brief search of the area before being recalled back to Suva. The search operation was then taken over by the RFNS Savenaca on May 22. The RFNS Savenaca searched a wide area 143 kilometres west of Nadi and roughly 90 nautical miles west of Fiji's Navula Passage outside Momi Bay.

The search was not easy; the weather had deteriorated considerably, and the crew aboard the RFNS Savenaca knew they were simply looking for bodies. If they had been thrown overboard on May 17, even if they had survived the initial plunge, with these conditions they were almost certainly dead by now.

Part of the search effort

On May 28, after one week of searching with two aircraft, two Fijian Navy vessels, and one other vessel that joined in, the Fijian Navy announced that the search was over due to the lack of any results and an almost 0% likelihood that any bodies would be recovered. Regardless, they issued a notice to other vessels sailing through the area to be on the lookout for bodies and to report any they saw floating on the surface. Unfortnuately, no such report ever came their way.

One might expect things to move quickly, but that wasn't quite the case. Although Tevita was arrested immideately, he hadn't been charged. When the vessel sank, that meant the police lost the crime scene and all evidence, such as the murder weapon and no bodies to confirm the survivors' account. Even if they were to find the wreck and dive to the bottom, any evidence, such as DNA or fingerprints, would likely be destroyed by the conditions on the seafloor.

All they had was the eyewitness testimony of Kamineli and Mitieli, and, ignoring the fact that Mitieli openly admitted to seeing none of the murders himself, there were some other issues with their story.

First was Mitieli's tale of survival, and the main problem was the fact that he survived at all. With the limited air supply and the very cold environment, Mitieli should've survived down there for at most 2 hours. Mitieli didn't have an explanation for how he hung on as long as he did, other than that the section of the hold he was kept in contained no ice, making the temperature warm enough for him to survive.

Tevita's getaway was also a little bit questionable. The life raft, a heavy piece of equipment, would normally require four men to unload and then launch, but somehow Tevita did it all by himself, and surely exhausted after chasing five men across the FV Tiro II and killing them all.

Some were also skeptical of the FV Tiro II's foundering, openly saying it was impossible for the vessel to have sunk on its own without any sabotage, while most believed that someone had opened the vessel's seacock.

But what did Tevita have to say? He said that Qiritivabea and Mitieli had an argument over the latest catch of fish to be shared with the rest of the crew, with extra for them to sell back on land as a bonus. He said that Mitieli started throwing the fish overboard, which angered Qiritivabea.

Holding the knife that he was using to gut the fish, Qiritivabea confronted Mitieli, who in response, kicked him in the chest, causing Qiritivabea to fall onto his own knife. Mitieli then approched Samuela and forced him to throw Qiritivabea's still-breathing body overboard. Mitieli was then joined by Kaminieli, who threatened the rest of the crew at knife point to jump overboard so they could cover up Qiritivabea's death.

Tevita said he went to hide, and Kaminieli and Mitieli never saw him at the time. While hiding, Mitieli took a shower, and Kaminieli had a smoke. When the two finally went to operate the vessel again, they steered it away, then came to another stop. Kaminieli went to unload the life raft and, seizing his oppertunity, Tevita rushed toward it, boarding the raft for himself and rowing away before Kaminieli and Mitieli could use it. As he did so, he heard the two men shout at him from the ship that they would blame him for the murders.

Much like how Kaminieli and Mitieli's story didn't have much evidence to support that Tevita was the killer, the same could be said for Tevita; nothing directly indicated that those two were responsible for the massacre either.

With nothing actually linking either of the three to the murder aside from their testimonies from all of them who had just been through a traumatic ordeal at sea by the time they were finally questioned, the police had no choice but to release Tevita, even though they were still all but certain that foul play was likely involved in the deaths of the missing fishermen and for nearly a year, that was how the case remained, unsolved.

But then came Ivamere Nataro-Tunidau, an investigative reporter for the Fiji Sun who ran a series in the newspaper about various crimes, including government corruption in Fiji, that he helped investigate, and she had been actively following the FV Tiro II case.

On March 8, 2022, Ivamere invited Tevita to an interview, which was conducted in the company's 15-seater van parked outside his home in Suva, with the driver present as a witness.

Tevita told the reporter that his cousin had offered him the deckhand job and that it was his first time on a fishing vessel. Because he was young and it was his first job, he said the voyage was fraught with tension, mostly stemming from the insulting remarks everyone else aboard made about his "Manhood" and insinuated that he had marbles or ball bearings implanted in his genitals. He then said that the rest of the crew tried to spy on him whenever he went to relieve himself, that he spent the entire expedition being mocked and surveilled, and that he believed they were plotting against him.

Having agreed to the interview, Tevita didn't have any way to avoid talking about what happened aboard, so when Invamere eventually asked about the deaths of everyone aboard, he finally told his side of the story.

On May 17, 2021, he was smoking a cigarette on the FV Tiro II's deck when Qiritavabea came and struck him from behind with a knife. Tevita instinctively grabbed the axe and struck both Qiritavabea and one of the Indonesian workers on the hand with the axe. According to him, his actions were purely self-defence. He stated that he had decapitated Qiritavabea with a single blow, but as none of the witnesses saw a headless body, it was believed he simply struck him on the head instead.

What wasn't self-defence was when he ordered the rest of the crew at axe point to jump overboard knowing full well they wouldn't survive. Tevita also stated that he was aware Kamineli and Mitieli were hiding and knew where they had been but had decided to spare them and then make his escape. When the interview was over, Tevita warned her not to publish anything he "disliked" and threatened to call and swear at her if she did.

Ivamere was not deterred, and eventually the audio recordings of their interview were published for the public. Now with a flat-out confession to go along with Kamineli and Mitieli's testimony, the police arrested Tevita on April 5, 2022, for five counts of murder, one count of attempted murder relating to Kamineli and one count of criminal intimidation relating to Mitieli.

When Tevita reappeared in court in June to be formally charged, he pleaded not guilty. During the hearing, Tevita's father testified that his son had no history of mental illness and was of sound mind. Meanwhile, outside the court, the police had to detain and escort Tevita's sister away from the building after she initiated a verbal altercation with one of the victim's mothers.

In July 2022, Tevita abruptly dismissed his attorney, and it took until February 2023 for a new one to be assigned. Once that happened, his new lawyer attacked the reliability of his confession and the limited evidence they had on hand.

The most controversial pieces of evidence were the satellite beacons and the black box from the wreckage of the FV Tiro II. Rather than provide that evidence to the defence for them to review, the state instead applied to have it returned to Green Tuna Fisheries for erasure and then placed onto a new vessel. The court understandably sided with the defence on this issue and rejected the prosecution's petition to return the evidence to the company.

The trial began on January 14, 2025, before the Suva High Court.

Tevita being brought to the court room

The first witnesses were Kaminieli and Mitieli, who told the same story they told the police, to which the defence countered by pointing out the few oddities from earlier, the fact that Mitieli should've died being in the fish hold and the fact that Tevita should not have been able to launch the life raft on his own.

The prosecution's main job was to prove that the missing victims were in fact dead and hadn't just been picked up by another vessel and started their lives anew. Aside from Tevita's confession, the first piece of evidence they presented to support their deaths was the fact that without life jackets, it would be impossible for them to survive the conditions of the sea that night long term.

The general manager of Green Tuna Fisheries also said that he kept sending the money from their wages to the families of Benjamin, Eme and Alfat as they hadn't returned to Indonesia, which the prosecution used to support their claims that they were dead.

Since Tevita himself exercised his right to remain silent throughout the proceedings, it was up to his lawyer to attack the witnesses' credibility, focusing on the inconsistencies between Kaminieli's and Mitieli's accounts.

The defence also pointed out that $500 dollars had been found on Mitieli's person and $50 dollars on Kaminieli's. He argued that this money may be related to disputes between the two over the profits of the fish they caught and that it might be the true motive for the murders.

They also argued that those two were responsible for scuttling the FV Tiro II so the crime scene would be gone by the time they were rescued, which, if so, would make Kaminieli and Mitieli the killers, something the defence was well aware of since they used the trial to say that the two of them should've been charged for what he described as overwealming evidence that they were the real killers.

The two, of course, denied these accusations, but Kaminieli did admit that Eme once had a drunken argument with Mitieli over sharkbait. As proof of his trauma and therefore used to argue his innocence, Kaminieli stated that the murders had given him a fear of going outside, which caused him to be unemployed since 2021.

When it came to attacking Tevita's confession, the defence claimed that Ivamere had used "improper methods" to obtain it, such as making promises to him she wouldn't keep or seduction, pointing to the part of his confession where he mentioned everyone thinking he had a marble in his genitals, which his attorney said was his attempt at flirting with and trying to impress Ivamere. However, these claims were largely dismissed, in part because he had previously confessed.

In February 2022, Tevita was playing rugby with a friend who eventually asked him about what happened that night. Tevita then reportedly said that he was responsible for the deaths because he felt he should've done something to defend himself before the rest of the crew made their move first. However, at the time, the defence didn't come forward because he believed Tevita was lying.

On July 11, 2025, Tevita Qaqa Kapawale was found guilty for the quintuple homicide of Benjamin Semuel Mattaputty, Eme Warma, Alfat Kodri, Samuela Sukera, and Qiritavabea Cagilabakomeli. Before sentencing, Tevita was asked whether he had anything to say or present as a mitigating factor, and, after already showing no remorse, he admitted he had nothing.

Tevita after the guilty verdict

On August 12, Tevita was sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole after 26 years and 2 months.

Immideately upon this sentence being handed out, officers began escorting Tevita in handcuffs out of the court. Three reporters were outside recording the police leading him away, and when Tevita saw them, he broke free from their grasp and charged toward the journalists ludging at one of the reporters and trying to attack him with the folder he was carrying before the police rushed to pull Tevita away.

Tevita's attempted assault.

With that, the case was formally closed albiet with many questions left unanswered, such as Tevita's true motive and why the FV Tiro II sank, if Kamineli and Mitieli were being entirely truthful, why the FV Tiro II was not broadcasting on AIS at the time and sadly, the five families were all left without bodies to bury.

Regardless of the answers to these questions, what is known for sure is that this case marks only the second bodyless conviction in Fijian history, preceded by the Dip Chand case from 2005.

Sources

https://pastebin.com/HypHPPkp

Even the Temptors, who were just pointed mounds of flesh rooted into the ground, incapable of really moving and used by the Qu as mere decorations, yet the book says they were mere centuries away from building a society and were one of Humanity's greatest hopes.

But the group that retained human intelligence and was used by the Qu as "memory-retainers" to record and preserve all their knowledge, on top of what they had as humans, was never able to figure out how to make anything work after a hundred thousand years?

I mean, they presumably have vestigial thumbs as dewclaws, and if really desperate, could use their mouths to grab hold of items to manipulate their environment.

I know, in part, that a lot of them were miserable, and their entire culture was built on suffering, mourning, and hopelessness with most probably not even upset that their sentience was dying out, but after so long, wouldn't at least one of them have been innovative enough to figure something out and then spread that knowledge to the rest of them and give them hope, hope like even the Colonials started to feel?

If they were able to get something started, who's to say they would've eventually evolved to grow appendages to make the job even easier?