u/moondog151

(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?

(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 6, 2003, wanting to cool off from the summer heat, two men in the town of Cazouls-lès-Béziers, located in the Hérault department of France, made their way to Le Roujas for a swim. Le Roujas wasn't a lake despite its appearance, but rather a deep crater filled with water, the remnant of an abandoned bauxite mine. Technically, swimming there was illegal due to the safety hazards, but many did so anyway.

During their swim, they noticed an object floating on the water's surface in the middle of the reservoir. Curious, the two swam over to it and saw that the object was a metal cabinet, its door half open, and from their spot in the water, they spotted a dark mass inside. Although they couldn't make out the cabinet's contents, they were struck by the foul odour it was giving off.

At first, the two believed it may have belonged to a dead pet or animal, such as a dog that was improperly disposed of. Regardless, the two didn't want to pry any further and swam back to the shore, where they dried off, got dressed and called the police to report the mysterious object.

Divers from the fire brigade were dispatched to Le Roujas, and as soon as they touched the cabinet, even slightly, the door shifted open, its contents sliding out of its prison. In so doing, all present were now able to see that the corpse belonged to a human.

The body being brought to shore

The body had been wrapped and tied in garbage bags, then stuffed into a sleeping bag, wrapped up in a blue tarp and tied down with a cord to keep everything held together.

Murder was already the obvious theory just from how the body was found, but in case the officers on scene had any lingering doubts, they were quickly put to rest once the body was unwrapped from the tarp and bags. Upon freeing the body, they were quick to notice the three gunshot wounds he had sustained, two to the victim's back and one to the left pectoral area. Fortunately, the bullet that struck his pectoral muscle didn't exit the body like the other two and was caught by and lodged within the clothing he was wearing.

Based on the angle of the wounds, it was concluded that the shooter was either standing at an elevated position compared to the victim, such as atop a flight of stairs or on a chair, or that the victim was kneeling when he was shot.

As for when the victim may have died, despite the foul odour, there was zero insect activity on his remains, so the police assumed he had likely been killed recently. According to the medical examiner, his estimation was that the murder took place 6-10 days prior. The fact that the body was found at all lent credibility to this estimate, the weight of the victim's corpse would've been enough for the cabniet to sink to the bottom of the reservoir, but as he decomposed, his body would've released eough putrefactive gases which, when trapped within the cabniet would've been enough for it to gradually start floating up to the surface of the water.

Unfortunately, this was where their luck ended. With the level of decomposition the body had sustained, the victim bore no intact identifying features, and no documents of any kind were found on his person. All that could be determined at the scene was that the victim was a white male and he was heavily tattooed.

On August 7, the police and fire department returned to Le Roujas, this time to retrieve the cabinet itself. Although it was empty, the police noted a shoe print on the cabinet floor and the serial number, which the killers had forgotten to shave off and remove.

The divers having retrieved the cabinet

The cabniet

Next, pictures of the tattoos were shown around in Cazouls-lès-Béziers, where a local tattoo artist recognized him. Unfortunately, he didn't know who the man was, only that he went by the name Pascal, lived in the center of town, and whenever he came to the tattoo parlour, he would brag about all the years he'd spent in prison.

In the meantime, the police continued to search Le Roujas with several divers sent to scour the bottom of the reservoir. On August 11, one of the divers discovered a leather bag containing several papers and documents.

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The bag and it's contents

One such set of papers was that of a heavily torn identification document belonging to 42-year-old Pascal Castillo.

Pascal Castillo

Pascal's mother and brother were called in, where they both identified the bag and tattoos as his, and his brother finally identified the body by a birthmark behind his ear. Pascal's mother said that when his brother saw the pictures, he let out a loud beastial and anguished scream that haunted her just as much as her son's death did already.

Pascal Castillo was born sometime in 1961 and grew up in the Béziers area of southern France. At first, Pascal appeared to be a dedicated student with dreams of studying medicine. When he was 16 and still excelling in high school, he finally told his father about his ambitions. Pascal's father had a plan for his son, and it didn't involve him becoming a doctor, so he put him down for trying to pursue that field of study and told him, "It's either the army or the door".

Pascal made his choice, now living on the streets alone at the age of 16. Homeless after running away from home and with nothing to support himself, Pascal turned to a life of crime. Pascal's first conviction for armed robbery came in 1984, and then another conviction in 1986 for aggravated theft, which got Pascal a sentence of 6 years, with the first-time offender to serve those 6 years in the company of more hardened criminals.

While in prison, Pascal met Alain Raspaut. Alain was born in 1959 in La Roche-sur-Yon in the Vendée department. Alain was the youngest of a large family and typically kept to himself when growing up. His childhood was spent between a mother who was a "chronic alcoholic" and his father, a post worker who often neglected his family.

When he was in the 8th grade, Alain dropped out of school and rented an apartment in Saint-Matthieu, and landed a job as a telegraph operator at the post office. He held his first job for only a few months before he was fired for theft.

Now with no job, Alain decided that more theft was the answer to his money problems. In 1982, Pascal's older brother was convicted of robbing a bank in Aude. When Alain was in prison awaiting trial, he initially professed his innocence, but later he pulled a rather grotesque stunt. Somehow, he managed to cut off his own finger while in his cell and mailed it to the prosecutor handling his case.

In 1986, Pascal was given a sentence of 10 years for aggravated theft to be served in the same penitentiary that had been housing Pascal, the Centre pénitentiaire de Lannemezan. After the two met, Pascal and Alain became good friends and decided to plot their escape.

The two didn't escape from prison in the conventional sense; rather, Inmates in France could apply for temporary leave permits to help reintegrate them into society as part of their rehabilitation and to visit their families. Pascal's permit was approved in March 1988, and so he simply waited for Alain's application to be approved. When Alain's permit was approved that July, the two met up and simply left, going on the run after refusing to report back to the prison.

Now fugitives, the two found themselves in the coastal city of Perpignan, located in the Pyrénées-Orientales Department. The two realized that they'd have to find some way to fund their lives on the run, which is what led them to fall back into what got them in prison in the first place, armed robbery.

On August 10, they robbed the Creuzet-Romeu store and managed to escape with 200,000 francs in jewelry, precious stones and cash, but the two felt they needed an even bigger payday. After some deliberation, they settled on a jewelry store in the center of town called "Bijouterie Paulignan" as their target.

On August 23, 1988, at 9:00 a.m., Pascal and Alain stormed the jewelry store. Pascal was carrying a 9 mm-calibre pistol concealed in his waistband, while Alain was armed with a 7.65 mm-calibre pistol. Additionally, the two had at least one grenade between them. They held the store's owner at gunpoint before tying up his arms and legs, then they threatened an employee and had her help them load the jewelry into the bags they had brought.

This employee made a bunch of subtle hand gestures through the shop window to alert someone, anybody, outside, that something was wrong without giving herself away, as nobody would be able to see the store owner lying on the ground, and the two had stopped aiming their guns at her. A shopkeeper across the street noticed the gestures she was making, recognized what she was implying and went to inform the police.

Of the two officers who were the first to respond, one was a 43-year-old father of two named Claude Marty, who joined the police force in 1969 and was a former member of the GIPN, meaning that shootouts and hostage situations were nothing new to Claude.

Claude Marty

Pascal exited the store almost exactly as the police arrived, with Claude pointing his gun at Pascal and forcing him to raise his hands, which was where he discovered the pistol on his waist. Before Claude could act on this discovery, Alain left the store with his own pistol and opened fire on Claude.

He didn't even have a chance to return fire or even point his weapon in his direction. Claude was struck three times and collapsed against the store's window, dying instantly. He then turned his gun on Claude's partner, who did have time to raise his own weapon, but was slower on the draw, being struck in the abdomen, though he did survive.

The two didn't have any time to make their getaway before reinforcements arrived, two police officers on motorcycles arrived almost as soon as the latest shot was fired, and Alain targeted them immideately although this time they were able to return fire.

The police shot and struck Pascal in the head, bringing him to the ground, although the bullet missed his brain, meaning he survived. One of the officers wasn't as lucky. 36-year-old Marc Pierre, another married father of two, was struck in the carotid artery by one of Alain's bullets, causing him to rapidly start bleeding out.

Marc Pierre

Additionally, a stray bullet fired by Alain also struck and injured a city employee who was unfortunately in the wrong place at the wrong time. Overall, 40 bullets were fired, which non fatally injured two additional police officers.

When Alain ran out of ammo, that should've been the end, but since Claude's dead body was practically next to him and Claude never got a chance to fire a shot, Alain seized his service weapon to use as his own and retreated into the jewelry store. The employee he had previously threatened never had a chance to leave the store before the gunfire started, and the owner was still restrained, meaning Alain now had two hostages.

Rather than staying in the store, he simply dragged the employee through a back entrance to use as a hostage to keep the police at bay until he could find a vehicle to flee, choosing now to brandish the grenade just as a further deterrent against the police. However, the police got a clear angle and managed to fire two bullets that non-fatally struck Alain in the chest. As the police swarmed him and brought him to the ground, he was screaming at the top of his lungs, "You shot me like a rabbit!!!"

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The police in the aftermath

With it now safe to do so, Marc was rushed to the hospital by his colleagues, but prospects were looking grim. On August 25, Marc fell into a coma, and his condition only deteriorated from there until he finally passed away on September 2.

The two officers who were non-fatally wounded were discharged from the hospital a few days later, although with injuries that the attending physicians warned would likely be permanent.

On August 25, the same day Marc fell into his coma, Alain was charged from his hospital bed with escaping prison, two counts of homicide, attempted homicide, attempted armed robbery, hostage-taking, and possession and carrying of a Category 1 firearm.

Meanwhile, Pascal not only never fired a single shot, but when his weapon was examined, the police discovered that it had never even been loaded. Based on this fact, Pascal was only charged with attempted armed robbery and possessing the weapon in the first place.

Additionally, according to some witnesses, a third man had fled the scene in a car after the robbery started going south. The police arrested Alain's brother and a friend of his on suspicion of being the possible getaway driver, but they were later released when no evidence implicating them was found.

At the time, this case was massive. Shops, schools, businesses, and government offices in Perpignan closed their doors for Claude's funeral on August 26, again for Marc's funeral when he succumbed to his wounds.

The French President sent his condolences to Claude's widow, and Lionel Jospin, then Minister of State and Minister of National Education, personally travelled to Perpignan to attend the funeral, where he was joined by other government officials and the director of the French National Police.

The funeral service

And with such a massive outpouring of grief, outrage was soon to follow. Olivier Stirn, the delegate minister in charge of tourism, was giving a speech at the funeral, but he struggled to finish it, being drowned out by the cries and heckling of the crowd demanding the restoration of the death penalty, which France had abolished in 1981.

The senator for the Pyrénées-Orientales department and the mayor of Perpignan also petitioned the French government to conduct an inquiry into the temporary leave program and possibly abolish it entirely. The government's response was delivered on March 16, 1989, and it stated that of the 25,130 inmates who had been given temporary leave, only 268 went on the run, only 65 offences were documented from those who were granted the leave, and only 7 of them were criminal offences rather than violations of the terms of their release. With numbers like these, the government argued that, despite the tragedy of the events in Perpignan, they did not warrant abolishing the temporary release program.

Meanwhile, Alain and Pascal's trial began on February 7, 1992, at the Cour d'Assises des Pyrénées-Orientales, and the verdicts were a foregone conclusion. On February 14, for the murders of Claude Marty and Marc Pierre, Alain Raspaut was handed a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 22 years.

Marc and Pascal during their trial.

As for Pascal, the court took into account the fact that he hadn't fired his weapon and, in fact, brought an unloaded weapon, which was taken to mean he never wanted to kill anyone and that only Alain had such an aptitude for violence. Therefore, Pascal was given a far more lenient sentence of just 20 years.

While in prison, Pascal was described as "Somebody remarkably intelligent, with an insatiable intellectual curiosity," and he proved himself by teaching himself four languages: Russian, English, Spanish, and Italian. He enrolled in an academic course, trained as a stone mason, got a diploma while behind bars and took up painting. His fellow inmates, those serious about rehabilitation, viewed him as a role model whose example they should follow, and even some of the guards respected him.

In 2001, after serving 13 years of his sentence, Pascal had genuinely seemed to be a changed man; he had learned real skills, was liked and respected and actually had a desire to improve. Believing he'd learned his lesson and had been successfully rehabilitated, he was granted an early release. After his release, he moved back to his home in Cazouls-lès-Béziers.

At first, Pascal was serious about his attempts to lead a normal, law-abiding life, but even when he stuck to it, he still found infamy to be quite thrilling to be the subject of. Whenever he frequented bars or nightclubs where small-time criminals could be found, they were fascinated by Pascal and often approched him to hear what he'd have to say, and he just couldn't resist telling them about his armed robberies, other noteworthy criminals he'd cross paths with and stories about trying to escape prison via the use of a helicopter (something he made up for attention)

In 2002, Pascal decided to leave the country and moved to the Dominican Republic. He went to the country to purchase a farm to run, grow fruit, and manage legitimately, and he would live on that farm, as well as paint and pursue his new passion for art even further.

Since the Dominican Republic was his new home, he had visited France only twice after the move; hence, his disappearance went largely unnoticed. As far as most were concerned, he lived across the Atlantic. According to immigration records, Pascal returned to France on July 12, 2003.

The first suspects the police considered, naturally, involved Pascal's acquaintances from his criminal past, whether accomplice or former victim seeking revenge. Since Pascal was also known to have been a womanizer, that opened up another rabbit hole of potential suspects for the police to look into.

They also questioned Claude and Marty's families and even the officers in Perpignan, entertaining the possibility that they may have carried out an extrajudicial killing 15 years later to avenge their fallen colleagues. However, every person the police questioned had an alibi and was slowly ruled out; in fact, none of them even knew Pascal had returned to France.

Pascal was known to be seeing a woman who lived in town. She went to the police station on July 29 to report Pascal missing after he didn't answer her phone call. However, before she filed the report, her phone received a text from Pascal saying he had left the car at a train station, was on his way to Paris, and had left the keys in the parking lot.

She went to the station and discovered the car abandoned. The main reason she went to the police was the absence of "Kisses" at the end of the message, something strange, as ever since landing in France, Pascal had closed his messages to her with "Besidos".

However, at the time, the case was deemed a low priority, and there was no evidence indicating Pascal didn't leave town, hence why the body had to be actively worked to identify his body rather than simply finding his name when cross-referencing with recent missing person reports.

The police went back to question her now that they found Pascal's body. The fact that she reported him missing even though at the time he hadn't been missing for too long at all seemed suspicious, as if trying to preemptively take suspicion off of herself. However, the police were able to rule out her committing a crime of passion as well, after all, it wasn't her who first shared the story of Pascal journeying to the French capital

Pascal's mother said that she had a phone call with one of Pascal's childhood friends, Jérôme Salvado.

Jérôme Salvado

The phone call consisted of Jérôme telling her that her son had gone to Paris and wouldn't be coming back. Whenever she asked Jérôme even a single clarifying question, he would say something like "I don't know" or "I wasn't there, I didn't see it". This went on for only a brief moment before Jérôme hung up. Pascal's mother actually fell down from shock during this phone call, bad enough to summon a doctor.

Jérôme appeared to be the last person to see him alive when they spent the morning together, and Pascal also trusted Jérôme with his life, even giving him the keys to his apartment to help take care of it and collect his mail while he was away in the Dominican Republic.

Unlike Pascal, Jérôme's life appeared mostly crime-free. In fact, at the time of the murder, he was most well-known for being a volunteer firefighter at the same department that recovered Pascal's body. Additionally, he spent several days out of each week on duty at the local emergency center.

When the police brought Jérôme in for questioning, he told them that on July 29, at around 10:00 a.m. Pascal had gone to his home to return a tent that he had borrowed. He said that, rather than deliver it, he called him to say he had dropped it off. Since he told Jérôme he was going to Paris soon, he invited him to join him for coffee, and the two did so, then Pascal departed after half an hour.

He mentioned that Pascal received a phone call during their time at the cafe that he chose not to answer; the call was from his girlfriend, who reported him missing after it went unanswered.

A story that didn't make too much sense because, according to Pascal's girlfriend, she only called him then because he had explicitly told her to call him later during the day at that time. It also wasn't just her; Pascal was supposed to join another friend for dinner, but he never showed up to that appointment either and when that friend tried to call him, Pascal's phone was turned off.

Now convinced that Pascal's departure was almost certainly staged, the police checked the phone records of both Pascal and their main suspect, Jérôme, and strangely, at 2:00 p.m. on July 29, both phones were turned off. Then, 5 minutes later, both phones turned back on at the same location in Cazouls-lès-Béziers, near the train station.

While all this was going on, divers were still scouring Le Roujas. On the opposite side of the reservoir from where the body and leather bag were discovered, the divers retrieved a plastic bag containing clothing, a towel and small pieces of paper. The papers came from the same torn documents found in the backpack from earlier.

https://preview.redd.it/9uq8rk65vx8h1.png?width=1241&format=png&auto=webp&s=7d2724ee0550b8795d91c2f0a6320a58c4dbcc7f

The second bag and the distinctive green towel

They also continued their investigation into the cabinet; during 2002 and 2003, only two companies in the region sold that brand of cabinet. While reviewing the company's invoices, the police saw that the local business that purchased the cabinet in question was Jérôme's workplace.

The only reason the police weren't already arresting Jérôme was to build the strongest possible case, which meant obtaining even more evidence. They reviewed Jérôme's phone records and found he had been in regular contact with a man named Jean-Paul Carbo.

Jean-Paul Carbo

The two men had known each other for years and were both high-level rugby players on the same team.

Despite the two being friends talking to each other regularly, once Pascal's body was found, all contact between the two came to an abrupt end.

On September 22, Carbo was summoned for questioning, where he denied any involvement in the murder. While Pascal and Jérôme had been friends since childhood, Pascal did not like Carbo and became very angry when he heard from Jérôme that he had once let him watch over the keys to his apartment.

The police began monitoring and listening in on Jérôme and Carbo's phone calls and overheard Carbo looking for a weapon. He made similar calls before Pascal's murder as well, which was the final straw for the police. On February 3, 2004, they moved in and placed both Jérôme and Carbo under arrest.

Jérôme denied everything, even when presented with the invoice showing the cabinet came from his workplace; he simply denied that the invoice was accurate. Jérôme stuck to his initial story that Pascal had gone to Paris, with the only deviation being that he was now unsure whether he had actually gone or if he had just told him he was going.

When he was asked to explain why he suddenly stopped talking to Carbo right after Pascal's death, he made the bizarre claim that he only talked to him every once in a while, or "by period," despite being a close childhood friend who lived in the same small town/city as him.

While Jérôme was being interrogated, Carbo had been arrested at his home, and as the police searched it, they discovered a green towel that matched the one found in the plastic bag they had recovered.

When Carbo was brought down to the police station and asked to explain why he and Jérôme had stopped talking, he told the police that his wife couldn't stand Jérôme, hated Carbo's friendship with him, and pressured him to cease all communication with his friend. As for his statements about wanting a gun, Carbo admitted that he had a drug addiction and wanted the gun to protect himself from his dealers. And finally, the matching green towel he dismissed as a coincidence.

Soon, the police would have no choice but to release the two, seeing as they still didn't have enough to actually charge them with murder. Hoping to avoid releasing them and risking the two fleeing, the police returned to both of their residences to see if they had missed anything.

In Carbo's home and his mother's, the police found even more of that brand of green towel, though, as Carbo pointed out, that didn't actually prove anything, even after forensic testing determined the towels were virtually identical. But looking into their manufacturing, the police learned they were old and had been discontinued in the 1970s, making it a bit more questionable a coincidence for them to have been used for the murder of Carbo's acquaintance, and odd that Carbo even owned them at all. Carbo's mother explained that they belonged to her late husband and that she decided to gift some to her son.

The police also continued to tap their phones and review their prior calls, and finally, a clear picture began to emerge. An oddly high number of drug users were calling Jérôme and Carbo, so the police decided to look into that, which brought them right back to the Dominican Republic. Pascal, in reality, didn't move there to pursue life as a humble farmer; rather, he wanted to get involved in the cocaine trade and assembled a network of small-scale dealers willing to distribute the product in his native Cazouls-lès-Béziers. One of these dealers said, "During the feria, with all the people who come down, it sells like hotcakes."

Among those dealers were Jérôme and Carbo, who made several trips to Paris. Once again, based on their phone records and activity, the police could see that Pascal joined them on these trips to the capital. Based on this, the police assumed that Pascal got the cocaine in Paris, which he then supplied to the other two to distribute.

Surely enough, debts began to accumulate between the two parties as they sold more than they made, consumed some of the product themselves, and, of course, came up short when it was time to pay Pascal, which led him to pressure the two to pay up.

On June 16, 2004, the police arrested Jérôme and Carbo for a second time, and this time, they finally did have enough evidence for the prosecutor to lay charges and bring them to the court to be indicted for Pascal's murder with additional charges of drug trafficking.

On October 26, Carbo said that being in pre-trial detention kept him off the drugs, which allowed him to look at what brought him here with a greater state of clarity and that he was now ready to confess.

Carbo swore that he didn't have any part in killing Pascal and that Jérôme had only called him after the fact, seeking his help in hiding the body. In this phone call, Jérôme told him that members of the mafia had assassinated Pascal while he was in his home and that instead of calling emergency services, he wanted Carbo to help him hide the body to avoid any scrutiny from the police.

Since the ground was too hard at the time to bury him, they decided to sink Pascal's body to the bottom of Le Roujas instead. They began by going to the supermarket to purchase some heavy-duty equipment, an inflatable mattress, chlorine and ropes. They also brought a tarp, a sleeping bag, and garbage bags from home to wrap up Pascal's body, and the green towel from Carbo's home so the two could dry themselves off once they were done, since they'd have to enter the water as part of their plan.

The purpose of the mattress and ropes was to tie the cabinet to the mattress so they could float the cabinet over to the center of Le Roujas, the deepest part of the water and then cut it free from the mattress so it would sink to the very bottom. After Pascal's body sank to the bottom, the two made their way back to Jérôme's home

After Carbo made this statement, Jérôme realized it was his turn to confess, lest he take the fall for everything. He said that Pascal went to confront Carbo for not paying him and consuming the product that he was supplying to him without selling any of it. Jérôme was brought in to act as an intermediary, and he arranged for their meeting at his home on July 29, 2003.

He and Carbo both waited at his home, and with each passing moment before Pascal arrived, Carbo grew increasingly distressed and scared at the thought of meeting him. And then Pascal called Jérôme, telling him he was parked outside. Their conversation grew tense and hostile, and eventually Pascal demanded to be left in.

Carbo was sent to open the door, and as Jérôme went downstairs to follow them, he suddenly heard the sound of three gunshots. He didn't see anything, but once he finally arrived, he found Pascal dead from two gunshots fired at point-blank range and then an extra third shot after the fact, with Carbo standing over him. According to Jérôme, the pistol Carbo used belonged to him, but Carbo knew where he had hidden it as he had invited him to his home on numerous occasions.

Based on the autopsy and trajectory of the wounds, Pascal would've been shot once in the chest as soon as he entered, and after he fell first to the ground, the shooter would've descended down the stairs and shot Pascal and an additional two times in the back, although at the time it still remained unclear which one of the two pulled the trigger.

On October 22, 2007, the two were brought to the Cour d'Assises de l'Hérault to stand trial for murder, and the trial was, all things considered, a fairly short one.

A courtroom sketch of the two during the trial.

When it came to who to believe, the court largely leaned in Carbo's favour. He was calm, collected, and nothing was outwardly wrong with his story.

Meanwhile, Jérôme continued to deny having anything to do with Pascal's death; however, he was much more nervous in his retelling, gave plenty of answers that were inconsistent with one another, and whenever an attorney asked him any questions, he would act aggressively toward them.

But what really sealed his fate was once again the two's telephone records, the one thing that consistently helped the police break this case open. According to their phone records, Jérôme did in fact call Carbo's phone exactly when Carbo said he got the call to help hide Pascal's body and most importantly.

Jérôme still tried in vain to defend himself, claiming that Carbo had spent the night at his house, that he had lent his phone to a friend, and that she was the one who had called Carbo. However, the data from Carbo's phone placed him at his own home at the time, meaning he had an alibi for Pascal's actual murder.

And for all the motive Jérôme kept trying to assign to Carbo, Jérôme was also in debt to Pascal and at the time of the murder owing him a debt of $3,000 USD, which he had no intention of paying.

On October 26, 2007, for the murder of Pascal Castillo, Jérôme Salvado was found guilty and handed a sentence of 18 years. That was not a surprising outcome, but what was shocking was the fact that Jean-Paul Carbo was acquitted, not just of murder but also for his role in disposing of Pascal's body, which he openly admitted to. However, Carbo was still convicted on the drug charges and sentenced to 4 years' imprisonment.

Although he insisted that he was innocent until the very end and proclaimed that he had been wrongfully convicted, Jérôme never appealed his conviction, bringing the case to a close.

While the case of Pascal's murder was now definitively closed, there remains one loose end in this story: what happened to Pascal's old accomplice, the one who killed the two police officers, Claude Marty and Marc Pierre, back in 1988?

On April 3, 2012, after serving 24 years in prison, Alain Raspaut was released on parole. The decision to release Alain was as baffling as it was enraging to Claude and Marc's families. Unlike Pascal, who, however, lacklustre had at least made an initial attempt to live a clean life before falling back into his criminal ways. Alain, meanwhile, never once expressed any remorse for the events in Perpignan and had spent most of his time in prison planning what crime he'd commit next once released. That plan was what he called "Opération Condor", the kidnapping of a wealthy businessman, "Gilles".

On May 22, 2015, Gilles was lured to the town of Drémil-Lafage in the Haute-Garonne Department under the pretext of a real estate deal. Once there, he was surrounded by a group of men impersonating police officers, recruited by Alain. The men stripped Gilles of all his possessions before binding his arms and legs and placing his body in the trunk of his own vehicle.

Gilles was moved from location to location, first to a house in Quint-Fontesgrives, then to his own home in Escalquens, where he was forced to hand over additional valuables and money. Afterward, he was placed back into the truck and transported across the Spanish border to his vacation home in Platja d'Aro in Spain's Catalonia Region.

Afterward, Gilles was placed into the trunk of another vehicle, which transported him to San Pere Pescador, then to Rosas. On June 23, the kidnappers used his money to purchase a camping car, which they placed Gilles into once more and drove along the entirety of the Spanish coast until they arrived in Manilva, Andalusia.

All this time, Gilles had been kept wearing a hood, chained by his feet, and forced to send reassuring text messages to family and friends so they wouldn't suspect he had been kidnapped. Sometimes they did have less cruel moments, for example, while being held prisoner, they would sometimes play chess together, though a weary Gilles always let his opponent win.

Whenever they discussed the taxes Gilles had to pay because of his wealth, his captors expressed sympathy and told him, "Well, they're really taking advantage of you." Something hypocritical considering what they'd go on to do next.

They forced him to open bank accounts in Latvia and Mauritius, make cash withdrawals, and purchase gold that they'd transfer to him. In total, the kidnappers extracted 1,264,640.53 euros from him. Alain was very pleased and boasted that they had "Ate his brain"

On July 12, after 52 days as their hostage, Gilles was finally released in Malaga albiet with a "roadmap" from his captors instructing him on future transfers he'd have to make.

The final map of all the locatoins Gilles was transported too.

When Gilles finally made his way back to France, his wife saw how he had "noticeably changed" and was clearly distraught, so she quickly alerted his bank about the transfers and then the police.

Getting information out of Gilles was difficult at first due to a mixture of genuine fear that they would return and because, according to a psychologist who interviewed him, he had developed some form of Stockholm Syndrome toward them. But eventually, he was able to describe his kidnappers to the police, and they recognized Alain's description immediately.

On September 7, the tactical team from Spain's Guardia Civil conducted several raids across Malaga, where they arrested Alain and several of his accomplices in the small town of San Pedro de Alcántara, who were then extradited back to France.

The large amount of evidence seized by the Spanish police

His main accomplice was François Decline, and he also had an extensive criminal history.

On January 9, 1992, in Alès, he and some accomplices burst into the home of Jean Liandier, a former star football player. After François was unable to find a safe of valuables in Jean's hope, he shot him twice in the back before fleeing. Then, on March 25, he attacked a post office in Saint-Brès where a 58-year-old postal worker named Rose Salmeron was shot dead. François made off with 10,000 francs. He was arrested in April and in July 1994, was handed down a sentence of 20 years imprisonment.

Another accomplice was named André Heitz. André had spent nearly 30 years of his life in prison for theft and bank robberies. All three met in prison, bonded over stories from the abusive or neglectful households they all came from and began plotting the kidnapping before their parole had even been granted.

Alain's trial took place before the Cour d'Assises de la Gironde in Bordeaux in June 2019, where he was predictably found guilty. For this latest crime, he and François were both given a sentence of 30 years' imprisonment.

One accomplice in the kidnapping, a man referred to as "Didier," did not attend the trial. On August 21, 2016, he committed suicide in his cell, leaving behind two notes saying that he couldn't "look at myself in the mirror" and that he wanted to "Regain my honour"

Meanwhile, André Heitz was given 15 years in prison.

Alain appealed this sentence, and on July 3, 2020, the Cour d'Assises de la Charente rejected his appeal. During the appeal trial, Alain defended himself by saying, "Don’t judge me on my past, some parts of which I regret, but on who I am today."

As a matter of fact, his past was exactly the metric the appeals court used to judge him. They ended up increasing his sentence to life imprisonment on the grounds that he had violated his parole and therefore had to serve the entirety of his initial life sentence for Claude and Marc's murder on top of the 30 years for kidnapping Gilles.

Alain during his trial.

Alain Raspaut will now remain behind bars for the rest of his life.

Sources

https://pastebin.com/48aYPFbH

(Haven't posted here in a while

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 August 30, 2008, a young boy was walking down the road in the small city of Aksu in Turkey's Antalya Province. During his walk, he was suddenly struck by a vehicle. That alone would be bad, but then a second vehicle, unable to stop in time, ran over his body, followed by a third. While the other two kept driving, the third vehicle came to a stop and the married couple who were driving loaded the boy into his car and drove him straight to the Akdeniz University Medical Faculty Hospital in Konyaaltı.

When he arrived at the hospital, he was completely unconscious and had nothing on his person that could identify him, such as a card, mobile phone or papers. He was immideately placed on life support, and the doctors were not optimistic about his chances. He had suffered from severe brain injuries and was in a state of full-body paralysis, with no identification or family coming to identify him.

The hospital called him "Umut", the Turkish word for "Hope," because with a survival likelihood of just 1%, hope was all he had. The police were asked to look around and conduct some inquiries, but nobody matching his description was reported missing, a bit odd considering what his description was.

The victim was European, i.e., white/caucasian and specifically appeared to be Slavic in origin, which would make him a foreigner. But what was truly odd was his age, based on his physical appearance and a bone density test, the hospital determined that he was about 16-17 years old. As for his height, he stood 175 centimetres tall. While his weight at the time isn't mentioned, it dropped to 35 kg during his initial hospital stay.

Also in the hospital when Umut arrived was a woman named Gülsüm Kabadayı. Gülsüm, a mother of three in her thirties, had been in the hospital since July 25 to accompany her sister-in-law for a surgery. When she first saw Umut being admitted, it was her idea to name him Umut, and when she was told that he had nobody looking for him and would almost certainly die, Gülsüm decided she would devote her time to caring for him, spending hours by his bedside, occassionaly joined by one of the occupants of the third vehicle that had hit him and brought him to the hospital.

Aside from generally being described as a kind-hearted woman who often helped others, Gülsüm said that she related to Umut on a personal level, her father died when she was young and her mother wouldn't take care of her so she knew what it was like to be a child-teenager and have seemingly no parents looking out for them, so if Umut's death was certain, she didn't want him to die alone.

Tragically, the aforementioned surgery Gülsüm's sister-in-law had gone to the hospital for was a failure, and she passed away on November 1. However, Gülsüm kept going to the hospital even then, solely to be there for Umut, and, in so doing, bore witness to a miracle. On November 28, Umut opened his eyes after waking up from his coma.

Gülsüm stayed by his side and fed him through a tube with a special formula she made at home. Eventually, Umut, who had grown skeletal, regained weight, reaching 85 kilos. As for Umut's real name, well, even after all these months, nobody had come forward.

Whenever the hospital staff spoke to him in Turkish, he produced no visible reaction, nor did he show any reaction to other Slavic languages such as Bulgarian or Serbian. But whenever he heard Russian from the other rooms or halls, he did show a faint reaction; sometimes he'd even shed some tears if somebody spoke Russian near him.

Umut would go on to defy the doctor's expectations completely, and on July 8, 2009, 312 days after arriving at the hospital, Umut had stabilized enough that, despite his permanent state of paralysis, he was able to be safely discharged from the hospital. But after nearly a year with still no family or identification, where would he go, and what would his legal status even be?

Gülsüm, for all the selfless care she had given to Umut, ran into many obstacles whenever she tried to do more for him because, legally, he didn't exist and was in a state of limbo. Eventually, Gülsüm went on television to beg the government to issue Umut some government and identification documents.

Eventually, Umut was issued an identification document in the name of "Mustafa Öz" with the date of birth listed as January 1, 1992, based on his likely age at the time of the accident. As for where Umut would go, for all the work she had done caring for him, Gülsüm became Umut's legal guardian; he was moved into her home, and Gülsüm was given a modest stipend of 830 Turkish Lira a month to care for him.

https://preview.redd.it/idrwh0modu8h1.png?width=642&format=png&auto=webp&s=63826ca091f7c2762b71a0169090e7e32086d93f

Undated pictures of Umut with Gülsüm

While he was legally a person now, this did go on to embarrass the Turkish government because with a date of birth and now Turkish citizenship, when he naturally didn't show up for the mandatory military service all Turkish citizens have to go through, he was declared a draft dodger.

This error occurred because their official registry listed his name as "Mustafa Öz" rather than what everyone actually knew him as, "Umut". Once military physicians examined Umut, the now very embarrassed Turkish military hastily declared him "Unfit for service" and granted him an exemption.

As his now-legal guardian, Gülsüm was just as diligent in caring for Umut, feeding and bathing him. repositioning in bed, administering his medication, and helping with any rehabilitation exercises that could be done. Her care was so meticulous that Umut never developed a single ulcer or bedsore.

The care also extended far beyond his physical needs; for all intents and purposes, Umut was now Gülsüm's fourth son. Her other sons grew up viewing Umut as their brother, and whenever there was a family outing, she brought Umut with them, and if an event was happening at her home, she made sure Umut was a part of it rather than being sent to his room.

A makeshift birthday being held for Umut.

Gülsüm also tried her hardest to uncover Umut's true name. She regularly contacted Russian tourists, expats, and members of Russo-Turkish friendship organizations about Umut, and Russian speakers were invited to her home to try to speak to Umut. They also seemingly confirmed that he was specifically from Russia, rather than just speaking Russian. One of them asked Umut to stick out his tongue if they understood what they were saying, and he did so. Someone then told him that they'd find his relatives "In Russia," to which he did the same.

The Russian talk show "Let Them Talk", is a show where guests come on to before a studio audience to address personal issues, such as crime, drug abuse, suicide, prostitution, and infidelity, as well as their opinions on social issues overall, such as immigration. And in January 2013, they did an episode on Umut.

There was no guest, and rather the host of that episode, Andrey Malahov, had been emailed by a Russian expat living in Turkey about the situation and after learning of the case, he told to his audience "We see in Gülsüm a love for someone she has never met in her life, the kind of love toward one's fellow human that we have not been accustomed to seeing in recent times. A Turkish woman set an example of Christian brotherhood and love toward a complete stranger. We thought all of Russia needed to see this".

Millions of people saw this broadcast, and now Gülsüm was more famous in Russia than in her native Turkey. Since Umut was certainly Russian, that meant many more people with the potential to identify him now had the chance to come forward.

Almost overnight, several women came forward claiming that Umut might've been their son. By the time "Let Them Talk" revisited the case, they had five women on as guests all at once, each telling the audience they were Umut's mother. All five live on air gave DNA samples, which Andrey told them would be shipped off to Turkey. In April 2013, the Turkish police announced that all five tests came back negative.

Meanwhile, another Russian newspaper reported that Umut's real name was Pavel Kuklin, who had gone missing in 2004 from a village called Kopylovo in the Tomsk Oblast, 3,500 kilometres from Moscow. Pavel would've been 27 years old and already married, with a daughter. Although Pavel's mother was prepared to go to Turkey for a DNA test, Gülsüm was insistent that Pavel looked nothing like Umut and that she would not relinquish custody of him until a definitive DNA test was made. Pavel was ultimately ruled out.

The number of potential candidates rose to 8, and some were starting to trickle in from other countries, with Russian speakers from Moldova and Israel coming forward to say they knew Umut. However, each time someone came forward, DNA testing would always rule them out.

Gülsüm was treated like a hero by the Russian press, and soon a Television Program in Russia invited her to appear as a guest in person, with her ticket to Russia paid for. This was the first time she had ever left Turkey, and among the audience were Russian politicians, including a sitting member of the State Duma. That member of the Duma knelt before Gülsüm and kissed her hand on live television as a show of Russia's thanks for what she had done.

https://preview.redd.it/ayi2mobsfu8h1.png?width=960&format=png&auto=webp&s=e9d9c1f7d2f757ff916f0fd1646bc9d9ff5e4cad

With all this attention, even if Umut's true identity remained unknown, it still came with some new benefits, for example, in November 2013, a Turkish construction and industrial company, which had a lot of operations in Russia, donated a purpose-built apartment in Antalya to Gülsüm for Umut to be moved into. Two more sitting members of the Duma, Dmitriy Savelyev and Olga Kazakova, visited Turkey for the opening ceremony, joined by Gökçen Özdoğan Enç, a member of the Turkish parliament.

This apartment was designed specifically with Umut's needs in mind, before Gülsüm had been caring for her in her own home, which presented a set of challenges, as a custom-made bed for Umut's condition couldn't fit anywhere in his room.

Many Russians also began donating to Gülsüm, using this sudden influx of money to purchase a hospital-grade adjustable bed, a tilt table for gradual vertical positioning, therapy mats, a patient lift, an electro-acupuncture device, and oxygen cylinders.

Four seperate organizations would name her Turkey's "Mother of the year" four times in a row. Despite living in Turkey, many organizations in Russia also awarded her the title. Overall, Gülsüm was called a "sacred woman" in Russia and was regularly inundated with calls from Russians asking if Umut might be their son.

In 2013, Gülsüm advocated for Umut to receive rehabilitation treatment at the Romatem Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Hospital in Samsun, as it was one of the few hospitals in Turkey equipped with the Lokomat system. However, at first, the local officials in Antalya refused to authorize the transfer, despite Erdoğan's personal support and the support of President Vladimir Putin's personal advisor. Despite large swaths of both Turkey's and Russia's governments supporting it, they refused to budge.

Eventually, likely owing to the backlash after Gülsüm went to the media, Umut was eventually admitted to Samsun. The staff noted improvements, including the ability to sit unsupported for approximately one minute, better head balance, responding to music, especially in Russia, and reacting to changes in voices and lights.

Gülsüm said that after this treatment period, Umut laughed when tickled and could sit in a wheelchair with reduced support. During his rehabilitation, Erdoğan was holding a campaign rally in Samsun, where Gülsüm approched him to hand him a letter requesting additional support. Once the rally was over, Erdoğan met with Gülsüm and Umut shortly before their return to Antalya on July 23, 2014.

Erdoğan had, in fact, consistently supported Gülsüm and Umut, in 2013 he was speaking at a ceremony for the opening of a fleet of 486 ambulances in Istanbul and talked about the case and referred to her as "our sister Gülsüm"

In October 2016, a Russian citizen born in Azerbaijan was watching a news report following the latest developments with Umut when she believed she recognized him. She came forward to say that Umut looked like her Kenan, who had been kidnapped at the age of 7 in 2001. If Umut were Kenan, he would've been 14 at the time of the 2008 accident.

This was the most promising lead yet, and the producers of that news report were said to be "Very excited" and put her in touch with Gülsüm immideately. In February 2017, she went to Turkey to personally hand over a blood and DNA sample ot the local authorities. Unfortunately, the results came back negative once more. She was, at the time of writing, the final person to come forward claiming to know him.

On the night of January 13, 2018, Gülsüm noticed that Umut was having difficulty breathing, when, to quote her herself "My son was sitting. He was smiling. The treatment was going very well. I gave him his night milk. Then I saw his tongue pulling back. I called an ambulance immediately" the ambulance arrived and took him to Korkuteli State Hospital where they immideately made the decision to transfer him to a more sophitciated hospital.

Once there, Umut was diagnosed with pneumonia with concurrent renal and hepatic dysfunction and placed on a ventilator with his kidneys and liver failing. While Umut had beaten the odds before, it wasn't looking like he'd do it again.

At 7:30 a.m. on January 23, having hung on for 10 days, Umut finally passed away from multi-organ failure and pneumonia at the ages of 25-27. When Gülsüm was informed of his death, she collapsed at the entrance of the hospital out of grief and then grabbed a scarf from around Umut's neck and refused to let it go, bringing it to her face repeatedly.

His funeral was held at the Çayırlı Mosque in Korkuteli almost immideately with many in attendance, including another member of Turkey's parliament. Messages of condolences also spread across social media, and Umut's death was considered one of the most defining events of the year in the Antalya Province. Umut was laid to rest at the Paşa Cemetery in Korkuteli

In July 2018, Gülsüm donated every piece of equipment she had bought with funds she had raised back in 2013 from sympathetic Russian citizens to a rehabilitation clinic in Korkuteli.

Umut is the most famous UID case in Turkey and his story continues to captivate and move many to this day.

Sources

https://www.dailysabah.com/turkey/2017/02/06/russian-woman-might-be-real-mother-of-mystery-youth-in-antalya

https://www.sabah.com.tr/yasam/kimsesiz_umutun_babasi_devlet_oldu-1638840

https://www.sabah.com.tr/yasam/umutun_yurek_burkan_hikyesi-1105945

https://www.memurlar.net/haber/390148/koruyucu-annenin-maasina-konulan-haciz-kaldirildi.html

https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/yasam/umutun-kimligi-dna-testiyle-belli-olabilir/741834

https://archive.ph/eclcs

https://archive.ph/zmiuG

https://archive.ph/zmiuG

https://archive.ph/ksjgC

https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/turkiye/gulsum-anne-umutunu-yitirdi-/1039338

https://www.trthaber.com/haber/yasam/gulsum-annenin-umutu-hayatini-kaybetti-347400.html

https://www.antalyaekspres.com.tr/umut-dayanamadi

https://www.sabah.com.tr/yasam/kimsesiz_umutun_babasi_devlet_oldu-1638840

https://archive.ph/bZXiG

https://www.haberturk.com/yasam/haber/813896-bu-turk-kadini-rusyayi-aglatti

https://archive.ph/63BQt

https://www.sondakika.com/dunya/haber-rus-sunucu-umut-a-bakan-gulsum-ana-rusya-da-buyuk-4325032/

https://www.haberalp.com/umutun-sibiryali-annesi-dna-testi-icin-sabirsizlaniyor

https://www.sabah.com.tr/yasam/umutu-gercek-annesi-gelse-de-vermem-2331145

https://www.haberturk.com/yasam/haber/817764-rusyayi-aglatan-umutu-askere-cagirdik?page=3

https://www.sondakika.com/guncel/haber-umut-a-askerlige-elverisli-degildir-raporu-geldi-4310518/

https://www.akasyam.com/umutun-samsunda-tedavi-olmasina-mudur-izin-vermiyor-7039/

https://www.haberturk.com/umutun-koruyucu-annesi-yuz-felci-oldu-1068556?page=2

https://www.sabah.com.tr/yasam/erdogan-umutun-bakicisi-gulsum-ana-ile-gorustu-2786933

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)

At 2:30 a.m. on December 23, 2005, a bus driven by Su Hongao pulled into a parking lot in the small city of Yanling in China's Henan Province. It was still early in the morning, so Hongao left the bus to take a nap at home.

At 3:32, 17-year-old Sun Junxiang, the ticket taker for that day, began boarding the passengers. The bus's route that day was to take passengers, who usually consisted of local merchants and traders, to the provincial capital of Zhengzhou so they could buy stock to resell at their local markets in Yanling. Owing to the early hour, there weren't too many awake, and only about 13-14 passengers had bought tickets.

At 3:35 a.m., a young man who appeared to be around 20-30 had boarded the bus, carrying a heavy green woven-fabric bag. The man, who was also wearing a white scarf wrapped around most of his neck and lower face, placed the bag behind Junxiang's seat before telling Junxiang and Hongao that he had to leave the bus for a quick bathroom break. Junxiang told him there was no rush, as the bus wasn't scheduled to leave for several more minutes, but the man nodded wordlessly and left the bus anyway.

5 minutes later, a small fire broke out on the bus, and before the passengers could leave or put it out, a sudden, powerful explosion jolted nearby residents awake. The force of the explosion expelled Junxiang out of the vehicle through the windows and onto the parking lot approximately five or six meters from the bus.

Junxiang's arms and face were on fire, but he managed to extinguish the flames by rolling over, removing his jacket, and beating it against the ground. Two other passengers, who had been seated near the front, had managed to jump from the bus before the flames reached them, but they were still alight and rolling on the pavement, screaming in an attempt to suffocate the fire.

Once he recovered, Junxiang rushed to the driver's compartment to retrieve a fire extinguisher, where he sprayed it at the bus's door and screamed at the remaining 11 passengers to get out. Sadly, that was a task easier said than done.

The sealed, air-conditioned bus was now a death trap to those who had remained. The vehicle, designed for long journeys, was fully enclosed, with reinforced windows that were nearly impossible to break, no matter how hard those inside pounded their fists or whatever objects they had on hand against the glass. Meanwhile, the upholstery, foam seating, and synthetic plastic materials that made up the bus's interior were excellent fuel for the fire, producing a highly toxic cloud of smoke that filled the entire bus.

Despite his best efforts, Junxiang had completely used up the fire extinguisher without putting so much as a dent in the fire. With nothing else to do, he ran to the nearest shop and used their phone to call for emergency services. Afterward, Junxiang was seen sitting and crying, knowing there was nothing else he could do and that, if anything, it was probably already too late.

Before the firefighters arrived, Hongao was also woken by the explosion, and when he saw a plume of smoke rising from the parking lot where he had left his bus, he grabbed two buckets of water and tried to fight the fire himself. The heat of the flames had grown so intense that not a single drop of water left those buckets before he had to retreat. He would then call emergency services himself and, much like the ticket taker, had to watch his passengers die a horrifying death.

The Yanling County Fire Brigade arrived at the parking lot only 5 minutes after the explosion, and after six seperate water hoses were used and 30 minutes had passed, the fire was finally extinguished, leaving the bus a charred skeleton.

Firefighters at the scene

The aftermath of the explosion

When the firefighters boarded the charred frame, they saw 11 dead bodies, all concentrated in either the middle or back of the vehicle.

A diagram of how the bodies were found.

There were only three survivors, and they were rushed to the hospital to receive treatment for their burns.

The inside of the bus

The deceased consisted of 5 men and 6 women between the ages of 18 and 43. All of their bodies were so burnt that DNA was the only way to identify any of them. The victims, by and large, were traders and small businesspeople who were travelling to Zhengzhou solely to purchase goods to stock their businesses back home. According to the autopieses, all of them had died from smoke inhalation rather than the fire itself.

https://preview.redd.it/m4n6nzg98n8h1.png?width=488&format=png&auto=webp&s=086394ae63e742a62cacd837eddc0e6d3269555a

Forensic investigators examining the bus

Since the parking lot was part of a vital traffic network with various buses about to arrive within the next few hours, the police only cordoned off the scene and investigated very briefly before deciding to transport the bus elsewhere to conduct their investigation, after removing all the bodies, of course.

At first, the police wrote the tragedy off as an unfortunate accident. It was late December with the holidays fast approaching, and with both that fact, combined with the fact that the bus was going to a major city, the police theorized that one of the passengers was likely carrying commercially available fireworks or some other flammable material, which they handled negligently, causing them to ignite.

So rather than a crime, the police and the fire brigade labelled the explosion as an accident involving hazardous goods. Junxiang told the police about the man who left the bag behind shortly before the explosion and assumed the fireworks belonged to him, and that after hearing of the explosion, he was afraid to come forward due to the punishment he'd receive.

That morning, the reports and results of the investigation were faxed over to Beijing. The man who eventually read the report was a 69-year-old named Wu Guoqing. Although he now worked as one of China's leading forensic scientists, he used to be an active detective and one of the best at that. He was known as "China's Sherlock Holmes" and was credited with solving over 1,000 cases. When Guoqing read the conclusion the local officials had reached, he wasn't convinced, so he hopped on a plane and arrived in Yanling that afternoon.

When Guoqing arrived at the parking lot, there wasn't much left of the evidence; everything had largely been cleaned up, vehicles were coming and going, and there was no sign that the disaster had happened.

However, at the facility where the police took the bus, just about everything was still intact. After all, despite the local police having already reached a conclusion, the investigation was still in its early stages, so they hadn't scraped the vehicle yet. As soon as he stepped aboard the bus, he was struck by a scent that should've been obvious to everyone who came before him, the smell of an accelerant.

With this, all the local police and forensic experts were summoned back to the bus for a more thorough going-over. Every piece of ash, fragment of metal or plastic and shard of material, no matter how small, was carefully removed from the bus and placed on a large plastic sheet left outside.

https://preview.redd.it/a41f8wjz8n8h1.png?width=1220&format=png&auto=webp&s=3ea98f919043f8e2ba8205e49d1572bcf3d452af

The investigators removing and sifting through wreckage and evidence from the bus.

Wire mesh sieves were also used to sift through every pile of ash, and the process continued for three days straight.

The first object of note was a deformed plastic fragment, which appeared to be the base of a large plastic thermos bottle or container. When the fragment was sent away for analysis, the results showed residual traces of gasoline.

Next, the police found a small strip of metal, which was determined to be a component from a quartz clock, specifically, a part of the mechanism that connects the clock's timing function to an external circuit.

The investigators continued sifting through the ashes, and when they were finished, over 40 electronic components were recovered, all belonging to a quartz clock, and every single piece bore traces of gasoline and black powder.

https://preview.redd.it/pu6n4vs69n8h1.png?width=1040&format=png&auto=webp&s=fee661185f749518bc4955d5971a4f9facad01f7

https://preview.redd.it/cvpss5o79n8h1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=f5d40849374df27eb68686f91854287bc68f5da6

Some of the recovered debris and fragmetns.

Putting together the pieces, the police arrived at the true cause of the explosion: a device had been constructed using a modified quartz clock as a timing mechanism, set to trigger a detonator at a predetermined time; the detonation ignited black powder, which in turn set off the gasoline that had been poured into the container beside it. It was a bomb.

At first, there was some mummering about the bombing possibly being an act of terrorism, but the police didn't think so. Ignoring the fact that no groups took any responsibility, a small bus with fewer than 20 people driving a local route in a deserted parking lot, guaranteed not to result in additional casualties at an hour when no one else was around, didn't seem like a target a terrorist group would seek out.

Additionally, the m.o. also went against that theory, the device was detonated via a timer rather than a suicide vest or a remote detonator and the time it was set to go off was 3:40 a.m., so not only was a small target pool selected, but whoever designed the bomb actively went out of their way to have it go off at a time nobody else would be around. That meant that, uncharacteristic of a terrorist attack, whoever was responsible actively went out of their way to make sure nobody would witness the explosion, just the aftermath.

Regardless, the locals were terrified, with many now refusing to open their businesses for fear of being targeted next, and several people were too scared to board the bus.

However, even if the police knew it wasn't an act of terrorism, that didn't make tracking down the bomber easy. Even eliminating children and the elderly, those who couldn't possibly have built the bomb, there were still hundreds of thousands of potential suspects in Yanling County alone, and during the first week of the investigation, the police were only able to question 216, none of whom remained a suspect after their interviews. All they knew for sure was that he was educated enough in electrical work to build such a device.

According to Hongao, among the many competitors on the Yanling–Zhengzhou route was a man named Jin, who, when it came to business, was known for being aggressive and domineering. In fact, on December 22, the day before the bombing, Hongao had gotten into a physical altercation with Jin after he accused Hongao of poaching his passengers. Jin was so fierce in the competition that he sometimes parked his bus in the middle of the route to prevent Hongao and any of his company's vehicles from reaching Zhengzhou on time. However, Jin's alibi was airtight, so the police had to look elsewhere.

The police also detained another man at the hospital housing the bodies and treating the injured. He claimed he was there to try to identify one of the victims, but his identification was found to be fake. However, he also wasn't involved and just wanted to get close to the tragedy out of morbid curiosity.

In their continued search for suspects, the police came across something very interesting. Sifting through other police reports in case suspects could be found there, they saw that on December 25, two days after the bombing, the parents of a 23-year-old labourer named Liang Penglei from Yuzhai Village walked into the police station in Yanling to report their son missing.

They said they have been unable to contact their son since December 23, when he told them he would take an early bus to Zhengzhou to buy goods for his girlfriend. When they heard the news about the bus explosion, they feared he was one of the victims.

The police already knew that Penglei's name was not among the casualties, but seeing the timing and circumstances, they began the search for him regardless. Penglei's home was located far away from the parking lot, too far to walk if he wanted to arrive on time, so if he had wanted to board that bus, he would have had to have spent the night somewhere nearby.

The police also spoke to Penglei's girlfriend, who told investigators that she had wrapped a white scarf around his neck before he left for Yanling to protect him from the cold, just as Junxiang had described the man who left the bag that caused the explosion.

Now convinced that Penglei was their bomber, the police went door-to-door conducting sweeping searches of every single guesthouse, hotel, and inn within a 500-meter radius of the explosion, asking the staff about a man in a white scarf who had checked in on the evening of December 22 and checked out on the morning of December 23.

On December 28, the police arrived at a small guesthouse, where the owner confirmed that a young man matching that description had checked into a third-floor room at 11:00 p.m. on December 22. The police went to the room in question and saw that the room provided a direct, unobstructed view of the parking lot.

The police investigating Penglei's room

Penglei could've left the bomb on the bus and made it back to his room in time to watch it go off.

The only thing that was hard to reconcile was what motive Penglei could possibly have, or how he would've done it in the first place. Penglei had only just finished his schooling two years prior and never studied anything involving electricity or explosive substances, simply jumping from one manual labour job to the next.

However, given his personality, the police didn't consider it unlikely that he'd do something like this if there were enough incentive. Penglei had a personality described as "impulsive and irritable," hot-headed, and as someone who would do almost anything for some money. While he most certainly planted the bomb, the police were incredulous at the idea that Penglei had built it. They suspected that Jing may have been the one who hired him, but the police found no evidence that the two had ever met or been in contact with one another.

The police looked through Penglei's telephone records for the days before the explosion, knowing he'd be speaking to the true mastermind behind the tragedy, and one name showed up repeatedly, that of a 32-year-old resident of Anling, He Shiya, a local businessman.

He Shiya

Shiya wasn't a stranger to the police; in fact, he had spoken to them before when he went to the hospital, where the bodies were being stored. His wife was among the victims, a woman named Zheng Ruqing. She was a regular passenger on this route, frequently making trips to Zhengzhou to purchase wholesale goods for a clothing stall she ran back home in Yanling.

Shiya appeared devastated by his wife's murder, openly sobbing and begging the police to catch the bomber, and yet the police now knew that Shiya had been talking to said bomber extensively, including right before the device was activated.

Prior to managing the flour mill, he worked for his father's various businesses as an electrician and small-appliance repairman. According to his neighbours, Shiya was capable of fixing or modifying almost any household device handed to him; in fact, his neighbours nicknamed him "百事通," an English translation being "know-it-all," and he would often rush to his neighbours' homes and help them out free of charge if they needed help.

Shiya was born in 1973, the eldest son in a family of four brothers. His father had built for the family a diverse collection of small businesses, including a furniture factory, an ice factory, a glass manufacturing facility, and various animal farming operations, including rabbit, fox, and pig farming. Overall, his family was quite prosperous. By 2001, the family had established a flower mill with Shiya as its manager.

Shiya's success didn't come easily; his father exercised complete and absolute control over the family and had no issue getting physical with his sons, striking them for any perceived slight. Even when his father became old and ill, and physically abused his now adult sons, they were already conditioned to still obey every word he said, and his capacity for verbal abuse remained as strong as ever.

In 1995, Shiya married his wife, a woman he barely knew, as it was a marriage arranged by his parents. This woman was Ruqing, and in 1996, the two had a son. Ruqing was described as diligent, capable, and dedicated to the family and to running their businesses, which made her adored by Shiya's family.

The only exception was Shiya himself. Being an arranged marriage, neither of them had any say; genuine love and affection for one another. In fact, Shiya didn't even view Ruqing as his wife, but rather as an authority figure he was stuck with, and all that he accomplished by living with her made him feel even more oppressed by his family.

He raised the subject of divorce several times, but both Ruqing and the rest of Shiya's entire family refused to entertain the idea in any capacity and accused Shiya of being ungrateful.

When the police visited Shiya's home, they found a green woven fabric bag of the same type that Junxiang had seen Penglei carrying, batteries that could be used to power an ignition circuit, a soldering iron, a storage battery, a pager-style electronic timer and a handwritten notebook containing detailed notes on the composition and preparation of explosive powder. On just about all of these items, chemical residues were detected that matched those found on the bus's wreckage.

The police had basically solved the case already with all this damning evidence, but Shiya still presented himself as someone wracked with grief and that everything found in his home would be expected due to his occupation. When asked about his contact with Penglei, he explained that Penglei owed him money and the calls were his attempt to collect on the debt.

In the middle of the interrogation, Shiya received a phone call, which he answered. Even though speakerphone wasn't enabled, enough of the voice could be faintly heard through the receiver for the investigators to determine that the caller was a woman and that, beyond her concern for Shiya, what she was saying was clearly personal and intimate. But Shiya was quick to end the call and continue the interview.

Seeing as the police knew the exact second the call was made to Shiya's phone, it wasn't hard to track down the woman on the other end; she was 34-year-old Hao Lihong. When the police brought Lihong in for questioning, she confessed immideately to being Shiya's mistress and that he had been having an affair with her since 2003. She told the police that Shiya had on many occasions told her that he would divorce Lei so he could marry her instead.

Shiya met Lihong, an orphan from Yanling, in 2002, after her husband had passed away in 2001 from an illness. She was raising her son alone on a small income from her job at the local electricity company. Shiya's flour mill supplied grain to Lihong and the electricity company, which is how the two met, and Shiya felt deep sympathy for her plight as both an orphan and a widow.

Grateful for his pity, Lihong wanted to spend more time with Shiya, so the two started eating together and then going on other dates. Shiya would drive her to and from work or anywhere else she needed to go. One evening when Shiya was driving home, he stopped the car as it was dark and the two had some privacy. On that day, their relationship became physical.

It lasted until 2003 when Ruqing found out, first from the local rumour mill and later overhearing Shiya on a phone call with Lihong. Ruqing, later called Shiya, was having dinner with Lihong at a restaurant and threatened to kill herself if he didn't return immideately. When Shiya returned, he found Ruqing collapsed on the floor, having overdosed on something and had to be rushed to the hospital.

After the failed suicide attempt, maintaining the affair's secrecy was no longer possible, and now everyone knew of it. Shiya's parents even called Lihong to warn her to stay away from their son. Although their dates became rarer, the two never actually cut off contact and instead took more precautions before calling each other.

In February 2005, Lihong became pregnant; the father was Shiya. Panicking, Shiya urged her to get an abortion, which she did, but under the tearful condition that he divorce Ruqing and marry her once the pregnancy was terminated. Shiya agreed, and after the abortion, he had every intention of making good on his promise. But Ruqing refused to accept the divorce, and his parents were even more insistent that he stay in the marriage.

It looked as if the police finally had a motive, so they continued their investigation. On December 31, they questioned all of Shiya's neighbours, and they confirmed that the day before the explosion, he was seen carrying an unidentified package into the pine grove behind his property.

On January 2, 2006, the police arrested Shiya for a second time and confronted him with all the evidence they had gathered.

Shiya's arrest

Shiya wasn't able to hold out for long before he finally confessed to masterminding the bombing. According to him, it went like this.

In October 2005, Lihong had a second pregnancy and then a second abortion, which once again fueled Shiya's drive to find a way to end his marriage with Ruqing, but since there was no way a divorce would ever be accepted, Shiya began thinking of other ways he could get out of it, and the main one that came to mind was murder.

Ruqing's intended method to murder Ruqing always involved a bomb of some kind since his technical know-how and experience as an electrician meant he knew how to do it. So after crafting the device, he tested his design on a riverbank. Satisfied with the results, he did so again two days later, this time using gasoline as an accelerant. The resulting fire scorched a roughly 1-meter radius of grass. On December 12, he conducted the third and final test in a small pine grove on the outskirts of Yanling, burning an area approximately one meter in radius once more. After three successful tests, he was not convinced his plan would work.

At the same time he was testing the bomb, he was also looking for the individual he'd have deposit it on Ruqing's bus. He had known Penglei since October and knew he was in a dire situation, strapped for cash, and that Penglei had a history of doing almost anything anyone asked of him as long as he got a payday out of it.

But more importantly, he knew that Penglei didn't know many people in his life and that his disappearance would likely go uninvestigated. You see, Shiya had no intention of ever paying him; instead, he was going to kill him the moment the job was over and had already settled on a location to dispose of his accomplice's body before even choosing who his accomplice would be.

In the weeks preceding the bombing, Shiya provided Penglei with free meals, did favours for him and so on, anything to make Penglei warm up to him. In early November, after the two had a drink and Shiya felt he had built enough rapport with Penglei, he told him, "I want to get rid of my annoying wife. Would you be willing to help?" If he agreed, Penglei would be paid 10,000 yuan, which immediately made him agree to whatever plan he proposed.

On December 22, 2005, Ruqing told Shiya that she was going to board the Yanling-Zhengzhou bus the following morning to buy stock for her clothing. The second Ruqing left Shiya alone long enough, he made a phone call to Penglei telling him to go buy a plastic container, fill it with gasoline and then meet up with him. The two met at a video arcade, where Shiya handed Penglei enough money to buy a room at a guesthouse where he could observe the bus and then the device he had constructed.

Meanwhile, Shiya personally escorted Ruqing to the parking lot and watched her board the vehicle. Once she settled into her seat, Shiya walked away and met back up with Penglei. There, Shiya attached the timer to the device and instructed Penglei to place it under one of the seats on the bus, then make his way back home to collect his promised payment.

Penglei did so, and after we saw the bus explode from the room at his guesthouse, he ran back to Shiya's home and told him the plan was a success. Shiya told Penglei to stay outside while he went to collect the money.

When Shiya emerged from his home, he was carrying a metal pipe and suggested that they walk together to a small pine grove behind his because the neighbour's dogs kept barking, which might alert the owners. The money should be transferred somewhere more private. When Penglei asked about the pipe, he said it was to help him navigate through the dark.

Once the two reached the pine grove, Shiya waited until Penglei's back was turned and then swung the pipe directly at the back of his head. When Penglei fell, Shiya struck him again across the head and face until he was dead. He then dragged Penglei's body to an irrigation well and dropped it down the well, and then he threw the pipe into the nearby stream.

The following morning, on December 24, he came back to the grove with lit pine branches and incinerated the blood that had stained the soil near the well until nothing recognizable as blood remained.

On January 3, the police retrieved Penglei's body from the well. Due to the conditions at the well and the cold water, there was hardly any decomposition to speak of, so the police were able to easily confirm Shiya's account. Penglei had died from blunt-force trauma injuries to the head.

The well

Meanwhile, the police recovered the pipe in question from the stream bed, luckily not having flowed too far.

The pipe being recovered

Shiya's trial began on November 3, 2006, at the Xuchang Intermediate People's Court, where he reportedly shed a few tears a little at the family members of the 11 victims before quickly averting his gaze. Shiya was being charged with arson and 12 counts of additional homicide. Additionally, the bus driver and the company that owned it took Shiya to civil court for damages.

On December 1, 2006, He Shiya was convicted on all charges. He was ordered to pay 2,143,863.26 Yuan in compensation, but most importantly, he was sentenced to death with immediate execution.

Despite the word "immediate" in China, death sentences are automatically presented to a higher court for review so they can approve the sentence and ensure that nothing questionable happened during the trial, 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.

Shiya announced that he wouldn't appeal and therefore waived his right to that automatic hearing. That meant that the same day the sentence was handed out, instead of being brought back to prison, Shiya was transported directly to the execution grounds and put to death via a single gunshot to the head.

Sources

https://pastebin.com/8hgUypqy

(Made a typo with the title but I also uploaded this write-up to r/masskillers with a fixed and more accurate one)

At 2:30 a.m. on December 23, 2005, a bus driven by Su Hongao pulled into a parking lot in the small city of Yanling in China's Henan Province. It was still early in the morning, so Hongao left the bus to take a nap at home.

At 3:32, 17-year-old Sun Junxiang, the ticket taker for that day, began boarding the passengers. The bus's route that day was to take passengers, who usually consisted of local merchants and traders, to the provincial capital of Zhengzhou so they could buy stock to resell at their local markets in Yanling. Owing to the early hour, there weren't too many awake, and only about 13-14 passengers had bought tickets.

At 3:35 a.m., a young man who appeared to be around 20-30 had boarded the bus, carrying a heavy green woven-fabric bag. The man, who was also wearing a white scarf wrapped around most of his neck and lower face, placed the bag behind Junxiang's seat before telling Junxiang and Hongao that he had to leave the bus for a quick bathroom break. Junxiang told him there was no rush, as the bus wasn't scheduled to leave for several more minutes, but the man nodded wordlessly and left the bus anyway.

5 minutes later, a small fire broke out on the bus, and before the passengers could leave or put it out, a sudden, powerful explosion jolted nearby residents awake. The force of the explosion expelled Junxiang out of the vehicle through the windows and onto the parking lot approximately five or six meters from the bus.

Junxiang's arms and face were on fire, but he managed to extinguish the flames by rolling over, removing his jacket, and beating it against the ground. Two other passengers, who had been seated near the front, had managed to jump from the bus before the flames reached them, but they were still alight and rolling on the pavement, screaming in an attempt to suffocate the fire.

Once he recovered, Junxiang rushed to the driver's compartment to retrieve a fire extinguisher, where he sprayed it at the bus's door and screamed at the remaining 11 passengers to get out. Sadly, that was a task easier said than done.

The sealed, air-conditioned bus was now a death trap to those who had remained. The vehicle, designed for long journeys, was fully enclosed, with reinforced windows that were nearly impossible to break, no matter how hard those inside pounded their fists or whatever objects they had on hand against the glass. Meanwhile, the upholstery, foam seating, and synthetic plastic materials that made up the bus's interior were excellent fuel for the fire, producing a highly toxic cloud of smoke that filled the entire bus.

Despite his best efforts, Junxiang had completely used up the fire extinguisher without putting so much as a dent in the fire. With nothing else to do, he ran to the nearest shop and used their phone to call for emergency services. Afterward, Junxiang was seen sitting and crying, knowing there was nothing else he could do and that, if anything, it was probably already too late.

Before the firefighters arrived, Hongao was also woken by the explosion, and when he saw a plume of smoke rising from the parking lot where he had left his bus, he grabbed two buckets of water and tried to fight the fire himself. The heat of the flames had grown so intense that not a single drop of water left those buckets before he had to retreat. He would then call emergency services himself and, much like the ticket taker, had to watch his passengers die a horrifying death.

The Yanling County Fire Brigade arrived at the parking lot only 5 minutes after the explosion, and after six seperate water hoses were used and 30 minutes had passed, the fire was finally extinguished, leaving the bus a charred skeleton.

Firefighters at the scene

The aftermath of the explosion

When the firefighters boarded the charred frame, they saw 11 dead bodies, all concentrated in either the middle or back of the vehicle.

A diagram of how the bodies were found.

There were only three survivors, and they were rushed to the hospital to receive treatment for their burns.

The inside of the bus

The deceased consisted of 5 men and 6 women between the ages of 18 and 43. All of their bodies were so burnt that DNA was the only way to identify any of them. The victims, by and large, were traders and small businesspeople who were travelling to Zhengzhou solely to purchase goods to stock their businesses back home. According to the autopieses, all of them had died from smoke inhalation rather than the fire itself.

https://preview.redd.it/6qhs915vum8h1.png?width=488&format=png&auto=webp&s=ec18c2bb776a8998ecb603e94172052562e6d702

Forensic investigators examining the bus

Since the parking lot was part of a vital traffic network with various buses about to arrive within the next few hours, the police only cordoned off the scene and investigated very briefly before deciding to transport the bus elsewhere to conduct their investigation, after removing all the bodies, of course.

At first, the police wrote the tragedy off as an unfortunate accident. It was late December with the holidays fast approaching, and with both that fact, combined with the fact that the bus was going to a major city, the police theorized that one of the passengers was likely carrying commercially available fireworks or some other flammable material, which they handled negligently, causing them to ignite.

So rather than a crime, the police and the fire brigade labelled the explosion as an accident involving hazardous goods. Junxiang told the police about the man who left the bag behind shortly before the explosion and assumed the fireworks belonged to him, and that after hearing of the explosion, he was afraid to come forward due to the punishment he'd receive.

That morning, the reports and results of the investigation were faxed over to Beijing. The man who eventually read the report was a 69-year-old named Wu Guoqing. Although he now worked as one of China's leading forensic scientists, he used to be an active detective and one of the best at that. He was known as "China's Sherlock Holmes" and was credited with solving over 1,000 cases. When Guoqing read the conclusion the local officials had reached, he wasn't convinced, so he hopped on a plane and arrived in Yanling that afternoon.

When Guoqing arrived at the parking lot, there wasn't much left of the evidence; everything had largely been cleaned up, vehicles were coming and going, and there was no sign that the disaster had happened.

However, at the facility where the police took the bus, just about everything was still intact. After all, despite the local police having already reached a conclusion, the investigation was still in its early stages, so they hadn't scraped the vehicle yet. As soon as he stepped aboard the bus, he was struck by a scent that should've been obvious to everyone who came before him, the smell of an accelerant.

With this, all the local police and forensic experts were summoned back to the bus for a more thorough going-over. Every piece of ash, fragment of metal or plastic and shard of material, no matter how small, was carefully removed from the bus and placed on a large plastic sheet left outside.

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The investigators removing and sifting through wreckage and evidence from the bus.

Wire mesh sieves were also used to sift through every pile of ash, and the process continued for three days straight.

The first object of note was a deformed plastic fragment, which appeared to be the base of a large plastic thermos bottle or container. When the fragment was sent away for analysis, the results showed residual traces of gasoline.

Next, the police found a small strip of metal, which was determined to be a component from a quartz clock, specifically, a part of the mechanism that connects the clock's timing function to an external circuit.

The investigators continued sifting through the ashes, and when they were finished, over 40 electronic components were recovered, all belonging to a quartz clock, and every single piece bore traces of gasoline and black powder.

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Some of the recovered debris and fragmetns.

Putting together the pieces, the police arrived at the true cause of the explosion: a device had been constructed using a modified quartz clock as a timing mechanism, set to trigger a detonator at a predetermined time; the detonation ignited black powder, which in turn set off the gasoline that had been poured into the container beside it. It was a bomb.

At first, there was some mummering about the bombing possibly being an act of terrorism, but the police didn't think so. Ignoring the fact that no groups took any responsibility, a small bus with fewer than 20 people driving a local route in a deserted parking lot, guaranteed not to result in additional casualties at an hour when no one else was around, didn't seem like a target a terrorist group would seek out.

Additionally, the m.o. also went against that theory, the device was detonated via a timer rather than a suicide vest or a remote detonator and the time it was set to go off was 3:40 a.m., so not only was a small target pool selected, but whoever designed the bomb actively went out of their way to have it go off at a time nobody else would be around. That meant that, uncharacteristic of a terrorist attack, whoever was responsible actively went out of their way to make sure nobody would witness the explosion, just the aftermath.

Regardless, the locals were terrified, with many now refusing to open their businesses for fear of being targeted next, and several people were too scared to board the bus.

However, even if the police knew it wasn't an act of terrorism, that didn't make tracking down the bomber easy. Even eliminating children and the elderly, those who couldn't possibly have built the bomb, there were still hundreds of thousands of potential suspects in Yanling County alone, and during the first week of the investigation, the police were only able to question 216, none of whom remained a suspect after their interviews. All they knew for sure was that he was educated enough in electrical work to build such a device.

According to Hongao, among the many competitors on the Yanling–Zhengzhou route was a man named Jin, who, when it came to business, was known for being aggressive and domineering. In fact, on December 22, the day before the bombing, Hongao had gotten into a physical altercation with Jin after he accused Hongao of poaching his passengers. Jin was so fierce in the competition that he sometimes parked his bus in the middle of the route to prevent Hongao and any of his company's vehicles from reaching Zhengzhou on time. However, Jin's alibi was airtight, so the police had to look elsewhere.

The police also detained another man at the hospital housing the bodies and treating the injured. He claimed he was there to try to identify one of the victims, but his identification was found to be fake. However, he also wasn't involved and just wanted to get close to the tragedy out of morbid curiosity.

In their continued search for suspects, the police came across something very interesting. Sifting through other police reports in case suspects could be found there, they saw that on December 25, two days after the bombing, the parents of a 23-year-old labourer named Liang Penglei from Yuzhai Village walked into the police station in Yanling to report their son missing.

They said they have been unable to contact their son since December 23, when he told them he would take an early bus to Zhengzhou to buy goods for his girlfriend. When they heard the news about the bus explosion, they feared he was one of the victims.

The police already knew that Penglei's name was not among the casualties, but seeing the timing and circumstances, they began the search for him regardless. Penglei's home was located far away from the parking lot, too far to walk if he wanted to arrive on time, so if he had wanted to board that bus, he would have had to have spent the night somewhere nearby.

The police also spoke to Penglei's girlfriend, who told investigators that she had wrapped a white scarf around his neck before he left for Yanling to protect him from the cold, just as Junxiang had described the man who left the bag that caused the explosion.

Now convinced that Penglei was their bomber, the police went door-to-door conducting sweeping searches of every single guesthouse, hotel, and inn within a 500-meter radius of the explosion, asking the staff about a man in a white scarf who had checked in on the evening of December 22 and checked out on the morning of December 23.

On December 28, the police arrived at a small guesthouse, where the owner confirmed that a young man matching that description had checked into a third-floor room at 11:00 p.m. on December 22. The police went to the room in question and saw that the room provided a direct, unobstructed view of the parking lot.

The police investigating Penglei's room

Penglei could've left the bomb on the bus and made it back to his room in time to watch it go off.

The only thing that was hard to reconcile was what motive Penglei could possibly have, or how he would've done it in the first place. Penglei had only just finished his schooling two years prior and never studied anything involving electricity or explosive substances, simply jumping from one manual labour job to the next.

However, given his personality, the police didn't consider it unlikely that he'd do something like this if there were enough incentive. Penglei had a personality described as "impulsive and irritable," hot-headed, and as someone who would do almost anything for some money. While he most certainly planted the bomb, the police were incredulous at the idea that Penglei had built it. They suspected that Jing may have been the one who hired him, but the police found no evidence that the two had ever met or been in contact with one another.

The police looked through Penglei's telephone records for the days before the explosion, knowing he'd be speaking to the true mastermind behind the tragedy, and one name showed up repeatedly, that of a 32-year-old resident of Anling, He Shiya, a local businessman.

He Shiya

Shiya wasn't a stranger to the police; in fact, he had spoken to them before when he went to the hospital, where the bodies were being stored. His wife was among the victims, a woman named Zheng Ruqing. She was a regular passenger on this route, frequently making trips to Zhengzhou to purchase wholesale goods for a clothing stall she ran back home in Yanling.

Shiya appeared devastated by his wife's murder, openly sobbing and begging the police to catch the bomber, and yet the police now knew that Shiya had been talking to said bomber extensively, including right before the device was activated.

Prior to managing the flour mill, he worked for his father's various businesses as an electrician and small-appliance repairman. According to his neighbours, Shiya was capable of fixing or modifying almost any household device handed to him; in fact, his neighbours nicknamed him "百事通," an English translation being "know-it-all," and he would often rush to his neighbours' homes and help them out free of charge if they needed help.

Shiya was born in 1973, the eldest son in a family of four brothers. His father had built for the family a diverse collection of small businesses, including a furniture factory, an ice factory, a glass manufacturing facility, and various animal farming operations, including rabbit, fox, and pig farming. Overall, his family was quite prosperous. By 2001, the family had established a flower mill with Shiya as its manager.

Shiya's success didn't come easily; his father exercised complete and absolute control over the family and had no issue getting physical with his sons, striking them for any perceived slight. Even when his father became old and ill, and physically abused his now adult sons, they were already conditioned to still obey every word he said, and his capacity for verbal abuse remained as strong as ever.

In 1995, Shiya married his wife, a woman he barely knew, as it was a marriage arranged by his parents. This woman was Ruqing, and in 1996, the two had a son. Ruqing was described as diligent, capable, and dedicated to the family and to running their businesses, which made her adored by Shiya's family.

The only exception was Shiya himself. Being an arranged marriage, neither of them had any say; genuine love and affection for one another. In fact, Shiya didn't even view Ruqing as his wife, but rather as an authority figure he was stuck with, and all that he accomplished by living with her made him feel even more oppressed by his family.

He raised the subject of divorce several times, but both Ruqing and the rest of Shiya's entire family refused to entertain the idea in any capacity and accused Shiya of being ungrateful.

When the police visited Shiya's home, they found a green woven fabric bag of the same type that Junxiang had seen Penglei carrying, batteries that could be used to power an ignition circuit, a soldering iron, a storage battery, a pager-style electronic timer and a handwritten notebook containing detailed notes on the composition and preparation of explosive powder. On just about all of these items, chemical residues were detected that matched those found on the bus's wreckage.

The police had basically solved the case already with all this damning evidence, but Shiya still presented himself as someone wracked with grief and that everything found in his home would be expected due to his occupation. When asked about his contact with Penglei, he explained that Penglei owed him money and the calls were his attempt to collect on the debt.

In the middle of the interrogation, Shiya received a phone call, which he answered. Even though speakerphone wasn't enabled, enough of the voice could be faintly heard through the receiver for the investigators to determine that the caller was a woman and that, beyond her concern for Shiya, what she was saying was clearly personal and intimate. But Shiya was quick to end the call and continue the interview.

Seeing as the police knew the exact second the call was made to Shiya's phone, it wasn't hard to track down the woman on the other end; she was 34-year-old Hao Lihong. When the police brought Lihong in for questioning, she confessed immideately to being Shiya's mistress and that he had been having an affair with her since 2003. She told the police that Shiya had on many occasions told her that he would divorce Lei so he could marry her instead.

Shiya met Lihong, an orphan from Yanling, in 2002, after her husband had passed away in 2001 from an illness. She was raising her son alone on a small income from her job at the local electricity company. Shiya's flour mill supplied grain to Lihong and the electricity company, which is how the two met, and Shiya felt deep sympathy for her plight as both an orphan and a widow.

Grateful for his pity, Lihong wanted to spend more time with Shiya, so the two started eating together and then going on other dates. Shiya would drive her to and from work or anywhere else she needed to go. One evening when Shiya was driving home, he stopped the car as it was dark and the two had some privacy. On that day, their relationship became physical.

It lasted until 2003 when Ruqing found out, first from the local rumour mill and later overhearing Shiya on a phone call with Lihong. Ruqing, later called Shiya, was having dinner with Lihong at a restaurant and threatened to kill herself if he didn't return immideately. When Shiya returned, he found Ruqing collapsed on the floor, having overdosed on something and had to be rushed to the hospital.

After the failed suicide attempt, maintaining the affair's secrecy was no longer possible, and now everyone knew of it. Shiya's parents even called Lihong to warn her to stay away from their son. Although their dates became rarer, the two never actually cut off contact and instead took more precautions before calling each other.

In February 2005, Lihong became pregnant; the father was Shiya. Panicking, Shiya urged her to get an abortion, which she did, but under the tearful condition that he divorce Ruqing and marry her once the pregnancy was terminated. Shiya agreed, and after the abortion, he had every intention of making good on his promise. But Ruqing refused to accept the divorce, and his parents were even more insistent that he stay in the marriage.

It looked as if the police finally had a motive, so they continued their investigation. On December 31, they questioned all of Shiya's neighbours, and they confirmed that the day before the explosion, he was seen carrying an unidentified package into the pine grove behind his property.

On January 2, 2006, the police arrested Shiya for a second time and confronted him with all the evidence they had gathered.

Shiya after his arrest.

Shiya wasn't able to hold out for long before he finally confessed to masterminding the bombing. According to him, it went like this.

In October 2005, Lihong had a second pregnancy and then a second abortion, which once again fueled Shiya's drive to find a way to end his marriage with Ruqing, but since there was no way a divorce would ever be accepted, Shiya began thinking of other ways he could get out of it, and the main one that came to mind was murder.

Ruqing's intended method to murder Ruqing always involved a bomb of some kind since his technical know-how and experience as an electrician meant he knew how to do it. So after crafting the device, he tested his design on a riverbank. Satisfied with the results, he did so again two days later, this time using gasoline as an accelerant. The resulting fire scorched a roughly 1-meter radius of grass. On December 12, he conducted the third and final test in a small pine grove on the outskirts of Yanling, burning an area approximately one meter in radius once more. After three successful tests, he was not convinced his plan would work.

At the same time he was testing the bomb, he was also looking for the individual he'd have deposit it on Ruqing's bus. He had known Penglei since October and knew he was in a dire situation, strapped for cash, and that Penglei had a history of doing almost anything anyone asked of him as long as he got a payday out of it.

But more importantly, he knew that Penglei didn't know many people in his life and that his disappearance would likely go uninvestigated. You see, Shiya had no intention of ever paying him; instead, he was going to kill him the moment the job was over and had already settled on a location to dispose of his accomplice's body before even choosing who his accomplice would be.

In the weeks preceding the bombing, Shiya provided Penglei with free meals, did favours for him and so on, anything to make Penglei warm up to him. In early November, after the two had a drink and Shiya felt he had built enough rapport with Penglei, he told him, "I want to get rid of my annoying wife. Would you be willing to help?" If he agreed, Penglei would be paid 10,000 yuan, which immediately made him agree to whatever plan he proposed.

On December 22, 2005, Ruqing told Shiya that she was going to board the Yanling-Zhengzhou bus the following morning to buy stock for her clothing. The second Ruqing left Shiya alone long enough, he made a phone call to Penglei telling him to go buy a plastic container, fill it with gasoline and then meet up with him. The two met at a video arcade, where Shiya handed Penglei enough money to buy a room at a guesthouse where he could observe the bus and then the device he had constructed.

Meanwhile, Shiya personally escorted Ruqing to the parking lot and watched her board the vehicle. Once she settled into her seat, Shiya walked away and met back up with Penglei. There, Shiya attached the timer to the device and instructed Penglei to place it under one of the seats on the bus, then make his way back home to collect his promised payment.

Penglei did so, and after we saw the bus explode from the room at his guesthouse, he ran back to Shiya's home and told him the plan was a success. Shiya told Penglei to stay outside while he went to collect the money.

When Shiya emerged from his home, he was carrying a metal pipe and suggested that they walk together to a small pine grove behind his because the neighbour's dogs kept barking, which might alert the owners. The money should be transferred somewhere more private. When Penglei asked about the pipe, he said it was to help him navigate through the dark.

Once the two reached the pine grove, Shiya waited until Penglei's back was turned and then swung the pipe directly at the back of his head. When Penglei fell, Shiya struck him again across the head and face until he was dead. He then dragged Penglei's body to an irrigation well and dropped it down the well, and then he threw the pipe into the nearby stream.

The following morning, on December 24, he came back to the grove with lit pine branches and incinerated the blood that had stained the soil near the well until nothing recognizable as blood remained.

On January 3, the police retrieved Penglei's body from the well. Due to the conditions at the well and the cold water, there was hardly any decomposition to speak of, so the police were able to easily confirm Shiya's account. Penglei had died from blunt-force trauma injuries to the head.

The well

Meanwhile, the police recovered the pipe in question from the stream bed, luckily not having flowed too far.

The pipe being recovered.

Shiya's trial began on November 3, 2006, at the Xuchang Intermediate People's Court, where he reportedly shed a few tears a little at the family members of the 11 victims before quickly averting his gaze. Shiya was being charged with arson and 12 counts of additional homicide. Additionally, the bus driver and the company that owned it took Shiya to civil court for damages.

On December 1, 2006, He Shiya was convicted on all charges. He was ordered to pay 2,143,863.26 Yuan in compensation, but most importantly, he was sentenced to death with immediate execution.

Despite the word "immediate" in China, death sentences are automatically presented to a higher court for review so they can approve the sentence and ensure that nothing questionable happened during the trial, 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.

Shiya announced that he wouldn't appeal and therefore waived his right to that automatic hearing. That meant that the same day the sentence was handed out, instead of being brought back to prison, Shiya was transported directly to the execution grounds and put to death via a single gunshot to the head.

Sources

https://pastebin.com/8hgUypqy

(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.

Another shorter than usual case and there were a few gaps in information during my research)

Born in 1956 in the port city of Kavala, Greece, Andreas Chtenas established himself as a successful businessman early on. Andreas was the co-owner of several nightclubs in the city and also ran a store selling contact lenses and glasses.

Andreas Chtenas

However, Andreas's hands were far from clean and had several arrests to his name for charges such as robbery, assault, extortion, money laundering and was suspected of being a gang leader who used Albanian immigrants to organize additional thefts and robberies, though he claimed to be innocent of all charges. He also made several enemies with other business owners from managing the nightclub.

In May 2001, the Urban Planning Office of Kavala ordered the demolition of a building on the property of Andreas's wife because the plot of land was, in fact, state-owned, meaning they had no authorization to build that building on the land, the land on which the state wanted to use to build a hospital. The two employees dispatched to demolish the building were 48-year-old Ioannis Koulousis and 55-year-old Giorgos Halkides. Andreas made sure to remember them.

Andreas was absolutely furious over the demolition, he placed three coffins on the property and announced that he would bury in them whoever had demolished his property. Over 20 people witnessed Andreas do this, but no action was taken.

However, the message was certainly received by the three, and when the demolition took place, Ioannis wore dark sunglasses and a hat to hide his face, as he was terrified of being seen. Although Andreas still knew it was him, he was regularly plagued by harassing and threatening phone calls.

On June 14, 2001, Ioannis and Giorgos returned to Thassos to stay at a vacation house in the village of Kallirachi, owned by Ioannis and were joined by a friend, 49-year-old Kyriakos Athanassas, a construction contractor and an executive of the Hellenic Sugar Industry plant in Xanthi. This is the last information known about them while they were alive.

By June 17, the families of the three men hadn't been able to contact them for over two days; calls to their phones went unanswered, so they contacted the local police, who dispatched an officer to the vacation house. Upon entering the home, the officer found Ioannis and Giorgos lying next to each other on the veranda, both dead.

The two were both shot twice, once in the chest and then a second shot to the head, just to make sure they were dead. Kyriakos's body was found further away in the olive grove of the property where he had likely tried fleeing from the gunman. Kyriakos had been shot twice in the back and then once in the head.

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The police at the scene

The police recovered ten shell casings of a 9mm calibre Heckler & Koch pistol fitted with suppressors, explaining why the neighbours hadn't heard anything, and those who did hear the gunshots assumed they were poachers. Two different guns were used to carry out the triple murder, indicating that more than one person was involved in the attack.

Evidence identifying the killers was not something the police were able to find. They recovered many fingerprints from coffee cups, glasses, and beer cans left on the veranda table, but they all belonged to Ioannis and Giorgos. The murders were believed to have taken place 24 hours prior, which also left no witnesses due to the late hour and the firearms being silenced.

The police entertained a lot of theories to explain the triple murder, such as that Ioannis was involved in criminal organizations that practiced pimping, human trafficking and prostitution. The island of Thasos is a hotspot for human trafficking, specifically in women from the former Soviet republics into Greece, and they are often involved with bribed public officials. However, the police couldn't link Ioannis to any of these organizations.

Moving away from Ioannis, perhaps the murder had more to do with Giorgos. He also worked in the Topographic Service of the Kavala directorate and was involved in land reallocations taking place in the villages of Maries and Kallirachi. However, nothing linking this to the murder could be uncovered either.

The police also considered the possibility of the murder being drug-related, but nothing linking the triple homicide to drugs was uncovered either.

Andreas was also considered a suspect in the initial investigation; however, he claimed to have an alibi. According to him, he was at a restaurant with his family on the opposite side of the island. Although the police had a motive, there was nothing else linking the murders to Andreas, so he walked free for now.

Despite all the extensive coverage the triple homicide had received with the newspapers labelling it an unprecedented crime on Thassos and some even labelling it a Mafia Execution linked to corruption in the Urban Planning Industry, the police ran out of leads, and the case eventually went cold.

Another enemy of Andreas was Giorgos Sidiropoulos, a nightclub owner in Kavala and a former business partner. The two men were in a long-standing dispute over the profits of the nightclub they used to co-own. Andreas was relentless in trying to get a payday from Sidiropoulos, having once called him using 6 different phone numbers registered in different names. Eventually, Sidiropoulos caved, and on July 26, 2002, he agreed to meet Andreas the next day.

On the evening of July 27, Sidiropoulos was suddenly attacked from behind, subdued with his hands and feet being bound, then he was handcuffed, gagged and placed in the trunk of a car. Wherever the kidnappers planned to take him, likely the Kavala waterfront, to murder him and dispose of his body either by drowning him or encasing him in cement. That ultimately never came to pass, as Sidiropoulos was stronger than they had anticipated.  

He managed to break free from his restraints, force the trunk open and began running away, to which his abductors stopped the vehicle and gave chase, shooting him multiple times in the back. Sidiropoulos's body was later found in the parking lot of an apartment building in Kavala, his hands and feet bound and dead from 5 gunshot wounds.

No murder weapon was found, but the police did retrieve casings of a 9mm Heckler & Koch 9mm pistol, and ballistic testing confirmed that it was the same gun used in the triple murder at Kallirachi the year prior.

On August 4, the body of a woman was found on a beach in Kavala, from what appeared to be a hit-and-run with the offending vehicle nowhere in sight. She had no identification on her person, so the police initially investigating it as a seperate case from Sidiropoulos's murder began showing her picture around.

Eventually, they came across some people who did recognize her; they said the body belonged to Sidiropoulos's girlfriend. However, she was still unidentified, Sidiropoulos never told any of his friends or family her name, and she never talked to any of them about herself either, so despite her relation to Sidiropoulos, she remains a Jane Doe.

The police believe she likely hailed from a former Soviet Republic or another Eastern European State. Even to this day, she has never been identified, and it's unknown if her death was even linked to Sidiropoulos's murder or not.

Unfornatuely, this case also went unsolved.

On October 31, 2002, the police would finally manage to pin a crime on Andreas. Two violent armed robberies were carried out simultaneously at two bank branches in Eleftheroupoli when four Albanian nationals armed with Kalashnikov rifles stormed the building.

The first job was successful, but once they stormed the second bank, the police were already on their tail, with five police officers now engaging them in a firefight. The police, of course, won the fight and arrested the four Albanians, identified as Albert Bleta, Harley Brekoff, Giuliani Schebi and Miger Schebi, but there was another man involved: Andreas Chtenas, the man who organized the foiled heists.

During the gunfight, a police bullet struck Andreas in the leg, but he managed to escape, crossing the border into Turkey and seeking treatment at a hospital in Edirne. Andreas's flight to Turkey was a short-lived one, as once the Greek police put the alert out, the Turkish police arrested Andreas at the hospital and extradited him to Greece.

Upon his return, Andreas was charged with organizing an attempted bank robbery of 5,000 Euros and the possession of Illegal weapons. His 43-year-old wife, Aria, who was in on his scheme, faced the same charges, alongside his 27-year-old son Dimitris. Additionally, two of the Albanians were charged with attempted murder of the responding police officers.

On December 10, 2023, while Andreas was being held in jail awaiting his trial, he managed to escape. He was brought to the bathroom, where he escaped by filing down and dislodging the window bars before jumping out. It took 20-25 minutes for the officers to investigate the restroom. Understandably, this was quite the embarrassment, and the two police officers were immideately suspended.

Andreas's wanted poster

On December 18, Andreas was recaptured without resistance in Thessaloniki, where he, the country's most wanted fugitive, was spotted by chance when two off-duty police officers found him enjoying a cup of coffee at a café in the city center. Andreas hadn't even made any attempt to change his appearance.

Andreas after being recaptured

On April 27, 2004, Andreas's trial for the bank robberies occurred at the Mixed Jury Criminal Court of Thrace, where he was found guilty and handed down a sentence of 25 years. His wife received a sentence of 17 years and 6 months, while his son was sentenced to 15 years.

The two Albanian nationals who opened fire on the police both got 25 years, while the other two were given 24 years and 8 months, and 11 years and 8 months, respectively. However, with time served and parole, Andreas was back on the streets after less than 10 years.

However, in February 2014, Andreas was arrested once more, and this time, it was for the triple murder at Kallirachi and for the murder of Giorgos Sidiropoulos. The police finally believed they had enough evidence to make a conviction.

So what changed? Well, first of all, a comb was placed on Ioannis's grave some time after his burial. The comb was placed on the grave by a neighbour; the Greek word for comb, "χτένα," is the word from which Andreas's last name, "Χτενάς." is very similar. When this happened, the police saw it as the neighbour trying to point the police toward the culprit.

Next, when the police reviewed both the triple homicide and Sidiropoulos's murder, since the same gun was used in both, a common thread linking the two cases was the fact that Andreas had a motive for both murders. And speaking of Sidiropoulos's murder, the police had new evidence in that case as well; they found the keys to his car in Andreas's glove compartment.

Next, a witness finally came forward to say that they saw a tall man matching Andreas's description jumping from the balcony and that a car identical to Andreas's was seen parked outside the vacation home shortly before the murders.

Then Ioannis's widow came forward to tell the police about three seperate men who had approched her to tell her that Andreas was the killer. They also already suspected Andreas back in 2001 over his stunt with the three coffins and death threats towards those who demolished the structure. But now the police believed they had a solid enough case to bring to trial.

The trial opened on June 20, 2014, at the Mixed Jury Court of Drama under heavy secruity with armed police stationed all over the court, metal detectors installed and all attendees, including witnesses, being searched prior to entering.

Andreas being escorted to court

Andreas's defence was that he was an honest buisnessmen who had fallen victim to persecution by the police and judicial system with the investigators assinged to the cases, prediging judges, and the media reporting on the crimes as just cogs in the machine meant to frame him in retaliation for being released early after his conviction for robbing the banks, of which he argued he was also framed for, and Andreas had no problem speaking vulgarly and cursing out those he deemed responsible.

For a moment, the evidence almost seemed to be on his side. Although it was never proven to be the murder weapon, when the police searched Andreas's home, they recovered a Heckler & Koch 9mm pistol. How did that weapon come to be in Andreas's possession?

The weapon was handed over to Andreas by a serving police officer in Athens. He eventually sold the weapon and sent it as a package from Athens to Kavala for Andreas to repair. The police officer in question was eventually dismissed, although the weapon was never found. This was something Andreas jumped on extensively to prove his corruption defence.

Another thing Andreas had going for him was that out of the 82 witnesses the prosecution called, just about all of them recanted and denied seeing what they told the police and prosecution before the trial, in fact, most of them denied having any knowledge of making prior statements at all, explaining this by saying they had "sudden amnesia".

So many witnesses used the words "sudden amnesia" that the judge actually had an outburst and, clearly frustrated and angry, said, "You are not the only one who doesn't remember. You all have amnesia in Thassos, perhaps it's the water".

Trying to salvage their case, the prosecution argued that it didn't matter if they were recanting now because their original statements were still reliable enough to implicate Andreas, but without having the weapon in their possession and now that all the witnesses were recanting, the defence argued that they had nothing, and the trial was now a farce and that the police and prosecution had bene holding Andreas "hostage" for 12 years.

On June 27, 2014, after deliberating for three hours, the court acquitted Andreas by a vote of 6-1. When Andreas left the court, he stopped on the steps of the courthouse and went on a tirade against the police, judges (despite overwhelmingly voting to acquit him), and the media, calling them "filthy dogs" who invented the charges, for all to hear.

On June 30, only three days after his acquittal, Andreas was arrested again after a nightclub owner claimed that Andreas approched him and demanded that he surrender the keys to his establishment or alternatively, pay a monthly payment of 2,000 euros to "allow" him to keep his own business open. Instead, he called the police, who arrested Andreas for extortion.

Within days, at the behest of the families of the three victims, the prosecution appealed the acquittal to the Court of Appeals of Thrace. The appeals court agreed that the acquittal was questionable, and so a new trial was held in Komotini. The new trial was set to open in December 2015, but was delayed to May 2016, then to May 2017, and then delayed again.

When the trial finally opened in the summer of 2018, Andreas was nowhere to be seen. Andreas was likely less confident that he'd taste victory for a second time. If, say, he had been paying off the witnesses, that was not a strategy he could employ for a second time, since by then he had fallen 224,864.48 euros into debt.

Instead, ended up fleeing the country entirely, prompting Greek authorities to issue a European Arrest Warrant for Andreas.

His fears were well-founded since on December 12, 2018, the Mixed Jury Court of Appeals of Thrace in Komotini delivered its verdict for the premeditated murders of Ioannis Koulousis, Giorgos Halkides, Kyriakos Athanasas and Giorgos Sidiropoulos, the court imposed four life sentences on Andreas Chtenas in absentia without the possibility of parole.

The defence announced its intent to appeal to Greece's Supreme Court, but Andreas was still missing in the meantime. Due to his connections with them, the police believed Andreas had fled to Albania.

Andreas's second stint as a fugitive lasted a little longer, but on September 27, 2020, he was arrested in Razlog, Bulgaria. When caught, Andreas defended himself by saying, "They are accusing me of something I've been acquitted of," even though that acquittal had been overturned.

On March 2, 2021, Andreas's appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected. Not long after, the Bulgarian courts approved Andreas's extradition back to Greece to serve his sentence.

Sources

https://pastebin.com/eRy8C3XH

(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 case is a lot shorter than usual)

The Black Bush Polder is a long stretch of farmland stradling the East Berbice-Corentyne region of Guyana. Despite the region's rural and sometimes inhospitable nature, it's home to numerous residential neighbourhoods and is lined with profitable dams, rice fields, fuel storage stations, irrigation pumps, and drainage channels. That said, many inhabited settlements remain accessible only by boat or air.

One such community is Mibicuri. Aside from a hospital and a police station, Mibicuri is one of those rural villages with little going on, where the population lives off farming and, most of all, fishing. Its residents regularly ventured into the Black Bush Polder to fish for freshwater armoured catfish to bring back home or sell in other communities. A favourite of the locals was the Kookrit Creek, located three miles outside of town.

One of those who called Mibicuri home was a 37-year-old resident named Pawan Chandradeo, known by the nicknames "Suresh" or "Jug Up." Pawan worked the fields as a rice farmer, where he raised his four children, who were between the ages of 9 and 15. Pawan had a rough patch in his marriage, briefly separating from his wife, but the two reconciled and renewed their vows on July 5, 2016.

Pawan Chandradeo

Pawan's eldest son, 15 years old, was Jaikarran Chandradeo, known by the nickname "Kevin." Jaikarran regularly helped his father work the fields in Mibicuri and regularly joined him on his fishing trips.

Jaikarran Chandradeo

Moving on to the extended family, Pawan's brother-in-law was 33-year-old Naresh Rooplall, who went by the nicknames "Teeka Bai" and "Mice". Naresh came from a small village in the Corentyne region, one so small it didn't even have a name (just referred to as "Number 77 Village").

Naresh Rooplall

On July 21, 2016, Naresh was visiting his sister in Mibicuri, now having the time since he was on leave. While there, Pawan approached him and asked if he would like to join him and his son for a fishing trip; he accepted. Pawan's 12-year-old son, Alvin Chandradeo, also joined them at the last minute; it was his first time accompanying his father on a fishing trip.

That evening, they gathered their fishing gear, cast nets, salt bags for the catch, and equipment to haul their catches from the savannah's waterways. When they reached an irrigation sluice, Pawan instructed Alvin to stay at the pump station, thinking it a safe location for the few hours it would take the three older members to venture deeper into the savannah, especially since a secruity outpost wasn't too far away.

Alvin waited at the pump station as his father instructed, but then 10 minutes after his father, brother and uncle disappeared from his view, he suddenly heard the sound of gunshots, only two of them. And then five minutes later, he heard four more gunshots. He waited at the pump station until he fell asleep, and when he woke up, his family had not returned, so he made his way to the aforementioned secruity outpost.

Once there, the guard manning the post bluntly told him he hadn't seen anyone and to go home, taking no further action. So Alvin walked several hours alone through the dark wilderness until finally arriving back in Mibicuri. Naturally, everyone was concerned when he arrived back alone and come the sunrise, their worst fears had already been realized.

At around 9:00 a.m. on July 22, a man set out with his workers for his rice farm in the Cookrite area.. Once they arrived, he and his farmhands discovered three dead men, two adults and one teenager, lying in the water of a dam on his property. Immideately, the owner of the farm contacted the closest neighbour, who then contacted the police.

The police arrived at the scene after a long while, having to use boats to reach it. When they arrived, they saw what was obviously a murder, and a sudden one at that, as all three were still carrying their fishing gear and seemingly shot where they had stood. They were also shot at close range, which seemed to indicate they may have known the shooter.

Blood and the fish they had caught were scattered across a wide area, being carried by the water, though the most important piece of evidence thankfully didn't drift too far, three shotgun cartridges, which the police found near the bodies.

All three had been killed instantly via one shot each; the oldest was shot in the head with a cast net in his hand. The second man had been shot in his neck, where he would've bled out fast, and had a cast net hung over his shoulder. And finally, the youngest victim had been shot in the back of his head, still with a bag of fish and a fishing net strung around his neck. The bodies were transferred to the nearest funeral home, where the families identified them as Pawan, Jaikarran and Naresh.

One theory considered was that the culprit was a fugitive believed to be in the area, wanted for murder and several armed robberies against those who ventured into the area. Were this theory to be true, he would've shot the men out of fear that his identity would be exposed. The police, however, weren't humouring this one.

Since the three had been shot late at night, exactly where they stood, in a sudden manner, the first theory entertained by the police was that their deaths were a tragic misunderstanding. Trespassing and illegal fishing were major problems for the locals, who routinely reported that their fences were being destroyed to give trespassers easier passage, which in turn allowed animals to enter their property and destroy their crops. In some cases, the farmers even fired warning shots at people they saw sneaking onto their property and warned them to stay away.

Perhaps they accidentally walked onto one of the locals' plots of land and, seeing three unfamiliar figures in the dead of night carrying a bunch of fishing gear, presumed them to be trespassers and decided to open fire first and ask questions later.

With this theory in mind, the police the police went to all the surrounding farms to question their owners and also questioned the guards at the secruity outpost. By July 24, the police had detained 10 individuals, including the man who discovered the bodies himself. Another suspect was an ex-lover of Pawan's wife who was currently working the land where the bodies were found. Perhaps he could've lured Pawan out of some form of revenge for marrying her.

After four days, three of those arrested gave their confessions on July 28.

The three men included a 36-year-old rice farmer named Carlton Chetram, who went by the nicknames "Lie Man," "Lima," "Rishi," and "Cashew Boy." Carlton was the eldest of four children and never had much of an education, as he had to leave primary school when it became too expensive to continue. Since he wasn't going to school anymore, he assisted his parents with cattle and cash-crop farming before transitioning to rice cultivation at 16 and later starting his own farm.

Carlton Chetram

Carlton described himself as a "lovely and caring" person who never got involved in any conflicts and, at worst, simply drank alchool occasionally. That was the exact polar opposite of what members of his community would say; they described Carlton as "a troublemaker who always used money as a tool to get what he wanted," hence the nickname “Lie-man.” Additionally, this wasn't even the first murder Carlton was involved in.

On October 5, 2013, a 49-year-old labourer, Jeewanlall Deonarine, who went by the nickname "Bingle," left his home in Lesbeholden in a car with a group of men to buy cigarettes from a neighbouring shop.

Jeewanlall Deonarine

At the time, his family was hosting a farewell party. Once Jeewanlall arrived at the shop, he and the group that had accompanied him got into an altercation with another group, a group that was drinking alchool while simultaneously armed with machetes and knives.

During the altercation, Jeewanlall was ganged up on by the others, beaten and cut all over. When the police arrived, Jeewanlall had already passed away from a severe skull fracture due to a wound to the back of his head.

Four men were arrested during the investigation, including 42-year-old Nazim Azimulla, 38-year-old Rajesh Singh, 17-year-old Kumar Mangru and, of course, Carlton. They were all charged with murder, but on July 3, 2014, a judge dismissed the case after the prosecution's main witnesses suddenly began denying having seen the murder. The locals believed Carlton paid them off.

Despite this alarming part in his background, Carlton was allowed to keep his firearm license and the shotgun itself, even applying for a second firearm license that same year.

The second man arrested was, in fact, a boy, Carlton's 17-year-old son Jairam Chetram, nicknamed "Ryan,"

Jairam Chetram

And finally, one of Carlton's farmhands, 18-year-old Tameshwar Jagmohan, nicknamed "Guana."

Tameshwar Jagmohan

Carlton was, as mentioned above, a registered firearm owner who owned a 12-gauge shotgun. The firearm was seized from his home, and when compared to the cartridges found at the scene, they came back as a match.

The three were interrogated relentlessly and eventually confessed.

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Their arrest

During their confessions, they implicated a fourth man, another of Carlton's farmhands, a 40-year-old named Rakesh Karamchand, who went by the nicknames "Go-To-Front" and "Rocky". Rakesh was the one who used his boat to transfer the other two to what would become the crime scene. Depending on which resident you asked, Rakesh was either "a very wicked person" or a "peaceful individual". The one thing that couldn't be denied was his difficult upbringing.

Rakesh Karamchand

He grew up in an abusive home, so abusive that when his mother went to confront her husband about his infidelity, his response was to immideately grab a machete and swing it at her repeatedly, cutting her all over and leaving her permanently scarred. In response, she took Rakesh and his siblings far away to live with their aunt instead.

According to their confessions, the four of them had gone to the Kookrit Creek to steal diesel from the farm of Carlton's neighbour, the same man who discovered the bodies, and it wasn't the first time. Carlton had been trespassing onto his land to steal his oil since 2013, with his neighbour at a loss to explain where his gas kept going. In fact, Tameshwar used to be one of his most trusted workers before leaving to find employment with Carlton. Carlton had brought his firearm with him in case they were ever caught.

They made their way to his property that night, carrying ten 5-gallon jars to fill with the stolen fuel. They broke the padlock on the fuel tanks, something the other neighbours heard, and they started siphoning the gas.

The four were on their way back to Carlton's that night when they suddenly came across Pawan, Jaikarran and Naresh, who clearly saw them and what they were doing. Jairam was the one actually holding the gun at the time, and he fired it into the air to scare them off. However, as Pawan's family knew Carlton's family personally, he was well aware he would be recognized and likely reported to the police, so Carlton looked at his son and ordered him to "Get rid of the evidence." 

It wasn't a particularly difficult task for Jairam because of the late hour, the lack of natural light, and the terrain. Pawan, Jaikarran, and Naresh had tripped and fallen several times. Jairam caught up to the three very easily, and while the two were lying on the ground, he fired a single shot at all three of them, killing them instantly with a single shot each.

Afterward, the four men used gasoline, diesel, and lime to wash their hands in an effort to get rid of any gunshot residue and forensic evidence before returning to Carlton's farm with the stolen fuel. The combined value of the ten containers of diesel they stole amounted to 45,000 Guyanese dollars, roughly 215 USD.

Rakesh was nowhere to be found, and the other three didn't know where he was hiding. So overnight, Rakesh became one of the most wanted men in Guyana, with the police looking everywhere for him. Their manhunt came to an end on September 17, when he was found working the land in the remote settlement of Duck Creek after local residents recognized him. He had spent two months living in the wilderness. When the police arrested him, they found an unlicensed shotgun and seven cartridges nearby, which led to two additional arrests.

Rakesh after his arrest.

But that wasn't all; the police would also arrest a 63-year-old man, Catchew Chaitram, nicknamed "Cashew".

Catchew Chaitram

Chaitram was Carlton's father, and he was arrested for not reporting his family to the police since he knew of the murders and was well aware his grandson had committed them. Catchew was released on a bail of $2,000,000 Guyanese dollars.

That bail was later revoked when he visited Carlton in prison, which was used to try to prove that Catchew had attempted to pervert the course of justice. However, he later sued the court over this decision, leading to his release after the court concluded that his bail had been unlawfully revoked. He was then paid 5 million Guyanese Dollars in damages.

Although they had all confessed, once they were brought to court for the first time, all four defendants pleaded not guilty.

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The defandants being escorted to court

On January 6, 2022, the trial finally began after 7 years, and Jairam, the one to actually pull the trigger, broke ranks with his father and changed his plea to guilty on January 24. Carlton and Rakesh didn't hold on much longer after that, with the two also changing their pleas to guilty on February 2.

Being acquitted was not in Tameshwar's future, but he still insisted he was innocent. He told the court that he tried his hardest to convince the other three not to pull the trigger and to just abort the mission entirely once the family was seen. Tameshwar's attorney also argued that he had been "led astray" by the other three and that the trial was unfair on the grounds that they were charging Tameshwar with murder instead of being an accessory.

The argument fell flat when it was pointed out that he never reported the other three for the murders, actively went out of his way to help conceal it and casually went about living his normal life as if nothing happened for his remaining week of freedom prior to his arrest.

February 10, 2022, after deliberating for two hours, the jury returned with their verdict, finding Tameshwar guilty on three counts of murder. After hearing the jury's verdict, the judge sentenced him to death by hanging.

Tameshwar during the trial

The exact same day also happened to be Jaikarran's sentencing day. For the triple murder of Pawan Chandradeo, Jaikarran Chandradeo and Naresh Rooplall, Jairam Chetram was given a life sentence, only avoiding the death penalty because of his plea and the fact that he was a minor when he committed the murders. When asked if he had anything to say before being led away, he said he was sorry but that "I did not apologize to the family because they would not accept it.". Jaikarran, overall, was said to be pretty emotionless during the proceedings.

Jairam during the trial

The same could not be said for his co-defendants.

Then, on February 21, Carlton Chetram and Rakesh Karamchand were sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Once again, they were allowed to make statements, and, unlike his son, Carlton begged profusely for release. He told the court he would provide a tractor to the family of the victims, give them a plot of his land, help them plant, provide him with the food and profit from his crops and ensure the deceased's family "never suffered" or had to worry about money again. When the judge asked Carlton whether he had ever tried to help them during the 7 years he was awaiting trial, he admitted he had not.

Rakesh was just as desperate, begging to be released because he wanted to see his five grandchildren, who were all born during his incarceration. Also, despite now pleading guilty, Rakesh claimed that he had nothing to do with the murder and went to go fishing on his own after dropping the other three off. The judge was unswayed. The two only avoided the death penalty because they changed their pleas to guilty.

Carlton and Rakesh during the trial

Tameshwar Jagmohan is now one of only 30 death row inmates in Guyana. Since Guyana has a moratorium on capital punishment, having never officially carried out a death sentence since 1997, it is unlikely that Tameshwar will be executed anytime in the near future.

Sources

https://pastebin.com/qphQRHhX

(If you're wondering how I got a case with this much information out so quickly despite having just uploaded a write-up here yesterday, I made a post yesterday where I explained that I have started working on doing two cases at the same time, working on one case one day and then another the next and so on. So by the time I uploaded yesterday's write-up, this one was already 3-5 paragraphs from being done)

Born in April 1964, Foridalma Roque hailed from El Paraíso, a town in Honduras' Copán department near the Guatemalan border. While she spent most of her early life in Honduras, she occasionally lived across the border in Guatemala's Petén Department, where many of her family also lived.

Floridalma Roque

Rural Guatemala and Honduras weren't the most ideal places to live back in the 1970s, both impoverished and run by military dictatorships, so in 1980, when she was 17, Floridalma left Honduras, immigrating to the United States and settling in Queens, New York, where she would raise her 4 children with her husband and later grandchildren.

In America, Floridalma attended school and graduated as a nurse specializing in caring for the elderly, a field she devoted most of her adult life to. Not long after obtaining her nursing credentials, she also became an American citizen, now holding triple citizenship with Honduras, Guatemala and the United States. Floridalma was a woman who deeply cared for and loved her family and patients.

And speaking of her family, many of them did not immigrate with her; many of her extended family and some members of her immediate family still lived in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, while some of her adult children left the US to study in Guatemala or Mexico. She would visit her family every two years, and whenever she went to Honduras, she would, without fail, cross the border into Guatemala to visit her siblings in Petén.

In late May 2023, she returned to Honduras as one of her many visits to her family. Then, on June 3, 2023, she boarded a plane that landed in Guatemala City, Guatemala's capital. She met with several of her relatives in the city, including one of her sons who was studying at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala. However, she also had a second reason for visiting the country.

Floridalma had used some of her savings to invest in plastic surgery. In 2021, she underwent a successful procedure at the Perfektima clinic in Guatemala City, which holds two permits for a specialized hospital and one for an aesthetic center. The purpose of her visit was for a lipoescultura, and she walked away satisfied with the results.

Therefore, she began saving up her money for a second visit to the clinic for eyelid rejuvenation, reduction of skin flaccidity in her arms, and liposuction. This procedure would cost around 10,000 dollars. If she had only known about the owner of the Perfektima clinic, she might have had second thoughts about entrusting herself to their care.

Born in 1975 to a Lebanese immigrant family in Guatemala, Dr. Kevin Malouf Sierra had a privileged background; for example, he was the nephew of Antonio Malouf, Guatemala's former Minister of Economy.

Dr. Kevin Malouf Sierra

Kevin wasted no time pursuing a career in medicine, completing his specialization in plastic and reconstructive surgery at the Hospital General Manuel Gea González in Mexico City from 2004 to 2007. He was subsequently certified as a specialist in plastic, aesthetic, and reconstructive surgery by the Mexican National Board of Certification, the National Academy of Surgery, and the National Academy of Medicine of Mexico in 2012.

Despite already having all the necessary qualifications, Kevin wasn't done with his education. He crossed the ocean and began studying microsurgery at the University Hospital of Ghent, Belgium and then studied microsurgery and aesthetic surgery in Barcelona, Spain.

Kevin was a member of the following organizations: the Mexican Association of Plastic, Aesthetic and Reconstructive Surgery, the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the Association of Plastic Surgeons of Lebanese Descent, and the Association of Former Residents of Dr. Ortiz-Monasterio. Kevin was also certified as a plastic surgeon on November 25, 2006.

Upon completing his education, Kevin moved back to Guatemala City and, in 2018, opened the Perfektima clinic in Zone 14, one of the city's most upscale areas. The clinic was a success, which only made Kevin more successful.

He got to meet and take photos with notable figures and celebrities, including Bad Bunny, Pepe Aguilar, and Yuri, as well as presidents and ambassadors. He was also invited as a guest to several high-profile events, including the 2019 Latin Grammy Awards.

A selfie Kevin took with Bad Bunny

So what was the problem? Well, just because Kevin was an educated doctor didn't mean he was actually a competent one, or even a moral one, for that matter. Kevin had been the subject of many public complaints, and at the time of Floridalma's visit, the Guatemalan Public Ministry had six active investigations against him for six seperate cases of medical malpractice and crimes unrelated to his profession.

In 2011, a patient died while he was serving as her attending physician. Details about this death aren't well-known.

In 2015, he threatened his girlfriend with a firearm, although she didn't press charges against him; she did go on to file a restraining order against him.

Then in 2016, Kevin held his brother at gunpoint, though much like Kevin's girlfriend, he declined to press any charges against him.

In November 2018, a fellow doctor filed a complaint against Kevin, accusing him of negligence and causing culpable bodily harm after he allegedly caused a patient to suffer a lesion to the peroneal nerve during an operation, resulting in partial paralysis of her leg.

Come 2019, Kevin brandished his firearm one more time, this time to threaten a cousin with it. For the third time, his victim decided not to press charges against the doctor, and the case was closed through mutual conciliation.

On November 19, 2021, a young woman named Johana Yamileth Salman Molina de Oliva entered the Perfektima clinic to undergo liposuction. Hailing from San Luis Petén, Johana was the daughter-in-law of the former congressman and mayor of San Luis Petén, Macario Efraín Oliva Muralles. During the procedure, Johana suffered a cardiac arrest during or after the operation, and when her family arrived at the clinic, she had already passed away. Although a manslaughter investigation was launched against him and the other surgeon with whom he was operating, no charges were ever filed.

Despite now having a body count exceeding 1 to his name, Kevin wouldn't suffer any consequences for Johana's death, not even a temporary suspension of his medical license. So because of that, he continued operating the Perfektima clinic as if nothing had happened, continuing to advertise his services.

That being said, he did suffer some reputational damage; in certain medical circles, Kevin's fellow doctors would refer to him as "Doctor Death". Aside from having had two patients die mid-operation and threatening to kill three of his family members with a firearm, he also earned that nickname because he seemed to display a certain veneration toward Santa Muerte.

A former staff member of his (who would also be arrested for what came next) also said that Kevin regularly talked about his patients in a derogatory and insulting manner after the anesthesia was applied, often calling them "old" and "stupid".

However, Floridalma, not living in the city or even the country, was largely unaware of Kevin's history and his at times fatal negligence. When she had her first successful surgery at his clinic, that was simply Flordialma getting lucky.

After speaking with Kevin, her appointment was scheduled for June 13. The day before the operation, on June 12, she met with him and paid him 74,400 Guatemalan quetzals for the procedure.

On the morning of June 13, 2023, Floridalma was dropped off at the clinic carrying a black suitcase.

Floridalma entering the clinic

Upon entering the lobby, she was guided by the staff to the elevator and taken up to the third floor. She was accompanied by a friend, but the clinic staff turned her away and said they'd call her when Floridalma's surgery was complete.

Five minutes before she was scheduled to enter the operating room, she sent a message to her children telling them she loved them. Afterward, they wouldn't hear from her mother again.

At 7:00 a.m. on June 14, that same friend returned to the clinic to pick up and ask about Floridalma. However, the staff told her that Floridalma had discharged herself against their advice and had already left with an Uber she had called.

Immediately, her family were now distrustful of the clinic. Floridalma did not know Guatemala City well and never travelled alone within the city; in fact, Floridalma hated travelling alone at all. She also didn't know how to use Uber or similar apps and didn't even have them installed on her phone, which had been turned off right before the surgery began. When they called Kevin out on this, he suddenly changed his story and told her family that they had helped her into the car and arranged one for her.

Her family members went to Guatemala's Public Ministry and immideately filed a missing person report with them. In response, they quickly issued an Alerta Isabel-Claudina (their version of an Amber Alert) for her.

Floridalma's missing person notice

Upon the alert being made public, Floridalma's sons living in Mexico and the United States were quick to fly down to Guatemala to help look for their mother. When they went to the home Floridalma was staying in, they found a suitcase still in the residence that contained all her documentation, including the full receipt for the surgery, items she would've likely have taken with her.

The police also checked Floridalma's banking history, and the last purchase on her credit card was for the surgery itself; there was no charge for an Uber or anything else after the surgery.

While waiting for the police's investigation to bear any fruit, her sons conducted their own search. They visited various hospitals and morgues in the city, but none of them had admitted a woman matching Floridalma's description.

They also posted appeals on social media that went viral not only in Guatemala but also among Guatemalan and Honduran diaspora communities in the United States. They also sought assistance from the U.S. Consulate in Guatemala, the FBI, the Guatemalan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and petitioned the Guatemalan police to file an Interpol Yellow Notice. And finally, they started a GoFundMe campaign, which received many donations.

Feeling the pressure from the viral media campaign and the fact that the police had already caught him in a lie due to Floridalma's banking history, Kevin went to his social media and uploaded a response video on June 18.

In this video, which he filmed while driving, Kevin denied responsibility and reiterated his initial claim that Floridalma had left the clinic of her own accord. He said he had "tens of witnesses" supporting his account as well as the clinic's CCTV footage showing Floridalma leaving.

A still from Kevin's responce

He also claimed to be the victim and that he was living in hiding and fear for his life as he felt the campaign from Floridalma's family would lead to vigilantes attacking him, which prompted him to file a police report of his own, urging the authorities to take action against those who orchestrated a "smear campaign" against him. In addition, he dismissed the public's concern as "gossip," labelled the surgery a major success, accused Floridalma's family of sending him death threats and said he was cooperating fully with the investigation.

In the same video, he also made this comment in response to accusations that he wasn't properly treating Floridalma or giving her the medication she needed: "It's important to say that the doctor's responsibility ends when they leave the premises. When a medication is prescribed, and the patient doesn't take it, that's not the doctor's fault. You can't go to their house and pat them down, as we say with dogs, to make them take the pill." Comparing the missing woman, whose disappearance he was a suspect in, to a dog did nothing to soothe public outrage toward him, and Kevin promptly disabled all comments on his social media.

He would also give several media interviews in which he said much the same. When a journalist asked why he hadn't informed Floridalma's family that the surgery was over and they could pick her up, he said that when he asked her for her emergency contacts, she told him her only relative was a brother in Mexico.

Now, the CCTV footage that Kevin mentioned in his response was real, and when the police arrived at his clinic to review it, this is what they saw. Floridalma was recorded entering the building at 7:05 a.m. and disappeared from view after entering the third floor, where the operating room was located.

And then, Kevin's word was seemingly proven true when the cameras later captured a member of Kevin's staff wheeling Floridalma, still alive but with her head bandaged after the surgery, out of the clinic on a wheelchair.

Floridalma being wheeled out of the clinic

The police were convinced after seeing this and felt that Kevin had been exonerated. Well, partly anyway. The police still believed foul play to be involved since Floridalma's bank history still showed no purchases after the surgery, so the police believed the staff were simply mistaking the car she got into as an Uber and that Floridalma had been abducted after leaving the premises and started devoting their efforts to identifying the vehicle she must've boarded.

But then her family watched the footage themselves, and it was plain to see that the woman in the wheelchair wasn't Floridalma. Floridalma was short, approximately 1.5 meters tall, with a distinctive body type from breast augmentation surgery that didn't match the woman in the video.

Additionally, the woman was visibly taller and had a different body type and build than Floridalma; the only thing she had in common with Floridalma was that she was wearing her clothing.

When this came to their attention, the police agreed and decided they'd watch the rest of the clinic's CCTV footage from that day. At around 8:40 p.m., a man was seen entering the same floor via the elevator. At 9:36 p.m., the same man was seen exiting a black SUV that had followed the supposed "Uber"/"Taxi" that "Floridalma" entered, heading back to the third floor.

Then, the footage from around 10:57-11:03 p.m. showed Kevin transporting a large black garbage bin, roughly waist-high on a tall person, toward the building's elevator and down to the basement parking area.

Kevin removing the garbage bin from the clinic

Based on this extra footage, Kevin was once again a suspect, so the police searched the Perfektima clinic, where they found that several large black plastic bags had disappeared. That, combined with the garbage bin, was starting to paint a picture of what likely happened to Floridalma.

Prior to the really suspicious activity, Kevin was seen on his phone, pacing back and forth. So the police were interested in who he was speaking to. After obtaining Kevin's phone records, it was revealed that during the afternoon and evening of June 13, he made several calls to pharmacies, ambulance and EMS services (without actually saying he needed an ambulance or paramedic) and to his fellow doctors and physicians. According to them, he was looking to purchase an anticoagulant called heparin, something odd if the surgery was a resounding success with zero complications.

Now that there was undeniable proof that Kevin and the staff at the Perfektima clinic had staged Floridalma's departure, the next order of business was to identify everyone in the footage who was part of the ruse.

Aside from Kevin himself, the woman in the wheelchair posing as Floridalma was a nursing assistant named Susana Emilia Rojas Cruz; the man pushing the wheelchair was a nurse, Luis Alfredo Castro Molina; and, finally, the fourth person involved was the clinic's anesthesiologist, Lydia Viviana Silva Moreira.

There was also a fifth person, the clinic's receptionist, 37-year-old Cindy Maybeli Barrios Morales. When Cindy was first questioned, she told the police that it was her day off and therefore she hadn't been at the clinic during Floridalma's surgery. However, the CCTV footage did show her working on that day.

On July 28, the police raided the clinic and their homes, arresting four of them.

The four after their arrest

Cindy wasn't present and left Guatemala City shortly after giving her testimony, so the police had no idea where she was. The four they did manage to arrest were presented before the Prosecutor's Office against the Crime of Femicide for their court hearing on August 4.

The four at their court hearing

All four refused to confess or make any statements, but the authorities moved forward with the charges regardless. Despite being brought ot the prosecutor's femicide office, nothing involving murder or even manslaughter would be among their charges because Floridalma's whereabouts remained missing and thus her cause of death unknown. So instead, Kevin and his staff were charged with kidnapping and obstruction of justice.

In the meantime, with all the publicity, Kevin finally faced some consequences even before the trial began. On September 13, he had his medical license stripped away from him, and the Perfektima clinic was forced to close its doors. Not long after, a new practice was opened from that building with no involvement from Kevin.

For a while, that would be the end of the case, as hearings were spaced out and all 4 defendants were true to their word, staying silent and refusing to make any statements or confessions. But on May 2, 2024, it would be Luis who cracked and requested to be brought before the judge and prosecution to make a statement. This is what he had to say.

When Floridalma stepped into the operating room on June 13, 2023, the surgery began as scheduled, but during the operation, Floridalma started suffering from complications due to her diabetes. Her blood sugar rose to above 350 and could not be brought down.

Luis, Susana, and Lydia repeatedly warned Kevin that she needed insulin and that they had to call an ambulance, but Kevin refused, saying, "No, that's very expensive, I'm not going to pay for it." However, transferring Floridalma to the hospital would've cost only $400 USD, not a lot of money for someone of his means, and the insulin would've cost just $65.

So despite the high blood pressure, Kevin simply said, "I forgot to tell you that this old woman didn't take her metformin," and went back to the operating room to continue the procedure despite having several opportunities to save his patient. Eventually, Kevin administered some insulin, but by then it was far too late. At 9:30 p.m., Floridalma passed away on the operating table.

Even though Kevin had a mostly loyal staff, friends in high places, and had already gotten away with several crimes and instances of medical malpractice, for some reason, he feared things would be different here. At some point, Luis began recording the conversation Kevin had with his staff in which he told them they had to hide Floridalma's death.

Kevin told the staff about how they would construct a false narrative about how the surgery was a success, and that she left the clinic alive and well, and simply tell the police they had no idea what happened after she left the premises. Kevin said, "We are not killing anyone; we are only doing what is best for everyone," and then, in that same conversation, said, "If God exists, I do ask forgiveness for the lack of respect. I insist, we did everything to save her life". This, despite the fact that mere minutes earlier, he actively impeded his staff in their efforts to get him to save Floridalma.

But what would they do with Floridalma's body? Kevin didn't hesitate when he suggested that they dismember her remains right there on the grounds of the clinic. Luis refused to take part in that, but it appeared to be fine by Kevin, who insisted he would handle the dismemberment entirely on his own and ensure her remains were never found. When Luis wondered how he thought of that plan on the spot, Kevin assured him that he had a  "contingency" plan for any situation.

He also justified disposing of/burying Floridalma's remains with this line: "All we are doing is giving her a proper burial, as the family should have seen her." he also defended himself to his staff by saying he'd have to endure death threats from Floridalma's family if they heard she died.

The staff agreed to the plan and got to work. First, they retrieved Floridalma's clothing from her suitcase, and Susana wore them herself. Susana then got into a wheelchair while the rest covered her face with bandages. Luis then pushed her through the clinic and out of the building, down into the areas of the Europlaza building that Kevin knew had few working CCTV cameras.

Knowing which levels and corridors in the building had no cameras, Kevin parked his vehicle in the underground parking garage out of view of the cameras. Luis pushed Susana until they reached the street outside, where they were not under any CCTV surveillance. Susana then called a taxi, which dropped her off in Zone 10 of the city, where Kevin, having followed the taxi in his SUV, discreetly picked her up and drove her right back to Perfektima clinic.

Just for good measure, Kevin paid the owner of that building 10,000 Guatemalan quetzals to delete the footage. According to Luis, bribery was nothing new for Kevin.

Realizing all the forensic evidence he'd likely leave behind, Kevin changed his mind about dismembering Floridama's body inside his business, so instead, he, Luis, Susana and Lydia put Floridama's body into the fetal position to fit it inside the garbage bin.

What happened next is a lot more sparse in detail as Luis wasn't present and only heard of it from everyone else, but from what he did know, he told the police that Kevin finally left the clinic at 11:57 p.m. with Luis helping him carry the container holding Floridalma's body, although once the container was stuffed into his vehicle, Kevin drove away on his own.

Before leaving, he called two friends of his, whom he referred to as "Chepe Guasaña" and "José." The police were unable to trace their numbers through call records, and in the call Kevin made to them, he instructed the two to turn off their phones so they couldn't be tracked.

Kevin lived in a town, on the outskirts of Guatemala City, called Santa Catarina Pinula, and once he arrived at his home, he, together with Chepe Guasaña and José, used a chainsaw to dismember Floridalma's body.

Afterwards, the remains were placed in the plastic bags they had taken from the clinic, and Kevin then drove to a town called Palín in the Escuintla Department. Kevin made his way to an avocado farm he owned, where he threw Floridalma's remains down a 60-meter-deep well, then covered the well up with a thick layer of soil, tree branches, leaves, and lime.

The well in question

On the morning of June 5, 2024, agents from Guatemala's National Civil Police were dispatched to the avocado farm, and upon locating the well, they began the excavation to recover Floridalma's remains.

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After 14 hours, the police retrieved the last plastic bag containing the now highly decomposed and skeletal remains of a woman, cut into 6 pieces. The cuts were largely made at the arms, femur and some cervical vertebrae; some bones were never found, and others couldn't be identified due to the state of the remains. The remains were also not immediately identifiable, only being identified as Floridalma's on July 16, after DNA testing.

Earlier, on July 4, Cindy was tracked down to the city of Chiquimula and extradited back to Guatemala City, where she was charged with lying to the police and courts about her presence at the clinic that day.

Cindy after her extradition

With the last remaining participant in custody and armed with Luis's story, the prosecutor updated the charges. Now, on August 21, all four found themselves charged with murder. The prosecution argued that Kevin purposefully withheld medical care from Floridalma to save money and for the sake of his reputation; meanwhile, his staff faced murder charges for refusing to stand up to Kevin and call an ambulance themselves.

On September 12, 2024, their trial began at the Fourth Multi-Person Court of First Instance for Criminal Matters, and it was fairly short. While Luis was the only one who actively cooperated and made detailed statements, Kevin, Susana and Lydia all pleaded guilty. However, this trial only involved their obstruction of justice charges and not murder, so all of them got lenient sentences, at least initially.

All four were given a sentence of four years imprisonment, although if they paid a high enough fine, those sentences could have been reduced to just two years. Additionally, they all had to pay fines as part of their sentences, with Lydia paying 16,922.95 Guatemalan quetzals, Luis and Susana paying 10,000 quetzals each, and Kevin paying 33,845.90 quetzals.

But what of their murder charges? Well, the prosecution suffered a severe setback in that regard when the judge declined to have the trial go forward and instead reduced the charges to negligent homicide rather than murder since the judge determined that the prosecution had no evidence that Kevin acted with the express intention of ending Floridalma's life.

The leniency continued when, in December, the Court of Honour of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Guatemala suspended Kevin and Lydia's medical licenses for just 4 years, meaning the two still had the potential to practice medicine in the future.

After several delays owing to the judge suddenly recusing themselves from the case, the four returned to court to stand trial for negligent homicide. On March 5, 2025, all four (I don't know what happened to Cindy) pleaded guilty albiet without actually confessing or making a statement. With their pleas entered, the court went straight to sentencing, and they were, by and large, given the maximum or at least close to it. The issue arises when one sees just how severe the maximum penalty for those charges is.

For the death and later dismemberment of Floridalma Roque, Kevin Malouf Sierra was handed down a sentence of 5 years imprisonment and a fine of $1,300 USD. Lydia Viviana Silva Moreira was given 5 years as well, Susana Emilia Rojas Cruz was hit with 3 years, and Luis Alfredo Castro Molina, in exchange for his cooperation, which put him on the receiving end of several death threats, wasn't charged with negligent homicide.

In addition, they were legally prohibited from working in the medical field for 6 years and 7 months, a longer period than the suspension of their medical licenses, so in total, they all have to wait 10 years if they ever want to practice medicine again.

Owing to time served, Kevin's 5-year sentence was reduced by one-third to 3 years and 4 months; Lydia's to 2 years and 3 months; and Susana's to 2 years.

Within just 5 days of these verdicts, Guatemala's Constitutional Court intervened and annulled them, largely questioning the judge's decision to let Kevin skip the majority of his prison time with a simple fine.

On June 5, the Constitutional Court denied the prosecutor's push to charge Kevin with murder after all, but still moved forward with a retrial. In the event that Kevin is convicted in this second trial, he would lose the right he previously had to commute a large portion of his prison time with a fine.

Unfortunately, no new trial has yet been held because the courts keep disagreeing on which court should try him, several courts have recusing themselves, and the prosecution's continued efforts to charge Kevin with murder. The last hearing was held in April, 2026, and they failed to reach an agreement. As of now, Kevin only has 5 more years in prison left to serve.

However, Kevin's legal trials aren't over just yet. In September 2025, Kevin was formally charged with culpable bodily harm in connection with the botched surgery back in November 2018, when he caused a patient to suffer a lesion to the peroneal nerve and partially paralyzed her.

Kevin's legal defence is that the patient caused those injuries and disabilities themselves via their own negligence and for disregarding Kevin's advice on what to do and what not to do during the recovery period, presenting the medical report written upon the surgery's completion, which showed no complications at that time. The prosecution, however, claims to have an audio recording in its possession in which Kevin admits the error was his own, saying, "That photo of the nerve, Damn, what bad luck… right there, piercing the nerve."

After being postponed once already, the trial in this case is set to begin on July 23, 2026.

Sources

https://pastebin.com/LaYvm5Qp

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. 

Anyway, with that in mind, I was wondering if anyone here knows of any true-crime cases from Kosovo, 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.

(A month ago, I did upload this write-up to this subreddit alongside another true crime one, but deleted it after a comment said it didn't fit as an attempted mass murder since he didn't shoot anyone else despite having the chance to do so.

But, having thought about it a lot more, I decided to reupload the case because a third person was injured by the killer in this case, and I remembered that the only reason he didn't shoot anybody else was that he had run out of ammo and was reloading when the police arrived. So it very well could've been a mass killing if the third unnamed victim failed to pull through and if the police were late to arrive. It is for these reasons that I'm deciding to re-upload this write-up)

On October 20, 2023, the Panamanian government passed a single piece of legislation named "Ley 406 del 20 de octubre de 2023". A contract between the government of Panama and the Canadian company, First Quantum Minerals, the operator of Cobre Panamá, the largest open-pit copper mine in Central America, located in the Colón Province. Said mine covered approximately 12,955.1 hectares of land, employed 40,000-50,000 workers, and accounted for 5% of Panama's GDP.

For 25 years prior to that, mine was already controversial. The first contract was signed in 1997, and the agreement was challenged almost immideately. In 2017, a full 20 years later, Panama's Supreme Court of Justice struck down the contract, declaring it unconstitutional. In the meantime, the owners had sold concession rights and assets to Cobre Panamá, a subsidiary of First Quantum Minerals, for $60 million. It was plain to many that this transaction was just a way to skirt around the court's ruling.

By 2019, the mine was already up and running, and Panama's president, Laurentino Cortizo, sought to regularize the situation through a new contract, opening negotiations in March 2023.

Even negotiating at all was unpopular with the Panamanian public. The Centre for Environmental Impact in Panama filed a protection request before the Supreme Court in July 2023, arguing that the contract violated the Escazú Agreement, a treaty among Latin American states on environmental access and public participation, which Panama had signed in 2020. In addition to destroying several tracts of rainforest, the mine also ran the risk of contaminating the drinking water of the locals and indigenous tribes.

On August 28, a large group of students gathered in front of the National Assembly to protest during the first of three debates on the contract as it worked its way through Panama's legislature. On October 16, the bell was approved by 47 votes in favour, 6 against, and 2 abstentions. On October 20, President Cortizo signed it into law.

It was even worse than people had feared. Aside from trying to fast-track the bill as soon as possible despite widespread opposition, the contract expanded operations into previously protected areas and allowed them to mine there for over 40 years. The people were already furious that a company was allowed to exploit and destroy their country's environment in this way, but First Quantum Minerals, being a foreign company, only angered them further.

The protests were immediate: within just 12 hours of President Cortizo signing the law, trade union leaders, indigenous communities, student organizations, teachers' associations, doctors, religious leaders, farmers, and ordinary citizens all joined forces and took to the streets across the country, blocking roads nationwide. All across the country, people were chanting "This homeland is not for sale" and "Mine, we don't want you."

Just one of the many demostrations

At first, the police dispersed the demonstrators, firing tear gas at those near the presidential palace. But little could be done, as this was an issue that united Panama. Truck drivers refused to work, and schools and universities were shut down as teachers and students made up the bulk of the protesters.

Fishing communities in the Caribbean Provinces also purposefully stalled their boats so no fishing could be done, amplifying the pressure. At the port of Punta Rincón, the fisherman blocked the port with their vessels so the mine couldn't go around the demonstrations by supplying themselves via the sea. Without coal coming from the port, the mine had to reduce operations, even with the government's support.

Because of the protests, there were food and fuel shortages in Panama City and the province of Colón, where the much-hated mine was located, and traffic was paralyzed as people from all walks of life blocked every province's section of the Pan American Highway. Blocking the roads alone caused $80 million in losses.

At first, the government seemed unwilling to budge. President Cortizo and his administration appeared multiple times on national media to condemn those taking part, arguing that their road closures were harming Panama's economy and GDP and that the people had to accept the contract, warning that closing it down would cost 8,000 direct jobs and 40,000 indirect jobs, which they desperately needed due to reduced traffic in the Panama Canal and Tourism due to COVID-19.

This argument fell flat because, for many in Panama, taking a principled stance and stopping First Quantum Minerals was the pressing issue above all else. Surveys revealed that 93% of Panamanians considered protecting the environment and opposing this mine the most important requirement of "good citizenship," placing it ahead of the nation's economy on their list of priorities.

And so, the people have kept coming, with tens of thousands taking to the streets of the capital and all nearby cities every single day since the law was signed on October 20. Desperate, President Cortizo proposed a national referendum on the contract to the public. It was a solution everyone saw as inadequate; there would be a lot of opportunities to sway the vote, and for most of the protesters, why bother? Anyone could tell just by looking outside that a majority of the public would've voted "No" anyway.

On November 3, feeling the heat, the government finally made a concession. They issued an indefinite moratorium on any new mining concessions to First Quantum Minerals. This measure also did nothing to slow down their momentum. Once again, those taking part felt it was too little too late, especially since the original contract was still in place. And so the largest demonstrations Panama had seen since the late 1980s, when the people took to the streets in protest against the dictatorship of Manuel Noriega, continued on.

Among those who took part in the protest was a school teacher named Abdiel Díaz Chávez. Originally from the city of Penonomé in the Coclé Province, Abdiel was a middle school teacher in San Carlos, Panamá Oeste Province. He was an active member of the "Association of Teachers of the Republic of Panama," which had been one of the most organized behind the strikes and road closures. His colleagues viewed him as a committed teacher, and he was also known locally as a musician.

Another participant in the protests was 62-year-old Iván Rodrigo Mendoza. Iván lived in Chame, a small town in the Panamá Oeste Province, and worked as a welder; however, his wife was a school teacher and a member of the same Association as Abdiel.

Abdiel with two of his fellow teachers preparing for a protest.

Abdiel (top) and Iván (bottom)

On November 7, 2023, three weeks after the protests began, the people returned to the street and began blocking their section of the Pan American highway, specifically in front of the business known as "Quesos Milly," just outside the entrance to Chame.

By now, this particular stretch of highway had been blocked by the protestors for two weeks. Abdiel had been here since the beginning, while Iván also decided to join out of solidarity with his wife and the organization she belonged to, and because he believed in the protestors' cause himself. On this day, the protesters were also joined by several non-teachers. Traffic was backed up for miles that day. The journalists' presence also meant that what came next was recorded for the entire world to see.

One man, toward the back of the line of cars, exited his vehicle and started walking toward the protesters. The man in question was a visibly elderly caucasian man. He walked toward the blockade right up to the protesters and, with as loud a voice as he could muster, demanded that they all get off the road. Alarmingly, the man was holding a Glock semi-automatic pistol in his left hand.

The man walking up to the protesters

The man then began clearing the blockade himself, using his right hand to pick up and remove the debris the protesters had left on the road, such as tires, rocks, and logs. At the same time, he held firm on the pistol, and the sight of it caused most of them to back away; only a small group remained close enough to speak with him. One of them outright asked if he was going to kill any of them, to which he looked toward them and said, "Do you want to be the first?" Meanwhile, a woman in the crowd didn't think the situation was real and tried calling his bluff, challenging him to "Go ahead, shoot...shoot!"

Two women approached this stranger and tried to talk him down. The man yelled at the two to step aside and demanded to speak to "the leaders of the protest". Several women in the crowd said they were, to which he said, "I don’t want to talk to women. I want to talk to men."

Abdiel and Iván then both approached, with Abdiel holding the Panamanian flag, and identified themselves as local leaders.

Abdiel approching the man

One woman was heard saying, "Why doesn't he shoot? He'll have to kill all of us". Mere seconds later, at 2:40 p.m. exactly, he pointed the pistol at Abdiel and pulled the trigger.

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The fatal shot

Abdiel instantly fell to the asphalt as the bullet struck him in the neck. Chaos soon engulfed the highway with screams heard throughout. But the gunman seemed perfectly calm. His facial expression didn't even change as he fired a second shot, hitting Iván.

Additionally, a third man whose name has not been disclosed was also shot and injured, although he luckily survived. In the immediate aftermath, the shooter was then heard proclaiming, "That ends the problem."

As mentioned, this protest attracted people from all walks of life, so several doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel were already at the scene and rushed to Abdiel's aid. There was unfortunately nothing they could do; he had died in front of his colleagues, students and relatives before he had even hit the ground.

Meanwhile, Iván, barely clinging to life, walked several meters across the road before collapsing and losing consciousness. His friends who had joined him in the protest loaded him into their car and drove to the nearest clinic in San Carlos, but by the time they had arrived, Iván had already passed away.

Meanwhile, the man who just shot the two dead in cold blood once again showed no emotion and simply cleared more tires and debris off the highway before turning around and walking back to his own car and getting inside. However, the vehicle didn't move.

The police arrived quickly after being called, having already been on their way because of the roadblock. Upon arriving, they found the shooter still sitting in his car and in the middle of reloading his pistol when they showed up.

Travelling with them were two women, one of whom was his wife. They told the police that he ordered his wife to start the car and drive away, but she refused, telling him "we're not leaving," and even called the police right in front of her husband. She also wouldn't turn the car on, leaving him a sitting duck until the police arrived and placed him under arrest. He showed no remorse and didn't ask about the condition of the two men he had just killed, or say anything for that matter.

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The police arresting the gunman

His wife and the other woman, a friend of theirs, were questioned at the scene, and they were borderline inconsolable and just as shocked as everybody else. They said they had been in the district of La Chorrera that day, running errands, and were on their way home in the upscale Paitilla district of Panama City when they came across a backed-up line of cars and trucks outside of Chame due to protesters blocking the road.

There, he turned to the two women and pulled out a pistol from the pocket of his trousers, one they didn't even know he owned, before saying, "This ends here" and exiting the vehicle. After the shooting, the two were distraught and horrified, asking him if he had any idea what he had done, perhaps hoping that, at the very least, dementia was setting in due to his age and that they could say he wasn't being himself. Instead, he showed no remorse; he callously stated, "Yes, I killed one, and I shot the other," before ordering his wife to flee the scene.

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The police having secrued the crime scene in the aftermath

Because of the journalists at the scene, the footage went viral internationally, especially in the United States, where a sizable number of people were almost supportive of the shooter's actions. A far-right YouTuber (whom I will not name) said that the victims were "Not just a nuisance, but enemies of civilization who threaten the lives of innocent people around the world," and that because blocking the road constituted a public safety hazard, any action taken to remove them was justified. Western Outlets also erroneously called them "climate protestors," often likening them to the much less popular "Just Stop Oil."

One name that frequently popped up was Kyle Rittenhouse and how the killer now found himself often compared to him, if not outright called "The Next Kyle Rittenhouse," which, depending on what side of the politcal aisle one is on, would be a glowing complement for or a damning indictment of the shooter.

But in Panama, there was no debate or controversy, only anger and condemnation. The protests weren't entirely peaceful; two people had already died in vehicle accidents related to the road being closed, and 40 police officers were injured, as well as hundreds of protesters and one journalist who had been hit by rubber bullets fired by the police.

This was on top of 1,500 documented arbitrary detentions made and 23 criminal charges levied against the protestors, and punitive measures against teachers and union members who participated in strikes, such as losing their jobs. But this was different, two of the protesters demonstrating against their environment and home being exploited by a foreign company had been killed in cold blood by a man who looked very foreign.

By the evening of November 7, the road was still blocked, not just because the shooter had turned it into a crime scene (and therefore just delayed the reopening of the highway further), but now it also served as a vigil for Abdiel and Iván. The protests also only increased now that their cause had a martyr.

Starting on November 8, the protestors were now dressed in black and, on their knees, observed a minute of silence, offered prayers, and sang the teachers' hymn. In addition, the various government organizations, the mining companies and President Cortizo were held responsible by the people just as much as the killer was.

President Cortizo himself also issued a statement expressing his condolences to the families of Abdiel and Iván and condemning the shooting. But his words were considered hollow, with almost every reply to his statement met with condemnation. Among the gripes many had was that instead of naming the victims or commenting on the protests, he simply referred to them as "the two citizens" and instead of calling it a murder said that they "lost their lives in an incident". And of course, many blamed his administration for setting in motion the events that led to their deaths in the first place.

The president's statement

And of course, the anger was largely directed toward the killer. Some of the protesters followed the police after they took him away, and a large crowd gathered in front of the police station and followed him to his first court hearing, also on November 8.

The killer after his arrest

Because of the protests outside the court, he needed a large police escort as the crowd chanted, "Murderer, murderer! Prison for the murderer!"

One of the protests outside the courthouse

But now for what everybody wanted to know, who actually was the shooter?

The man, 77 years old at the time of the double murder, was named Kenneth Franklin Darlington Sala, and he was not a stranger to the police.

Kenneth Franklin Darlington Sala

He was born in 1946 at a hospital in the Panama Canal Zone near the city of Colón. Panama practices unrestricted birthright citizenship, and since Kenneth was also born to American parents in the Canal Zone, which the United States administered at the time, he was a dual national from the moment of birth, holding both Panamanian and American citizenship.

Kenneth came from a high-profile family; his father, Henry Ivor Darlington, served as the Honorary Consul of South Africa in Panama. Kenneth would inherit his father's honorary consulship upon his father's death.

The consulship operated out of the same offices as those associated with the financial operations of Marc M. Harris, a con artist who was convicted of embezzling and laundering millions of dollars in the United States and renounced his American citizenship prior to his arrest to become a citizen of Panama exclusively, as Panamanian law forbade the government from extraditing its own citizens. Kenneth knew Marc well, worked for him, and even served as his spokesperson once.

Despite his American citizenship, Kenneth lived almost exclusively in Panama, attending school there, where he appeared in the 1964 yearbook of a local high school.

Kenneth's yearbook photo.

It was in 1964, at this school, where Kenneth would commit his first act of violence.

On January 9, 1964, a group of local students attempted to raise the Panamanian flag in Balboa, the biggest city in the Canal Zone territory, but as they tried to do so, they were attacked by a group of students living in the zone who belonged to a group known as "Zonians," a term used to describe Americans born in the Canal Zone. Things really got violent when the Zonians tore the flag down

They fought back against the Zonians, and soon rioting broke out. The local Canal Zone police were overwhelmed, and soon U.S Army Units had to be called in. The fighting lasted for three days until the American military finally suppressed the violence. When all was said and done, 22 Panamanians and four U.S. soldiers were killed. This event, known as "Martyrs' Day," played a direct role in motivating the United States to cede the territory back to Panama.

A scene from Martyrs' Day.

Kenneth was among the Zonians who fought with the local Panamanians over the issue of raising their flag. And clearly, his sentiments hadn't changed in the 60 years since.

After graduating from high school, Kenneth pursued higher education in Panama proper, earning several university degrees as a dual citizen. He obtained a law degree and a master's degree in Higher Education, and in the ensuing years had careers as a lawyer, university professor, and in the financial sector.

He travelled to private universities and colleges across Panama, teaching courses in Forensic Psychiatry and law. According to his students, Kenneth wasn't exactly good teacher material. Withdrawn, solitary, uncommunicative and seemed bitter toward his students, he said that he always came off as bitter.

Kenneth was also known as a talented pianist, using that skill to record a 12-track LP titled "Piano y Ritmos". He was also an author, having written several books. In addition to Panama, he had briefly lived in Romania and Spain. At the time of the murders, he was a sitting professor at Florida State University-Panama.

In 2005, the police conducted a search of Kenneth's apartment in Panama City and discovered that the lawyer had been building an entire arsenal. The police seized two M-16 rifles, ten pistols, two revolvers, a shotgun, AK-47 ammunition, and M-16 ammunition. Under Panamanian law, these were considered "weapons of war," and civilians were prohibited from carrying them.

Kenneth's defence was that he was building a personal collection, but again, him even owning those weapons was a crime itself so he had effectively confessed. The Décimo Juzgado (Tenth Court) sentenced Kenneth to 32 months' imprisonment, but when he appealed his conviction in December 2007, the Supreme Court stunningly vacated the Conviction and acquitted him, leaving him with a clean criminal record when the protests broke out.

Kenneth was also investigated by the Panamanian police, who conducted their own investigation into Marc M. Harris's activities. Marc was eventually arrested by the local police while on a trip to Nicaragua, whose courts later extradited him to the United States. Kenneth faced no charges, and it's unknown how involved he actually was in Marc's seedy business.

One detail about Kenneth's background that would enrage the protestors even more was this: among the many clients he represented as a lawyer were several mining companies. The origin of Kenneth's pistol was unknown; it was unregistered and illegal, just like the 9 other firearms found in his possession when the police searched his home after his arrest, meaning Kenneth was also charged with illegal possession of firearms when brought to court to be indicted for the murders.

And at that hearing, Kenneth's lawyer argued that, due to his client's advanced age, there would be no danger if he were released on house arrest. He also tried to argue that Kenneth was senile, also owing to his age and was overmedicated at the time, but a psychiatric evaluation determined that despite pushing 80, Kenneth wasn't experiencing any cognitive decline and was in full control of his faculties, as shown by the coherant exchanges he had with the protestors and the very deliberate acts of removing the obstructions from the road, trying to flee the scene and reloading his weapon.

The court ordered that Kenneth be held in pretrial detention while awaiting trial, a condition Kenneth himself consented to. Chances were good that if he were given anything else, he either would've fled or been killed, especially since it wasn't just him but his family as a whole receiving death threats due to his actions.

Abdiel and Iván's funerals were held on November 10 with hundreds of teachers, former students, trade unionists, community members, friends, and family members joining in. Their funeral processions would span the length of the Pan-American Highway through the districts of La Chorrera, Capira, and Chame, accompanied by a band and carrying Panamanian flags and banners. As they passed through towns, more people joined them, with the mourners chanting Long live the martyrs of the homeland!"

The funeral procession

The church service was held at the church of María Auxiliadora in Bejuco, not far from where the two had been shot dead. The service was presided over by the president of the Panamanian Bishops' Conference, who also described the two as "Martyrs in the struggle against metallic mining."

When Abdiel's body was repatriated to his home city of Penonomé, hundreds more gathered with candles and Panamanian flags. One of the leaders present was now demanding that November 7 be permanently marked as "The Day of the Martyrs of Education." The Municipal Council of Chame, in a unanimous vote, passed a motion declaring that for the next 7 years, Iván's family wouldn't have to pay any cemetery fees.

Meanwhile, Kenneth's lawyer continued his efforts to secure his release. He argued that his rights had been violated for being kept in prison because it was inhumane to keep somebody so elderly in prison while his health was declining.

But as usual, the best way to refute his arguments was to just see Kenneth in person, who remained mentally sharp and in perfect health despite now being 78. He didn't appear to have health issues of any kind, physical or mental; therefore, no reason to release him either.

On May 13, 2024, all parties arrived at the Accusatory Criminal System (SPA) in Panama Oeste to begin arranging Kenneth's trial and setting a date for the proceedings.

Kenneth being brought to court

Kenneth's lawyer was fighting an uphill battle, especially because the footage was the prosecution's best piece of evidence since Kenneth was captured, up close in HD quality, executing Abdiel and Iván in cold blood.

There was no doubt of any kind to introduce; Kenneth's character and prior criminal history didn't make him seem sympathetic either, and they couldn't even argue he had been provoked since the footage showed the protestors trying to de-escalate while Abdiel and Iván were shot immideately upon identifying themselves.

The prosecution was seeking the maximum sentence the law in Panama allowed, 50 years' imprisonment, and they were in every position to do so. In fact, they took it a step further and argued that the murders were premeditated. Kenneth supposedly knew the road was going to be blocked; it was no secret after all, and yet he brought the gun with him and walked up to the protesters to open fire after telling his wife, "This ends here," so it wasn't as if he suddenly snapped.

The fact that he was reloading the pistol when the police arrived was damning in its own right, showing that he was more than prepared to shoot additional protesters had the police not arrived right when they did.

It was also what the public wanted, with a large crowd outside the courts chanting and demanding that justice be served.

Meanwhile, the facts above were why the defence kept pushing the narrative that Kenneth was senile so hard; it was really the only card they had to play, and it was just as easy to dismantle as ever. So he approached the prosecution for a plea deal instead.

On June 11, 2024, the judge accepted the plea deal, meaning no trial would ever actually take place. Although for the defendant, it wasn't a very good "deal". In exchange for confessing and accepting the indictment exactly as the prosecution presented it, Kenneth Franklin Darlington Sala would receive 48 years' imprisonment for possession of an illegal firearm and for the double murder of Abdiel Díaz Chávez and Iván Rodrigo Mendoza, and the wounding of the third victim, a sentence that fell just two years short of the maximum.

In addition, if by some miracle he survives the entirety of his sentence and gets to see the outside world again at the age of 125, Kenneth would have a 48-year ban on holding any firearms lest he be sent right back to prison.

Outside the courthouse, celebration and cheers erupted when they heard the news. While not the maximum, it was sufficient for many, including the families of Abdiel and Iván, who expressed satisfaction with the sentence. Many in attendance also said that the so-called "exemplary sentence" restored their faith in the Panamanian police and Justice system.

Additionally, the two did not die in vain. The protestors won their fight. By November 14, the fishermen's blockade had caused the mine to scale back operations due to a lack of coal, and by November 23, it had ceased operations in the area. First Quantum Minerals' stock fell by 50% as a direct result of the mass protests. They suffered $2,000 million in economic losses.

On November 28, 2023, Panama's Supreme Court struck down the mining contract as unconstitutional and ordered the mine to be permanently shut down. Federico Alfaro, the minister of Commerce and Industries and a vocal supporter of the contract, resigned his office on November 30. President Cortizo made a brief statement that he would abide by the court's ruling.

The ruling was met with cheers and celebrations in the streets, with the final protests peacefully dispersing on December 2, bringing this saga to an end. When President Laurentino Cortizo left office on July 1, 2024, he did so with an approval rating of just 19%.

Construction for a monument in Abdiel and Iván's honour began as early as November 30, 2023. That monument was unveiled on February 9, 2024. The monument, inscribed with the text "The fortress of struggle of the educators of the Chame and San Carlos districts against Law 406," is located adjacent to the Pan-American Highway, mere meters from the exact spot where Kenneth pulled that trigger.

Abdiel and Iván's memorial

Sources

(I had to share them this way because Pastebin flagged the paste for some reason)

(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 layout has changed for uploading and writing posts, so hopefully all the pictures are right and in the text body where I wanted them to go.)

At 2:25 a.m. February 14, 2009, a secruity guard stationed at the entrance of the Vạn Phúc Diplomatic Compound in Hanoi, Vietnam, noticed a large black Toyota Lexus SUV pulled to the curb, parked at an unnatural angle. The engine was still running, and he could see the driver reach through the open window and wave his arm weakly.

The Lexus as it was found.

He ran to the vehicle and, through the glass, saw the driver, a middle-aged man, slumped behind the wheel, his neck and clothing covered in blood. The compound had an on-site family clinic, so he rushed over and alerted the attending physician. The two returned to the Lexus, and after the doctor opened the door, the driver had passed away, his head slumped to the right against the passenger seat.

When the police arrived, they concluded that the man had been murdered. The vehicle's interior was completely soaked in blood. The step-plate on the driver's side was also coated in blood, and a series of blood-spray droplets ran along the car's right-rear exterior panel. The blood was even outside the vehicle, with several long streaks of blood found on the road about 50 meters from where the Lexus came to a stop.

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https://preview.redd.it/wfg890p17i6h1.png?width=450&format=png&auto=webp&s=6894c8cff83c6a4cf266e524a944e0b1c3bcc023

The police and investigators at the scene

The quantity of blood present was too high for a mere accident, and the damage caused to the vehicle would've been insufficient to fatally injure him anyway. The Lexus had only sustained minor damage to the left front of the vehicle after nicking a utility pole.

So what caused all the blood? The man had sustained a single wound on the left side of the neck running from left to right and angling slightly from front to back. The wound measured 15.9 centimetres in length and 3.5 centimetres at its deepest point, cutting through the left carotid artery and severing the trachea, jugular vein and windpipe.

Finally, the police collected hair samples from inside the car and found a strand belonging to a person other than the victim trapped between the front seats, as well as fingerprints on the left side of the doors. The driver's side headrest also bore traces consistent with someone having sat immediately behind that seat while the driver's seat had been reclined all the way down, meaning the murderer had, in all likelihood, slit his throat from the backseat while he was lying down on the reclined seat.

In an effort to locate the initial crime scene, the police conducted door-to-door inquiries in all the nearby neighbourhoods and visited all the tea stalls and night shops that would still be open at that early hour. They also questioned residents, those who were awake anyway, about whether they heard any unusual sounds, but to no avail.

Identifying the victim wasn't too hard; the killer had left everything that had belonged to him, such as his wallet, identification documents, cash, and personal items like a golden watch on his wrist, undisturbed, which also meant that, in addition to identifying him, they could safely rule out robbery as the motive.

The victim's belongings

The victim was 42-year-old Nguyễn Tiến Chính.

Born in Cao Bằng province in 1967, Chính used to make his living as a police officer. However, his career in law enforcement was short-lived. On January 8, 1991, Chính was disciplined for an unspecified infraction and forced to resign.

After his ouster from the police force, he moved to Hanoi, where he started a business of his own that made him very successful. He and his family lived in a five-story townhouse and were currently leasing out the bottom floor to a bank. Chính had been married for many years, and his son was currently a student at the police academy.

When it came to suspects, the police had a lot to work with. Aside from a possible financial motive with the murder being committed by one of Chính's business partners, a drug-based motive was also possible. According to those who knew him, Chính had a severe heroin addiction that went back several years.

Chính also lived a lifestyle described as unpredictable, coming and going at irregular hours, to the point that it wasn't unusual for his own family not to know where he was at any given moment, and it was an open secret in his hometown that he was a serial womanizer.

On February 17, two residents came forward and told the police that in the early hours of February 14, a black Toyota Lexus had been parked deep inside the narrow alley adjacent to their residence, in front of a head wash and therapy parlour that Chính was known to frequent.

The Lexus had sat there for nearly an hour until a young woman in a short jacket and jeans, with curly hair, burst out of the right-rear door of the car and quickly ran to the mouth of the alley, where she flagged down a passing taxi and disappeared. Minutes later, the Lexus itself had lurched out of the alley and turned erratically up the main road. This alley was located only 800 meters from where Chính's body was found.

The police rushed to the alley, and although they could confirm the witness's story based on the tire tracks left behind, they were disappointed nonetheless, as the knife used in Chính's murder remained missing, and no additional evidence that could identify the killer was left behind. The only thing the police learned was that the killer was a young woman.

The police dug into Chính's phone records, and in the days and hours immediately before the murder, he had made several outgoing calls and received several incoming messages from just one phone number. In addition, he also had a phone call late in the evening of February 13 from a phone with a newly activated SIM card.

The police also paid a visit to his home in Cao Bằng to ask about his business and personal life. They learned that on January 3, 2009, he had returned home for a wedding and, in full view of the public, had a confrontation with a young woman. Chính had crossed the room to sit at the woman's table, then told other guests that this woman had been his former mistress before referring to her as a prostitute. Visibly humiliated, she got up and stormed out of the wedding.

This woman was identified as 22-year-old Vũ Thị Kim Anh, a student from Cao Bằng currently enrolled in her fourth year at Hanoi's National University of Education.

Vũ Thị Kim Anh

Kim Anh had no prior criminal record, though she was described as curly-haired and slight of build, which matched the description given by the witnesses in the alley.

Kim Anh was born on December 24, 1987, into a family from the Tày ethnic minority of northern Vietnam. She grew up in Cao Bằng, where her father worked as an engineer in the transport sector and had retired. Meanwhile, her mother was employed as an English teacher at a local secondary school and also ran a small stationery shop.

Kim Anh was the younger of two daughters, and she grew up dedicated to her studies. There was nothing alarming in her past; she never did anything that got her disciplined, and she wasn't associated with any questionable characters.

At school, she earned good grades and was selected to represent Cao Bằng Province at the national Chemistry Olympiad for high-achieving students. She had also placed in the national rapid-calculation competition using Casio calculators. In the university entrance examination, she had scored 26 points, the highest score achieved by any candidate from Cao Bằng that year.

In 2005, when she moved to Hanoi to begin her university studies, her family purchased and helped pay for an apartment for her so she wouldn't have to live in the university dormitory.

In Hanoi, Kim Anh continued to excel in her studies, especially in the university's Chemistry Department. Additionally, she regularly participated in the various extracurricular activities offered by the university. She was also a regular participant in the university's cultural events and was talented at singing and dancing; she entered a university beauty competition for the Chemistry Department in 2008, though she didn't win.

Kim Anh at the competition

Tracking her whereabouts, the police determined that on the nights of February 13 and 14, Kim Anh hadn't been sleeping at her apartment, and those who knew her did not know where she had been that night.

Now, as their first suspect, the police began their search for Kim Anh. On February 19, the police found her walking down the street at 11:00 p.m. on her way to her boyfriend's apartment. The police immideately picked her up and brought her down to the station for questioning.

At first, Kim Anh was uncooperative, tried to deny any involvement, and actually seemed perfectly calm, composed, and casual. In one instance, she took off her sandals and dangled her bare feet under the interrogation table before propping them up on the edge of the table

But then the hairs found in the backseat of the Lexus were matched to Kim Anh, as were the fingerprints on the left door. Then, when she was told by her parents that she would still be loved and treated leniently by the courts so long as she confessed, she broke down in tears and soon told the full story.

In April 2006, Kim Anh was introduced to Chính through some mutual friends. Despite the 17-year age gap between them and the fact that Chính was married, they started dating in secret.

Their relationship didn't last long, and by the end of 2006, after discovering that Chính had married and was having more mistresses than just her, something she didn't know, as Chính never discussed his family with her and that he was a heavy narcotics user. She ended the relationship in August 2007 and cut off all contact with Chính.

At the same time, Kim Anh moved on and started dating a young man of similar age, and by early 2009, they were preparing to marry. Kim Anh's new boyfriend had visited her family in Cao Bằng to seek their permission to marry their daughter, and they agreed that the wedding would take place after Kim Anh obtained her degree.

Kim Anh's new boyfriend was the eldest son of Nông Quốc Tuấn, at the time the Deputy Party Secretary of Bắc Giang Province and a son of Nông Đức Mạnh, then the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam; suffice to say, Kim Anh was about to marry into a very influential family.

Meanwhile, Chính, despite having a wife, a wife he cheated on with various other women, was infuriated when Kim Anh left him, and he tried to call her regularly and on December 28, 2008, while she was visiting her family in Cao Bằng, Chính came to her front door to harass her and demand that she resume her relationship with him.

Then, as mentioned when the two both returned to Cao Bằng for a wedding in January, Chính singled her out to say aloud for everyone to hear that they were once in a relationship, and then accused Kim Anh of being a prostitute.

On the afternoon of February 13, 2009, Kim Anh purchased a promotional prepaid SIM card and inserted it into her phone. The first number she dialled with this SIM card was a misdial, leading her to call Chính by mistake. At first, Chính didn't know who had called him, but when he heard Kim Anh's voice and recognized her, Kim Anh hung up before he could say anything else. So Chính called back, and when Kim Anh picked up and recognized him, she immediately hung up again.

For Kim Anh, the next several hours were unrelenting. Chính sent her 29 messages, ranging from casual to persistent to threatening. At around 10:00 p.m., Kim Anh received a message from him, asking, "Why won't you pick up my calls?" When she finally dialled him back, he invited her to join him at a birthday party at the Sheraton Hotel.

Kim Anh initially declined, but in response, Chính said that if she didn't join him, he would track down her boyfriend and tell him about their past relationship. With her wedding on the way, Chính's blackmail worked, and Kim Anh agreed to meet him.

At 12:15 a.m. on February 14, Chính picked Kim Anh up, and she sat in the backseat as Chính began the drive through the city. Rather than going to the party, Chính stopped inside the alley and turned the Lexus's lights off. When Kim Anh questioned this, he said that they were waiting for a friend of his.

After about 20 minutes, Chính reclined the driver's seat all the way back, forcing Kim Anh to move to her right. Afterward, Chính reached back and began groping Kim Anh through her clothing, reaching his hand inside her jacket and onto her breast. Kim Anh pulled back and shouted at him to stop, and he did, briefly anyway, but he would go on to try to grope her on four more occasions.

At one point, Chính stepped out of the Lexus to make a phone call. While Chính was outside, Kim Anh reached out to steady herself against the back of the driver's seat and found her fingers entering the mesh pocket behind the headrest. Inside the pocket was a 20-centimetre-long fruit knife.

Chính got back into the Lexus, lay down on the reclined seat, pulled up Kim Anh's shirt, and grabbed her hair to yank her head up and down. Chính then reached for the waistband of his own clothing toward his belt and zipper.

Still having the knife, something that Chính didn't see, braced herself against the back of the seat and slashed the knife across Chính's throat. He immideately lurched upward and started bleeding everywhere, but he didn't make a sound.

Kim Anh pushed the passenger door open with her right shoulder and jumped out of the car. Despite Chính's severed carotid artery and trachea, he somehow managed to turn the car back on and drove 800 meters until passing out.

Kim Anh ran toward the entrance of the alley. On the way, she threw the knife toward the wall of the alley and fled. Somebody had likely picked up the knife to use as their own, since it has never been found.

After leaving the alley, Kim Anh disposed of her phone and SIM card before flagging down a passing taxi, changing taxis at least once during the route. Eventually, she was dropped off at her boyfriend's, where the two rented a room at a guest house rather than their actual home. The next morning, she asked a friend to go to her apartment and collect some clothing and belongings for her and then moved again to live with his maternal uncle, where she stayed until her arrest. When asked to explain why she rented the guesthouse instead of going home, she said that at the time she feared Chính was still alive and would come to her home seeking revenge.

The police didn't have much evidence supporting her version of events, but there was little to dispute it either. The only things they could confirm were Chính's character and that a knife was left in the mesh pocket of the backseat, as the fabric and plastic showed scratches consistent with a pointed metal object having been inserted and removed. They also tracked down the taxi driver who picked Kim Anh up, and he would identify her as his passenger that morning.

So the police largely accepted Kim Anh's confession, much to his wife's devastation, who insisted that her husband was innocent of any wrongdoing and that Kim Anh acted in cold blood and with premeditation.

She cited the fact that Chính's belt and zipper weren't undone when the police arrived. She argued that they never kept a knife in their car, so the murder weapon had to have been brought by Kim Anh, and she wouldn't be able to reach it either if the seat was fully reclined, as she claimed, and also that she appeared rather calm as opposed to emotional when reenacting the murder and equally calm in the 5 days before her arrest.

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Kim Anh reenacting the murder.

Some, in response to these doubts, instead argued that Kim Anh's boyfriend was an accomplice who either actually killed or helped kill Chính to protect Kim Anh. Or more likely to protect his family's reputation as his relationship with Kim Anh ended as soon as she was arrested.

Finally, she claimed that the position Chính was in, lying back on a reclined seat with both hands at his waist, but his throat cut from behind, was not consistent with a man in the middle of sexually assaulting a woman.

The trial began at the Hanoi People's Court on December 30, 2009, with the courtroom full to capacity and with heightened secruity. Kim Anh was seen to be openly weeping and expressing remorse before the proceedings were even formally opened.

Kim Anh being escorted to the courtroom

The trial

Because of the sympathetic nature of Kim Anh's actions, the prosecution sought only a sentence of 17-19 years, arguing that she had acted in a sudden emotional state and that there was no premeditation.

The defence sought an even more lenient sentence, arguing that Kim Anh had tried to defend herself, had no criminal history, and came from a respectable family.

On December 31, the court returned with its verdict, finding Vũ Thị Kim Anh guilty of the murder of Nguyễn Tiến Chính. The court accepted that Kim Anh had been acting under duress and that Chính was coercive and either lured or threatened her into his vehicle. With the mitigating factors in mind, the judge imposed a sentence of 14 years' imprisonment on Kim Anh, as well as being told to pay 69 million Vietnamese dong to Chính's family in compensation.

Chính's family was furious and cursed at and screamed at the judges. They were so furious that the police had to physically remove all of Chính's relatives from the courthouse. Throughout the duration of the trial, they breached the police's cordon on multiple occasions and tried to attack Kim Anh as a mob. They were so vicious that Kim Anh's family were too afraid to show up to court themselves at times in support of her.

Even before the violence, the police were ordered by the presiding judge to remove all of them as they were purposefully disruptive and speaking over Kim Anh's attorney in an effort to prevent her from pleading her case, even demanding Kim Anh's attorney "go away". Because of their behaviour, the judge had the officers remove Kim Anh from the court before even announcing the sentence.

Despite their anger, the sentence remained as is because the prosecution declined to file an appeal. The defence followed suit, viewing the sentence as a victory.

Kim Anh spent the first 15 months of her incarceration at the Hỏa Lò Prison in central Hanoi, and she was evidently loved and respected by her fellow inmates. When she was transferred in September 2010, her fellow inmates helped her pack; some were in tears that she was leaving, and one smiled and said, "Keep going, we'll meet again someday."

Kim Anh in prison.

As part of the rehabilitation programs offered, the prison had a cultural performance team, and since Kim Anh had a history of singing and dancing from her university years, she was accepted.

In 2011, a writing competition was held among prisoners with artistic talent, titled "Repentance and the Faith in Turning Toward Good." Kim Anh entered the competition, but she didn't win.

One of the performances featuring Kim Anh

On September 2, 2015, over 400 prisoners at the prison holding Kim Anh were granted amnesty, and Kim Anh was among those pardoned. So after serving 6 years and 6 months out of her 14-year sentence, Kim Anh was granted an early release.

Kim Anh recieving the pardon

She collected her belongings and left for the bus station that would take her home to her family in Cao Bằng. She has lived a quiet life in the media and hasn't made any statements since that bus dropped her off at home.

Sources

(I had to share them this way because Pastebin flagged the paste.)

On August 31, 2017, a woman in Vernouillet, located in the Yvelines department of France, was out for a morning dog walk with her daughter. During their walk, they came across a pile of burnt tires and rubble in the bushes. This alone wasn't unusual; the area was known as an illegal dumping ground for construction materials, but the fire that had ignited them was so intense that even some surrounding trees had been burned.

The prior day, August 30, the pair had already discovered a bone but assumed it belonged to an animal. But this pile of burnt rubble concerned them a little, so they walked around it, and that was when her daughter discovered a human skull. She called out to her mother, who rushed over and, in turn, discovered a human ribcage tangled in metal wires that had likely been the remains of burnt tires. They also saw the rest of the body lying on its side, half covered by the tires that had collapsed atop it.

The police arrived with a forensic doctor accompanying them, and based on their findings, the police knew they were in for a gut-wrenching and horrific case.

Police and forensics at the scene.

According to the doctor's findings, the remains belonged to a child, possibly under the age of 10. Although no child had been reported missing in the area, the police had an idea of who the remains belonged to.

Four days prior, an 8-year-old girl named Maëlys de Araujo had gone missing from a wedding in the Isère department. The case was massive in France, and the search efforts were extensive, but at the time of the discovery in Vernouillet, they had found nothing. While a fair distance away from Yvelines, they started to wonder if perhaps the killer had transported Maëlys's body, the nearly 600 kilometres from her home to Vernouillet, to make the body harder to link to her.

It would also be a good location to hide a body. The place was a fairly isolated, poorly lit path on the edge of some fields, with the tires and rubble set at a small incline. Aside from the body, which had been charred to the point of just being reduced to bones, the police noted the remains of burned gloves and a condom wrapper at the scene.

When the autopsy was conducted, the medical examiner had some issues trying to determine anything about the victim, such as their height and age. Some bones had shrunk from the heat, while others had been completely fractured, making it difficult to determine factors such as their age and height.

Eventually, though, he was able to rule out the body belonging to Maëlys. The victim stood at 152-158 centimetres and was between the ages of 10 and 16. He also concluded that the victim was European and had light brown hair, but beyond that, the remains were in such a poor state that he couldn't even determine the victim's gender.

The cause of death also eluded him since all the organs had been completely destroyed. He could determine that whoever the victim was, they had suffered two broken ribs shortly before death, and her remains were dismembered post-mortem, although with what instrument was also unknown.

Based on the level of insect colonization on the remains, it was determined that the victim had been killed sometime around August 28. Overall, that was all the medical examiner could uncover, leaving the police with little to work with.

Starting September 1, the police went door-to-door to question the locals and conducted a second search of the crime scene. The police would recover some additional bones, teeth and pieces of fabric. They also collected soil samples to test for accelerants, which tested positive for gasoline.

With how flammable tires and gasoline are, the police assumed the fire likely flashed and ignited with a higher intensity than the killer had expected, so they went to the hospitals to ask about anyone who came in to get treated for burns. Unfortunately, no such patients were admitted.

Through the victim's DNA, they could finally determine that she was female, but not her identity; her DNA didn't appear in France's database, nor could anything be recovered from her fingerprints. Her DNA did allow them to refine what physical characteristics she likely had, though.

They concluded that the victim had fair skin, blonde hair, and gray-green or gray-brown eyes. With this slightly more detailed description, the police looked for any missing girls of her age in France's missing persons database, only to be met with nothing once more. Therefore, the police issued an appeal for witnesses, but only a few people came forward, and none of them provided any worthwhile leads.

Desperate, the local police sought the aid of the Criminal Research Institute of the National Gendarmerie, surrendering the remains over to them for a more sophisticated autopsy and in yet another ditch to find out whatever they could about the victim, no matter how small the detail.

According to them, the dismemberment had occurred in three seperate sections to the knee, at the hands and others at the vertebrae, with the hands disfigured and cut up in an attempt to hinder the police from using her fingerprints.

Using a magnifying lens to check for any striations or marks, they also determined that the likely implement used to dismember the victim's remains was a saw, specifically a hacksaw used for cutting metal.

Then, for the 2nd time in this case, the findings regarding her age were overturned. Now, instead of being a teenager, the victim was now an adult between the ages of 25 and 35. In just two weeks, the victim went from being a child to a teenager to a full-fledged adult.

While still a pretty vague description, it gave the police enough to produce three seperate facial reconstructions with the only difference between them being the victim's hairstyle.

https://preview.redd.it/84p4i0zg6o5h1.png?width=128&format=png&auto=webp&s=232117a21cfc4a96a417c39243903965173bd4ac

https://preview.redd.it/rlr5lolh6o5h1.png?width=159&format=png&auto=webp&s=4850e7fa4d967f234d1fb429fa3e1849c8364b38

The three composite sketches

They compared their sketches to the list of missing women in France, then distributed them to all gendarmerie stations and finally to Interpol as a Black Notice, but frustratingly, still nobody came forward.

It was now January 2018, and the victim was still unidentified, but they managed to learn one more thing about her. Shortly after the police found her body, they had some of her hair sent for a toxicological analysis, and while there was a massive backlog to get through, the police finally got the results from those samples back.

The results revealed that their victim was a heavy cannabis user; they also found traces of anti-depressants at a level which indicated that she took them regularly. Now with this new lead, the police requested records from the primary health insurance funds in France, seeking a list of women around that age who had been prescribed venlafaxine and who hadn't renewed their prescription since August 2017. Astonishingly, they once again hit another roadblock as they couldn't match any of the names to the deceased.

By May 2019, it had been almost two years since the body had been found, and any hope of identifying her remained slim. But unexpectedly and unbelievably, a third opinion regarding the victim's age had been submitted; the conclusion that she had been around 25-35 was also incorrect.

Now, they were claiming that she was 50-70 years old and suffered from osteoarthritis in her left knee. So everything the police spent the past 2 years doing, they had to do all over again, only with the middle-aged to elderly in mind rather than young adults.

On June 6, 2019, the police finally got a hit on her DNA. With that, the police identified the victim as 68-year-old Anne-Marie Richy. "L'inconnue de Vernouillet," as Anne had come to be known, was identified for 18 months.

Anne-Marie Richy

Anne had been reported missing on October 16, 2017, by her partner, 67-year-old Philippe Marchand, in Boulogne-Billancourt, located in the Hauts-de-Seine department, 35 kilometres from the crime scene. Although Anne and Philippe never formally married, they were legally registered as partners because they lived together.

Philippe Marchand

She had first met Philippe in 2015, after she had retired from the transport company where she had worked her entire life, back in 2010. Anne lived alone and was said to be self-sufficient.

Philippe was born in the capital city of Paris on April 29, 1952. His mother was a seamstress, and his father worked in construction. Shortly after he was born, his family moved into a small apartment in Boulogne-Billancourt. When his younger brother was born, the family didn't have enough space for everyone, so he was forced to live with his grandmother instead. Something a young Philippe wasn't too upset over, as his alcoholic father was abusive and struck him regularly.

Philippe didn't study much at school and entered the workforce early, drafting engineering drawings and blueprints. When he was 30, he met his first wife, falling in love with her partly because her 9-year-old son reminded him of himself. The two married and had a daughter in 1986. In 1992, Philippe was laid off and found employment as a taxi driver, a job he greatly enjoyed.

In his early 60s, his wife fell ill and took on a bunch of extra body weight, which caused Philippe to lose whatever attraction he felt toward her and turn to various dating websites, beginning his first of many affairs to come. Philippe approached his wife and asked whether they could stay together while he was allowed to have relations with other women; in response, she divorced him.

The end result remained the same: Philippe was free to seek out whoever he wanted, and he preferred those who were divorced or widowed. In one instance, Philippe said to a friend, "I should be decorated for having taken care of their sexual misery, in the end."

In December 2015, he was introduced to Anne at a party by a friend, a party that turned into an "intimate, erotic evening". When all was said and done, Philippe claimed to have fallen in love with Anne almost instantly.

He was said to be quite charming and did a good job at flattering Anne. He would regularly talk about travel with her and soon marriage as well. Philippe was, as of recently, a fellow retiree; he enjoyed sports, owned an apartment in Fréjus and had a substantial amount of money saved up. He also had no prior history with the police.

In June 2016, Anne had to leave her apartment, and Philippe didn't hesitate to let her move into his own.

An obvious question that came to mind was why her boyfriend waited nearly two months to report her missing. Well, according to Philippe, he had been in the hospital and wasn't discharged until October 3. After his discharge, he received a text message from Anne telling him she was in Cambrai and that she'd return on October 8. But a week passed, and she never came back. Oddly, the only things she took with her were her passport and cellphone.

As for why he waited a week after she said she'd be back to report her missing, well, Philippe said that Anne was bipolar and suffered from schizophrenic tendencies; she also suffered from depression stemming from the fact that all three of her husbands, prior to marrying Philippe, had died, one of whom by suicide.

He said that Anne was possessive and jealous whenever he had relations with another woman (even though that would be him cheating on her). He said that he hated conflict and typically "submitted" to Anne whenever she raised her voice at him.

On two occasions, in the summer of 2016 and in May 2017, Anne was hospitalized, and Philippe tried to use this oppertunity to break up with her and go live with one of his many mistresses in Normandy, but once Anne was discharged, he'd immideately change his mind and go back to her.

The last time he spoke with her, they had an argument which resulted in Anne pushing him, resulting in a fractured femoral neck; therefore, he wasn't in the mood to speak with her again.

But what about the rest of her family, such as her children? Why didn't they report her missing?. Well, for one, they didn't know she was missing; texts were still sent to them from her phone after the body was found in August.

Additionally, they didn't speak much to Anne anyway. To the best of one of her son's recollections, the last time he heard her voice was in a short phone call in either 2016 or 2017, which went roughly like this: "Mom, it’s me." To which Anne said, "What do you want?"
followed by, "What I want? Nothing, goodbye." The last time he actually saw her in person was in 2003.

The last known activity on Anne's phone was on October 8 in Boulogne-Billancourt, at the couple's residence, so the police investigating at the time assumed she had returned home and hadn't contacted him. The police would regularly call Philippe to ask whether she had returned so they could remove her from the missing persons list, but he rarely responded.

But then in January 2019, he reached out to the police and asked if they had made any progress, a call which prompted them to reopen the case. When they did, they saw something interesting: Anne's bank accounts were still active. The purchases were rather mundane, always just living expenses, and they were always made in Boulogne-Billancourt or the surrounding area, with the total amount of money spent being 25,000 Euros. The strange thing is that Philippe said Anne had left without her bank card.

First, the police froze the bank accounts to see what would happen, then paid a visit to Philippe's home. When entering the home, the police found only one pillow on their marital bed and also got rid of all of Anne's belongings, which he said he donated to charity, even though he still had plans to formally marry her and even though she had only been missing for a year in circumstances the police didn't consider suspicious, which made Philippe's actions suspicious in return.

This was why the police, having already been allowed into Philippe's home, decided to seize Anne's hairbrush that hadn't been given away. Then, DNA samples were extracted from the hair brush, which was how Anne's DNA came to be in the police's database when her body was finally identified that June.

Now with Anne's body identified, the police began scrutinizing Philippe, starting with his initial story. After reporting Anne missing, he said that he waited so long because Anne had pushed him hard enough that it left him injured, which sent him to the hospital.

However, the police looked into the call to emergency services that day when he was brought to the hospital. According to Philippe, he had injured himself while jogging, a completely different story than what he'd tell the police months later. Additionally, Annie wasn't present when the paramedics arrived.

The police put Philippe under surveillance, where he did little to quell their suspicions. Once more, he appeared to move on very quickly, having many affairs and relationships, and quickly changing the subject whenever Anne was brought up.

Whenever he would talk about Anne, he would tell people that he tried calling her several times, only for her to never pick up, something the police knew to be false based on his phone records. She also tried portraying Anne as a sex addict, making comments like "Anne-Marie was a slut. She liked that," and whenever it wasn't sex, it was always violence against him, which he would tell people Anne regularly indulged in.

Money was another thing the police took note of. Whenever Philippe went on a date and needed to pay for flowers, a restaurant, or just daily necessities, he always drew from Anne's bank account. Over roughly a year and a half, he withdrew around 28,000 euros from Anne's bank account, while withdrawing only 4,000 euros from his own account during the same period.

Two purchases in particular jumped out to investigators, one on August 22, 2017, when he purchased fuel from a gas station in Les Moulins. A few minutes later, using Anne's bank account, he purchased bags of rubble, decking boards and cleaning supplies from a Bricorama store. Based on these purchases, the police narrowed down Anne's cause of death and the burning of her body to around 7:00 p.m. on August 22 or 7:00 p.m. on August 23.

Philippe had turned his phone off during that time, but his vehicle was equipped with a device containing a geolocation chip, so the police could trace his vehicle's movements instead, which placed a ping near Vernouillet on the night of August 22, at 12:15 a.m. on August 23.

On October 15, 2019, Philippe was placed under arrest for Anne's murder. When taken into custody, he didn't resist, react with surprise or ask any questions, almost appearing detached from what was happening.

The police then subjected the home's bathroom to luminol testing, assuming that if the murder happened here, that would be where Philippe dismembered her body. Even after two years, the police found a small sample of blood on the sink and blood on the walls, so the police cut out tiles from the wall to send off for DNA testing.

The police also searched the entire home, finding a 15-litre jerry can in the basement. Also retrieved from the basement were several hacksaws that reacted strongly to the luminol.

The DNA from the blood samples weren't a match for Anne. The blood on the wall belonged to an unidentified female, and the blood on the sink was Philippe's.

When questioned, Philippe first denied everything and adopted a professional, clinical, and cold tone when speaking to investigators; that is, unless he was asked about himself or something he had done unrelated to the murder, in which case his tone suddenly became boastful and prideful, as if a switch had been flicked.

Philippe also seemed perplexed that he was even being questioned. He defended his use of Anne's bank accounts by stating that he had power of attorney and argued that the fact that he reported Anne missing in the first place was an iron-clad defence, as he'd have every reason not to do that had he been her murderer.

During the second interview, the police were far more direct, questioning him about Anne and her murder almost exclusively, something that made Philippe feel uneasy, and his answers grew shorter in response. That said, he still denied any involvement and brought up a planned wedding in Las Vegas to explain why he wouldn't kill her.

The police then brought up the comments he had made toward Anne when they had him under surveillance, his many affairs with Anne, being aware of them and telling one of his mistresses to leave Philippe alone, in addition to insulting remarks he had made toward other women on his social media accounts. Philippe would admit to the philandering but still refused to confess to the murder.

Finally, with him cornered, the police brought up the geolocation data from his car and the activity from Anne's bank accounts showing he was in Vernouillet and had purchased all he would need to dispose of Anne's body using her own bank accounts. Philippe's response said it all: "I didn’t imagine you could have such precise elements."

Philippe claimed that leading up to her death, Anne had been angry with him over his constant infidelity, threatening and insulting him. But on August 22, she got violent, throwing herself at him and grabbing Philippe by the throat. Philippe said he acted in self-defence when he wrapped his own hands around Anne's neck and squeezed, ultimately winning out over her and strangling Anne to death.

Philippe insisted that Anne's death was an accident and that he spent the next several hours stunned and unsure of what to do. Eventually, he decided to undress Anne and carry her body to the bathroom, place her in the bathtub and cut an incision into the base of her neck so she could slowly bleed out. While she bled, Philippe left the home and went out to purchase bags of rubble, decking boards, cleaning supplies and cans of gasoline.

Upon returning home, he used a hammer to smash and break Anne's bones so it'd be easier for him to saw through her body. Once the dismemberment began, the first pieces of Anne's body he removed were the skin from the fingertips, which he cut off with scissors to hinder identification. He also used the hammer to smash and damage Anne's teeth. That is the most the police ever got to hear because Philippe didn't want to go into detail about the dismemberment, shutting that line of questioning down.

So he skipped past the dismemberment during his confession and jumped ahead to when he placed the body parts into the rubble bags and loaded them into his vehicle, and just drove aimlessly until he finally arrived in Vernouillet, where he noticed the small, isolated path and at the top of the path saw a pile of discarded tires.

Getting out of the car, he stuffed Anne's remains into the structure of abandoned tires, soaked them in gasoline and set them on fire. The fire didn't burn at first, so he approached the tires to see why the fire hadn't begun, only for it to suddenly ignite with the blast knocking Philippe back, knocking him down and breaking his femoral neck when it landed on a rock.

Lying on the ground in a town he'd never been to before, next to the body of the woman he had murdered and with a broken leg was not an ideal situation at all. Because of the adrenaline, he didn't actually feel the pain but still had to practically crawl and drag himself to his car, crawling over stones, broken glass, and piles of rubble.

Since he couldn't put any weight on his now broken leg, getting into his vehicle and driving away was quite difficult, to say the least, but he somehow found a way and drove home. Once home, he made his way into the apartment, now in serious pain with the adrenaline wearing off. He then called emergency services with a fake story of having fallen, which explained why he was in the hospital until October 3.

Then, in the ensuing months and years, he used Anne's phone to send text messages to those who knew her, including to his own daughter, to apologize for attacking her father, that being Philippe himself. He would use her bank accounts to create the impression that she was still alive, report her missing, and routinely ask for updates to try to take suspicion off of himself.

When Philippe was first brought to court, the judge indicted him for murder and violating the integrity of a corpse. Since all the tools used to aid in disposing of the body had been purchased hours after the murder and because the prosecution had no direct evidence contradicting his version of events, the judge ruled that premeditated murder would not be among his charges.

Now 70, Philippe stood trial for murder on March 6, 2023. Philippe's attorney tried to argue the same self-defence narrative that he had told the police. That Philippe had killed Anne by accident when she tried strangling him during one of her psychotic breaks brought about by her documented history of bipolar disorder going back nearly 30 years.

The only thing that may have contradicted that theory was his callous behaviour. During the interrogation, when asked what was going through his mind after setting the fire, he simply said that the fire reminded him of a Johnny Hallyday song.

When asked in court about the dismemberment, he again tried to avoid speaking about it, but he eventually said, "Oh yes, right, I forgot. I had trouble with certain parts of the body, and I went to get my carving knife."

And finally, he had written two letters in prison to two of his other lovers, and the contents of the letters were literal mirrors of each other, with the only differences just being the names, and many of the promises were the same ones he made to Anne prior to her murder.

His actions after the murder also struck many as indefensible, such as using Anne's bank accounts to buy gifts for his mistresses and lovers after having killed Anne.

On March 10, for the murder of Anne-Marie Richy, Philippe Marchand was handed down a sentence of 25 years in prison. When asked if he'd like to appeal the sentence, he declined, stating that he didn't want to relive it or have to make Anne's son relive it either.

And so that was that. What exactly happened to Anne-Marie Richy, and how truthful Philippe has been in his account, will likely never be known for sure.

Sources

https://pastebin.com/JZ2X2rn5

At 6:00 p.m. on November 29, 2020, a man living in an apartment building in the Beitun District of Taichung, Taiwan, heard a loud argument coming from his 36-year-old neighbour Gong Yurong's apartment on the 5th floor, and he had clearly heard her shouting “Help!” several times.

Gong Yurong

The other voice he heard was Yurong's husband, 33-year-old Chen Hsin-kai.

Chan Hsin-kai

He dropped everything to rush upstairs, but no matter how many times he knocked on the door and shouted, no one answered, even though he could still hear banging from inside.

Alarmed, he ran downstairs and alerted the apartment's manager, who accompanied him back up to Yurong's apartment. They rang the doorbell for several minutes, but there was still no response. Although the arguing and banging could no longer be heard, they could see “shadows of light” constantly moving around the living room through the gap beneath the door. Now terrified that something had happened, Yurong's neighbour left to call the police.

Since an officer was already patrolling the area, it only took 5 minutes for one to arrive. Unfortunately, the officer didn't do much of anything; he just called out and heard no response coming from the other end. Furthermore, there was no further movement visible from the crack between the floor and the door.

The officer assumed that the couple had fought over something "trivial." Then, after calming down, they felt too embarrassed to let the neighbours come in to surely laugh at them. He assumed they were simply hiding inside the apartment without opening the door, making any noise, or moving around out of embarrassment. The officer then left.

At 9:00 p.m., the police were preparing for the shift change at the station. Before everyone got to go home, the chief at the police station had to listen to the reports from all the officers, and when the one who went to Yurong's apartment told the chief about the incident, he immideately flew into a rage and shouted at the officer for his negligent conduct. Afterward, he summoned two detectives and declared his intention to go back to the apartment.

When they arrived, the manager was questioned about the couple, and he told the police that Yurong and Hsin-kai had been married for about 6 years and had two daughters, one 8 years old and the other only 5. Before 2016, the family had been a happy one, and almost every weekend the couple could be seen taking their eldest daughter out for fun.

The arguments didn't really begin until after the birth of their second child, and they could be about almost anything; almost anything would set them off. Additionally, even when not near her husband, the neighbours described Yurong as gradually becoming depressed with each new day. A far cry from her former cheerful and outgoing attitude.

Since 2019, he'd never actually seen the couple together either, and Hsin-kai didn't seem too concerned about his children. His neighbours no longer saw him taking them out to play or picking them up and dropping them off at school; it was now Yurong who handled everything.

However, at around 7:00 p.m., not long after the first officer left, he saw Hsin-kai bringing his daughters back from outside. Unfortunately, he had been busy at the time and didn't confront him about what the argument was about or where Yurong had gone.

Concerned after hearing this, the police went back up to the front door and rang the doorbell. This time, Hsin-kai did open the door and seemed confused about why the police were at his front door. There, they explained what had happened and asked permission to enter the apartment. The police occasionally heard his daughters laughing from another room, so at least they were safe.

In response, Hsin-kai was very angry. He said that Yurong had gone out of town that afternoon to discuss business with a client and would not return for several days; therefore, everyone had simply misheard, and there was no argument. He said that before leaving, she had taken their children to a playground and asked him to pick them up later that evening.

Hsin-kai added that at 5:30 p.m., he had gone out to a nearby supermarket to buy some groceries and daily necessities. He then went to the park to pick up his daughters. If he was telling the truth, that meant that from 5:50 to 6:00 p.m., when the neighbour first heard the argument and called the police, nobody would've been home at all.

Finally, Hsin-kai told the police station chief that unless he could produce a search warrant, he would formally accuse him of “abuse of power” and trespassing into his home if they tried to push the issue any further.

He didn't have a search warrant and no way to obtain one on such short notice with so little evidence, so he and the detectives he'd reluctantly brought had to give up and leave. Worse yet, as he thought about it some more, he believed Hsin-kai; he felt that he was overreacting and had been too hard on the initial officer.

Why would he think such a thing? Well, the distance between the apartment building and the playground was 5.4 kilometres; a round-trip by bicycle would take about 45 minutes, and the route would be entirely along busy commercial streets and main roads. If the apartment manager said that Hsin-kai brought the children home at 7:00 p.m., that meant the latest he could have left the apartment was 6:15 p.m.

So if he and Yurong had started arguing at around 6:00, with this argument ending in Hsin-kai killing her. That would give him only 15 minutes to hide the body, somewhere inside the apartment, so that he wouldn't be noticed trying to leave, and then clean up the crime scene. And even if he had done all that, why would he be in such a hurry to bring his daughters to the crime scene instead of telling them he'd be running late so he could dispose of the body first?.

So that was that; the matter was considered closed, with the official conclusion that the couple's neighbours had simply misheard what was happening.

On November 30, a middle-aged woman arrived at her local police station in the Taiping District in a panic. She had been unable to contact her daughter, Yurong, since the night of November 29. Her son-in-law, Hsin-kai, told her that Yurong had gone out on a trip. However, that claim made no sense. Taiwan was still in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant that pretty much all tourist attractions were currently closed, so even if she were to leave her two daughters alone, where would she even go?

She also told the police about the state of Yurong and Hsin-kai's marriage, as well as Yurong's personality. Yurong would regularly call her to confide, the last such call coming on the night of November 28. Yurong had promised her that she would bring her two daughters to visit their grandmother on November 29. The fact that she didn't do so without a word tipped her off that something was seriously wrong.

Tragically, with how sudden the disappearance was, and how Hsin-kai was clearly lying. She already felt that she was too late by the time she walked into the police station.

Upon receiving this report, the police agreed that something was very wrong and wasted no time accompanying Yurong's mother to the Beitun District to investigate.

Before even entering the building itself, the police noticed Yurong's scooter parked by the roadside, with only the steering lock engaged and not the main security lock. So if she did go on a sudden trip, why would she park her scooter on the roadside instead of in the underground parking lot available at the apartment?

Upon entering the apartment unit itself, things still didn't look that suspicious; for example, there were no obvious bloodstains. The police ventured further into the apartment, entering the couple's bedroom. Once again, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but Yurong's mother discovered her phone and handbag inside a drawer. Inside that handbag were Yurong's bank cards and several thousand New Taiwan Dollars in cash. Once again, an odd thing to leave behind if one was going on a trip.

Hsin-kai was present when the police arrived, and suddenly, he started backtracking on the trip claim. Now, he told the police that he and Yurong had an argument over their daughter’s education. In a fit of anger, he slapped Yurong several times. In response, Yurong threatened to divorce him before running out of the apartment in tears, forgetting to take her phone or handbag with her.

Since Yurong usually carried several hundred in cash, enough for a taxi ride to Changhua County, Hsin-kai believed that she had gone to stay at her father-in-law’s home in Changhua for a few days and would eventually return. When confronted about why he lied to Yurong's mother, he said he did not want an elderly person to worry about such a "small matter."

That was the same reason he didn't tell her mother about the police's prior visits, which were the first time Yurong's mother and the police, who were currently questioning him had even heard of the prior visits.

Yurong's parents never had a good relationship, divorced in 2010, and have had no contact with each other since. However, Yurong still occasionally visited her father’s home for a day or two to try to mediate between them. Furthermore, after Yurong's graduation, she went "off the grid" for a week in Changhua due to work-related stress. So Hsin-kai's new story certainly seemed plausible.

The police called Yurong's father to ask about his daughter, to which he said Yurong was resting at his home. He seemed quite irritated by the police calling him and hung up before they could ask any follow-ups. In addition, they still didn't have a search warrant, so they couldn't conduct a full sweep of the apartment.

Yurong's mother was stunned, and the police were embarrassed. The officers present apologized profusely to Hsin-kai before leaving. So that was the third time the police had arrived, only to conclude there was no foul play and then leave.

On December 1, the police station chief responsible for the second visit came forward, officially filing a complaint regarding the initial officer's response to the emergency call, insisting that foul play was involved and demanding that an investigation team be formed. So what changed his mind?

Well, after clocking out and going to bed on November 29, he spent that night tossing and turning, unable to sleep with the sense of unease now washing over him. So, on November 30, shortly after the police and Yurong's mother had left, he would pay a second visit to the building and request that the manager allow him to view the building's CCTV footage to verify Hsin-kai's story.

What he saw was Hsin-kai leaving the apartment at 6:57 p.m., nearly an hour after the first officer left. He then returned with his daughters at 8:04 p.m., not 7:00 p.m., as the manager had said. He simply misremembered the time because he was busy with work.

Yurong herself had returned home at 5:46 p.m. and was never seen leaving by any of the cameras.

The last time Yurong was seen alive.

Based on this footage, he concluded that shortly after Yurong returned home, she and Hsin-kai had a violent argument, which ended with Hsin-kai killing his wife. The "moving lights and shadows" their neighbours saw from under the door would've been Hsin-kai dragging Yurong's body.

Perhaps Hsin-kai was considering disposing of the body outside, but was interrupted when the first police officer showed up. With no other option, he quickly cleaned up the scene and hid the body inside the home, then immediately went out to pick up his two daughters to make it look like his neighbours had simply misheard what was happening.

He ended up speaking to the lead investigator who led the second team of police officers to their apartment, and he was puzzled by this news. If she never left that building, why would Yurong's father say she was with him when he called him?. Urgently, he called her father once again to do what he should've done: ask for clarification, but after 10 straight phone calls, nobody answered.

Immideately, the police went back to the couple's apartment, now for the 4th time. Once again, Hsin-kai had an excuse. He said that Yurong was afraid he would try to stop her from leaving, so she decided to exit the apartment building via the stairwell, where there were no cameras. He also said that the constant police visits were having a negative effect on his daughter's mental health and that he would sue them if they returned for a fifth time.

This time, the police had learned their lesson and were not easily convinced. Ultimately, it didn't matter which route within the building Yurong could've taken; there were still cameras stationed at the exits and entrances, so she would've been captured if she left. And it wouldn't make any sense for Yurong to go out of her way to avoid any and all cameras.

The police also caught Hsin-kai in another lie. He said that Yurong threatened to divorce him, but upon doing some digging, the police saw that their divorce had already been finalized on November 24 and that the only reason Hsin-kai still lived with her was that he'd be homeless otherwise. Interestingly enough, one of the many things the couple argued about was the property itself.

Thinking they'd have better luck if it wasn't them, the police approached Yurong's mother and asked her to, at least for now, set aside her grievances with her ex-husband and ask him herself whether Yurong had really gone to Changhua to see him.

Sure enough, this did the trick. Yurong's father admitted that she never dropped by. He had just assumed the police were a scam caller who would inevitably use her disappearance (which he was then unaware of) to try to squeeze some money out of him, so he just impatiently lied to make what he thought was a scam caller go away. He then refused to answer any numbers he didn't know, in case they were scammers too.

With that, Hsin-kai had nothing more supporting his story, so the police paid their 5th visit to the apartment, this time with an entire forensic team. The forensic technicians noted wiped spray-pattern bloodstains in the living room and the hallway leading to the bathroom. Fresh traces of corrosive liquid burns were also found under the bathroom door. Unfortunately, after searching the entire apartment, they failed to turn up anything else, though they still had Hsin-kai accompany them back to the police station for further questioning.

Hsin-kai repeated his story that Yurong had simply run away from home. He insisted that he had always loved her deeply and would never hurt her. But at the same time, he shifted all the bad behaviour onto his missing wife, telling the police that it was always her who would start the arguments, constantly picking fights to try and force a divorce.

That night, Hsin-kai said that Yurong was "pulling her old tricks", using the children as an excuse to provoke an argument and demanding that he move out and never visit any of them again, which was what finally caused him to snap and slap Yurong several times.

Hsin-kai also saw fit to introduce a new theory as to where Yurong may have gone. He told the police that perhaps she had been seeing another man, which was why she kept trying to create conflict to justify a divorce. Afterward, she staged a case of domestic violence to run off with her lover, which was why she avoided the CCTV cameras. He had told this same story to the children as well albiet simplifying it to just "mom ran away from home."

The police questioning Hsin-kai were visibly enraged, hearing him say this. They already knew it wasn't true since they had already been divorced, and because Yurong would've been caught on camera regardless, but most of all, the police had some time to dig into the couple's background, and, suffice it to say, Hsin-kai was doing some serious projecting.

Yurong was well educated, having excelled in school from a very young age. During middle school, she repeatedly won awards and scholarships in competitions, and with a top-ten ranking in her grade, she was admitted to the National Chengchi University, where she majored in Japanese. In her third year of university, she worked as an intern translator at the Taiwan office of a Japanese vehicle company.

After graduating, she moved back to Taichung and was hired as an assistant in the Japanese department at a publicly listed company. After working that job for two years, she purchased her apartment in the Beitun district and even helped her parents each buy a seperate studio apartment.

Whenever somebody had something negative to say about Yurong, it mostly concerned her love life and lack thereof. She focused entirely on her studies and, for most of her life, hadn't been in a relationship. Her mother had tried to introduce her to several "eligible bachelors," but she always turned them down because she was busy with work, which led many around her to believe she was arrogant and had an inflated sense of self-importance.

But in 2010, Yurong finally fell in love with a man three years younger than her and from an entirely different class. A middle school dropout named Chin Hsin-kai, who at the time was working as a dishwasher. For all that has been said about Yurong, we haven't yet dived into Hsin-kai.

When he was in first grade, his parents divorced, and then four years later, his father passed away from an illness, while his mother remarried into another family and didn't take Hsin-kai with her. As you might expect, Hsin-kai had a terrible life because of this. He had to turn to his neighbours and other relatives just to get barely enough food to eat, and he once spent six months in the custody of a social welfare agency.

If dropping out wasn't any indication, Hsin-kai struggled in school, and after dropping out at 14, he jumped from job to job, mostly working as a cashier at supermarkets, bubble tea shops, and karaoke bars. Despite it all, Hsin-kai was said to be quite polite and was once promoted to shift manager, so now he could support himself, albiet barely.

Hsin-kai had a habit of taking money from the registers, and after his promotion, he suddenly stopped caring about acting professionally or even putting in much effort into his job. So when Hsin-kai was eventually fired from his management job, most local businesses, well aware of him, refused to hire him, so Hsin-kai was back to drifting, working as a dishwasher at various restaurants.

With this new job came a massive pay cut, so he once again resorted to illegal means to get money. Hsin-kai had a criminal record for many counts of theft and fraud, which made it even harder for him to get a decent job.

Regarding his long-term goals, Hsin-kai's friends said he once stated, "I must find a rich woman to support me in the future." When his co-worker retorted that the hypothetical woman would become poor by supporting him, Hsin-kai countered, "If she becomes poor, then I’ll just change to another rich woman."

On September 10, 2010, after finishing a night shift and having not eaten all day, Yurong walked into a restaurant near her company. After finishing her meal, she realized she had forgotten her wallet in her office drawer, and the company door was already locked at that hour. Most of her relatives and friends were asleep, leaving her unable to pay for her meal.

As Yurong was about to give up, Hsin-kai approached her, helped pay the bill, went a little further, and summoned a taxi for Yurong. The next day, before leaving, Yurong returned to the restaurant to pay him back for the taxi.

With this good first impression, Yurong paid more visits to this restaurant, though it took until mid-November for her to meet Hsin-kai again at a scenic nature park. She decided to invite Hsin-kai to dinner, and at that dinner, he would confess to Yurong that he also had feelings for her, describing it as love at first sight and that he didn't want to lie to her, so he admitted to his criminal record. He would later add that he was hoping Yurong would reject him upon learning of his past.

Instead, Yurong found herself moved by what he had to say and told Hsin-kai that he wasn't a bad person, had simply dealt a bad hand in life, and that she remained love-struck by him. After a few more days, she told Hsin-kai that she felt the same way, and the two became a couple.

The couple on one of their trips

At the start of their relationship, Hsin-kai continued trying to borrow money from anyone he knew to pay for their dates. In response, Hsin-kai said she would pay for everything and even went a step further by paying off all her outstanding debts and begging those she knew to give him a decent job.

Yurong never got anywhere because whenever Hsin-kai was presented with an oppertunity, he would always find an excuse to decline taking the job. This never bothered Yurong, though; she rationalized that once they saved enough money, she would open a small restaurant for Hsin-kai to run as its owner.

Yurong's friends and family were far from happy with her new relationship; her mother was furious and once threatened to kill herself over the relationship, while her father threatened to disown her if she didn't break up with Hsin-kai.

Yurong decided to set some boundaries and defied her parents in this regard. On September 10, 2011, the first anniversary of their first meeting, Yurong and Hsin-kai married. The first few years of their marriage went great, and they were very loving toward one another. After the birth of their third daughter, they could often be seen travelling together as a family of three.

In 2014, Hsin-kai even got a job at an electrical appliance factory as a warehouse dispatcher, a job that paid several times more than his work as a dishwasher. Hsin-kai managed to hold this job without incident longer than any job he had before, and he provided for his wife and daughter, often going out with them, doing their laundry, cooking for them, etc. Hsin-kai had seemingly rehabilitated his image, and now his neighbours were regarding him as a good man. Even Yurong's parents came around and gladly accepted Hsin-kai as their son-in-law.

In late 2015, Yurong, who was 7 months pregnant with their second daughter, went on maternity leave. For several months, aside from her normal salary, she went without the usual bonuses and overtime she received. At the same time, their eldest daughter started school right as the family was now struggling to pay for their daily expenses.

Of all the times for Hsin-kai to fall into his old ways and slack off at his job, this would be one of the worst, but sure enough, he repeatedly left work early without permission and was absent without leave. To rub salt in the wound, he had also cost the factory several hundred thousand New Taiwan Dollars through negligence. His supervisor lost patience with him fast and fired him.

Hsin-kai then got another job, once again as a dishwasher at a restaurant. Despite the situation being his own fault, Hsin-kai would always complain that being a dishwasher was too exhausting and humiliating. He would only work a few hours and spend most of his time in the bedroom playing games or sleeping, leaving the household chores to Yurong, who had just given birth weeks earlier.

Yurong wouldn't catch any breaks when the company she worked for withdrew from the Japanese market in favour of China, the Japanese department of the company was now obsolete, and her income was slashed in half. Seeing no future in that company and likely facing a layoff anyway, she resigned from her job and wanted to spend more time with her daughters, and began taking freelance translation work so her proficiency in Japanese wouldn't go to waste.

In early 2016, after posting her resume online, Yurong got contracted for translation jobs to keep her family afloat. Through it all, she would remain charitable toward Hsin-kai, posting online that his "decline" must have been caused by the setbacks they both faced at work, which left him anxious, depressed, and desperate to escape reality. She said she was confident that Hsin-kai would once again be the "great husband and father" she saw him as.

Yurong spent the rest of 2016 and all of 2017 trying to introduce Hsin-kai to various jobs she found, only for him to once again have an excuse for rejecting them all. Even doing anything as a dishwasher was an uphill battle, with several long arguments required to convince him to clock in for even a few hours. Hsin-kai was also falling back into his criminal ways, having once invited some friends over to the apartment to plot a new scheme.

The one redeeming aspect, his care for their daughters, was also discarded. When Yurong went into work, leaving Hsin-kai alone with them, he would do next to nothing to care for them. Yurong's mother had to come to the apartment regularly just to cook a meal for the children or to wash their clothes. Hsin-kai's selfishness knew no bounds. Despite all this, he still had the audacity to demand Yurong give him some of her money so he could buy cigarettes and alchool.

The financial burden and stress being placed on her, which in no small part was amplified thanks to Hsin-kai, caused Yurong to briefly contemplate taking her own life, though she decided not to go through with it because of her daughters.

Fortunately, Yurong's situation would improve; her former colleagues and classmates were always trying to aid her and get her a job. In 2018, she had the opportunity to collaborate with a well-known engineer from Japan and translate various documents to help Japanese companies expand into Taiwan. Not only did this solve her financial problems, but it also restored Yurong's optimism.

Yurong had admitted to her friends that Hsin-kai was now a freeloader, or as her friends and family would put it, a "parasite," but Yurong would repeatedly say that she would never abandon him and leave her children without a father. But even Yurong's patience wasn't unlimited.

Although Yurong had gotten lucky, Hsin-kai's actions would still negatively affect her career and reflect poorly on her whenever she applied for a new job. It also had a detrimental effect on their daughter's upbringing. The final straw came in April 2019, when Hsin-kai was once again brought to court and charged with fraud, and Yurong just couldn't ignore it anymore and filed for divorce.

Hsin-kai utterly refused to accept a divorce and often vented angrily not at Yurong but at their children. This only made Yurong more determined to divorce him. Because of the divorce, the couple argued regularly, getting into fights daily, with the arguments becoming fiercer during COVID-19, when the two couldn't leave their home. But finally, on November 24, 2020, their divorce was finalized.

After hearing everything about their backgrounds, it was now very easy to see why the police nearly lost their temper with Hsin-kai when he tried to argue that Yurong had run off with a lover. But the one thing that made them even angrier was the fact that they still had nothing on Hsin-kai proving he was responsible for her disappearance.

The police returned to the couple's apartment on December 3 and questioned their eldest daughter before Hsin-kai could return home. When asked if she had seen anything strange, she said that on the morning of December 2, before Hsin-kai sent them off to school, he had placed a large red-and-black suitcase at the entrance of the master bedroom. She had even touched it out of curiosity and found it extremely heavy. However, when she returned home from school that evening, the suitcase was gone.

The police once again seized the apartment's CCTV footage, and at around 10:39 a.m. on December 2, Hsin-kai was seen on a motorcycle exiting the underground parking garage. 15 minutes later, he returned to the garage with a trolley now attached to the rear of his motorcycle. Then, at 10:59 a.m., Hsin-kai once again left the apartment, the suitcase placed on the trolley, with ropes tying it down.

An easy picture could be painted from this. The police realized that Yurong was likely murdered on November 29, and her body was kept inside the suitcase in the same apartment where her children lived for three days, and Hsin-kai was now disposing of it before it decomposed and because of the police constantly showing up to question him. In fact, this also meant that her body would've been inside the apartment when the police entered for the first time on November 30.

Since Hsin-kai didn't have a lot to work with, the police believed that he disposed of Yurong's body in the dense forested area of Dakeng Mountain, as that was the closest viable location to the apartment. After several hours of sifting through roadside CCTV footage, the police finally saw Hsin-kai at an intersection 6-7 kilometres from the apartment, riding toward Dakeng Mountain at 11:18 a.m.

Hsin-kai driving away with the suitcase

Then at 11:29 a.m., he returned along the same route, only with the suitcase and trolley now missing.

The police also tracked down the hardware store where Hsin-kai had purchased the trolley. He made the purchase in person and requested that the salesman issue an invoice. So the police confronted him once again and asked him where he disposed of Yurong's body.

Rather than answer, Hsin-kai instead kept denying having done anything wrong. He stated that since Yurong had "so heartlessly" abandoned the family, he packed the clothes she had left behind into the suitcase and discarded them in the mountains so that he and the children wouldn't be reminded of her or how she had abandoned them by seeing her belongings. And then, the very second he threw the suitcase away, several scavengers immideately rushed towards it, carrying away its contents and the suitcase itself, meaning he didn't know where it was.

Left with no other choice, the police had to look for that suitcase themselves. Since there was a 12-minute interval between Hsin-kai passing the roadside cameras, it was determined that the suitcase was likely discarded within a 3–4-minute ride from the camera, about 400 meters away.

A large group of police officers, split into four teams, spent the entire night searching the area, and after 15 minutes, one of them found a large red-and-black suitcase hidden in the bushes behind a utility pole.

The suitcase

The zipper was already slightly open, and a human leg could be seen protruding from it. 100 meters away from the suitcase, the police recovered the trolley.

The autopsy was fast-tracked, having been performed on December 4, where the pathologist concluded that the body belonged to a woman approximately 35 years old. She had suffered multiple blunt-force trauma injuries to the back of her head and a total of 27 stab wounds across her body. The pinky finger on her left hand had been completely severed, with only a small strip of flesh still connecting it. Finally, her face had been completely disfigured and burnt with acid, making visual identification impossible.

That being said, the police were still easily able to identify her as Yurong and Hsin-kai was finally placed under arrest.

Hsin-kai's arrest

Chillingly, only three hours before his arrest, Hsin-kai posted to his social media account, showing off his daughter's LEGO builds with the caption "My eldest daughter's creative imagination."

The post in question.

Even now, Hsin-kai refused to admit defeat. He would simply say he couldn't recognize "the deceased" and insisted that his story was true, and the fact that a murder victim was found in that same area stuffed into the same brand of suitcase he also disposed of was just a coincidence.

Hsin-kai only confessed after the police found his DNA on both the trolley and suitcase, and when they threatened him with the death penalty. Albiet he still confessed reluctantly and tried to make himself out to be sympathetic even in light of the brutality he was about to recount. This was his story.

After he was dismissed from his factory job in 2016, he felt he had failed as a husband and father and was therefore too ashamed to take a second factory job, for fear he'd be fired again. He then said that he came down with depression over this incident. Hsin-kai only felt worse in 2018 when he saw Yurong becoming successful again and felt he had to make money fast lest he be looked down upon for not being good enough for Yurong.

However, Hsin-kai didn't have the education or connections his wife did, and after several months of trying online, he still couldn't find a way to earn money. Feeling as if he had no choice, he and his friends were driven to fraud once more out of desperation, leading to another crime on his record.

He was shocked that Yurong would divorce him over this arrest and refused to accept it because he didn't want their daughters to grow up in a broken home, so he utterly rejected the divorce, causing them to argue every week.

When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down essentially every industry Hsin-kai could hope to get a job in, he was left living entirely off Yurong. Yurong spent this time repeatedly telling Hsin-kai to accept the divorce, promising that she could support the two daughters on her own; she didn't even ask him for child support.

Seeing that he couldn't convince her not to go through with it, Hsin-kai reluctantly accepted the divorce, but without another place to go, he remained living with Yurong in the apartment.

At around 3:00 p.m. on November 29, 2020, only 5 days after their divorce, Yurong left the apartment to go to work as a Japanese interpreter for an upcoming anime convention. Before leaving, she also sent the two daughters to plan to cook dinner and pick them up later.

However, that convention was abruptly cancelled, leaving Yurong in a bad mood when she returned home and lashed out at Hsin-kai upon seeing him lying on the sofa. She demanded that he move out immideately and never try to contact her or their daughters ever again.

This caused Hsin-kai to fly into a rage and grab Yurong by the hair, striking and slapping her repeatedly. During the struggle, Yurong cried for help, but Hsin-kai refused to stop and eventually grabbed a baseball bat and struck her several times on the back of the head while she was already on the ground.

It was around then that the neighbours arrived and knocked on the door. Yurong was still alive but weak, so when she called for help once again, those on the other end of the door couldn't hear. Hsin-kai then dragged Yurong, who was barely conscious, to the bathroom. These were the "moving lights and shadows" the neighbours saw through the crack in the door.

Now in the bathroom, Hsin-kai grabbed a bottle of toilet-cleaning acid from the storage cabinet and poured it onto Yurong's face. Then he grabbed a kitchen knife and frantically slashed and stabbed at her. Even after everything, Yurong was still alive and raised her arms to defend herself, which was how she nearly lost her pinkie finger.

After stabbing her 27 times, Hsin-kai said she finally passed away around the exact same time the first police officer arrived at their front door, so he hid in the bathroom and didn't make a single sound until he left.

After the officer left, he grabbed a large plastic tablecloth he stole from the restaurant where he worked and a suitcase. He wrapped up Yurong's body and stuffed it and her bloodied clothes inside the suitcase and then hid the suitcase in the master bedroom wardrobe, covering it with quilts and bedsheets.

The next 20 minutes were spent wiping away the bloodstains in the living room, kitchen, and bathroom before heading to the park to pick up their daughters, so it would look as if nobody was home.

On November 30, their eldest daughter was unable to attend school that day since she was sick, meaning that Hsin-kai wasn't able to dispose of Yurong's body.

On December 1, after the children went to school, Hsin-kai used the time he had to himself to go looking for a place to dispose of his wife's body. He settled on a remote forested area within the Dakeng Mountains. However, when he returned to retrieve the suitcase, he saw the building's manager speaking with two secruity guards. Erroneously believing them to be the police once more, he abandoned his plan to dispose of the body that day.

On December 2, the suitcase began giving off an odour, so he knew he had to move fast. He took the suitcase containing the body out of the wardrobe before sending the children to school, placing it by the master bedroom door to “air out.” After returning home, he bought a trolley from a hardware store and headed straight to Dakeng Mountain to dispose of the body.

Now, with his confession, the police were able to seize the baseball bat, sulfuric acid, the trolley purchase invoice, and the tablecloth that Hsin-kai had mentioned, but the knife was nowhere to be found. Hsin-kai claimed he wrapped the knife in a small plastic bag and threw it away together with the suitcase, but despite several days of searching the area, it was never recovered.

The police believed that a scavenger discovered the suitcase. After seeing a dead body inside, instead of reporting it to the police, he simply took the knife as his own and hid the suitcase. Not only would it explain why the knife couldn't be located, but also why the zipper had been undone when the police found it.

Naturally, it didn't take Hsin-kai long to change his mind, and on December 7, he was already claiming that Yurong had snapped and attacked him with the kitchen knife first and that he was simply defending himself and that he accidentally killed her while fighting back. Regardless of which story was true, the one constant was that Hsin-kai showed no remorse.

During his trial at the Taichung District Court, Hsin-kai once again changed his statement back to his original one and confessed. On June 16, 2021, rather than hand down the death penalty, Chan Hsin-kai was given life imprisonment for the murder of Gong Yurong, with an additional sentence of 1 year and 6 months for disposing of her body.

When justifying his decision not to sentence him to death, the judge pointed out that the murder hadn't been premeditated and that, due to his brief bouts of improvement early in their marriage and when he first got the factory job back in 2014, there was still potential to rehabilitate him.

Despite being shown mercy, Hsin-kai didn't think it was good enough and soon appealed the sentence. He said that he was willing to compensate Yurong's family with 5 million New Taiwan Dollars, atone for his crimes, and would even replace Yurong as her ailing mother's caretaker. He had copied multiple Buddhist scriptures and would write a letter of repentance to the family, and that he deeply loved his daughters and that they needed their father. Even putting all that aside, he added that life imprisonment was too severe a sentence regardless.

The prosecution and Yurong's mother also appealed. She said she had no desire to accept any compensation from Hsin-kai and would raise her granddaughters herself. She and the prosecution were hoping to secure the death penalty.

However, on December 1, 2021, the Taichung High Court ruled that there were no errors in the trial that warranted a change in the verdict and upheld the life sentence.

Both parties appealed one final time to Taiwan's Supreme Court, but both appeals were rejected on February 25, 2022, making Hsin-kai's life sentence final.

Sources

https://pastebin.com/ys6ihQDU

(Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of pictures relating to this case that aren't just newspaper articles.)

On March 7, 1932, a child was out playing in what is now the Meguro district of Tokyo, Japan. While playing, she accidentally dropped one of her wooden clogs into a drainage ditch that ran alongside the road. The ditch was a stagnant sewage channel about two meters wide and one meter deep with a thick layer of accumulated sludge at the bottom. The water was dark and oily in texture and, therefore, impossible to see through; gas constantly bubbled to the surface. It was so bad that the locals nicknamed it "お歯黒どぶ", literally meaning the "Tooth-Blackening Ditch".

Dead dogs and cats were dumped there regularly, and the bodies of newborn infants, abandoned by prostitutes from the neighbouring Tamanoi area (Tamanoi was a sort of red light district), who had given birth and could not cope, were pulled out of it from time to time. In other words, that clog was basically gone.

Despite the odds being stacked against them, a local shopkeeper opted to be a good Samaritan and took it upon himself to try to retrieve the child's shoe. He grabbed a long stick and started poking around in the black water, trying to fish the clog out. He certainly did hook onto something, but it wasn't a clog; instead, he pulled a large bundle wrapped in a white cotton yukata to the surface. Whatever the merchant had just discovered was obviously sinister in nature since the bundle was also secured tightly with a hemp cord, and blood was seen seeping through the yukata.

Rather than interfering with the bundle, he went to find a police box, and after receiving the call, the nearest officer, one who was already patrolling the area, rushed to the scene. The officer cut the hemp and unwrapped the bundle. After removing the yukata, he saw another layer obscuring the bundle's contents, this time a thick brown kraft paper. After removing the paper, the upper torso of a man from the chest upward, with the head, both arms and both hands cleanly severed at the joints, was revealed.

A second police officer was summoned to the scene to help his colleague search the ditch and wade through the dirty water. The two officers recovered two additional bundles, one from a spot slightly further along the same channel and another from the opposite side of the road. One of the bundles consisted of the victim's severed head. The victim's nasal cavities and mouth had been stuffed with old cotton wadding from a futon

Meanwhile, the other bundle contained the lower torso, from the navel down to the hips, with both legs cut off at the base. The rest of the body was nowhere to be found.

On March 8, the pathologists who performed the autopsy at Tokyo Imperial University determined that the victim was around 30 years old, with his skin tanned from being exposed to the sun for a long time. His skeletal frame was robust, and the muscles of his right shoulder were particularly well developed, which led them to believe he had spent most of his life engaged in manual labour.  His face was square-jawed, and he had a widow’s peak hairline.

On the upper right side of his mouth, behind his front teeth, he had a prominent double canine tooth, an unusual dental feature in Japan. His buttocks bore traces of a previous skin disease, and on the topic of his medical history, there were also signs he had been treated for a mild case of pleurisy sometime in life.

The cause of death was determined to be blunt force trauma to the front and left side of the forehead with a blunt instrument; the blows were so severe that the victim's jawbone was shattered, and three of his lower front teeth had been broken off. He had been dead for approximately one week. Based on the degree of mud-water saturation in the tissues, it was determined that the victim's remains had been dumped into the ditch on the evening of March 6.

According to the medical examiner, the likely instrument used in the dismemberment was a saw.

Six strands of female hair were found attached to the cord that bound the torso, four of them dead shed hairs and two from a living person. Cat hair was also found clinging to the cord, and sardine scales were found.

The kraft paper used for the wrapping was traced to the type commonly used by soap factories and similar businesses in the neighbourhood, and the cords used to bind the bundles were a meticulously knotted assortment of hemp rope, curtain cord, and the stiffening insert from inside a kimono sash.

The police returned to the ditch armed with two fire pumps and a motorized pump. Additionally, they also enlisted approximately 130 volunteers from the local neighbourhood and a group of youths to drain and dredge the channel, while they were trying to recover the rest of the body, removing the unhealthy, filthy and hazardous water was something they were eager to do anyway, especially now that they had an excuse. Unfortunately, once the disgusting blackish water fully receded, they didn't find anything.

The police then went door-to-door, canvassing all the households and local businesses, asking whether anyone knew of anyone who had gone missing, run away, or just hadn't been seen in a while. Once again, the police were left empty-handed, as nobody they spoke to could recall any missing persons that matched his description.

Since there were no fingerprints to take and his face had deteriorated from a week of decomposition and bloating, the police published pictures of his distinctive hair and teeth in hopes somebody would see and recognize them.

While initially overshadowed by the assassination of Dan Takuma only two days prior, when it looked as if the police were struggling and still had no leads as to the victim's identity, the newspapers began running wild with the story. The crime scene also became a tourist attraction of sorts; vendors set up food stalls near the ditch, catering to those who came far and wide to view the ditch from which the body had been discovered.

A group of men at the ditch

The Tamanoi district also suffered as a result of the case, losing up to 10,000 customers.

Another institution whose reputation suffered due to the murder was the police's as well. With no new leads, the police station was soon inundated with letters criticizing them for failing to make an arrest and others demanding they solve the case quickly. Eventually, the police offered a reward of 200 yen for anyone who identified the killer, 100 yen for the identification of the victim and another 100 yen for any useful leads at all.

The most notable thing about all the newspapers was how they all tried to put a name to the case. Various names were proposed, including "コマ切れ殺人" ("Chopped-Up Murder"), a title that would be used for at least one other murder case being phased out entirely. Another title used by a newspaper was 八つ切り殺人 ("The Eight-Piece Murder"). But then, the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun used the name バラバラ殺人事件; バラバラ means something along the lines of "scattered, disconnected, or falling apart," while 殺人事件 translates to "Murder Case".

バラバラ殺人事件 soon became the most popular name, and now just about every newspaper would refer to the murder as "玉の井バラバラ殺人事件" or the "Tamanoi Dismemberment Murder Case." バラバラ殺人事件 soon became a new word in the Japanese language, translating to "Dismemberment Murder Case," and now every single murder in Japan involving dismemberment will include バラバラ殺人事件, and that term can be traced back to this case, where it made its first appearance.

Although the case now had a name, one that changed the Japanese language forever, the case was still not any closer to being solved. With the police still looking just as clueless as before, the newspapers tried to take it upon themselves to solve it. They reached out to Japan's most famous mystery writers of the day to get their theories on the case, with newspapers publishing their deductions as facts.

This made it difficult for the police conducting the real investigation, but things were only getting started. The police station was overrun by "self-appointed detectives" who insisted they had to be part of the official investigation, while others arrived already claiming to have solved the case; this was a daily occurrence.

Some of these theories got particularly outlandish, like many insisting the killer was part of a travelling circus trope or, in the most extreme instance, that the famous writer Edogawa Ranpo had murdered the victim so he could use the case to market his latest book.

The police were also besieged daily by a bunch of unreasonable demands, such as several demands from the public to simply round up every cat in the entire city, find the one whose hair matched the hair on the cord, and follow it home to the killer. Psychic mediums also made their way to the station regularly, offering to locate the missing body parts through their readings. Other non-psychics would say that a Kokkuri-san (a Japanese equivalent to an Ouija Board) gave them the answers.

In the two most egregious cases, a man walked into the police station trying to sell the police on a screenplay he had written for a movie about the case, a case which wasn't even a year old or close to being sold yet. And later, two women came into the police station, saying, "We'd like to see Barbara-san's head, please." They were rather upfront about not suspecting the victim to be someone they knew; they just wanted to see his severed head.

All of this happened in just a two-week period, and nothing brought the police any closer to a real lead, not even solving the case, just a lead of any kind. A small altar was erected by the ditch where the victim had been found, and the investigators would regularly visit the Shirahige Shrine to pray for any luck in the investigation, as things had gotten so desperate. But with nothing still, the case was shelved on April 28, and the team was soon disbanded and reassigned to other cases.

While the lead investigator failed to solve this case, he had a distinguished enough career to be promoted to head of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police's First Investigation Division. On September 26, shortly after the promotion he used his new office to order his former post, the police station he worked at at the time to reopen the Tamanoi case.

On September 27, the new chief at that police station gathered up all the officers and staff and began the new investigation with a quick recap, reading aloud to them all everything known about the victim. Among the officers listening was one who hadn't worked there at the time, and when he heard about the hairline, double canine teeth and his muscular right shoulder, a wave of realization washed over him; he knew someone by that description.

In August 1929, he had stopped a homeless-looking man wandering the streets with a young child. The sight struck him as odd, so he naturally questioned the man. The man had given his name as Chiba Ryutaro, then 27 years old and said that the child was his 8-year-old daughter. He told the officer that his wife had died, and he had been laid off, which forced him and his child onto the streets.

Taking pity on him, the officer decided to let his daughter stay in his own home for a while so she'd have a roof over her head while he arranged a job for Chiba at a freight company. A job Chiba quit after only three days. He then took his daughter to Yokohama, only to return 10 days later, once again drifting. Still pitying him, the officer gave Chiba enough money to buy a train ticket back to his hometown in the Akita Prefecture, and that was the last he saw of him.

He immideately shared this with his colleagues, and soon the police's top priority was to track down Chiba Ryutaro. They sent telegrams to police stations across Tokyo. Meanwhile, the police in the Akita Prefecture paid a visit to his registered address, only to find it empty. He had sold off all his property, what little he owned, several years earlier and left for Tokyo, and no one in his hometown had heard from him since.

In the meantime, they also decided to look into Chiba's background. He hailed from the Semboku in the Akita Prefecture, had told various people that he was the son of a wealthy landowning family in Akita, that he had attended a higher agricultural school and that he possessed considerable property in the form of fields, paddy land and forested hills worth a combined four or five thousand yen, all registered in his own name.

He also claimed that if only someone would help him get back on his feet, he would repay them many times over with this inheritance once he could return to Akita to liquidate it. This was a regular plot he pulled, going to other prefectures, telling this story, getting the money and then "returning" to Akita, where he'd never speak to them again.

The only part of that story that was true was that he did need help getting back on his feet. Chiba was indeed penniless, and that fact remained consistent no matter how many times he pulled this scheme. According to the authorities in the Akita Prefecture, there was no property of any kind registered in Chiba's name.

It was mentioned that he owned a small amount of property, which he sold before leaving for Tokyo, and that his departure was due to a falling-out with his stepmother, which drove him off his ancestral land. His story about his wife dying and having to care for his daughter was also true.

The police then showed a composite sketch of the victim to a group of homeless men near Kototoi Bridge. They recognized the victim as Chiba and told the police that he was staying at the home of a 39-year-old Hasegawa Ichitaro. On October 16, police visited the Ichitaro residence and spoke with Ichitaro. He told them that Chiba had been living with his family for about a year but had left in early February, saying he was going back to Akita to arrange some financial matters and had not returned since. His daughter, now 10 years old, was still living with them.

Hiding their suspicions that he was the victim, the police told him they were merely looking for Chiba and asked Ichitaro for his help, asking him to accompany them into the city and take them to locations he was known to have frequented. Not only did the police not find him, but nobody they spoke to during this exercise recognized him either.

While Ichitaro was away, a seperate team of police officers also went to the neighbourhood to question his neighbours. They told the police that for months they heard constant arguments, fighting and conflict coming from Ichitaro's household, with said conflict ceasing in late February.

As for what caused the fighting, well, Ichitaro was a carpenter but, as of late, found himself unemployed, so, to make money, he began drawing and painting shunga illustrations, which he would give to Chiba and send him to the Asakusa entertainment district to sell, then split the earnings. However, from what the neighbours could overhear, Chiba would spend the money himself rather than returning home with it to give to Ichitaro.

On October 20, the police returned and brought Ichitaro in for questioning. After a long interrogation, Ichitaro would finally confess. The first thing he said to the police was, "I saved Chiba, and he repaid my kindness with cruelty. My anger boiled over, and I killed him by myself." he stressed that his siblings, who lived with him, had no involvement. He also said that Chiba was violent toward everyone in the household. He described his thought process as he dismembered Chiba's body, along the lines of "This foot kicked my mother. This hand struck my sister and beat my brother. 'Take that, and that,' I said, grinding my teeth as I sawed."

When the media first heard of the arrest, the articles being printed were depicting Ichitaro in a sympathetic manner, as a man driven to a desperate act by an ungrateful, violent freeloader who had terrorized his family. Although with much pressing, Ichitaro eventually changed his confession and admitted that while he was the mastermind behind the killing, his brother and sister did help him carry it out. And when he told the full story, public sympathy for the killers skyrocketed ever further.

The family lived in a cramped dwelling consisting of Ichitaro, his ailing mother, his 30-year-old sister, Tomi, and his 23-year-old brother, Chotaro. The family lived well below the poverty line. Chotaro, in particular, worked as a printing press operator at the engineering faculty of Tokyo Imperial University, earning a daily wage of 1 yen 30 sen. Tomi worked as a barmaid and earned around 40 sen a day, and as mentioned, Ichitaro had no stable income as the money he would've made selling his illustrations was instead spent by Chiba. Because they couldn't keep making the payments, they had their power to the house cut off and got by using only candlelight.

In late April 1931, Ichitaro was returning home from a park in Asakusa when he noticed a man and a small girl huddled on a bench behind a wooden bench; it was Chiba and his daughter. When Ichitaro approached him, Chiba told him the same story he told anyone who went to show him any kindness.

Although Ichitaro and his entire family were living in severe poverty, he agreed to share with him, giving him 50 yen and a packet of cigarettes. He returned home and told his family what had happened, and his mother said she was proud of him and encouraged him to help people in need.

So over the next few days, Ichitaro and his family would regularly go to the park to share food with Chiba and his daughter. Eventually, they agreed to let Chiba and his daughter live with them, not just out of pity but because they believed Chiba when he said he had the potential to make a lot of money and then pay Ichitaro's family handsomely for their help.

Ichitaro did almost everything he could to cater to Chiba; he got him a job as a stevedore at the Shiodome Train Station while Ichitaro and his mother tried to pressure Tomi to enter into a relationship with Chiba, though at first she refused because she was already in a relationship, a common-law marriage with a customer at the bar she worked at and pregnant with his child.

However, when her husband learned of the pregnancy, he abandoned her and left the area, leaving Tomi alone with the baby. The baby was born in May, but the delivery was extremely taxing on her health, and she required a blood transfusion. Chotaro donated blood, but his alone wasn't enough. Chiba volunteered to donate his own, and this did save Tomi. Afterward, the pressure for Tomi to start a relationship with Chiba only grew, and eventually she relented.

But soon the pressure was transferred over to Chiba. As months passed, they kept pressing him to finally return to Akita and claim his inheritance. They pawned Tomi's and their mother's kimonos to scrape together the money for him to go to Akita, and eventually, he would leave. They waited and waited, but when Chiba finally returned, he had only a souvenir.

When he was predictably confronted about why he didn't have any of that vast fortune he was supposedly entitled to, he would tell the family that a conflict between the tenant farmers and landlords had broken out on the land, making it impossible for him to sell it at the moment.

Now rightfully suspicious, Ichitaro went to one of his more wealthy associates, a man with whom he had a business relationship (and also the father of Tomi's initial partner). He told him about Chiba and how he now believed he had been deceived by them. He made his own inquiries to Akita, and when he heard that Chiba was indeed destitute, he informed Ichitaro immideately.

In November, Chiba told the family he was returning to Akita, this time claiming that his uncle would bring the property-transfer documents to Tokyo by December. Although Ichitaro now knew Chiba to be a fraud, the rest of the family rented a larger house in another ward in anticipation of the money they'd be receiving the following month. December came with no uncle, transfer documents or money.

Ichitaro decided that it was time to evict Chiba. When he tried evicting him, Chiba refused to leave. After helping himself to their alchool mid-eviction, he became violent. He struck Tomi, kicked their mother and hit Chotaro. Unfortunately for them, Chiba had leverage over them that prevented the family from forcing him out.

It was mentioned that Ichitaro sold shunga illustrations, but I didn't explain what exactly shunga was. They are erotic/pornographic in nature, and therefore, the production and distribution of them was illegal at the time, and Chiba threatened to expose Ichitaro if he forced his eviction.

Now, with the entire family aware of his fraud and being blackmailed into letting him stay in their house, Chiba dropped all pretense and was now openly hostile and abusive toward him at all times, and Chiba knew no bounds, once grabbing Tomi's baby and swinging it upside down. Additionally, being that he was now in a relationship with her due to their own pressuring, Chiba was openly talking about selling Tomi into prostitution in the Tamanoi district.

By now, Ichitaro and Chotaro had decided their only recourse was to kill him. They saw Chiba as a con artist and a parasite who took advantage of their generosity and brought them nothing but violence and misery. Furthermore, they viewed Chiba's death as their way to atone for pressuring Tomi into a relationship with him.

February 11, 1932, Tomi's baby passed away. It is unknown whether the death had anything to do with Chiba grabbing and swinging it. Chotaro had taken leave from his job to attend the funeral on February 13. After the funeral arrangements were finalized, Ichitaro forced Chiba to accompany him to a youth group lecture at the nearby Elementary School before they returned home.

At home, Tomi was kneeling in front of the family's small Buddhist altar, praying with her hands clasped before the memorial tablet of her dead baby. Chiba, seeing her, callously said, "Stop that. You're doing it just to make a point." Tomi replied, "What are you angry about? My poor child is dead." Chiba flew into a rage. He shouted, "What did you say?!" and lunged at her, trying to strike her.

Ichitaro already had a wrench ready, and as Chiba rushed toward her sister, he swung it, striking Chiba on the back of his head. Being quite durable, Chiba was more angered by the blow than anything and turned around to start fighting and wrestling with Ichitaro. Chotaro rushed to his brother's aid, swinging a baseball bat at Chiba's legs, which brought him to the floor.

With Chiba now on the ground, the two brothers took turns striking him with the wrench and baseball bat. Meanwhile, although Tomi didn't join in, she knew of the murder plot in advance and had a part to play; that part was standing at the entrance to make sure their mother and Chiba's daughter didn't return home (they left to go to the bathhouse) while Chiba was being killed. After Chiba stopped moving, the three hid his body in a crawlspace beneath the kitchen floor.

With their mother's ailing health and Chiba not being around anymore to take his daughter outside, it took 9 days before the three had the house to themselves again and once they did, starting on February 20 and bleeding into the early hours of February 21, Ichitaro and Chotaro took turns dismembering Chiba's body, using a saw to cut through the bones, severing the corpse into eight pieces, the head, the upper chest, the midsection of the torso, the lower torso, both arms and both legs.

Once his body was completely dismembered, they wrapped his remains in bundles using kraft paper and cotton cloth. They then bound and tied the bundles shut with whatever they had on hand, lengths of hemp, curtain cord and strips of obi stiffener. The bundles were then placed back into the crawlspace so they could dispose of them when they had the oppertunity.

On February 24, Ichitaro wrapped the bundle containing the midsection of the torso with the wrapping cloth and walked to the drainage ditch behind the Army gunpowder depot in the Ooji district, where he disposed of it.

Then, on March 6, under the cover of darkness, Ichitaro and Tomi loaded the three bundles containing the head, upper chest, and lower torso into a wicker trunk, hailed a taxi, and asked to be taken to the Tamanoi district. Once the taxi dropped them off, they dropped the three bundles into the ditch. They had intended to throw them into the covered section of the culvert where they would never be found, but because it was around 8:30-9:00 p.m. and the water was so murky, they ended up depositing Chiba's body into the open channel.

On March 8, at about 6:00 a.m. Ichitaro took the bundles containing Chiba's arms and legs to Chotaro's workplace at the Tokyo Imperial University, the two brothers completely unaware that in that same building, pathologists were currently conducting Chiba's autopsy. Chotaro happened to be working an overnight shift when Ichitaro arrived and took the bundles to hide beneath the floorboards of a corridor on the second floor of an abandoned building inside the university compound, where they stayed.

The same day as Ichitaro's confession, October 28, the police went to the abandoned building at Tokyo Imperial University's engineering faculty and broke up the floorboards to recover Chiba's arms and legs. Meanwhile, the midsection of the torso was recovered from the drainage ditch behind the Army gunpowder depot in Ooji.

Chotaro's arrest after his brother's confession

Lastly, Ichitaro and his family continued to take care of Chiba's daughter; they saw her as innocent in all of this and still pitied her. After the three siblings were arrested, she was taken away by the police while they tried to sort out who would assume custody over her. Ultimately, what happened to her and who, if anyone, took final custody of her after this case hasn't been documented. One can only hope life treated her better after his ordeal.

While much has been said about how newspapers covered this case, another medium of interest was the cinema. Between Ichitaro's arrest on October 20 and his full and final confession on October 28, three seperate movies about the case were rushed into production, filmed and released.

All three advertised themselves as based on real events, but since they premiered before or shortly after Ichitaro's full confession, their plots were almost entirely fictional. Some depicted Ichitaro sympathetically, although acting alone and without the true details of Chiba's behaviour, while others portrayed Chiba as an innocent victim, and that Ichitaro premeditated his murder out of greed.

Around this time, some of the movies were still silent and had a narrator in the theatre to explain the plot to the audience, and these narrators were seen adjusting and improving their narration in real time as more and more information about the actual true story was published in newspapers.

On August 6, 1934, the Tokyo District Court found the Hasegawa siblings all guilty for their roles in the murder of Chiba Ryutaro. Although Ichitaro and Chotaro were eligible for the death penalty, that wasn't exactly a sentence most were excited for, seeing how contemptible the public viewed Chiba. In turn, the judges handed down more lenient sentences.

For murder, corpse mutilation and corpse abandonment, Ichitaro was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment, Chotaro was convicted of murder and sentenced to 8 years, and Tomi was convicted of aiding in corpse mutilation and abandonment and was sentenced to 6 months' imprisonment with three years' probation.

Ichitaro and Chotaro both appealed, and on December 17, 1935, the Tokyo Court of Appeals reduced Ichitaro's sentence to just 12 years and Chotaro's sentence to 6 years; Tomi's sentence remained unchanged. The three didn't appeal a third time and began serving their sentences.

It is unknown what they did for the remainder of their lives after their release, as they chose to avoid the media.

Sources

https://pastebin.com/expXhh9W

On March 20, 2022, an elderly resident was walking along the road in the village of Borno in Northern Italy. As he walked the mountainous road, he eventually looked down and saw four black garbage bags lying in a roadside ditch. People often illegally dump their trash in the area, so these garbage bags were nothing unusual to him; his first instinct was to load them into his pickup truck and drive them to the landfill for proper disposal.

The two bags

However, when he went to retrieve the bags, they immideately struck him as odd because they were unusually heavy. He stopped trying to lift the bag and decided to open the first one up, where he was greeted by a human hand. The hand was dirty with earth and soil, but the fingernails were quite striking, purple, with traces of glitter that made it nearly impossible to mistake what he was seeing for anything else.

The police arrived in less than 10 minutes, and they already knew there were exactly four bags. An officer on patrol had noticed the bags on earlier that morning and planned to return to do some clean-up, but the elderly resident discovered the body first. The police also caught a lucky break involving the bags; had they gone undiscovered for another 10-14 days, growing spring vegetation would've concealed them completely.

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Police and forensics at the scene

When the police opened up the four bags, they recovered a complete body belonging to a naked woman who had been cut into 15 pieces with what was described as surgical precision, with the cuts going cleanly through the feet, hands, arms, legs, and even the sternum. In addition, her face had been severely disfigured, having been burned with fire.

Based on the level of brutality before them, the police suspected a deeply personal motive likely connected to a romantic or sexual relationship of some kind and were considering the murder to be a femicide.

Aside from the obvious, which was identifying her, the first challenge for the police to overcome was to determine exactly how long she had been dead. Her remains were almost perfectly preserved, looking like she had died very recently and hadn't decomposed yet due to the cool weather, although the police suspected that this was artificial. Mid-march just wasn't cold enough for this degree of preservation. Rather, it looked as if her remains had been frozen for an extended period of time and that her remains were simply disposed of in the ditch not long before they were first spotted on March 20th.

The police, aided by some firefighters, descended down the mountainous slope in an attempt to locate any additional evidence, such as a murder weapon or identification documents the killer may have disposed of, but they climbed back up empty-handed.

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Forensics and firefighters preparing to decend down the slop.

The police also checked the license plates of any vehicle captured by the closest roadside camera to the crime scene, but these efforts were also mostly for naught.

According to the medical examiner, the victim was a caucasian woman between 35 and 50 years old, stood at 160 centimetres, and weighed in at around 50–55 kg and had dark hair. No woman matching this description was reported missing in Italy's Lombardy region.

Taking the victim's fingerprints was difficult as the killer had applied fire to the fingers in an attempt to burn them as well. Additionally, her DNA didn't match anyone missing in Italy, so it was another dead end.

The police's most promising lead was the various tattoos the woman had, eleven in total and even then, there might've been more, as it looked like the killer tried to remove patches of skin that may have contained them. The tattoos in question were

"Step by step" inked on the right ankle, "Wanderlust" on the right clavicle, "elegance is the" on the right side of the back, a partial design on the left elbow with the words "be brave", "fly" on the right wrist, an inverted "V" on the right thigh, an inverted "VV" on the left thigh, the letters "te" on the back of the left hand, Designs on the fingers of the right hand and finally, a leopard/spotted print design on the right buttox.

The police published pictures of the tattoos in all the local newspapers, asking anyone who recognized them or the artist who tattooed them to come forward. They were so distinctive that the police believed it was essentially impossible for anyone who saw them not to remember them. While another week passed with no new information, this lead would pan out for the police and from an unlikely source.

On March 26, a journalist from the online newspaper, BsNews.It, Andrea Tortelli received a telephone call from a friend who had read an article he published after the police shared the tattoos and issued their public appeal.

This friend told Andrea that on December 6, 2021, he was listening to a radio broadcast featuring an interview with a woman active in the adult entertainment industry who appeared on the show under the name Charlotte Angie. After hearing the interview, he began to follow Charlotte on her main social media, her OnlyFans account, and according to him, Charlotte's tattoos matched the decedent's exactly. Having been a journalist since he was 17, Andrea knew what he was doing and began his investigation.

Andrea immideately visited all of Charlotte's social media accounts himself, enlarging and examining images from her content frame by frame to compare the visible tattoos against the official list released by investigators. He quickly confirmed that eight of the eleven tattoos were a near-perfect match for those shared by the police. Additionally, some other models who collaborated with Charlotte were contacted by her and asked to remove any pictures featuring her from their accounts.

Rather than publishing his findings immideately, Andrea decided to do his due diligence as a journalist and investigate further. First of all, Charlotte hadn't uploaded a single new piece of content to any of her social media accounts since around January 10, but despite her online activity abruptly ceasing and the fact that the victim had been dead for at least a month or two due to how she had been frozen, nobody had filed a missing person report in her name.

After some further digging, Andrea found a social media account linked to her phone number, so she sent Charlotte a message via WhatsApp. Andrea was a little surprised by how quickly the reply came and just as alarmed by its contents. Andrea was told that "she" did not wish to speak with journalists and had retired from the adult entertainment industry. Andrea told "Charlotte" about the body found in Borno, to which she said, "Ah, I understand, several people have told me about that girl. I'm fine, fortunately."

Andrea asked if he could be sent a brief audio clip of Charlotte's voice, even if only a few seconds long, to confirm that he was really speaking with her and that she was all right. He received no further texts, and when Andrea tried to call the number directly, the call went unanswered twice. He was now certain that Charlotte was not only dead, but that he had just been speaking to her killer.

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Andrea speaking with \"Charlotte\"

Once again, he didn't publish this in his newspaper right away. Instead, he contacted the police in Borno and provided them with everything he had found: Charlotte's tattoos, her contact information, what he believed to be her last known address and, of course, a transcript of the text exchange he had just had with whoever was on the other end of the line.

The police were quick to learn Charlotte's real name, and on March 28, they identified their victim as 26-year-old Carol Maltesi, a resident of Rescaldina in the Province of Milan.

Carol Maltesi

Carol Maltesi was born on December 23, 1995, in Monza, in the region of Brianza. Carol was mostly raised by her mother in the small town of Sesto Calende after her father moved to the Netherlands to open a bar with her brother following their parents' divorce. As a child, she enjoyed dance, horseback riding, and reading. As an adult, she was described as cheerful, adventurous and fascinated with the rest of the world, often posting online about her love of travel.

Carol then enrolled in a vocational school specializing in fashion and clothing, and graduated in 2015 with a final grade of 85 out of 100. After graduation, she moved briefly to the province of Verona, where she began a relationship with a man and, in 2016, had a son with her boyfriend.

This relationship didn't last, son, and after they broke up, Carol's son went to live with his father in the Province of Verona. Fortunately, they remained on amicable terms, so Carol visited and spoke with him regularly, and she was planning a future that would bring her closer to her son.

After the breakup, she returned to live with her mother in Sesto Calende to help with her mother's health problems before eventually getting an apartment of her own in Rescaldina in early 2020. In Rescaldina, she worked as a sales assistant at a clothing boutique near Malpensa airport and later at a shopping center. Unfortunately, neither of those were jobs she could hold for long.

In March 2020, COVID-19 had become a pandemic, and, as many may remember, Italy was one of the first Western nations to be hit, struck hard and fast. Italy's entire retail sector was effectively shut down, leaving Carol unemployed and unable to support her son or contribute to his upbringing.

So what job could Carol still do without any prior experience at a time when leaving her home was basically illegal? Well, around the same time, a website called OnlyFans was starting to enter the mainstream, and Carol decided to give it a try. At first, Carol only posted softcore content to the site, but knowing it would bring in more money, she started posting far more hardcore pornographic content under the stage name of Charlotte Angie.

By December 2021, Carol was earning up to €10,000 per month and was successful enough to be invited as a guest on the aforementioned radio show.

Around the same time, Carol began planning a move to Verona so she could be closer to her now 5-year-old son. She had also begun a long-distance relationship with an adult film actor based in Prague, and the two were discussing the possibility of one of them moving to Italy or Czechia so they could have a life together.

However, it seemed more likely that he would come to Italy, as Carol had been in contact with a real estate agency in Verona to inquire about rental properties. Carol had confided in her closest associate and former business partner, a then-42-year-old man named Davide Fontana, about her plans to leave Rescaldina permanently to be closer to her boyfriend and son. This, as it would turn out, was a grave mistake.

Davide Fontana

Davide was born in Milan on April 5, 1979, and lived there for most of his life. He worked in the human resources department of a major Milanese bank and had been married for 20 years. He had no criminal record or any history of psychiatric problems.

He was active on social media as a food and travel blogger with 13,000 followers, posting restaurant reviews, event photos, and occasional posts about charitable causes he supported, such as anti-violence initiatives in Africa, specifically in Zanzibar. Anyone who attended his cooking classes said he was kind and passionate. Overall, nothing about him seemed very alarming.

In October 2020, after meeting her at a hotel in Milan, Davide reached out to Carol through her OnlyFans account and presented himself as a client interested in photographing her as a model. What ultimately ended up happening during their first meeting was Davide paying Carol to have sex with her. It only took a few months of knowing her for Davide to become completely infatuated with Carol, even divorcing his wife after 20 years of marriage and then renting an apartment on the same floor of Carol's building just to try and be with her instead.

At first, they did, in fact, have a relationship, and even though it didn't last long, the two remained in contact afterward, with Davide acting as her photographer, manager, driver, and sometimes even her partner once again. He had a spare key to Carol's apartment, received approximately 10% of her earnings, and sometimes appeared in her content. Those who knew both of them described Davide as constantly being with Carol.

Additionally, Davide ran a second social media account where he uploaded professional erotic, sometimes pornographic images of various women, including Carol under her stage name Charlotte Angie, during the period when the police suspected Carol to be dead.

Their relationship was supposed to be open, hence Carol's long-distance boyfriend in Prague. Davide agreed, but he apparently wasn't okay with the open part of the open relationship since he went back on it immideately, obsessing over her and was supposedly "glued to her 24 hours a day." he also couldn't accept their relationship ending either and had apparently structured his entire life around his relationship with her.

In October 2021, Carol told Davide about her plan to move to Verona to be closer to her son, possibly move to Prague and maybe retire from the adult entertainment industry altogether. Somehow, this came as a genuine shock to Davide, who was convinced that Carol needed him and had tried to convince her of the same.

Now, with the background out of the way, the police decided to trace the movements of Carol's personal vehicle. They tracked down CCTV footage and toll road data to place the car in Borno before the remains were found, and the vehicle was being driven by Davide.

On March 28, Davide walked to the police station accompanied by a mutual friend of his and Carol's. Davide decided that now was the best time to finally report Carol missing. He presented himself to the police as a neighbour who had grown concerned over how long it had been since he last saw her, but already suspicious, the police questioned him further and in just three hours, with the police pointing out contradictions in his account and knowing information that hadn't been made public, he went from trying to report her disappearance to confessing to her murder. His confession lasted three hours and began with him saying, "Yes, it was me. I killed Carol, and I'll tell you how."

On December 22, 2021, three weeks after Carol's appearance on the radio show, Davide created a fake OnlyFans account under the name "Tombeur de Femme," which literally just means "womanizer". Between January 3 and January 11, 2022, he used this account to commission a series of videos from Carol. The final video in the series was to be a bondage video in which Carol would be tied up and gagged, with the male actor restraining and striking her.

In this fake context, he included the specific instruction in his "script" that the male character was to demand that Carol reveal her phone access code before tying her up. The session was structured so that a less violent video would be filmed first, with the most extreme content filmed last. Carol accepted the commission, and the shoot was scheduled for the morning of January 11. Not knowing anyone else nearby, Carol would, in theory, have no other choice than to ask Davide to be that "male actor" where he would naturally agree.

On that day, Davide arrived at Carol's apartment, having been granted permission by the bank to work from home. They then filmed the first video together, a rather softcore scene with little explicit content.

They then moved to the upper floor of the apartment, where a pole used for lap dancing was installed in the bedroom. As part of the second video they filmed, Davide bound Carol's wrists and feet with adhesive tape, put a black plastic bag over her head, and taped her mouth shut.

Davide stated that this was an entirely consensual erotic game and also part of the video's script, and said the script called for a scene where Carol was "lightly" struck by a hammer on the thighs and then on the stomach. What Davide did instead was use that hammer to inflict 13 blows to Carol's head. Despite how obviously premeditated this entire encounter was, Davide justified striking Carol repeatedly with the hammer by saying he had "lost control".

After he was finished, he noticed Carol's leg spasm and realized she was still alive. So he went to the kitchen, retrieved a kitchen knife, and then used that knife to slit Carol's throat, something that he defended as an "Act of mercy". Davide remained in the apartment for a while before picking up Carol's phone and responding to someone else's message posing as her.

On January 12, Davide drove to a building supply store in Cerro Maggiore and purchased an axe and a metal hacksaw. The receipt printed at 1:49 p.m. showed that only 2 hours had passed between Carol's death and Davide's purchase of the tools.

Davide then called the bank and told them he had tested positive for COVID-19, giving him a mandatory 7 days off at least, which he devoted to covering up his murder. Davide used the axe and hacksaw to dismember Carol's body into approximately 15 pieces and made attempts to peel the skin off of her body to get rid of her tattoos, although he was less successful in this regard.

Davide also purchased a large chest freezer, and once it was delivered, he sealed the body parts in five black garbage bags and stored them in the freezer. In addition to the freezer, he ordered a brazier, but he returned it because he couldn't find any use for it in this situation.

Next was the key part of Davide's plan: delaying anyone from suspecting that anything was wrong. He used her phone to reply to messages from her family, friends, and boyfriend. Unlike most killers who employ this tactic, Davide thought ahead and mimicked Carol's writing style exactly, as opposed to using his own and risk striking her relatives as acting out of character.

Being her manager, Davide already had access to Carol's OnlyFans account, so he made a post announcing to her subscribers that she had paradoxically "taken a break to spend time with my son," while also being "abroad filming," in Dubai and that anyone needing to contact her should contact "Dave."

Davide also took it a step further, using Carol's own credit card to pay her rent and utility bills as well as to periodically pay for food at a restaurant or at a gas station so it would look even more like she was still alive. 

Carol's father, who still lived in the Netherlands, was none the wiser. Davide even played voice recordings of Carol to get around wanting to hear from her directly, including a reply to late birthday wishes sent his way.

When it came to Carol's boyfriend, on January 13, Davide messaged him directly, this time as himself, to tell him that Carol didn't want to see him anymore and wanted to be alone for the time being. When he tried messaging Carol directly, his calls went unanswered. When Davide finally used Carol's account to message him back, he said, "I slept all day," and then, when he went to message Davide, he told him that Carol couldn't answer him because she was "sleeping."

In February, an entire month since Carol's dismembered body was placed in that freezer, Davide used her account to reach out to other OnlyFans models and offered them an oppertunity to do a collab. One of these women had already collaborated with Carol back in 2021. However, that collab would naturally never come. Although any model interested was told to contact "Dave" instead.

However flawless his deception may have seemed at the time, Davide knew he couldn't sustain it forever and had to get rid of Carol's remains. He rented a chalet in Cittiglio, in the province of Varese, and transported some of Carol's body parts there. Once there, he tried to incinerate them using alcohol and petrol at an outdoor barbecue. This plan ultimately failed since the remains weren't burnt enough to his liking, so he drove them back to Rescaldina and placed Carol's body parts back into the freezer.

Davide began researching the local geography to find an ideal location to dispose of the garbage bags, driving as far as Malegno and Paline and scouting the terrain along the road for places to discard the bags. As part of his so-called reconnaissance mission, he spent the weekend at a hotel in Boario, where he even left an online review of the hotel after checking out.

On March 20th, Davide loaded the garbage bags into the back of Carol's vehicle, which Carol's neighbours had already seen Davide driving during her "absence," and drove to Borno, where he dropped the bags into the ditch, then drove back to Rescaldina. For all his planning and 69 days spent with Carol's body in the freezer while he agonized and planned over what to do with it, Davide couldn't even finish the drive back home before Carol's remains were found.

After this confession, Davide was transferred to prison immediately and, within a day, ordered to be held in pre-trial detention awaiting his trial. In making his ruling, the judge stated that it was all but certain Davide would flee or even kill again if granted any form of conditional release.

In the meantime, the police visited both Davide and Carol's apartments. Using luminol testing, the police found large amounts of Carol's blood in her apartment despite all the time Davide had put into cleaning the apartment of any trace of her murder.

The police also recovered numerous rags that he had used in the cleaning, with traces of DNA still present. The pole installed in the room where Carol had been tied was still present. The pole had also been scrubbed, but biological evidence remained on that, too. The large chest freezer wasn't removed either. The freezer was, in fact, too big to fit into the apartment's small kitchen to begin with, and was jutting slightly into another room when the police arrived.

https://preview.redd.it/dc2a4pkh233h1.png?width=284&format=png&auto=webp&s=3a44979717cdf8b72e8f55b5b05c6f141665aab6

The police at Carol's apartment.

Davide's trial began at the Corte d'Assise di Busto Arsizio on November 24, 2022, and the prosecution was seeking life imprisonment. Contrary to his claims of losing control, the prosecution had a hoard of evidence proving otherwise. Putting aside the fact that he arranged the meeting and session with Carol under false pretenses, they argued that he purchased the tools and settled on dismembering Carol's body way too quickly for an accidental murder and then a panic-driven disposal. That and the fact that he kept Carol's body in the freezer for 69 days straight before disposing of the bags.

On June 12, 2023, Davide Fontana was convicted of the murder of Carol Maltesi, although it didn't pan out in the way many had been hoping. The presiding judge rejected every aggravating factor raised by the prosecution and imposed a sentence of 30 years, as well as being made to pay 50,000 Euros to Carol's family.

The judge concluded that it was indeed a crime of passion and that Davide's feelings of being used by Carol were a "genuine grievance." Even more insulting, 30 years was simply his total sentence; he was only given 24 years for murder, with the additional 6 stemming from his decision to hide and later dispose of Carol's body.

Carol's family and the Italian public at large were enraged; to them, it was blatantly obvious that the judge held Carol's work as an OnlyFans model against her and that Davide would've been handed a life sentence if Carol had any other occupation. The outrage was so bad that the judge himself had to make a statement defending his verdict. He said that even if Carol "had been a nun," he would've handed down the same sentence.

Hearing that he would've treated a man who carried out the premeditated murder of an innocent woman, dismembered her, hid her body in a freezer for 69 days, impersonated her to her family and disposed of her in a ditch leniently, regardless, naturally did very little to soothe the public's outrage. His fellow prisoners also held a dim view of Davide. In late August, an inmate managed to break into his cell and beat him severely.

On September 19, 2023, Davide applied to be added to a restorative justice program and was accepted, becoming the first person in Italy to commit such a crime and still be added to the program. Carol's family said they were "dumbfounded" when they heard the news and refused to take part. In fact, Carol's father said, "You are a devil, a damned murderer, I'll wait for you outside, and you will pay a second time."

Unsurprisingly, the prosecution and Carol's family were eager to appeal this sentence. Their appeal was heard at the Corte d'Assise d'Appello di Milano in February 2024. During this hearing, Davide apologized to Carol's family and even e-Transferred 39,000 Euros to Carol's son. Neither of these was seen as very genuine since he didn't apologize during the trial, where he was let off leniently, and still sent an amount of money smaller than had been ordered.

The prosecution presented the exact same evidence they did during the last trial, and on February 21, 2024, the appeals court saw it for what it was and what the initial judge should've seen it as: premeditation. As a result, Davide was handed a life sentence, and the compensation he was ordered to pay was increased to 180,000 Euros. Now, Carol's family were satisfied and said they were happy to hear of this new sentence.

It was now Davide's turn to appeal, and on September 10, 2024, Italy's Supreme Court actually sided with him, overturning the life sentence and sending the case back down for a retrial specifically to reevaluate the accusation that the murder was premeditated; all other aggravating factors stood.

On May 15, 2025, Davide was once again sentenced to life at this retrial, so the case was finally over?. No, Davide appealed once again, and on February 10, 2026, Italy's Supreme Court overturned the sentence for the second time, finding that they had failed to adequately prove premeditation and ordering yet another retrial.

A date for this third trial has yet to be scheduled.

Sources

(I had to share them this way because Pastebin flagged the paste for some reason)

(Grammarly messed up the title a little bit and titles can't be edited, but hopefully it's not too confusing to follow

Also, no real or full names are available in this case, as far as I can tell, nor any pictures of the victim.)

At 3:30 a.m. on January 24, 2007, an employee on duty on Line 4 of the Seoul Metropolitan Subway in Ansan, South Korea, noticed a man pulling a dark-colored travel bag toward the platform entrance. It was hard not to notice this man, after all, this man's suitcase was dripping onto the floor a dark red liquid which was obviously blood.

The employee stopped the man and wasted no time, bluntly asking him, "What's in the bag'. The man's response was equally swift. Speaking in Mandarin and some broken Korean, he claimed that he was 40 kilograms of pork.

Skeptical, he ordered the man to let go of the suitcase so he could open it up and inspect it. He complied, so he undid the zipper and opened it, finding an opaque white plastic bag wrapped around the suitcase's contents. With the dim lighting he had to work with, it did indeed look like raw meat. However, that made little immediate difference since one fact remained the same: the man was not allowed to board the subway with a suitcase dripping blood.

The man complied, took the suitcase back, nodded, and left through the ticket gates, showing absolute indifference to what many would consider a massive inconvenience.

A half hour passed, and now another station employee was conducting a routine patrol of the men's restroom on the ground floor. Inside the accessible-use stall at the far end of the row, he found the same suitcase discarded on the floor, blood seeping steadily from its base and pooling on the floor.

When this new employee opened it, it became clear that he wasn't dealing with soiled pork. What he saw was the torso and both arms of what appeared to be a woman wrapped in vinyl sheeting and garbage bags, severed cleanly at the neck and at the hips.

https://preview.redd.it/04fldsci1d1h1.png?width=851&format=png&auto=webp&s=a0e4e00e8c3743b49265ba4c7f67fbf2bdb72b0a

https://preview.redd.it/vp4ezl9o1d1h1.png?width=858&format=png&auto=webp&s=24453d87b4b5b53916705e3a08bbc939b48d8128

Police and forensics at the scene.

Within minutes, the police arrived at the station in droves and could tell a fair bit about their victim before the body was even moved. First, they confirmed she was a woman and estimated she was in her 20s or 30s. Her blood type was A, she stood at 160 cm tall with an average build and had five moles on her chest and neck.

But without the head, hands or the rest of the body, identifying her was nearly impossible. Although given just how much fresh bleeding her remains were giving off, it was obvious that she had been killed very recently.

There was nothing special about the suitcase or the bags that contained the victim's remains; they could've been purchased at just about any discount store in the city. Interestingly, there were signs that the victim had been washed or bathed recently, and she was still wearing her clothing, likely an attempt on the killer's part to stunt the flow of her blood. The clothing in question consisted of a pink sweater and a black suit from a mid- to low-priced brand.

A sweater the victim was wearing.

The police collected 9 fingerprints from the bathroom, one cigarette butt, and thirteen hairs from the bathroom stall and sent them all off to be tested, believing them to be the killers.

Finally, the medical examiner confirmed what the police had suspected. The woman had been killed that very morning based on the rate of blood flow and her empty stomach contents.

Luckily for the police, the killer's plan to stop his victim's blood from dripping through the suitcase was a resounding failure, so the police just had to follow the blood trail his suitcase left behind. The blood trail extended from the station entrance for approximately 800 meters before abruptly ending in a residential neighbourhood known as Wongok-dong.

This was a problem for the police. Wongok-dong was home to the highest number of foreigners in all of Korea; around 70% of the neighbourhood is, in fact, foreigners, mostly Chinese nationals from the provinces of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang. The way the neighbourhood was arranged also worked against the police; it was composed of single-room rooftop flats, subdivided rooms, and semi-permanent structures, making door-to-door inquiries difficult.

But even if it were an easy task, most were undocumented, so they wouldn't want to involve themselves with the police too much, and if the killer and victim were undocumented immigrants, it would make identifying either of them difficult as well.

Regardless, the police tried their best, knocking on as many doors as they could find and interviewing several shopkeepers, but their first day yielded nothing. There were hundreds of dense residential blocks to cover, and nothing to guarantee the murder even occurred anywhere remotely close to where the blood trail ended.

This uncertainty wasn't diminished when over 100 officers searched as many trash cans, restrooms, and sewers in the neighbourhood as they could find in search for the rest of the victim's remains, only to still come up empty.

That's not to say the police didn't catch any breaks; the residents set up various CCTV cameras across the neighbourhood and in most of the businesses. One of the cameras at a convenience store in Wongok-dong had captured a man purchasing a 100-litre garbage bag at 11:30 a.m. on January 24.

A second camera at a discount supermarket in the same neighbourhood had recorded the same man purchasing the suitcase at around 2:16 p.m.: dark-skinned, medium build, approximately 172 to 175 centimetres tall, wearing a black padded jacket and beige cotton trousers. He appeared to be in his mid-30s. Furthermore, based on his interaction with the station worker and the neighbourhood he appeared to come from, the police believed him to be Chinese rather than Korean. Based on this footage and interviews with the store owners, the police created a composite sketch of this man.

The CCTV footage

On January 25, the police released these images to the public and placed their unidentified suspect on the nationwide wanted list. In addition, the police were now offering a reward of five million won for information leading to his identification and arrest. But nobody came forward.

In addition to handing out flyers to everyone in the neighbourhood, they also erected banners featuring images of the suspect and information about the victim throughout the neighbourhood, with the text written in both Korean and Mandarin.

One of the banners.

The police were so desperate that they even arranged for a Chinese detective to be flown into Korea, hoping the immigrant workers would be more forthcoming with him.

Despite 30 detectives and 200 police officers knocking on 1,725 doors, they still found nothing useful during the initial investigation.

The same could also be said for the victim; the police were just as clueless as ever when it came to identifying her, and they were growing genuinely concerned that the case would likely go unsolved. They hadn't uncovered anything new about her, and there were still no missing persons reports yet. Considering where the murder likely took place, and the killer's likely origin, the police believed the victim was also a foreign national, likely undocumented and with no family in South Korea to explain why nobody had yet to report her missing after nearly a week.

On January 30, the police returned to Wongok-dong to conduct another sweep, hoping that perhaps this time they'd finally come across at least one lead. The police decided to go to a four-story apartment in the neighbourhood close to the discount store where the killer bought the suitcase, reasoning that he likely went shopping close to home.

The police were interested in any vacant apartments, preferably those that had been vacant recently, and came across one that looked promising. When they entered the bathroom on the fourth floor, they subjected the room to luminol testing, which revealed heavy traces of blood in that room. In addition, the police found three knives with damaged blades inside the kitchen sink and six blade fragments from the bathroom. Venturing to the veranda, the police retrieved a bloodied shirt and a pair of trousers.

Forensic technicans investigating the apartment.

The police then went up to the roof of the building and noticed two garbage bags lying there. The police opened them up and found two human legs belonging to a woman. After a week sitting on the rooftop, exposed to the sun, the legs had become severely decomposed. The legs had been severed cleanly from the hips, and the surviving tissue was a match to that of the torso, so the police had finally found the legs.

https://preview.redd.it/5sxkdeiz0b1h1.png?width=796&format=png&auto=webp&s=50ce7b40f21007869a875952f4916b70ab844fe9

The legs being removed from the apartment

Identifying the victim came easily after this discovery. The police spoke to the building's landlord and neighbours, and checked the resident registry. With that, they narrowed the victim down to a 33-year-old Korean woman named Jeong. The police then reached out to Jeong's family and asked if she had any identifying features they could use to identify the remains. They told them that Jeong had five moles arranged on her neck and chest area, just like the victim, finally identifying her.

The entirety of Jeong's adult life was spent mostly working in factories. She had worked at a garment factory in Busan for 10 years before moving to a stone-processing factory in Seoul's Guro district. It was around 2005 when she met many of her closest friends, who were, by and large, introduced to her through working at the same factory.

Although she was Korean, just about everyone Jeong knew after moving to Seoul was Chinese, largely factory workers. She had relocated to Wongok-dong and taken a job at a computer parts manufacturer within the Banwol industrial complex. Aside from just being co-workers and friends with some of them, Jeong considered herself a friend of the Chinese community as a whole; her cousin had married a Chinese worker, and that worker was the younger brother of a man Jeong had been dating for a long time, a man named Han.

Han and Jeong had been dating since 2001; however, Han was an illegal immigrant, and soon he was caught. On May 22, 2006, he was deported back to his home in the Chinese city of Qingdao. Jeong was unable to move on, and on October 23, 2006, secured a 90-day tourist visa to visit Han in China. She remained in China for three months, only returning to South Korea on January 23, 2007, one day before the murder.

Unfortunately, the police still didn't know who the killer was; nobody had yet come forward. The police canvassed the area and searched the apartment more thoroughly, and found a shattered mobile phone in the trash bin of Jeong's room. While the phone itself was destroyed, the memory chip was intact, so the police were able to restore the contacts and call records: 51 phone numbers and a log of recent calls later, they identified one of them as belonging to a 35-year-old Chinese national named Son.

At the same time, the police began sharing photos of the suspect with people who actually knew Jeong, hoping for better luck now. These expectations were met when Han's brother was shown the CCTV images, and he identified the man as Son, the same man Jeong had called on that destroyed cellphone. A relative of Jeong also identified him as Son, and lastly, the CCTV images were emailed to Han back in China, and he, too, identified the man as Son, so the killer had now been definitively identified.

Now they just had to find him. Son's phone had been turned off, so the police couldn't just track his location, and he had abruptly quit his job the day of the murder, making him even more elusive at the moment. So in the meantime, the police dug into Son's past in search of a potential motive.

Son first arrived in South Korea in July 1997 on a three-year industrial trainee visa, which the government often handed out to foreigners willing to take jobs in factories that locals didn't want. Suffice to say, Son overstayed his visa, soon finding employment at a dye factory, a stone-processing factory, and various other manual labour jobs across Ansan, Seoul and Busan. Overall, his background wasn't that remarkable. He also had a wife and child back in China.

His present was a different story; despite maintaining a long-distance relationship with Han, she seemed to be maintaining one at home with Son, beginning in August 2005. After Han was deported, their relationship appeared more openly romantic, though some simply assumed Son was trying to comfort Jeong through a difficult time.

According to Han, a former friend and colleague of Son's, when Son visited him in China in 2006, he learned from him that Jeong was still in contact with him.

After hearing that last bit of information, the police were sure they had found their motive, but locating Son seemed as difficult as ever. Nobody had seen him, and his phone remained turned off. But inexplicably, at 8:50 a.m. on February 1, Son's cellphone was turned on and pinged in Dongducheon, Gyeonggi Province.

Son was heading south on a subway back to Seoul, following Line 1 toward the Seoul metropolitan area. Police mapped out that his likely route would take him to Geumjeong Station, the transfer point between Line 1 and Line 4, and Line 4 was the line that connected Geumjeong back south to Ansan, likely to return to Ansan under the cover of darkness to take note of how big the police presence was and if it was safe to return home.

The police were stationed at Geumjeong Station to lie in wait, and once Son stepped off the platform at 11:30 p.m., he was immideately arrested before he could act. Although Son had shaved his head to alter his appearance, he was still recognizable. Once brought to the police station, Son confessed, beginning with  "I'm sorry... we fought... I drank too much."

https://preview.redd.it/5n4pu0txyc1h1.png?width=490&format=png&auto=webp&s=a5e2d5c5639a220b0ad44a34cf893ccb84ffcde4

Son's arrest.

At 9:00 a.m. on January 24, he entered Jeong's apartment and saw her with another man he didn't know. Son's reaction was immediate, and he engaged the stranger in a physical altercation, striking the man and forcing him out of the room with him promptly fleeing and leaving Son alone with Jeong.

There, they had a long argument about their relationship, about the man Jeong was just with, her contact with Han and her visit to China. Obviously, Son was hypocritical in more ways than just one, seeing as he was also cheating on his partner, a wife and that Son wasn't even Jeong's original partner and just someone she was cheating on with. During his argument, Son drank three bottles of Chinese liquor, which he said left him severely impaired.

Finally, Jeong told him that his interference in her private life was unacceptable, that their relationship was now over, and she wanted him to leave and never come back. Hearing those words enraged Son; he picked up a claw hammer from off the television set and struck Jeong on the head repeatedly. When she began to flee, Son gave chase, swinging the hammer at her once more before wrapping his hands around her neck and strangling Jeong until she passed away.

Rather than fleeing, Son remained in the apartment for a while before deciding to dismember Jeong's body. He dragged her body to the bathroom and used the claw section of the hammer and a knife sourced from the kitchen to start dismembering the body, cutting Jeong's remains into 8 seperate sections, the head, both hands, both arms, the torso, and both legs, having to use multiple knives as the blades kept breaking.

Once the dismemberment was complete, Son washed the severed body parts with water and wrapped them carefully in clothing to try to stunt the blood flow when he inevitably tried disposing of Jeong's remains.

He then left the building and travelled to the nearby discount stores. He purchased a 100-litre garbage bag at a convenience store and returned to the building to place Jeong's remains inside it. He went out again to buy a suitcase, and once he returned, he stuffed the torso and arms into it.

The two garbage bags containing Jeong's legs were carried to the roof of the building and simply abandoned. The two garbage bags containing the head and hands were placed in a seperate garbage bag, which he took with him.

After being turned away upon his arrival at the train station, Son, as established, went to the bathroom to abandon the suitcase in one of the stalls, concluding that he couldn't go any further without being caught. Afterwards, he left the station.

Son then claimed to have gone to a dirt area near a lane close to Wongok-dong's Gwansan Library so he could bury the head and the hands, although he couldn't remember the exact location due to how drunk he was during this entire process. The police conducted a search of the area in question and eventually recovered Jeong's head, but her hands have never been located.

To the investigators, there were more than a few issues with Son's confession. First of all, the man he claimed to have seen Jeong with has never been identified, so there was no way to verify if that part was true. Second, despite his claims of being absolutely wasted, he certainly didn't behave that way, being able not just to plan something like this but also to carry out everything mentioned without any difficulty.

But most of all, there was the part that Son didn't tell the police. After killing Jeong, Son had not simply fled. He had gone through her handbag, removed four bank savings books, and, over the following days, withdrew all the money held in those accounts from ATMs in various cities. The total amount was 9.8 million won.

Through these withdrawals, they could track that Son had travelled between Seoul, Busan, Jinju, and Dongducheon, staying at cheap roadside inns and at Buddhist temples along the way and exclusively using public transport.

If this were a crime of passion and Son acted out of a blind rage brought about by envy, what purpose would withdrawing this money even serve if not the true motive?.

Lastly, it was already mentioned that Son was a massive hypocrite for getting so angry at Jeong for still speaking to Han and possibly seeing someone else, even though he himself was cheating on his wife back home and wasn't actually Jeong's boyfriend. But there was a third layer to his hypocrisy. Son had another girlfriend from China, whom he was seeing at the same time as Jeong, and he had spent several days with her during his time on the run.

Ultimately, what really happened will likely never be known, as Son would never deviate from his initial confession. Regardless, the police already had enough evidence for the prosecutor.

On February 20, 2008, South Korea's supreme court sentenced Son to life imprisonment, putting a definitive end to the "Ansan Station Dismemberment Case".

Sources

https://pastebin.com/n6hgbxvn