r/TrueCrimeDiscussion

Kirk Mundy served five years as an accessory and Justin Smith's case was thrown out by the judge.

In 1996, Rebecca Middleton, of Belleville, Ontario, was raped and stabbed to death after a night out with a friend in St. George's. The two 17-year-olds waited for a taxi that did not come and finally accepted rides from three men on two bikes. Jasmine Meen was taken back safely to their hotel, but Becky Middleton was taken to a remote road and raped and stabbed. A couple driving home found her bleeding and still conscious in the road and consoled her as she lay dying.

Two young men were arrested with Kirk Mundy stating that Justin Smith raped and murdered Becky and in return he received a five year sentence for agreeing to testify against Smith. However, the judge threw out Smith's case. Years later, the DNA swab from Rebecca's rape kit showed only one rapist - Kirk Mundy. Her family has tried over 30 years for a retrial but that will never happen. Mundy was recently deported from Bermuda back to Jamaica after serving a lengthy sentence for robbing a bank.

I watch a lot of true crime tv and documentaries as well as listen to several podcasts. It starts to get depressingly repetitive after a while— female victim, perp is a male partner, there’s an affair or financial motive etc etc.

What’s a really strange or unusual case that has sent you down a rabbit hole? I am looking for something different to dive into.

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

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

Ramgahan Sanjay Ryan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The police and forensics at the scene

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

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

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

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

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

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

The two captured by the CCTV footage

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

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

Ryan's remains being taken away for an autopsy

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

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

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

Ryan's last moments as captured by the CCTV footage

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

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

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

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

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

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

A still from the hardware store's CCTV footage

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

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

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

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

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

Mayer Oren Shlomo

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ewart Odane Bent

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

Ewart's arrest

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wu Hsuan

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

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

Hsuan's arrest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mayer's after his arrest in the Philippines

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mayer upon his return to Taiwan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jason Eugene Hobbie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jason after his arrest

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

Mayer being escorted to his trial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ewart and Mayer being brought to their appeal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mayer and Ewart at the reenactment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources (Should be in the comments)

As someone who has been a true crime buff for decades, it's somewhat annoying to watch how certain cases wind up getting pulled into such polarizing discussions that it seems like a huge mystery when it's actually a simple solution.

A few that I think of.

The Karen Read case. IMO she accidentally killed him. They were both drunk, he goes to see the vibe of the house. Get's inside and realizes he doesn't want to stay. So he comes back outside. She's in the middle of rage texting him, and doesn't see him in front of the car. He drops his phone or bends over for some reason and she puts the car into gear and hits him, and he falls backwards and hits his head again. Then he lays there undetected until morning. This is why she suddenly realized she had hit him. She sobered up and had that "realization" moment that all binge drinkers have once they sober up from a brownout type of state.

Darlie Routier. I've shared my theory on this before. She was attempting a murder/su but she survived. This is why the neck wound was serious. She made up the story of the intruder in advance because she wanted her family friends and society to think she died trying to protect her kids. She planted the sock earlier. This also explains her hypomania in the days after. She honestly thought she was going to die that night.

There are other missing person cases where the spouse disappeared after the death of their parents. Just vanished without taking their Identification information and never surfaced under their name again. I always wonder if some of those cases are a situation of someone who has suffered with gender dysphoria and finally "escaped" to go make another life with another identity. It's always interesting to me that in several of the cases, the persons parent or parents had recently died. Seemed like they were waiting for that to escape because they didn't want to do that to their parents.

Do any of you have "simple theories" on cases that created a ton of controversy?

Nicole Lorraine Linton was a travelling nurse who killed 6 people, including a toddler and his unborn brother, in a car crash.

Although she has a previous history of mental health problems, her legal team and family insist it was a seizure that caused the reckless driving, although car data, medical history and witnesses paint another picture.

I was interested in this case, which I believe occurred in 2022. It hit me hard as I was pregnant at the time, and 2 babies were taken so graphically.

The sister of Nicole, Camille was controversial, going as far as arguing on social media and creating a website to try and demonstrate Nicole’s innocence, which understandably did not go down well with the public.

Linton plead not guilty in her preliminary hearings and since then, updates have pretty much ceased to exist online. There hasn’t been a trail, or news of one either. Does anyone know what is going on?

The mods said I can post this now as an exception because the chat is broken

By similar style, I think what makes all three similar to me is that rather than starting out with the death, it follows the buildup to said murder and the way it affected the people around them,

I'd prefer recommendations from platforms like HBO or Hulu, but anything works tbh.

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

Lai Huili

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

Xu Guoli

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The last time Huili was seen alive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guoli during one of his many TV interviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the missing person notices

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

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

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

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

The police searching one of the storage units

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://preview.redd.it/n022vavmjpjh1.png?width=377&format=png&auto=webp&s=c32d501c5e05845b98958e25b802a60793721a07

https://preview.redd.it/7a22a2qnjpjh1.png?width=720&format=png&auto=webp&s=2935f5588071ee8014321cdf5ad12611f9d52598

The sewage being drained

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guoli during the trial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guoli during the appeal trial.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources (Should be in the comments)

(Warning: the above link includes some exceptionally graphic descriptions of sexual assault and abuse. Against children, I must add)

I don’t have much to add, except that…well, I'm not all that shocked by this article. Even though, if the allegations are true, he’s far worse than I could have ever imagined.

For those unaware, Christopher Berry-Deem is a true crime writer, who has (at least, according to him), interviewed over 30 serial killers and mass murderers.

His works include the books Talking with Serial Killers, Talking with Female Serial Killers, and Talking with Psychopaths. He was also a writer and interviewer on the television series The Serial Killers (1995)

That said: he’s always been a controversial figure, within the true crime world.

The way he writes about women, many of them murder victims, has frequently been criticised as misogynistic (he feels the need to comment on their appearances whenever possible, for one).

Moreover: he’s known for pushing explosive theories based on, at most, minimal evidence.

(He wrote the source material for Monster, and insists that Aileen Wuornos only killed in self-defence, even though the forensic evidence strongly refuted her version of events.)

(He also strongly believes that Kenneth Bianchi committed the Alphabet Murders, even though DNA evidence has ruled him out. And he firmly believes that Douglas Clark was innocent.)

How many murderers he has actually interviewed, and to what extent, has also come under fire. The very reason why I'm avoiding listing them here.

As the article mentions, he’s been accused of fabricating quotes, too.

What cases don’t leave you because they feel incomplete, or just plain wrong? For me it’s two. I’ll put them in the comments.

This incident occurred down the street from me in Spring Valley and I’m just now learning about it. It’s hard to believe that in 2022 I was living my life carefree, delivering food, working out, going for walks, completely unaware of what was transpiring in my neighborhood. I’m beyond shaken by this.