Born in 1976 in Shenzhen, China, Fan Man Yee was born into a troubled family. Both of her parents abandoned her when she was very young, and she was placed in an all-girls orphanage in the Ma Tau Wai area, which is in Hong Kong.
Unfortunately, during the time she was in the orphanage, she was never adopted. There was an age limit for the girls, so at 15, Fan Man Yee was let go to fend for herself.
Hong Kong at that time was a dangerous place. While the city glittered with Japanese pop culture exports, music, and fashion, the alleys told a different story, of prostitution, drugs, and gangs.
Fan Man Yee, unfortunately, joined the wrong crowd and became addicted to drugs. At the age of 21, she joined a brothel to fund her growing addiction, called ‘Romance Villa’ in a poorer district of Kowloon. This was a step up because street work was considered more dangerous and less reliable.
After working in the brothel for some time, she became attached to one of her clients, Ng Chi-yuen, who was also a drug addict. She would go on to marry Ng Chi-yuen in 1996.
Reports indicate Ng Chi-yuen was very abusive to her, and neighbours in their apartment often heard the couple arguing late at night. Fan Man Yee eventually got pregnant and gave birth to a boy in November 1998.
She quickly realised, after becoming a mother, that this was not the trajectory she had envisioned for her life or her child. This led Fan Man Yee to quit prostitution and drugs. She also got a job as a hostess at a nightclub called ‘Empress Karaoke’.
Return to Dangerous Ties
Though Fan Man Yee was now living a much safer life, she did not have as much money to support the family, given her husband’s instability at the time.
She then re-established contact with a previous client, 34-year-old Chan Man Lok. Chan was not the best person to be close to at the time, especially since her goal was to get clean and provide a safe life for her child.
Aside from being a pimp and drug dealer, Chan was also a member of the Wo Shing Wo, a major organised crime syndicate in Hong Kong. As they continued to spend more time together, Fan Man Yee became more acquainted with his world.
This included his henchmen, 21-year-old Leung Wai Lun and 27-year-old Leung Shing Cho, who accompanied Chan everywhere. Despite the tough economics of her new job, Fan was hanging out with criminals who did not have these financial restrictions.
She got used to the lifestyle of partying again and took advantage of how the gangsters flashed money. On one of their drug binges, Fan stole Chan’s wallet, which had 4000 Hong Kong dollars in it. This was equivalent to about 500 US Dollars at the time.
Chan would immediately discover that he was HK$4,000 short, so he sent his goons to deliver a message to her. She was to repay HK$4,000 and, in addition, a fee of HK$10,000. This was an interest in stealing his money in the first place. The intention was, aside from making an example of her, to have Fan Man Yee work under Chan to pay off this debt.
Fan Man Yee cleared the initial HK$4,000 debt, but the remaining debt took much longer to settle. This was especially since she was also trying to take care of her baby and her drug habit. Chan soon became impatient and decided to teach her a lesson because she had taken advantage of his kindness.
On 17 March 1999, Chan Man Lok, Leung Wai Lun, Leung Shing Cho, and Lau Ming-Fong, a 14-year-old associate of theirs, went to collect Fan from her apartment in Lai Yiu Estate. They forced her into a vehicle and took her to an apartment on Granville Road in Tsum Sha Tsui.
Torture and Murder
The apartment that Fan Man Yee was taken to was very spacious, with five bedrooms. Chan was renting it, so he had full access.
The initial goal was to pimp Fan Man Yee out to any client who came, until she worked off the debt owed to Chan Man Lok. But before she could work, the men wanted to ‘discipline her’.
Fan Man Yee was beaten with metal bars till most of her bones were fractured. She would also be tied with wires that dug into her skin as they beat her all day and night.
The three men would take turns beating Fan Man Yee, experimenting with their assault techniques. They even rubbed Chilli powder into her wounds to exacerbate the pain. The men would also strangle her with a wire till she could not breathe and repeat the cycle again.
Fan Man Yee was in and out of consciousness most of the time due to the blunt force trauma. Chan and his henchmen were mostly high on methamphetamines at the time, which is probably why their sadistic torture kept intensifying.
At one time, Chan even forced Fan Man Yee to eat her own faeces.
Unfortunately, even the young girl, Lau Ming-Fong, would take part. Considering her age and the circumstances, there was a high likelihood that it was not negotiable. Fong was forced to say that she liked beating Fan Man Yee.
Fan Man Yee eventually died from her wounds sometime between April 14th and 15th of 1999. When she died, her captors had an argument about who was supposed to watch her. They assumed then that she must have gotten her hands on methamphetamines and overdosed.
Determining they needed to get rid of the body, the four grabbed a hacksaw and began to cut her body into smaller pieces. They also wanted to avoid prying eyes because of decomposition smells, so the group decided to boil her body parts in a large pot.
This was meant to destroy the DNA and other traces of their involvement, making the parts easier to dispose of. However, they had different plans for her head once the flesh was boiled off Fan’s skull.
The house had a significant amount of Hello Kitty memorabilia. So they decided to take a Hello Kitty mermaid doll, cut its head off, stuff a human skull inside, and sew the doll’s head back on.
Paranormal Activities and Justice for Fan Man Yee
It appeared that they had gotten away with the crime, as the men went on with their lives as if nothing had happened. However, Lau Ming-Fong could not continue on as normal, considering what she had seen and done.
On May 24th, 1999, Fong went to the police and told them that she was haunted day and night by a woman who was bound with electrical wires. While the police were initially dismissive, thinking that she had a wild imagination, they quickly gained interest when Fong added that her torment was because she had participated in the murder of the same woman in her dreams.
Fong said she was willing to give them a full confession in exchange for protection because the triads were implicated. She proceeded to tell them everything from when they took Fan Man Yee to how they dismembered her body.
Horrified, the police went to the apartment and found the Hello Kitty mermaid doll. They tore it open to find rotten insects and the skull of Fan Man Yee. In the fridge were some internal organs still remaining from the dismemberment.
Police immediately issued warrants for the arrest of the three men.
SWAT officers arrested a completely oblivious Chan at his home while he was spending time with his wife and newborn baby. His wife, Tse Pui‑ling, was also taken in for questioning because she was a possible person of interest, but was later released after no evidence was found tying her to the crime.
Leung Wai Lun got wind of the manhunts and fled to mainland China. He was later arrested in February 2000 for passport irregularities.
Leung Shing Cho was added to Interpol’s most-wanted list and returned to Hong Kong for indictment.
The trial unfolded in the High Court of Kong from 20 October, 2000, lasting six weeks. It attracted a lot of media attention because Hong Kong was known to at least tourists and outsiders as having a low homicide rate.
Here was a case detailing sadistic torture and dismemberment of a sex worker. Prosecutors even warned the jury that the details would be disturbing. They said that it would take them into a ‘slice of life in Hong Kong that they would never wish to encounter.’
Fong would testify against the prosecution in exchange for her immunity. Chan and his two henchmen claimed they did not intend to kill Fan Man Yee. Instead of saying they just wanted to rough her up.
It was also more complicated because internal injuries could not be examined since most of the body was missing. Chan and his co-defendants did agree to dismember the body, but claimed she may have died from an overdose of drugs.
Convictions and Aftermath
Justice Peter Nguyen sentenced Chan, Leung Shing, and Leung Wai to life in prison. He stated, “Never in Hong Kong in recent years has a court heard of such cruelty, depravity, callousness, brutality, violence and viciousness.”
In Hong Kong, a murder verdict requires proof that the suspect intended to kill or cause serious bodily harm to the victim. The basis of the defence for the accused was that they did not intend to kill Fan Man Yee. So they were charged with manslaughter and unlawful imprisonment.
Following the decision, Leung Wai Lun’s sister suffered a mental breakdown in court. His brother apparently slammed the courtroom door and broke it.
After the trial, Leung Shing filed an appeal in March 2004, reducing his sentence from life to 18 years in prison. He was let out early in 2014.
Leung Shing Cho was then arrested and put in jail again in 2022 for indecent assault of a 10-year-old girl. Chan Man Lok and Leung Wai Lun are still serving their life sentences in prison.
Little is known about what happened to Lau Ming-fong. After the trial, she vanished from public records, and it is assumed she assumed a new identity or relocated to rebuild her life.
The crime sparked significant debate about the realities of Hong Kong’s underbelly versus the image portrayed to the outside world at the time.
Professor Karen Joe-Laidler from the University of Hong Kong said, “I get that it’s connected to this era of violent events in Hong Kong, but I see it as an isolated event that was in the context of heavy methamphetamine use and all the consequences that come with the chronic use of meth.”
