WARNING: THIS CHAPTER CONTAINS SENSITIVE CONTENT THAT SOME MAY FIND OFFENSIVE OR DISTURBING.
The Hello Kitty murder case took place in Hong Kong in the spring of 1999, when a nightclub hostess was abducted in Citrus Road, Lai Yiu Estate and tortured in an apartment in Tsim Sha Tsui after stealing a wallet owned by one of her frequent customers. Fan Man-yee (23 yrs. old) was held captive by three men and one girl before dying on April 15, 1999. Her body was decapitated and her skull placed inside of a Hello Kitty plush, which gave the name for the murder case.
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The apartment where Fan Man-yee was tortured and murdered
The unwrapping of the Hello Kitty case actually started when a 14-year-old girl reached the Hong Kong police station in May 1999. The distressed girl who wasn't accompanied by any guardian informed the police that she was being tormented by the ghost of a woman.
The police did not believe when she said that the spirit of a young woman who had blood marks all over her body has been haunting her for the past several weeks. However, when she further revealed that the ghost was that of a woman she'd had a hand in the killing, the police were horrified and understood the actual reason for the girl's visit to the police station.
The girl revealed that she has been part of the torture and murder of a young girl whose ghost would be haunting her until she confesses her role in the crime to the police. There were other men who actually tortured and killed the young girl and this 14-year girl was just a part of that crime. She was the youngest of all and who unknowingly joined them in their crime.
On the confession of the teenage girl, the police followed her back to a flat in the city's rundown Kowloon district. What they found on reaching there was really shocking. They found a Hello Kitty mermaid doll which had the decapitated skull of a woman inside.
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Born in 1975, Fan Man-yee was abandoned by her family as a child, resulting in her being raised in an all girls' orphanage. When she turned 15, she was told to leave the orphanage because they had an age restriction. Becoming homeless and addicted to drugs, Fan was forced into street prostitution until the age of 21, when she began working at a brothel. Fan eventually married one of her clients, a fellow drug addict, in 1996. She gave birth to their son two years later, not long before her murder. Fan's husband was described as abusive and neighbors would report being woken-up by sounds of the couple's fights and the child's screaming & crying from their apartment. Upon the pregnancy and then birth of her son, Fan decided to turn her life around in order to protect her son and provide him a safer life. She quit drugs and prostitution, got a job as a hostess at a brothel, and eventually left her violent husband shortly before her murder. Due to these sacrifices, she had a much lower income and struggled to support herself and her family.
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Chan Man-lok, 34-year-old triad member, was one of Fan's regular clients at the brothel. In early 1999, Fan stole Chan's wallet, which contained about $HK 4,000 (roughly 500 usd). When Chan realized what had happened, he demanded Fan to return the money in addition to a fee of $HK 10,000 (roughly $1,000 usd). Although Fan immediately returned the stolen money, she needed additional time to secure the additional fee.
On March 17, 1999, Fan was abducted by three men and one girl in Block 90 Citrus Road, Fu Yiu section of Lai Yiu Estate: Chan; his grooming victim Lau Ming-fong (pseudonym Ah Fong, 14 yrs. old). The group took Fan to an apartment at No. 31 Granville Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, where they imprisoned her for a month. Initially, Chan had intended to make money off of Fan by pimping her out to other men.
During her imprisonment, she was tortured and raped. According to one source, she was beaten with metal bars, sometimes while being strung up and used as a punching bag. On one occasion, Fan was kicked in the head around fifty times. Spices were rubbed into Fan's wounds, her legs and feet were burned with candle wax and hot plastic (specifically so she couldn't walk), she was forced to consume human feces and urine, and she was forced to smile and say she enjoyed the beatings; if she refused, they subjected her to even harsher torture. This treatment eventually led to traumatic shock and ultimately death.
Fan succumbed to her wounds on April 15, 1999. Some sources claim that she died while her captors were out, while others say she died overnight. Upon returning Fan's body, her captors dismembered and boiled the remains; her skull was sewed inside of a Hello Kitty mermaid doll while the rest of the body was discarded. Only her skull, one tooth, and some internal organs were recovered in a plastic bag, after Lau led police to the scene on May 24.
When they were finally caught by the police, they narrated their own version that they were simply running a brothel with Fan Man-Yee and it was a mutual agreement. They said that Fan Man-Yee was a drug addict and she died because of a drug overdose. They also said that they did all this with her body as they were scared of being caught.
After a trial which lasted over six weeks, the three men were convicted of manslaughter, as the jury ruled the remains were not sufficient to show whether Fan was murdered or died from a drug overdose. While the jury could not rule that the men intended to kill Fan, they did determine that she had died as a result of their abuse. Lau testified at the trial in exchange for immunity.
Justice Peter Nguyen, who sentenced the trio to life in prison with the possibility of parole, stated, "Never in Hong Kong in recent years has a court heard of such cruelty, depravity, callousness, brutality, violence, and viciousness." Psychiatric reports described the three as "remorseless".
