18 classic true crime cases from around the world, including;
The Family Man: Losing one family to violent death might be considered a tragedy, but three almost certainly points to something more sinister.
Death In The Valley: A teenaged boy is accused of murder but acquitted and welcomed back into the village as a hero. Two weeks later he kills again.
Unthinkable: Four teenaged girls commit an unbelievably barbaric crime, the torture murder of a 12-year-old.
Slayer's Book of Death: Jason had only one ambition, to become America’s most feared serial killer, now he had his eye on his first victims, a 15-year-old boy and his younger sister.
Killing For Comfort: The barely believable story of a female serial killer who murdered her victims so that she could spoil herself with shopping sprees on their credit cards.
The Waterfront Ripper: Harry killed his wife in a dispute over alimony, then found he had a taste for mutilation murder.
Hell's Sanitarium: A Canadian couple make a fortune selling babies, murdering those infants who do not measure up to their stringent quality standards.
Hear No Evil: A killer is stalking the halls of Washington DC’s Gallaudet University for the deaf and hearing impaired. Will he be caught before he kills again?
Plus 10 more riveting cases....Scroll up to grab a copy.
Murder Most Vile Volume One
The Hello Kitty Murder
Hello Kitty is an iconic figure in the Far
East. More than a toy, this ubiquitous cat character was created in 1974 by
Japan’s Sanrio Company, who claim that she weighs as much as “three apples” and
likes “small cute things, like stars, candy and goldfish.” She has appeared on
over 15,000 products, with more being added all the time. There is even a Hello
Kitty amusement Park in Japan.
But in 1999, the famous kitten became
associated with something that was everything but cute, the horrific torture murder
of a Hong Kong prostitute by a quartet of miscreants who seemed to regard there
horrendous acts as no more that an extension of their obsession with video
games.
In May of 1999, a pretty 14-year-old girl
turned up at the Tsim Sha Tsui police station in Hong Kong. She had a bizarre
story to tell. The girl (identified in press coverage of the case only as
Melody) said that she was being tormented by the ghost of a woman who she had
helped torture to death a year earlier.
Initially skeptical, detectives listened
with growing interest as Melody recounted her tale. She said that she had run
away from home a year earlier, just before the Lunar New Year in 1998. Hungry,
alone and terrified on the streets, she’d wandered into a cheap restaurant
where she’d plopped down in a seat hoping that someone might take pity on her
and buy her a meal.
She’d been sitting there only a short while
when a young man slid into the adjacent booth and struck up a conversation with
her. He said that his name was Leung Wai-lun, although he insisted that she
call him Gangster. He certainly looked the part. In his knocked off Armani
suit, with copious bling, he looked like an extra from an early Jackie Chan
movie. Nonetheless, Melody was besotted. Later that night, she gave up her
virginity to the 18-year-old Leung.
The next months passed in a haze for
Melody. She became Leung’s girl and fully embraced his twilight world of love
hotels, nightclubs and karaoke bars.
One night, Leung introduced her to a man
named Chan Man-lok, a ruthless pimp, pornographer, loan shark and drug dealer.
Chan invited Melody and Leung to move into his place, a seven-room apartment
above Kowloon’s famous
Granville Road shopping district.
Melody could not help but be impressed by
Chan’s digs. He had every amenity she’d ever dreamed of – cable TV, Playstation
games, and an extensive library of Hollywood and Hong Kong movies. In addition,
there was a huge collection of porn, and plenty of drugs, mainly Ice
(Methamphetamine). Chan also appeared to have an obsession with Hello Kitty.
His home had Hello Kitty curtains, Hello Kitty bed-sheets and Hello Kitty
kitchenware. Scattered about the place were dozens of Hello Kitty dolls,
including a mermaid doll which the case would later make infamous.
Melody had been living at the Granville
Road apartment for only a couple of weeks when another woman was introduced to
the household, a 23-year-old named Fan Man-yee, but known by the street name Ah
Map.
Abandoned as a child, Ah Map was raised at
Ma Tau Wai girls’ home, escaping in her mid-teens to take up a life of drugs,
petty crime, and prostitution. In 1997, while working at a Kowloon brothel
named the Romance Villa, she met Chan Man-lok, who became a regular client as
well as Ah Map’s drug supplier. The two often engaged in marathon sex and drug
binges together, but after one such session, Ah Map made a fatal mistake,
rifling through Chan’s wallet after he passed out and stealing $4,000.
It was a stupid crime, with only one
possible perpetrator. Chan demanded that Ah Map pay the money back, with
interest amounting to an additional $10,000. Yet even after Ah Map complied
with these demands, Chan wanted more. He insisted on an additional payment
of $16,000. When Ah Map refused,
he instructed his accomplices Leung Shing-cho and Leung Wai-lun to kidnap her
and bring her to his Granville Road apartment.
The abduction took place on March 17, 1999,
whereupon Chan and his henchmen beat Ah Map senseless and told her that she was
to remain at the apartment, working as a prostitute and handing over all of her
earnings to them, until her debt was paid off.
But their plan had one fatal flaw. They’d
beaten Ah Map so badly that she could barely stand, let alone work the streets.
And besides, which john was going to pay for at a hooker as battered and
bruised as she was?
As it turned out, Chan would never send Ah
Map out onto the streets. He and his cohorts were having too much fun beating
and torturing her.
Over the weeks that followed, life in the
apartment (as described to the police by Melody) picked up a familiar pattern.
The three gangsters would get high, play video games, watch movies and torture
Ah Map, all the while dreaming up more and more sadistic methods. They burned
her with matches and with melted plastic straws, they beat her with sticks and
metal pipes, they poured chili sauce into her open wounds and forced her to
drink cooking oil. They urinated on her and forced her to eat excrement. On other
occasions they’d string her up from a hook on the ceiling and leave her hanging
there overnight. All the while, Ah Map was forced to laugh and smile as she was
being brutalized. Failure to do so would result in even more severe punishment.
Melody also participated in the torture
and, according to her testimony, she was not an altogether unwilling accomplice.
“I did it for fun,” she’d later admit. “Just to see what it was like to hurt
someone.”
No one was ever going to survive the
torments heaped on the unfortunate Ah Map for very long. Yet, the young woman
lasted for almost a month before eventually succumbing to her injuries. Then,
one morning, Melody woke and found Ah Map dead on the bathroom floor, where
she’d been left over the previous three days. Her tormentors had apparently
become bored of hurting her.
The body remained on the bathroom floor for
the next two days, before Chan eventually called his men together and informed
them, “She must be destroyed. She will vanish into thin air.”
That set in motion a gruesome 10-hour
operation to dismember the corpse. Ah
Map was lifted into the bathtub, where Chan
cut off her head with a wood saw. His accomplices then began slicing flesh from
the corpse, bagging it and stashing it in the refrigerator. At one point,
Gangster handed Melody a plastic bag stuffed with intestines and told her to
cover them with hot water to stop them smelling.
Later, while Leung Shing-cho was cooking
the head, he called Melody over and insisted that she look into the pot. “Just
pretend you’re watching TV,” he coaxed.
Melody looked into the pot and saw the head
bobbing in the boiling water. “He was right,” she later admitted. “It looked like something I saw once in
a film.”
In the midst of this gory operation, the
killers broke for lunch, cooking up a pot of noodles on one plate while the
dismembered head was boiling away beside it. They even used the same spoon to stir
both pots. Once all of the flesh was boiled from the head, the skull was hidden
inside a Hello Kitty mermaid doll where it would remain until the police found
it there a year later.
The horrific murder of Ah Map would likely
have gone undiscovered had Melody not found herself tormented by the woman’s
unquiet ghost. As it was, Chan Man-lok, Leung Shing-cho and Leung Wai-lun were
arrested and charged with murder. They would eventually be convicted only of
manslaughter, the jury deciding that Ah Map’s drug use may have contributed to
her death. The sentence though, was the harshest allowed by law. Each of the
killers was sentenced to life in prison.
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