The Scary Story of Notorious “Hello Kitty Murder” in Hong Kong

A 14-year-old girl arrived at a Hong Kong police station in May 1999. She informed authorities that she had been haunted by the spirit of a lady who had been tortured to death and tied by electrical wire for several weeks. The cops shrugged her off, rejecting her accusations as a figment of her imagination or adolescent foolishness. Their curiosity was peaked, however, when she revealed that the ghost was the spirit of a lady she had helped kill. They tracked the kid down to a shabby flat in the city’s Kowloon neighbourhood, where they learned that the girl’s nightmares were definitely genuine. They discovered an enormous Hello Kitty doll with a woman’s severed skull inside inside the flat. 

The case became known as the Hello Kitty Murder, and it was widely regarded as one of the most heinous murders in Hong Kong’s history. 

Fan Man Yee, the Hello Kitty Murder Victim

Even before she was beheaded and her head placed inside a doll, Fan Man-yee’s life was sad. She was reared in a girl’s home after being abandoned by her family as a kid. She had acquired a heroin addiction by the time she was a teenager, and she was turning to prostitution to support her habit. She obtained a job as a nightclub hostess at the age of 23, despite the fact that she was still fighting addiction.

Chan Man-lok, a 34-year-old socialite, and Fan Man-yee met in early 1997. They met in a nightclub and realised they had interests. Chan Man-lok was a pimp and a drug dealer, while Fan Man-yee was a prostitute and a drug addict. Man-yee, in addition to Man-henchmen, lok’s became a regular member of Man-lok’s gang before long. After some time in year 1997 Fan Man-yee snatched Man-lok’s wallet desperate for money and drugs, and attempted to flee with the $4,000 inside. Chan Man-lok was the last guy she should have taken this money from, as she hadn’t realised. Man-lok ordered two of his thugs, Leung Shing-cho and Leung Wai-Lun, to abduct Man-yee as soon as he realised his money was gone. He planned to push her into prostitution and keep the money she made as retribution for the money she had stolen from him. The idea, however, quickly spiralled out of control. The drug lord and his thugs quickly realised that merely prostituting Fan Man-yee wouldn’t suffice, so they began torturing her. They tied her up, beat her, and tortured her for almost a month, including scorching her flesh, rapping her, and forcing her to ingest human faeces. Though Fan Man-yee’s torture was horrible enough, the story of the 14-year-old girl who reported her murder to the authorities is much more so. She was not only the one who turned the torturers in, but she was also one of them. The 14-year-old girl, known only as “Ah Fong,” most likely a pseudonym provided to her by the Hong Kong courts, was Chan Man-lok’s girlfriend, albeit “girlfriend” was presumably a vague term. Almost certainly, the girl was one of his prostitutes. When Ah Fong went to Man-lok’s residence to see the tortured three, she saw Man-lok kick Man-yee 50 times in the head. Then Ah Fong joined in, punching Man-yee in the head. Though the amount of Ah Fong’s torture was not revealed as part of her plea agreement, it is likely that it was significant. When questioned about them, she said,

“I had a feeling it was for fun.” 

After a month of torture Ah Fong learned Fan Man-yee had died overnight. Chan Man-lok and his henchmen claimed she died of a self-administered methamphetamine overdose, although most experts believe it was her injuries that killed her. Because there’s no way to know for sure, they can only conjecture. Man-yee’s body was taken to the apartment’s bathtub after the henchmen discovered she was dead and dismembered her with a saw. The various portions of her corpse were then roasted to prevent her from decaying and generating rotten flesh odours. The killers cooked the parts of her corpse on the same burner they were preparing supper on and threw them out with the rubbish. Her head, on the other hand, was preserved. They stitched her cooked skull into an enormous Hello Kitty mermaid doll after boiling it on the stove (and apparently used the same cooking tools to stir their meals as they did to move her head about). They also saved one of Fan Man-yee’s teeth as well as many internal organs, which they put in a plastic bag.

Hello Kitty Murder: The Trial

Ah Fong testified against Chan Man-lok and his two henchmen in return for protection (which she most likely obtained in part because she was so young). She described the torture that the three guys subjected Fan Man-yee through in an attempt to get rid of the haunting she claimed to be experiencing. Despite the fact that many people believed the narrative couldn’t possible be real, the evidence found by police was damning and unsettling. Man-yee’s miserable  apartment was crammed with Hello Kitty paraphernalia, from bedding and drapes to towels and cutlery. Additionally, Man-body yee’s part trophies were discovered within, along with proof that all three males had interacted with them. The police and medical examiners were unable to identify a cause of death owing to the condition of Fan Man-yee’s surviving  body parts. There was little question that she had been subjected to unimaginable suffering, and that the three men were responsible for much of the damage to her body, but there was no way of knowing whether the damage was caused by a chemical overdose or the torture. As a consequence, the three were found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder, since the jury concluded that, while they were responsible for her death, death was not their intention. The Hello Kitty Murder accusation shocked Hong Kong’s people, but the three was sentenced to life in jail with the prospect of release in 20 years.