May, 1999.
A 14 year old girl walks into a residential Hong Kong police station.
The police humor her as she complains that for several weeks she has been haunted by
the ghost of a dead woman.
The ghost comes to her almost every night, and the cops humor her even as she dives into
some of the apparition's graphic details.
This isn't just the ghost of some ordinary woman, this is the ghost of a woman who was
tied up with electrical wire and slowly tortured to death.
Then she drops an absolute bombshell that spurs the police to launch a full-scale investigation
into the apparent teenage fantasy, one that will end with a decapitated head found stuffed
inside a Hello Kitty doll.
Fan Man-yee had a troubled childhood (use photo https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/fan-man-yee.jpg).
Abandoned by her poor family, the orphan was raised in a girl's home run by the government.
However, like most children discarded by society, Fan's life quickly took one bad turn after
another.
By the time she was 15 she had already developed a serious drug habit, and to pay for her habit
she turned to prostitution.
Sex was an easy and reliable way to pay for her bills, so she continued prostituting until
her early 20s, when she tried to start making some changes in her life.
One of those changes was getting a job as a hostess at a nightclub at 23 to help support
herself and her one year old child.
At this point she was still battling her addiction but seemingly on the path to recovery.
Then, in 1997 she met Chan Man-lok, a 34 year old pimp and drug dealer.
It wasn't long before Fan's life once more spiraled out of control and she was back on
drugs.
The mounting drug costs however meant Fan had to return to prostitution, though she
remained independent refusing to work for Man-lok.
With cash low, and a raging drug addiction needing to be sated, Fan made a fatal mistake.
She stole Man-lok's wallet and the $4,000 inside of it.
Man-lok however quickly discovered the theft, and immediately contacted two of his personal
thugs.
His plan was simple: find Fan, kidnap her, and force her to work for him.
He'd take every dollar she made until she'd paid him back in full, and then ensure that
she remained his permanent employee afterwards.
Things wouldn't turn out that way at all.
Chan Man-lok, Leung Shing-cho, and Leung Wai-lun kidnapped Fan one night and drove her to a
decrepit apartment block.
Once inside, the men tied her up with electrical wire and began to beat her.
To make sure her screams couldn't be heard they used dirty rags as a gag, and dragged
her into a broken down abandoned apartment inside of the building.
The three men would stay right next door during the imprisonment.
Pretty soon Man-lok decided that simply forcing Fan to pay off her debt by prostituting for
him wasn't enough.
He needed to make an example of her for the other girls, and even more importantly, he
was a psychopath.
A court-appointed psychiatrist would later find that all of the men involved suffered
from psycho-social behavior disorders, which explained what happened next.
The men kept Fan tied up day and night, the electric wires cutting into her arms and legs
painfully.
Each day, they would come into the apartment and devise new ways of torturing her.
Sometimes they would beat her with iron rods, other times it was with their fists.
In the words of a Hong Kong justice just a few years later, “Never throughout the years
in Hong Kong has a court heard such cruelty, depravity, callousness, brutality, violence,
and viciousness, perpetrated by a human being, or human beings, on another human being.
The beatings didn't end there though.
Fan would be subjected to punches and kicks until she lost consciousness, other times
she was whipped with electrical wire, leaving deep lacerations on her body.
The beatings with iron rods would fracture bones.
To make sure that Fan suffered even more, the three men would wait until Fan regained
consciousness and then proceed to rub chili powder into all of her wounds.
But the three men would have an accomplice.
The same 14 year old girl who would eventually turn to the police for help in ending her
ghostly haunting was also one of her torturers.
Known only as “Ah Fong” in official records, she was described as a girlfriend of Chan
Man-lok's, though in all likelihood she was just another one of his prostitutes.
Fong would elaborate on the details of Fan's torture in exchange for a plea deal from the
police, and recalled how one day she came to the apartment on Man-lok's invitation and
found the severely beaten Fan there.
Then she watched Man-lok kick her in the head over fifty times, and at Man-lok's insistence,
Fong joined in as well.
Fong would later tell police when questioned about why the torture was taking place that,
“I had a feeling it was for fun”.
We'll never know to what extent Fong joined in the month-long torture of Fan, as part
of her bargain with the police ensured that most of those details would remain out of
the public eye.
What we do know is that on at least one occasion, Fan was also made to eat Fong's excrement.
Other times Fong watched as the men burned her with lighters.
The beatings, as always, were regular, day after day, with torture to match.
After a month of brutal torture, Fong came to the apartment and found that Fan Man-yee
was dead, having passed away overnight.
The three men got into an argument with each other, with Man-lok believing that she had
somehow gotten a hold of methamphetaines and given herself an overdose.
We'll never know the truth because there would never be a body to examine, but most medical
experts believe that Fan simply succumbed to her wounds that night.
The three men dragged Fan's lifeless body into a bathtub and began to dismember her
with a handheld saw.
They planned to dispose of her with the rest of the trash, but needed to avoid drawing
suspicion from the rotting smell of decomposing body parts, so they came up with a plan.
The men put her body parts into a large pot, one or two at a time, and on the same stove
they used to cook their own dinner, they boiled the body parts.
Once thoroughly boiled, the body parts were simply thrown into the garbage.
They had sadistic plans for the head though.
After sawing it off the body, the men put the head in the pot and boiled it until the
flesh was soft enough to peel off.
Apparently, they even used the same chopsticks they used to cook with to stir her head around
in the boiling water.
Once the skull was clean of flesh, they stuck it inside a large Hello Kitty mermaid doll
and sewed it shut.
This wasn't the only souvenir the men kept though, they also kept at least one of her
teeth and some of her internal organs sealed up in a plastic bag.
Eventually, Ah Fong couldn't take it anymore.
She claimed to have been haunted by Fan's ghost for weeks, the haunting apparition urging
her to confess and bring justice to her killers.
Unable to take her nightly torment anymore, Fong turned herself into the police, and in
exchange for protection agreed to testify against Man-lok and his two goons.
Initially the police were highly skeptical, the crime seemed so outlandishly brutal that
at least some of it had to have been made up.
However, when police arrived at the apartment where Fan had been held and tortured for a
month they were horrified to discover the body parts the men had stashed away, along
with the infamous Hello Kitty doll with Fan's skull sewn up inside.
What made the find even more unsettling was the fact that the entire apartment was outfitted
in happy, smiling Hello Kitty memorabilia.
News of the crime shocked Hong Kong, and the trial would leave many people furious with
the authorities.
In the end, because the police couldn't determine which had killed Fan- the torture or a drug
overdose- the men were convicted of manslaughter and unlawful imprisonment, instead of murder.
The men were all sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole in 20 years.
That parole hearing is rapidly approaching, but given the extreme nature of the brutal
killing, nobody has much hope that any of these three men will actually receive parole.
Now go watch How Tylenol Became The Perfect Murder Weapon, or click this other video instead!