The Ghost of the Hello Kitty Murder

The Hello Kitty Murder Case shocked Hong Kong and the world to the core when the skull of a woman was found sewn inside of a Hello Kitty Doll. One of the participant in the torture of the victim claimed that she was haunted by her and for years after the murder, the place itself was said to be haunted.

In 1999, a young girl walks into a Hong Kong police station alone, riddled with nightmares and guilt. The 14 year old teenager claims to be haunted by this dead woman for the last couple of weeks, and she truly believes she won’t be at peace until the girl confesses to what happened to the ghost that is haunting her.

At first the police disregards her statements, thinking she is delusional and making stuff up, but when she tells them about the horrible torture and murder she witness and even took part in, the police couldn’t ignore it.

When the police started investigating the address the girl gave, they came to find something truly shocking and horrible. The apartment had been the sight of a crime were a woman had been held imprisoned, tortured and raped for over a month before she died. The body had been mostly disposed of, but stuffed inside of a huge Hello Kitty plush doll, they found the woman’s head. Therefore the murder case was called The Hello Kitty Murder Case.

The Harsh Life of the Kidnapped Hostess

The place of the murder was in a third-floor flat in the downtown area on No. 31 Granville Road in Tsim Sha Tsui area in the Kowloon district. The inside of the apartment was filled with Hello Kitty memorabilia, including the big Hello Kitty Mermaid Plush Doll.

The victim was the 23 year old nightclub hostess and young mother, Fan Man-yee (樊敏儀)who had been missing for a month.

Her life had never been easy, and it ended in the most gruesome way imaginable. She had been abandoned as a child and grew up in an all girls orphanage in Hong Kong. When she got kicked out at 15 because she was too old to be there, she supported herself through sex work.

Over the years she turned into a drug addict and barely got by. She ended up marrying one of her clients who also were a drug addict, and lived with him despite their abusive relationship.

Then she got pregnant and had a child and decided to turn her life around. She got clean, left her husband and quit being a prostitute. Instead she started working as a nightclub hostess at the Romance Villa and hoped for a better future together with her son.

The Murderous Pimp and Drug Dealer

Her hopes got crushed fairly quickly however as bills were piling up and her nightclub was frequented by criminals, drug dealers and addicts as well as the Chinese crime syndicate, The Triads.

One of these seedy types she met was the 34-year old Chan Man-lok. He was both a drug dealer and a pimp and had a sexual relationship with Fan-Man. She once stole his wallet that had around $HK4,000 (roughly $500 USD) inside of it, but even if she gave it back at once Chan Man-lok realized she was the thief, he demanded more money from her that she was unable to pay. And because of this, he decided to kidnap her, thinking he would make money out of her by pimping her out.

A Month of Sadistic Torture

Instead he ended up rounding up his other accomplices, and ended up just torturing her in what seemed to be for no other reason than perverse and sadistic enjoyment.

The teenaged girl given the cover name Ah Fong because of her young age testified that three men Chan Man-lok, Leung Shing-cho and Leung Wai-lun, all in their 30s and 20s abducted Fan Man-yee and tortured her until she died over the course of a month. She was the quote on quote: “girlfriend” of Chan Man-lok who also worked as a sex worker for him and she admitted that she even joined in on the beating on occasion.

Over the course of that month the men got high on drugs while they beating her with iron bars, raped her, burning her by dripping melting plastic on her, puring chili oil on her wounds, stringing her up hanging from the ceiling for hours and other sadistic acts they came up with. She was even forced to smile and say she enjoyed the torture. If she didn’t it would only get worse.

After she died they dismembered her body, boiled them and disposed of it as household trash or feeding it to stray dogs. Some of her internal organs were found in the refrigerator. The head they sew in the head of the Hello Kitty doll, although their motive for this is still unclear.

The exact cause of death is not known because of how little of her remains they found, and therefore there was also too little evidence to sentence the men for murder with intent, although it was clear she had died because of their abuse.

“Never in Hong Kong in recent years has a court heard of such cruelty, depravity, callousness, brutality, violence and viciousness,” said Hong Kong Justice Peter Nguyen after the trial, who sentenced the defendants to life imprisonment Wednesday after they were convicted of manslaughter. “The public is entitled to protection from people such as you.”

The three men were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to life in prison without chance of parole for 20 years. Hong Kong does not have the death penalty, but if it had happened on mainland China, they would have likely been executed.

The Ghost of Fan Man-yee

Who really knew what would have happened to the case if the teenage girl known as Ah Fong hadn’t been convinced she was haunted by , and because of her torment and remorse, she ended up walking into the police station and at least helping to find her. Because of her young age and corporation she never received any punishment for her involvement.

The apartment building where Fan was tortured has since been demolished as no one wanted to buy or rent the infamous apartment that everyone in Hong Kong knew the backstory behind. It was empty for years and eventually, no one wanted to live in the other apartments in the building either.

Some claimed that the building itself was haunted by Fan and there were many who claimed to have seen her haunting the area.

In the end someone bought the empty building and demolished it in 2012. Instead they built a hotel there in 2016 named Soravit. As a memorial to what happened there, they placed three Buddha portraits in the hotel.