The Tragic Death of Fan Man-yee
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May 1999, fourteen year old, whose name has been changed to Melody, walked into Tsim Sha Tsui police station in Hong Kong, telling them that a young woman’s ghost was haunting her. Police wasn’t sure how to deal with the situation, but seeing how terrified and upset the young girl was, they listened, and were horrified by the story and details she gave.
Fan Man-yee had a troubled life, her family abandoned her when she was a child, so she was raised in Ma Tau Wai girl’s home. During that time, she came across drugs and by the time she was a teenager, she was a drug addict and soon turned to sex work to pay for her drug habit. She got herself into a life of petty crime along with her profession and addictions.
Fan Man-yee got herself a job as a dancer at Empress Karaoke nightclub and in May 1996 she met her husband, a drug addict. She moved in with him and two years later, she gave birth to their son. It’s reported that neighbors would often complain about being woken up by the sounds of domestic abuse.
In 1997, Fan was working as a sex worker at Romance Villa, a Kowloon brothel. A man named Chan Man-lok, who was a thirty-four year old socialite and was a regular client of Fan Man-yee, would often pay her to have long sex sessions and ice binges together.
Ice, also known as ‘Crystal Meth’, ‘Crank’ and Methamphetamine can come in several different forms — tablets, powder or crystals. According to former users, when you smoke meth, you don’t feel disorientated like you would on heroin, ecstasy or cocaine. The effects are subtle, your energy increases, you feel stronger, you can converse better and before long, you feel sober. But you feel better than ever.
During one of these binges together, Fan Man-yee stole Chan’s wallet, which contained $4,000. This was her biggest mistake. To pay Chan back, she gave him her earnings from sex work, which amounted to the money she took and an extra $10,000 on top. But the loan shark wanted more for ‘interest’.
Chan was a drug lord and a member of the triads, an organized crime syndicate in Hong Kong. On March 17, 1999, Chan ordered two members of the triad, Leung Shing-Cho and Leung Wai-Lun — also known as ‘gangster’ to abduct Fan Man-yee from her home.
They took her to Chan’s apartment on Granville Road in Hong Kong. The apartment had five bedrooms and was decorated in Hello Kitty products, such as bed sheets, curtains, stuffed toys. The plan was to make her work as a sex worker and take all of her earnings until the debt she owed, was paid. But Chan was never satisfied and kept increasing the amount.
However, the plan didn’t go how they expected, instead of making her work, the group got their frustrations out on her. They beat her and subjected her to sadistic torture. She couldn’t work whilst she was beaten and bruised. The three triads were always getting high on ice and torturing Fan Man-yee was too much fun for them.
Leung Wai-Lun started dating a thirteen year old, who joined in from time to time, torturing Fan Man-yee, who was being held against her will. She would burn and hit her when the others did. This girl would be the fourteen year old, Melody that went to the police, crying about being haunted.
The kitchen in the apartment became the torturer’s favorite place to find anything they could to torture and inflict pain on Fan Man-yee. They used everything they had. Setting drinking straws alight, holding Fan Man-yee down and dripping the melting plastic onto the soles of her feet until they blistered.
When they got bored of doing it like that, they went and burnt her feet and hit them with sticks. Chili oil was used to pour into her wounds, oyster sauce was thrown in her face, she was made to drink oil.
They used water pipes and metal bars to beat her. They even made Fan Man-yee smile and laugh, pretending to be happy when they beat her so that it would be more fun. “It was a game they played. If she didn’t pretend to be happy they would beat her harder. They told her to smile while they burnt her. It was a fun atmosphere.”
They would even urinate on her face or directly into her mouth and then beating her if she spat it out. The thirteen year old once defecated in a box “for a laugh” and forced Fan Man-yee to eat it. They would wrap electrical wires around her and hang her from a hook in the ceiling and beat her with iron bars and leave her to hang there overnight.
They would leave her to drift in and out of consciousness on the floor or tied up with the electrical wires, whilst the group played video games or watched TV. Melody said “She was broken and playing with her wasn’t so much fun after that. But we carried on anyway. There wasn’t anything else to do.”
A month of sadistic torture had passed; Melody woke up one morning and found Fan Man-yee dead. They had left her passed out on the bathroom floor for days. The men spoke in front of Melody about what to do with her body but they couldn’t agree on a solution, so they left her laying dead on the bathroom floor whilst they went and played video games in an arcade nearby. “Then we came back and fell asleep” Melody said in court, they slept whilst Fan Man-yee’s body lay cold.
The next day, Chan was high on ice, telling his men to gather around “Now she must be destroyed” he apparently told them. The next ten hours, the men lifted Fan Man-yee’s body and placed her into the bathtub, using a saw, they dismembered her body. Chan cut off her head whilst the others stripped the flesh from her body and bagged it, placing it in the fridge.
Melody was woken up by Chan with a plastic bag that contained Fan Man-yee’s intestines, he instructed her to put them in some hot water to stop them from smelling. Leung Shing-Cho started cooking the head when he called Melody over, he told her to take a look and when she said she was too scared to look, he told her to “pretend you’re watching a television”. She went over to look and said that he was right, it looked like something you would see in a film.
During this ten-hour operation to get rid of the body, the group got hungry so they started to cook some noodles on one hob, whilst Fan Man-yee’s head was boiling on another. They used the same spoon to stir both the pots. After eating lunch, they returned to the head which was now boiled down to just a skull. It was then that they decided to hide the skill inside of a giant Hello Kitty mermaid toy.
This was when the haunting began for Melody; she was convinced that Fan was haunting her from beyond the grave for what she had done. She had enough of the ‘haunting’, which the police said was either result of her guilt or the drugs she was on, she confessed to the police and told them everything.
When they were looking further into the teenager’s story, they came across everything. Chan and his two associates were charged with manslaughter instead of murder, due to the possibility that Fan Man-yee died from the drug intake. They were sentenced to life anyhow, except Melody. Because she gave them a confession and told them everything, standing in court telling every detail, she was given immunity.
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