Fan Man-Yee was a nightclub hostess who in 1999 was kidnapped, tortured, and beaten to death in a horrific case that would come to be known as the Hello Kitty murder.
Three men kidnapped Fan Man-Yee and took her to an apartment in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong, where they held her hostage for over a month before brutally killing her.
They cut off her head and put it inside a life-size Hello Kitty mermaid doll, which is why the case was dubbed the Hello Kitty murder.
Unwrapping The Case
The details of the case became even more disturbing when a 14-year-old girl turned up at a Hong Kong police station distressed and unaccompanied by an adult. She told officers that she was being harassed and tormented by the ghost of a woman.
Of course, the police didn't believe the little girl's story. She had described the incidents in a lot of detail and interpreted the ghostly creature as that of a young woman with bloody lacerations all over her body. In the coming days, the girl confessed to the murder of a woman, the same woman who was supposedly haunting her.
At this moment, the police realized that they were looking at a 14-year-old murder suspect, one of the youngest in Hong Kong's history.
A Strange Little Girl
It wasn't long before the police figured out why the girl had come to the station in the first place. She confessed candidly that she had been heavily involved in the torture, murder, and dismemberment of a young woman. She went on to say that her interactions with the ghostly woman were getting increasingly troubling. The girl felt that unless she confessed to the murder, the haunting visions would continue to torment her.
It turned out that the girl wasn't solely responsible for the gruesome murder of Fan Man-Yee and was nothing more than a pawn in the deeper underbelly of societal damage. The murder took place in a neglected part of Kowloon's old city which was notoriously dangerous and poverty-stricken.
The Hello Kitty Murder Crime Scene
The police were directed to a dilapidated address in the center of town, and nothing could have prepared them for what they saw next.
They found a life-size Hello Kitty Mermaid doll laying on a blood-stained bed with Fan Man-Yee's skull inside.
The cotton stuffing had been removed to make room for her head to be placed in the compartment. The horrifying details of the Hello Kitty murder went down in history as one of the most brutal and vicious attacks that Hong Kong had ever seen.
Fan Man-Yee's Tragic Story
Fan Man-Yee was only 23 years old when she was brutally murdered. She hadn't had an easy life up to this point and was abandoned by her parents when she was young. Growing up in orphanages and being passed around between foster carers left young Fan Man-Yee feeling discarded and alone. She inevitably got into bad crowds and eventually started taking drugs.
Fan worked at a nightclub to fuel her growing habit and would regularly interact with dangerous individuals, including those from the Chinese Mafia.
The young nightclub employee would often engage in sex acts to bolster her income. She notoriously lived life on the wild side and wasn't afraid of those who might seek to harm her. One day she met a 34-year-old drug dealer and Mafia Chief, Chan Man-Lok, at the nightclub where she worked.
The pair soon hit it off, and before long, Chan Man-Lok became a regular client of Fan Man-Yee.
A Turn For The Worse
One day after a regular sexual encounter, Fan Man Yee was caught red-handed stealing 4,000 Hong Kong dollars from Lok's wallet. He demanded that she immediately pay back the money she stole and charged her an extra 10,000 Hong Kong dollars in interest.
Petrified, Fan Man Yee gave back the money she had stolen but asked for some time to pay the rest back. Lok wasn't interested in waiting for his money and decided to kidnap Fan Man-Yee and roped in three other men to help him get the job done.
Lok initially planned to earn his money back by forcing Fan Man-Yee into prostitution but later abandoned this idea. The 14-year-old girl revealed that Fan Man-Yee was repeatedly raped and beaten during her first few nights at the Kowloon apartment.
The sodomization didn't stop there. They would regularly find new ways of beating helpless Fan Man-Yee and use tools such as metal bars or kitchen utensils.
After a month of morbid torture, Fan Man-Yee died overnight and left the three murderers at odds of what to do with her body. They placed her in a bath and proceeded to cut off her body parts piece by piece so that she wouldn't be recognized. They even cooked her limbs to stop the decomposition of her body and placed her head inside the skull of the Hello Kitty murder doll.
Trial & Punishment
Police eventually caught the three men, and an intense investigation and trial would occur over the next year. The media buzz around the courthouses was strong, as the public's interest in the case was not going anywhere. Whilst the men denied any wrongdoing. They were charged with manslaughter, meaning they had no intention of killing the victim.
They were sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole in 20 years.
The 14-year-old girl assisted the police and the investigation right up until the conclusion of the trial. She provided vital evidence and accounts of what happened throughout Fan Man Yee's abduction and subsequent torture and murder. The police decided not to bring any charges to the 14-year-old girl, and she was eventually released into foster care.
To this day, Fan Man-Yee is remembered by Hong Kong residents who keep her memory alive by celebrating her birthday with a candlelit vigil in the center of Hong Kong.
