These ten cases span forty-five years and nine jurisdictions, from Manila in 1967 to Suwon in 2012. Several ended in executions. Two have never been solved. Several turned on a single question that courts in very different legal systems were forced to answer: what, exactly, can be proved? A trial court in India sent a man to death row for murder, and the country’s Supreme Court decided the evidence showed rape but not murder. A Hong Kong jury heard six weeks of evidence about a young woman held captive and returned verdicts of manslaughter. A Malaysian appeals court freed two police commandos, and the Federal Court sent them back to death row. The verdicts, not the rumors, are the story.
On the night of April 1, 2012, a 28-year-old woman was abducted near her home in the Ji-dong neighborhood of Suwon, a city south of Seoul. The man who took her was Wu Yuanchun, a 42-year-old ethnic Korean from China who was working in South Korea; the Korean press also rendered his name as Oh Won-chun. He took her to his home and killed her there.
The woman had managed to call the police emergency line while she was being held. That call became the second scandal of the case. The Korea Times, carrying a Yonhap report, said police were found to have delayed their initial response and so lost a chance to save her, and the police chief, Cho Hyun-oh, resigned to take responsibility. It took officers 13 hours to track Wu down, Korea JoongAng Daily reported.
He was tried in the Suwon District Court. Prosecutors asked for death, the heaviest penalty the law allows, and on June 15, 2012, Chief Judge Lee Dong-hoon imposed it. The court also ordered him to wear an electronic monitoring device for 30 years and directed that his personal details, including a photograph of his face, be made public for 10 years. In its ruling the court said it doubted Wu’s own account of why he had acted, and it raised the possibility that he had intended to traffic in the victim’s body, a suspicion her family shared. Executions were another matter. No condemned prisoner in South Korea had been put to death since December 1997, Korea JoongAng Daily noted, so the sentence was unlikely to be carried out.
Wu appealed within days. The appeals court replaced the death sentence with life imprisonment, finding, as the Kyeonggi Ilbo later summarized it, that the suggestion of trafficking had no basis. Prosecutors took the case to the Supreme Court, arguing that life was too lenient. In January 2013 the Supreme Court upheld the life term, together with the 10 years of public disclosure and 30 years of electronic monitoring.
The victim’s family went to court as well. In August 2013 the Seoul Central District Court ruled that the police, despite considerable effort, had fundamentally neglected their duty of care, and it ordered the state to pay her parents, her older sister and her younger brother about 100 million won. The court held the state 30 percent responsible, eToday reported, on the reasoning that the direct cause of her death lay with the man who killed her.
Soumya was 23, from Shoranur in Kerala’s Palakkad district, and on February 1, 2011, she was riding home on a passenger train from Ernakulam to Shoranur. She was found beside the railway line near Vallathol station. She was taken to the medical college hospital at Thrissur and died there on February 6.
Police charged Govindachamy. The prosecution’s case was that he had robbed her on the train and pushed her from it. On November 11, 2011, the Thrissur Fast Track Special Court convicted him and sentenced him to death. In December 2013 the Kerala High Court, in a ruling by Justices T. R. Ramachandran Nair and B. Kemal Pasha, upheld the sentence and called the case one of the "rarest of rare."
The Supreme Court of India took a different view of the murder charge. On September 15, 2016, a bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi, Prafulla C. Pant and U. U. Lalit upheld his conviction for rape and the life sentence that went with it, but set aside the murder conviction under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code and substituted grievous hurt under Section 325. The judges were not satisfied that the prosecution had proved he pushed her from the train, The News Minute reported, and because she had lived for five days after the attack, they found that an intention to kill had not been shown. The death sentence was gone; he would serve life for the rape.
The ruling was received in Kerala as a failure of the prosecution. Soumya’s mother called it a painful miscarriage of justice. The forensic expert in the case, Dr. Sherly Vasu, said publicly that the evidence showed she had been pushed, and that the state’s lawyer had not spoken to her before the hearing. The Kerala government and Soumya’s mother both filed review petitions, which the same three judges dismissed in November 2016. A curative petition from the state then went to a six-judge bench headed by Chief Justice J. S. Khehar, which dismissed it on April 28, 2017, finding no grounds to reopen the case.
Govindachamy made one more appearance in the news. At about 1:15 a.m. on Friday, July 25, 2025, he escaped from Kannur Central Jail. He was caught within hours, about four kilometers from the prison, and early the next morning a police rapid action unit moved him to the high-security prison at Viyyur, The South First reported.
Pai Hsiao-yen was the teenage daughter of Pai Ping-ping, one of the best-known television entertainers in Taiwan. In April 1997 she was kidnapped by three men, Chen Chin-hsing, Lin Chun-sheng and Kao Tien-min, and she was killed. Hou Yu-ih, a police officer who worked the case and was later deputy commissioner of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, wrote afterward that her mother had kept a detailed record of the inquiry, offered police her own theories and stayed composed through the worst weeks of her life.
He was less generous about the press. In earlier kidnappings, Hou wrote, the media had generally cooperated with police; this time they overstepped. One magazine published confidential details of the inquiry, and to keep them from endangering the investigation the police spent more than NT$400,000 in a single day buying up every copy.
The killing set off something Taiwan had not seen before over a criminal case. On May 4 and May 18, 1997, large crowds marched against rising crime, orderly demonstrations drawn from every part of society. The pressure produced lasting changes: a dedicated anti-kidnapping unit, a law governing telecommunications surveillance, and a law against domestic violence.
The three men spent the rest of 1997 on the run. On August 19 police were tipped off that two of them were hiding in an apartment in northern Taipei. Lin and Kao fired on the officers who went to the building, and one officer later died. Kao escaped on a motorcycle; Lin, cornered in an alley, shot himself. In October a plastic surgeon, his wife and a nurse were killed at the surgeon’s clinic, killings later counted among Chen’s crimes. Kao died in another gunfight with police in November.
Chen was the last. On the evening of November 18, 1997, he followed Colonel Edward McGill Alexander, the South African military attache, from a convenience store into his home in a walled compound in the Tienmu district and took the family hostage. Police tried to storm the house that night; the colonel and his daughter Melanie were wounded in the crossfire. Hou negotiated his way inside to bring out the injured. The next day, Annie Huang reported, an opposition legislator, Frank Hsieh, spent nearly two hours with Chen and left with another of the daughters. About 24 hours after it began, Chen let the last hostage go and surrendered, after police agreed to look again at the cases of his wife, his brother-in-law and two friends, who had been convicted as his accomplices. A foster child of the family, then seven months old, was among those freed; in September 2023, Taiwan News reported, Hou met him again at a banquet.
Chen received three death sentences for the killings, kidnappings and robberies of 1997, with other charges. The Supreme Court made the sentences final but sent the Pai murder back for review, and the Taiwan High Court reaffirmed the death sentence on September 23. He was executed by shooting just after 9:30 p.m. in early October 1999, the Taipei Times reported; his body was taken to Chang Gung Memorial Hospital at Linkou. He had agreed to donate his heart, lungs, kidneys and corneas.
For three years the killings in rural Henan were investigated one county at a time. Each police force assumed its killer was a local man; villagers were fingerprinted and questioned, and innocent men were held, China Newsweek reported. The attacks came at night, in poor farmhouses, against families asleep inside, and they spread over four provinces: Henan, Anhui, Shandong and Hebei.
The man responsible was Yang Xinhai, born in 1968 into one of the poorest families of a village in Zhengyang County, in southern Henan. He was the fourth of six children and the only one to reach senior high school, which he left in his final year. He drifted through work in a coal mine and as a cook for a construction crew, and his record grew with him: two years of reeducation through labor in Xi’an in 1988, another year in Shijiazhuang in 1991 for pickpocketing, and in 1996 a five-year prison term for an attempted rape in his home county. He was released early, in 1999 by Reuters' account or 2000 by China Newsweek’s.
Most of the killings that followed took place in Henan in 2002 and early 2003, many in the counties around Luohe. He moved on foot and by bicycle and covered great distances, police told China Newsweek. In November 2002 Henan’s provincial police linked cases in three counties and set up a joint headquarters. Not until August 2003 did the Ministry of Public Security connect the Anhui and Shandong killings to the Henan series. Two men wrongly held in earlier cases, one in Anhui and one in Henan, were eventually cleared; the Henan man was not released until June 28, 2003.
In November 2003 Yang was detained in Cangzhou, in Hebei, after officers inspecting entertainment venues noticed him acting suspiciously, the South China Morning Post reported. By mid-November the Hebei police were putting the death toll at no fewer than 65, and the Post, citing the Beijing News, reported that he had confessed to 22 cases in which 65 people were killed and five seriously injured: 49 dead in Henan, 8 in Hebei, 6 in Anhui and 2 in Shandong.
He was convicted, sentenced to death and executed on February 14, 2004, Agence France-Presse and Reuters reported. Reuters put the number of dead at 67 and called him one of China’s worst serial killers. Reports gave his age at death as 35 and as 38. Eight years later, when People’s Daily Online looked back over China’s recent serial murder cases, his remained the deadliest of the seven it listed.
Altantuya Shaariibuu, a 28-year-old Mongolian woman, was shot dead in the Bukit Raja area of Selangor, near Shah Alam, between 10 p.m. on October 19 and 1 a.m. on October 20, 2006. She was identified by DNA tests.
Two members of the police Special Action Unit, known by its Malay initials UTK, were charged with her murder: Chief Inspector Azilah Hadri, then 30, and Corporal Sirul Azhar Umar, then 35. Abdul Razak Baginda, a political analyst, was charged with abetting them. The case reached into the highest levels of Malaysian politics, and it has never fully left them.
On October 31, 2008, the High Court acquitted Abdul Razak at the close of the prosecution case, without calling on him to answer the charge; the prosecution did not appeal. On April 9, 2009, the same court convicted Azilah and Sirul of murder and sentenced both to death, finding that their defenses, which amounted to denial and blaming each other, raised no reasonable doubt.
On August 23, 2013, a three-judge Court of Appeal panel unanimously acquitted them, holding the conviction unsafe and the circumstantial evidence insufficient. The prosecution went to the Federal Court, and on January 13, 2015, a five-judge panel unanimously restored the convictions and the death sentences. Azilah was in court and was taken to prison. Sirul was not; a warrant was issued, and he was found to be in Australia, which does not return people to countries where they face execution. He was held for years at Villawood Immigration Detention Centre in Sydney and released in November 2023, one of more than 90 people freed from indefinite detention.
In October 2019 Azilah signed a statutory declaration, published by Malaysiakini, in which he claimed that the then prime minister, Najib Razak, had ordered the killing. Najib dismissed it as a fabrication, and in December 2020 a separate Federal Court panel refused Azilah’s bid for a review and retrial. Under a 2023 law that let the Federal Court review death sentences, he applied to have his reconsidered. On October 10, 2024, a review panel led by Chief Justice Tengku Maimun Tuan Mat set aside the death sentence and imposed 40 years in prison, counted from his arrest on November 1, 2006, and 12 strokes of the rotan. Altantuya’s father had written to the court in support of the application.
Her family’s civil claim, filed on June 4, 2007, ran for nearly two decades. In December 2022 the Shah Alam High Court ordered Azilah, Sirul, Abdul Razak and the government to pay RM5 million. On January 20, 2026, the Court of Appeal cleared the government of vicarious liability and reduced the award to about RM1.4 million. Her father, speaking through an interpreter that day, said he wanted no money, only a sincere apology. The family sought leave to appeal, and in July 2026 the Federal Court set the hearing for October 27, 2026.
Lucila Lalu was 28, a native of Pampanga province who had made a life in Manila running a beauty salon and a restaurant. In the last days of May 1967 she was found dead in Manila.
The investigation looked at three men, PhilSTAR Life recounted in 2020. One of them, J. L. S., a 28-year-old student, went to the police about two weeks after she was found and confessed. Three days later he withdrew the statement and said he had been an unwilling witness to a crime committed by three other men. The fiscal found the evidence unconvincing, the National Bureau of Investigation took over the case, and J. L. S. was released. No one was convicted. The killing of Lucila Lalu remains unsolved.
On the morning of January 6, 1979, four children were killed at their home in Geylang Bahru, Singapore. They were Tan Kok Peng, 10; Tan Kok Hin, 8; Tan Kok Soon, 6; and their sister, Tan Chin Nee, 5. Their parents ran a minibus service that took other people’s children to school, and they had gone out to work that morning. They found their children when they came home.
The case went to the Special Investigation Section of the Criminal Investigation Department. Officers found no forced entry, nothing ransacked and nothing taken, and concluded that the killings had been planned. They recovered hairs and bloodstains, but DNA testing did not yet exist. More than 100 neighbors were interviewed. One neighbor, a Malaysian man, was arrested after a taxi driver picked him out of a line-up, and was released for lack of evidence, Mothership reported in 2018.
The killings remain unsolved. In April 2021 a former neighbor of the family came forward with new information after a local history group highlighted the killings during a charity drive, and the police resumed their inquiries, MS News reported. The Chinese-language daily Shin Min tracked down the children’s mother and reported her response.
Datuk Mazlan Idris, 49, was a state assemblyman in Pahang with ambitions to rise further. He sought help from a couple who practiced as bomoh, traditional healers: Mohd Affandi Abdul Rahman and his wife, Maznah Ismail, who had once had a career as a pop singer under the name Mona Fandey. On July 2, 1993, he was last seen after meeting the couple in Raub. Police later estimated that he was killed between July 2 and July 8.
The case broke in late July. On July 22, 1993, The Star reported that three people had been detained; one of its reporters, acting on a tip from a police source, reached Ulu Dong, near Raub, ahead of the officers. Early on July 23 police confirmed that he had been found dead there. Police seized amulets and posters with Thai writing, but they gave the motive as greed: the couple, they said, had wanted control of his property, including plots of land.
Mona Fandey, her husband and their assistant, Juraimi Husin, were charged with murder and tried in 1994. Each blamed something or someone else. Mona Fandey said the death had happened by accident during a ritual bath; her husband told the court the group had sold the assemblyman a cane and a talisman for RM2.5 million. In 1995 the High Court convicted all three and sentenced them to death. The Federal Court rejected their appeal in 1999, and in April 2001 the Pahang Pardons Board refused clemency, their last chance.
They were hanged before dawn on Friday, November 2, 2001, at Kajang Prison, outside Kuala Lumpur. She was 45, her husband 44 and Juraimi 31. A prison warder who guarded her husband on death row recalled years later that he would sometimes drift into thoughts of his wife and whisper that he pitied her.
Fan Man-yee was 23. From March 17, 1999, she was held prisoner for about a month, and she died in April. Her death came to light in late May, after a teenage girl, the girlfriend of one of the men involved, went to the police. By the end of May two men had appeared in court charged with her murder.
The men were Chan Man-lok, 34, Leung Shing-cho, 27, and Leung Wai-lun, 21. After a six-week trial in the Court of First Instance, the jury cleared them of murder and, on November 21, 2000, convicted all three of manslaughter, false imprisonment and preventing the lawful burial of a body. Justice Peter Nguyen sentenced each of them to life, with no review for 20 years, and told them that no case in Hong Kong had shown such cruelty. The public, he said, had to be protected from them.
On appeal in 2003 the defense argued that the jury should have been told she might have died of a drug overdose she brought on herself, and that without a cause of death the jury could not decide what the experts could not. The Court of Appeal upheld the life sentences of Chan Man-lok and Leung Wai-lun; the judge who wrote the ruling said the case came close to the line between murder and manslaughter. Leung Shing-cho’s conviction was quashed and a retrial ordered, the South China Morning Post reported. The Standard later reported that his life sentence had been reduced on appeal to 18 years and that he was released in 2011, after 11 years. In August 2022, at 48, he was convicted in a new case involving a 10-year-old girl and jailed for 12 months.
Junko Furuta was 17, a third-year student at a prefectural high school in Saitama. In late November 1988 she was abducted by a group of teenage boys and held for about 40 days. She died in January 1989. On March 29, 1989, she was found dead in Koto Ward, Tokyo.
Four youths were arrested and tried: the leader, A, who was 18, and B, C and D, who were 16 and 17. Because they were juveniles, much of the Japanese press refers to them only by letters. They were charged with offenses that included abduction, unlawful confinement and murder, with other charges. In the Tokyo District Court on July 20, 1990, B received an indeterminate prison term of 5 to 10 years; the prosecution had asked for 13. The court took into account that he had no earlier record of protective custody and that his parents had apologized and promised to save for the victim’s family. The prosecution appealed all four sentences, and on July 12, 1991, the Tokyo High Court left B’s sentence as it was. D, who acted as a lookout, received an indeterminate term of 5 to 7 years. The leader was sentenced to 20 years, Tokyo Weekender reported in 2025.
All four served their sentences and were released. A was released in 2009 and was later arrested over a fraud scheme. B was convicted again in 2005, of unlawful confinement causing injury, and sentenced to four years. C, then 45, was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder in Kawaguchi, Saitama, on August 19, 2018. Tokyo Weekender reported in 2025 that two of the four had since died. A film based on the case, Concrete, was made in 2004; its planned theatrical release was canceled, and it was pulled from a small cinema after about a week.
Set side by side, the ten cases show how unevenly courts reach their endings. Two men, Chen Chin-hsing and Yang Xinhai, were convicted of multiple killings and executed. The three people convicted in the Mazlan Idris case went to the gallows in 2001, after their last appeals failed. Wu Yuanchun and Govindachamy were sentenced to death and saw those sentences struck down on appeal, one because the higher courts found no proof of the motive the trial court suspected, the other because the evidence did not prove murder. In Malaysia two men were convicted, acquitted and convicted again, and the man accused of abetting them was never called to answer. In Hong Kong and Tokyo the defendants were convicted of something less than murder or received terms that ended in release. And in Manila and Singapore, more than half a century apart, no one has been held to account at all.
• 1967, May 28 and 29: Lucila Lalu, 28, is found dead in Manila. A student, J. L. S., confesses about two weeks later, withdraws the confession three days after that and is released. The case remains unsolved.
• 1979, January 6: Tan Kok Peng, Tan Kok Hin, Tan Kok Soon and Tan Chin Nee are killed at their home in Geylang Bahru, Singapore.
• 1988, late November: Junko Furuta, 17, is abducted and held for about 40 days.
• 1989, January: Junko Furuta dies. March 29: she is found in Koto Ward, Tokyo, and four youths are arrested.
• 1990, July 20: the Tokyo District Court sentences the four; B receives 5 to 10 years.
• 1991, July 12: the Tokyo High Court dismisses the appeals in B’s case.
• 1993, July 2: Datuk Mazlan Idris is last seen after meeting Mona Fandey and her husband in Raub, Pahang. July 22 and 23: three people are detained and his remains are identified.
• 1995: the High Court convicts Mona Fandey, Mohd Affandi Abdul Rahman and Juraimi Husin of murder and sentences them to death.
• 1997, April: Pai Hsiao-yen is kidnapped and killed in Taiwan. May 4 and May 18: mass demonstrations against crime. August 19: Lin Chun-sheng dies in a shootout with police. October: a plastic surgeon, his wife and a nurse are killed. November: Kao Tien-min dies in a shootout. November 18 and 19: Chen Chin-hsing holds the family of the South African military attache hostage for about 24 hours and surrenders.
• 1999: the Federal Court of Malaysia rejects the appeals in the Mazlan Idris case. March 17: Fan Man-yee is taken captive in Hong Kong; she dies in April. Late May: the case comes to light. October: Chen Chin-hsing is executed.
• 2000, November 21: Chan Man-lok, Leung Shing-cho and Leung Wai-lun are cleared of murder and convicted of manslaughter, false imprisonment and preventing lawful burial; they are sentenced to life.
• 2001, April: the Pahang Pardons Board refuses clemency. November 2: Mona Fandey, her husband and Juraimi Husin are hanged at Kajang Prison.
• 2002 to 2003: most of Yang Xinhai’s killings take place in Henan; in August 2003 the Ministry of Public Security links the four provinces' cases. November 2003: Yang is arrested in Cangzhou, Hebei.
• 2003: the Court of Appeal hears the Hong Kong appeals in March; it later upholds two life sentences and quashes Leung Shing-cho’s conviction.
• 2004, February 14: Yang Xinhai is executed.
• 2005: B in the Junko Furuta case is sentenced to four years for unlawful confinement causing injury.
• 2006, October 19 and 20: Altantuya Shaariibuu is shot dead in Selangor. November 1: Azilah Hadri is arrested.
• 2008, October 31: Abdul Razak Baginda is acquitted.
• 2009, April 9: Azilah Hadri and Sirul Azhar Umar are convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
• 2011, February 1: Soumya is attacked on a train in Kerala; she dies on February 6. November 11: Govindachamy is sentenced to death. Leung Shing-cho is released in Hong Kong.
• 2012, April 1: a 28-year-old woman is abducted and killed in Suwon. June 15: Wu Yuanchun is sentenced to death.
• 2013, January: the Supreme Court of Korea upholds Wu’s life sentence. August: the state is ordered to pay the victim’s family about 100 million won. August 23: the Malaysian Court of Appeal acquits Azilah and Sirul. December: the Kerala High Court upholds Govindachamy’s death sentence.
• 2015, January 13: the Federal Court of Malaysia restores the convictions and death sentences of Azilah and Sirul.
• 2016, September 15: the Supreme Court of India sets aside Govindachamy’s murder conviction and upholds his life sentence for rape. November: review petitions are dismissed.
• 2017, April 28: a six-judge bench dismisses Kerala’s curative petition.
• 2018, August 19: C in the Junko Furuta case is arrested on suspicion of attempted murder.
• 2022, August: Leung Shing-cho is jailed for 12 months in a new case. December: the Shah Alam High Court awards Altantuya’s family RM5 million.
• 2023, November: Sirul Azhar Umar is released from immigration detention in Australia.
• 2024, October 10: Azilah Hadri’s death sentence is replaced with 40 years in prison and 12 strokes of the rotan.
• 2025, July 25: Govindachamy escapes from Kannur Central Jail and is recaptured within hours; the next day he is moved to Viyyur.
• 2026, January 20: the Court of Appeal reduces the Altantuya damages award and clears the government of vicarious liability. October 27: the family’s bid to restore the award is set for the Federal Court.