In August 1996 a bag was found floating in the water at Chi Ma Wan, on the southern side of Lantau Island in Hong Kong. Inside was the body of Tam Ngan-hang, twenty-three, who had worked as a hostess in a bar. Seven months passed before anyone learned who had put her there.
In March 1997 Chan Ka-chun, then twenty-four, was arrested and led the police to two more bodies. Cheung Wah-mei, twenty-nine, had, like Tam, been suffocated with a pillow. Yu Wai-man, twenty-four, had fought back harder than the others and had been stabbed. All three were bar hostesses, and the killings came with rape and robbery. A fourth woman had been raped and marked for murder, and she survived.
He had not acted alone. Chan Ki-nang, twenty-nine, was tried alongside him and denied murdering two of the hostesses. A third man, Leung Sze-lai, twenty-three, pleaded guilty to raping the surviving woman three times and to plotting to rob her, and admitted the manslaughter of one of the hostesses.
On January 13, 1999, the court described the crimes as "unimaginable" and sentenced Chan Ka-chun, by then twenty-seven, to three terms of life imprisonment for the three murders. He received a further twenty-six years for twice raping the fourth woman and for conspiring to murder her. Chan Ki-nang was given two life terms. Leung was sentenced to twelve years.
The account of the case that survives in English is thin: a summary of the sentencing drawn from the Hong Kong press, which gives the victims' names and ages, the manner of each death and where Tam's body was found, but little of their lives or of how the investigation connected three deaths that had begun as a single body in the sea. Where the other two bodies lay, what led the police to Chan in March 1997, and which victim's death Leung admitted to are not stated in it.