Chen Jui-chin was 54 years old and living in Chiayi County, in southwestern Taiwan, when Nantou County police arrested him in May 2003 for the murder of a woman he knew. Within a week he had admitted that the killing was not his first. Over 13 years, five members of his family had died: two wives, a son and two stepsons. He had insured each of them, often without their knowledge, and had been the beneficiary every time.
The investigation that followed turned a single murder case into one that set a sentencing record in Taiwan's courts. At first instance he received five death sentences and one life sentence, a total no defendant in Taiwan had reached before. The appeals went on until 2011. Because the courts treated his confessions to the family killings as a surrender, they later reduced that part of the case to a 20-year prison term. The death sentence for the 2003 murder stood. He was executed in Taichung on April 19, 2013, one of six men put to death in Taiwan that night.
Chen was a native of Chiayi County. He had worked as a technician for the Chinese Petroleum Corporation, the state oil company, and later as a temporary employee at a township office. People who knew him found him easy company. He was also a gambler, and his gambling debts grew heavy over the years.
He married his first wife, Tseng Pi-hsia, in 1974. At the time of the marriage she was covered by a life policy with Taiwan Life Insurance, and Chen was named as the beneficiary.
Tseng Pi-hsia died in January 1985. Chen was the only witness, and when prosecutors examined the case nearly two decades later he could not explain how her death had happened. The insurance on her life paid NT$2 million.
Later in 1985 he married again. His second wife, Wang Shu-ying, had a son, Chen Yi-chi, whom Chen adopted in 1986. Chen Yi-chi died in April 1988, at the age of 15.
Chen's own son, Chen Chien-hung, died in August 1995.
Wang Shu-ying was insured under numerous policies with several companies. She died in August 1996, and Chen received NT$11,372,540.
In 1997 Chen married a third time and adopted his new wife's two children, a son and a daughter. By then his gambling debts were large. The boy, Chen Tsung-ching, died in October 1998. Each of the three boys' deaths, like the two women's, followed insurance policies that Chen had taken out on their lives.
His third wife came to believe that Chen was responsible for her son's death and feared for her own life. She divorced him, paying him alimony to secure the divorce.
Prosecutors in 2003 estimated that the five deaths had brought Chen about NT$22 million. In 2004 the Chiayi District Court tied NT$13.21 million to the killings: the sums paid on the policies on his first wife and on the three boys.
The insurers who stopped paying after Chen Tsung-ching's death opened an inquiry of their own. In September 2000 Chen Chao-jung, a member of the Legislative Yuan, brought their complaints forward, and the Criminal Investigation Bureau took up the case.
Tsai Pei-yuan, the bureau detective who handled it, found a man with many gambling debts and a pattern of insurance on relatives who had died. Chen had an answer. The policies, he said, had been taken out after so many of his relatives had died, on a friend's advice. In public he denied any wrongdoing, blamed fate and feng shui for the deaths in his family, and wept on camera more than once. Investigators had suspicion but not proof. A long period of surveillance turned up nothing out of the ordinary, and police set the case aside.
By 2003 Chen owed NT$2 million to a loan shark. That year in Chiayi City he met Chen Yi-ling, a woman from Chiayi, through a friend. She was a friend of Chen's, not a relative. She had asked him to cash two checks for her. The indictment charged that Chen had learned that she had money and decided to kill her and take her assets to solve his financial problems. She died on May 11, 2003. The case arose in Zhushan Township in Nantou County, and so it fell to the Nantou District Prosecutors Office.
Nantou investigators reached Chen quickly. Chen Yi-ling had made many telephone calls to him on the day she died, and camera images of his vehicle and a traffic ticket linked him to the area. The vehicle evidence, Nantou prosecutor Wang Jeh-tuo said, was "how we knew he was the man we wanted."
Police and Wang arrested Chen in Chiayi on May 22, 2003, and the Nantou District Court approved his detention. He soon admitted to police that he had killed Chen Yi-ling, saying it followed a quarrel over his financial problems. Nantou prosecutors announced the confession within days.
The arrest brought the five family deaths back into view. Nantou prosecutors found that five members of Chen's extended family had died over 13 years, each shortly after Chen had taken out insurance on them, and that he could not explain why. Prosecutors said he had bought the policies without the insured people's knowledge and was the sole beneficiary of all of them. Prosecutors and police in Nantou and Chiayi, together with the Criminal Investigation Bureau, began to reinvestigate the deaths.
Chen held out at first. He denied everything, demanded that investigators show him evidence, and pointed out that he had come through the earlier inquiry. Investigators appealed to his conscience and explained that a confession could reduce his sentence. After a long talk with prosecutors one night, he gave way. On May 28 he confessed to killing four members of his family for their insurance: his first wife, Tseng Pi-hsia, his son, Chen Chien-hung, and his two stepsons, Chen Yi-chi and Chen Tsung-ching. Chen had "finally admitted" the four deaths, Nantou chief prosecutor Wang Ching-chieh said.
He still denied any part in the death of his second wife. That held for little more than a week. On June 6, 2003, the Chiayi District Prosecutors Office announced that Chen had confessed to killing Wang Shu-ying in 1996. The key, prosecutors said, was testimony from a witness whose identity they kept confidential. Chen had sought NT$8 million from the policy on her life. "It was all about money," said Chiayi prosecutor Wang Cheng-chuan.
The two parts of the case went forward separately. In July 2003 the Nantou District Prosecutors Office indicted Chen in the death of Chen Yi-ling and asked the court to impose the death penalty; the indictment, prepared by prosecutor Hsieh Wei-cheng, charged him with murder and a second offense.
The family deaths went to the Chiayi District Prosecutors Office. It filed two indictments charging murder and fraudulent insurance claims, and asked for a death sentence for each killing.
In December 2003 Chen was sentenced to death for the murder of Chen Yi-ling, with a further five years for an offense against sexual autonomy.
On February 9, 2004, the Chiayi District Court sentenced him for the deaths of his two wives: death for one killing and life imprisonment for the other.
On December 20, 2004, the Chiayi District Court passed three more death sentences, one for each of the three boys, with permanent deprivation of civil rights. Because three of the victims had been minors, the case was heard by the court's juvenile panel. Chen, in custody, did not attend the hearing. The court said he had disregarded the bonds of family and acted without conscience. It treated each killing as the product of a separate criminal intent, not as one continuous course of conduct, and so sentenced each separately.
That brought his total to five death sentences and one life sentence. The previous highest total in Taiwan had been three death sentences, imposed on a man who had killed seven people.
Chen appealed. In court he withdrew his confessions and claimed, falsely, that police had coerced them. The insurance case moved between the Supreme Court and the Taiwan High Court's Tainan Branch for years; the Supreme Court sent it back to the lower court seven times.
The decisive point in that case was Chen's confessions. He had admitted the family killings himself after his arrest in the Nantou case, and the Tainan Branch found that he met the legal requirements for surrender. It also applied commutation statutes of 1991 and 2007 to those sentences. In March 2009 a court in Tainan reduced three death sentences to a 20-year prison term, and prosecutors said they would appeal.
The final judgment in the insurance case came from the Tainan Branch on the seventh remand. It sentenced Chen to life imprisonment for three murders, with lifetime deprivation of civil rights, and commuted that sentence to 20 years' imprisonment with 10 years' deprivation of civil rights. A commutation provision had been applied twice because of his surrender, and it spared him the death penalty in the insurance killings. The Supreme Court dismissed the prosecutors' appeal, and the judgment became final. Which of the five family deaths the three murder counts covered, and how the other two were finally resolved, is not on record.
The Chen Yi-ling case followed a different course. On February 10, 2011, the Supreme Court dismissed Chen's appeal, and the death sentence for her murder became final.
On April 19, 2013, the Ministry of Justice carried out six executions in four prisons, in Taipei, Taichung, Tainan and Hualien. Chen was executed in Taichung. The orders had been signed by Justice Minister Tseng Yung-fu, and Deputy Minister Chen Ming-tang announced them at a press conference.
The other five men executed that night were Chen Tung-jung, Lin Chin-te, Chang Pao-hui, Chi Chun-i and Lee Chia-hsuan, each convicted of murder. Human rights groups condemned the executions, arguing that the orders had been signed before the prisoners' remaining legal applications were heard, and promised legal action. The Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty had made last-minute legal and media appeals to stop them; when its representatives confronted the deputy minister, they said, the only answer they received was that the government had followed the law. Fifty prisoners remained on death row after that night.
Chen's case ran through a decade in which Taiwan's use of the death penalty changed more than once. In the 1990s more than 50 offenses carried a mandatory death sentence; the mandatory death penalty was abolished in 2006. No executions were carried out from December 2005 until April 2010, a de facto moratorium that began while Chen's trials were under way.
In 2009 Taiwan ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. An implementation act that took effect in December 2009 gave the covenants the force of domestic law. Executions resumed the following year, under President Ma Ying-jeou and Justice Minister Tseng Yung-fu: four in 2010, five in 2011 and six in December 2012, the only executions of that year. The six of April 2013 brought the total since the moratorium ended to 21, and made twelve executions in under six months.
The April 2013 executions came weeks after an international review of Taiwan's human rights record. In February 2013 a panel of independent experts, among them Manfred Nowak, a former United Nations special rapporteur, and Eibe Riedel, a member of a United Nations treaty committee, visited Taiwan. Their report of March 1, 2013 urged an immediate moratorium on executions as a first step toward abolition. The government replied that abolition would be difficult at that stage and set up a committee to study gradual abolition. Officials told visiting abolitionist groups in April 2013 that Taiwan would not abolish the death penalty overnight but meant to reduce its use. Public support for capital punishment stayed strong: a July 2012 survey found 76.7 percent of respondents opposed to abolition.
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty all condemned the April executions. Amnesty called on President Ma to impose an immediate moratorium. Families in Taiwan were not usually told of an execution in advance. Five more prisoners were executed in April 2014.
The commutation statutes that shortened Chen's insurance sentences were among a series of general sentence reductions in Taiwan. The 2007 statute took effect on July 16, 2007, to mark the 20th anniversary of the end of 38 years of martial law; it was the fifth such commutation, and 9,597 prisoners walked free on its first day. Some offenses fell outside it: one murder conviction in a widely reported case that year was ruled ineligible.
Under the constitution, the president may grant pardons in accordance with law, but the procedure under the Amnesty Law lacked clear rules. Between 2000 and 2009 the Supreme Court made 93 death sentences final, and in 61 of those cases the defendant had no lawyer before that court.
The legal ground continued to shift after Chen's death. On September 20, 2024, Taiwan's Constitutional Court, ruling on petitions by 37 death-row prisoners who had exhausted their appeals, held that the death penalty was constitutional only for the most serious premeditated murders and crimes leading to death, a ruling that sharply narrowed its future use.
Several questions about the case remain open. Chen confessed to all five family deaths in 2003, and the first-instance courts sentenced him for each of them. The final insurance judgment, however, covered three murders, and which three is not on record, nor is the final outcome for the remaining two deaths.
Chen's own account changed over time. Before 2003 he denied any responsibility and attributed the deaths in his family to bad luck; in 2003 he confessed in stages, holding back his second wife's death until a confidential witness gave evidence; and at trial he withdrew his confessions altogether.
1974: Chen Jui-chin marries Tseng Pi-hsia; she is insured with him as beneficiary.
January 1985: Tseng Pi-hsia dies; her policy pays NT$2 million.
1985: Chen marries Wang Shu-ying; in 1986 he adopts her son, Chen Yi-chi.
April 1988: Chen Yi-chi dies, aged 15.
August 1995: Chen's son, Chen Chien-hung, dies.
August 1996: Wang Shu-ying dies; Chen receives NT$11,372,540.
1997: Chen marries a third time and adopts his wife's two children.
October 1998: his stepson Chen Tsung-ching dies; the insurers stop payment.
September 2000: insurers' complaints reach the Legislative Yuan; the Criminal Investigation Bureau investigates, then sets the case aside.
May 11, 2003: Chen Yi-ling dies, Zhushan Township, Nantou County.
May 22, 2003: Chen arrested in Chiayi; the Nantou District Court approves his detention.
May 28, 2003: he confesses to four family killings.
June 6, 2003: Chiayi prosecutors announce his confession to killing Wang Shu-ying.
July 2003: Nantou prosecutors indict him for the murder of Chen Yi-ling and seek the death penalty; Chiayi prosecutors file two indictments for the family deaths.
December 2003: death sentence for the murder of Chen Yi-ling.
February 9, 2004: Chiayi District Court: death and life imprisonment for the deaths of his two wives.
December 20, 2004: Chiayi District Court: three death sentences for the three boys.
March 2009: a court in Tainan reduces three death sentences to a 20-year term.
After seven remands (date not on record): Tainan Branch, life for three murders, commuted to 20 years; the Supreme Court dismisses the prosecutors' appeal.
February 10, 2011: Supreme Court makes the death sentence for the murder of Chen Yi-ling final.
April 19, 2013: Chen executed in Taichung, one of six men executed that night.