Between February and July 1982, four women who took a taxi in the small hours in Hong Kong did not reach home. The driver was Lam Kor-wan, a quiet 27-year-old who had driven a cab since 1979 and preferred the night shift. Police found the first of the women in February, in Sha Tin, and spent six months questioning hundreds of people and searching for the right driver among tens of thousands. The case broke in August 1982, when staff at a photo shop saw what was on a roll of film he had left to be printed and called the police. Officers arrested him on August 17 when he came to collect the prints.
He was tried in the High Court in March 1983. The jury found him guilty of four counts of murder, and on April 8, 1983, he was sentenced to death. In August 1984 the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, as every death sentence in Hong Kong had been since 1966. Sing Tao reported in October 2023 that he was still in prison. Hong Kong newspapers named him the Rainy Night Butcher, from a phrase he used about himself in a police interview, and by 1983, a caption in the South China Morning Post's archive records, he had been christened the Jars Killer.
Lam was born on March 22, 1955, according to a 2023 Sing Tao series on the case, and was the eldest of seven children. His father worked as a mechanical engineering consultant for an oil company in Brunei and, Sing Tao reported, took a second wife there. Lam went to primary school in Brunei and came back to Hong Kong in October 1962. The South China Morning Post's account places his childhood in Malaysia and says the family moved to Hong Kong when he was a teenager; the two newspapers differ on both the country and his age at the move.
Both accounts describe a violent father. The Post says his father beat him and his mother, once knocking the boy unconscious, and that the beatings stopped after the move to Hong Kong. Sing Tao, drawing on its archives, said his father was strict from the start: when Lam was about two, his father slapped him so hard for starting a meal without first greeting the family that half his face swelled. During the trial, according to the Post, the court heard that his father had beaten him severely as a child.
Lam had trouble making friends at school, the Post wrote, and his closest companion was an electronic chess set. In Hong Kong he went to secondary school in the mornings. In 1970 his father opened a shop selling motorcycles, and Lam had to work there in the afternoons after school. His grades fell. Sing Tao reported that he was scolded and beaten for dozing in the shop and became withdrawn. When he was 19, his family noticed a change in his mental state.
He never had a girlfriend, the Post wrote. In the late 1970s, by the Post's account, he took covert photographs of women and stopped only after women he had photographed chased him through the streets.
Lam became a taxi driver in 1979, Sing Tao reported. The Post said he chose the night shift because it suited his temperament. Sing Tao, describing him before February 1982, said he regularly gave money to his mother and that his life looked like anyone else's. He lived in the family flat in To Kwa Wan, in Kowloon, with his father, his siblings and the family of a brother-in-law, and he shared a small bedroom with his younger brother. The two brothers slept in bunk beds and, by an informal agreement, never touched each other's belongings.
In the bedroom he built up a large photography collection. At his arrest police seized 109 pieces of photography equipment, along with pornographic films and magazines, according to Sing Tao.
Chan Fung-lan was 21, according to Sing Tao, or 22, according to HK01. She worked as a nightclub hostess in Tsim Sha Tsui. She was married and had two daughters. Her mother had died when she was 12, and her father was a retired army officer who had commanded a battalion in the war against Japan; she gave him money for the household every month.
At about 4 a.m. on February 3, 1982, after work, she went for a late meal with co-workers. She planned to spend the night at a friend's home, and a co-worker went to a cafe to telephone the friend. When the co-worker came back, Chan was gone. She had taken a taxi in Tsim Sha Tsui.
The account the retired detective Leung Ping later gave Sing Tao, drawn from the investigation, was that she had been drinking heavily that night and that a first taxi refused to take her. Lam's cab was the second. She was killed during the ride, and he later told police he had strangled her. Sing Tao, summing up what he later told police, said his first killing was impulsive rather than planned.
On February 11, 1982, her remains were found in Sha Tin; the Post reported the discovery on February 12. The detective Chan Tim-wo of the police homicide unit linked the discovery to the nightclub worker who had been reported missing. "When this body was found, a girl working at a nightclub had gone missing, and the body turned out to be her," he told Sing Tao in 2023.
Police questioned hundreds of people, among them regular customers of the nightclub. A man who had pursued Chan and been turned down was investigated, but there was no evidence against him. Officers checked shops that sold power tools without result. Chan Tim-wo told his foreign superior that they should concentrate on taxi drivers, and many officers questioned drivers in Tsim Sha Tsui. The task was large: Sing Tao put the Hong Kong taxi fleet of the 1980s at about 16,000 cars and nearly 30,000 drivers. Police did not find the man they were looking for. The taxi Chan Fung-lan had taken was never traced by its number, and the case stayed open through the spring.
More than three months passed before the second killing. Chan Wan-kit, 31, worked as a cashier at a recreation center in Yau Ma Tei. At about 5 a.m. on May 29, 1982, she got into Lam's taxi in Jordan, according to Sing Tao. She was killed during the ride.
Leung Sau-wan was 29. HK01 described her as a cleaner; Sing Tao described her as a hostess at a nightclub in Tsim Sha Tsui. She took Lam's taxi after finishing work at about 4 a.m. on June 17, 1982, and was strangled.
Sing Tao reported that three of the four women, Chan Fung-lan, Chan Wan-kit and Leung Sau-wan, were married, and it described all three as working in the entertainment trade. Leung Ping, the detective, told the paper that Lam hated women he regarded as bad, sex workers above all, and believed that killing them was a form of justice.
Leung Wai-sum was 17. She had just finished Form 5 at a secondary school in Sham Shui Po and was, by Sing Tao's account, a strong student. On the night of July 2, 1982, she went to her graduation dinner at a hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui. Her classmates asked her to go dancing afterward, but she said no, because she did not want her mother to worry. She hailed a taxi by the roadside. It was raining heavily.
She was killed during the ride, at about 3 a.m.
On August 10, 1982, a customer left a roll of film for printing at a photo shop in Tsim Sha Tsui. An equipment fault meant the film was sent to the company's branch in Mong Kok to be printed. There, as the pictures came up, a technician saw that they showed a woman's dead body and alerted his superiors, and the company's management called the police, Sing Tao reported. The Post wrote that a photo technician's concern about the images led to the capture. Forensic pathologist Dr. Ma Suen-lap, who worked on the case early in his career, later told HK01 that a fingerprint on one of the photographs matched one of the victims.
On August 17, police watched both the Tsim Sha Tsui and the Mong Kok branches. Shortly before the Tsim Sha Tsui shop closed at about 5 p.m., a man came in and collected the prints, and officers arrested him on the spot. It was Lam.
Lam told the officers that he was collecting the photographs for a regular passenger, who paid him HK$50 a time for such errands and who was waiting for him near his home. Police went with him. "He didn't seem to be waiting for anyone," Chan Tim-wo recalled, and the officers went on to search the family flat.
At first they found nothing. Then they lifted Lam's bed. "One colleague found things under the bed. Something was not right," Chan Tim-wo told Sing Tao. A forensic pathologist was called and warned the officers to prepare themselves. Police seized human remains and thousands of photographs, the Post reported at the time; its report of August 20, 1982, said the remains of at least three women had been found in the flat. Police also found 44 numbered videotapes in his bedroom, Sing Tao reported, one of them labeled "Rainy Night Action."
On August 19 the Post reported arrests in the case, among them Lam, a 27-year-old night-shift taxi driver.
Police first suspected Lam's younger brother, who slept on the bunk above him and had no idea what was stored beneath it. He was detained and then released for lack of evidence, according to Sing Tao and the retired officer Leung Ping, who also worked on the case. Dr. Ma told HK01 there was no evidence that the brother took part, and that Lam took responsibility for the crimes.
Lam's father would not believe it at first. He told police they had made a mistake and that his quiet son could not have killed anyone, until officers found something that changed his mind, Sing Tao reported.
For a long time Lam told police nothing. He gave statements several times without disclosing anything. "He didn't say a word, didn't want to talk, never made a sound," Leung Ping, then a detective in the homicide unit, told Sing Tao.
Leung worked to build a rapport. He brought Lam dim sum for breakfast and drove him around to help him remember where remains had been left; the places named in Sing Tao's account are Sha Tin, Tai Po and Hang Hau. Lam believed in ghosts and liked strange stories, and Leung talked with him about the spirit world. He persuaded Lam that if the remains were recovered, the women could be identified and buried. Lam then gave a full account, which Sing Tao placed on the eve of the trial. Before he did, he asked that someone write his story, a kind of autobiography, and keep it; Leung agreed that the investigation would be written up.
It was in his tenth interview with police, Leung Ping testified in 1983, that Lam described himself in English as a "Rainy Night Killer." That phrase became the newspapers' nickname for him, the Rainy Night Butcher.
All four women were named: Chan Fung-lan, Chan Wan-kit, Leung Sau-wan and Leung Wai-sum. HK01 reported in 2018 that the case was the first in Hong Kong to rely on dental evidence for identification, and that it led to the founding of the Hong Kong Forensic Odontology Group.
Dr. Ma, who later became an associate professor of pathology at the University of Hong Kong, said of Lam's view of the women: "I feel he did not regard them as people."
Lam was tried in the High Court in March 1983, HK01 reported, and the trial lasted 21 days, according to Sing Tao. The evidence was considered so distressing that a female forensic scientist was taken off the case and only men were allowed to sit on the jury, the Post reported. A Post photograph from 1983 shows him being led from the High Court during the trial.
His father spoke in court. He denied that he was to blame for his son's crimes, Sing Tao reported, and asked: "Why don't you say society has a responsibility?"
The jury found Lam guilty of four counts of murder. On April 8, 1983, the judge sentenced him to death, the Post reported. His arrest had been brought about by his own photographs, and he said he took them because he "wanted the world to see them."
The sentence was not carried out. In August 1984 it was commuted to life imprisonment, the Post and HK01 reported. By then it was settled practice in Hong Kong: since November 1966 the Governor had commuted every death sentence passed, most of them to life imprisonment, Amnesty International recorded in 1993. In April 1993 the Legislative Council voted 40 to 9, with two abstentions, to abolish the death penalty for all crimes.
Lam has been in prison since his arrest. The Post, writing when he was 62, reported that he was serving his life sentence at Shek Pik Prison, a maximum-security prison on Lantau Island. Leung Ping visited him twice, the second time about a year after the arrest. He found Lam well adjusted, a little gloomy but smiling, and happier for having told his story.
Lam never showed remorse and never apologized to the families of the four women, Sing Tao reported in 2023. The paper said he had joined Catholic and Christian religious classes in prison, behaved well and liked to read books on medicine and religion.
In January 2018 a radio host posted on Facebook that he had heard from people in government that Lam would be granted parole. The claim spread quickly. The Correctional Services Department said it could not comment on individual cases, for privacy reasons, and a source close to the security departments told HK01 that no parole had taken place. Sing Tao later wrote that the department had denied the reports. In 2023 the paper said that, unless something changed, he was likely to die in prison.
In 1986 Lam's father set up memorial tablets for the four women at the Yuen Yuen Institute in Tsuen Wan, where a Taoist priest chanted scriptures for them, according to Sing Tao; HK01, citing a documentary, dated the memorial to November 1986. Sing Tao wrote that the father, for all his denials in court, still showed compassion for the victims.
The 1992 Hong Kong film Dr. Lamb was based on the case. Simon Yam played the killer, a character named 林過雨 (Lam's own Chinese name is 林過雲); Danny Lee and Billy Tang directed it, and it took about HK$12 million at the box office, HK01 reported in 2026. Sing Tao noted in 2024 that much of the film is set in police interrogation scenes. In September 2026 HK01 reported that the singer YT was preparing his first film as a director, drawn from the case under the Chinese working title 雨夜之徒, and that it would not be a remake of Dr. Lamb.
More victims. Rumors have long said Lam killed more than four women, and some reports say at least one woman escaped from him. Sing Tao wrote in 2023 that the truth remains unknown. He was charged with and convicted of four murders only.
His age at the move to Hong Kong and where he lived before it. Sing Tao says Brunei, with a return in October 1962; the Post says Malaysia and a move in his teens.
Chan Fung-lan's age: 21 (Sing Tao) or 22 (HK01).
Leung Sau-wan's work: a cleaner (HK01) or a nightclub hostess (Sing Tao).
His father's marriages: Sing Tao says his father took a second wife in Brunei; Leung Ping told the same paper the father had married three times.
The 2018 parole reports. No release took place, by every account; the claim began with a social media post.
March 22, 1955: Lam Kor-wan born (Sing Tao).
October 1962: returns to Hong Kong from Brunei (Sing Tao).
1970: his father opens a motorcycle shop, where Lam works after school.
Late 1970s: takes covert photographs of women (Post).
1979: becomes a taxi driver (Sing Tao).
February 3, 1982: Chan Fung-lan takes his taxi in Tsim Sha Tsui at about 4 a.m. and is killed.
February 11, 1982: remains found in Sha Tin; the Post reports the find on February 12.
May 29, 1982: Chan Wan-kit takes his taxi in Jordan at about 5 a.m. and is killed.
June 17, 1982: Leung Sau-wan takes his taxi at about 4 a.m. and is killed.
July 2, 1982: Leung Wai-sum, 17, leaves her graduation dinner, takes his taxi and is killed at about 3 a.m.
August 10, 1982: a roll of film is left at a Tsim Sha Tsui photo shop; staff report the prints to police.
August 17, 1982: Lam arrested when he collects the prints; the family flat is searched.
August 19 and 20, 1982: the Post reports the arrests and the search.
March 1983: trial in the High Court; 21 days.
April 8, 1983: convicted of four murders and sentenced to death.
August 1984: sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
1986: his father sets up memorial tablets for the four women in Tsuen Wan.
1992: Dr. Lamb released.
April 1993: Hong Kong abolishes the death penalty.
January 2018: parole rumor; the Correctional Services Department declines to comment; no release.
October 2023: Sing Tao reports him still in prison.
September 2026: HK01 reports a new film project drawn from the case.