In August 1982 a man brought film to a Kodak shop in Mong Kok to be developed. The manager looked at the prints, which showed a dismembered woman, and called the police, and when the customer came back to collect them plainclothes officers were waiting. On August 17 Lam Kor-wan, a twenty-seven-year-old night-shift taxi driver, told them the pictures belonged to a friend who worked on a ship and was coming to meet him. When the friend did not appear, the police went with Lam to his parents' first-floor apartment on Kwei Chau Street. In the bedroom he shared with his brother they found an old ammunition box holding pornography, more photographs of body parts, videotapes, and several Tupperware containers with women's sexual organs preserved inside. The press called him the Jars Murderer.
He was born in British Hong Kong on May 22, 1955, as Lam Kwok-yue. From 1957 to 1962 he lived with his mother and sister in an oil company's dormitory in Brunei, where his father worked, along with his father's concubine and her children. Back in Hong Kong the family settled in Kwun Tong, and he did well at a government primary school until, from 1970, his father made him work in his motorcycle shop after school; his grades fell and his father scolded him and drove him out of the house. In early 1973, thrown out after an argument, he was arrested for threatening a woman with a knife and touching her near a public toilet in Hung Hom, and spent 102 days in Castle Peak Hospital. His family noticed him behaving strangely, and he was caught peeping at his sister in the bathroom. In 1978 he got a taxi license and changed his name to Lam Kor-wan; around 1980 he began driving nights, and in 1981 he took up photography and joined a camera club.
At four in the morning of February 3, 1982, Chan Fung-lan, a twenty-two-year-old nightclub dancer, took his cab outside a nightclub on Kimberley Road in Tsim Sha Tsui East. He drove to his building, went up for an electrical cord, strangled her in the car and hid her body under the sofa. Hours later he used her money to buy an electric saw. The next day, when the family was out, he photographed and dismembered her, filming it on a tape he titled "Serious Secrets," and preserved her sexual organs in rice wine. Heavy rain washed the wrapped remains down the Shing Mun River in Sha Tin.
On May 29, 1982, at 5:20 in the morning, Chan Wan-kit, a thirty-one-year-old cashier, got into his cab on Woosung Street after work. He handcuffed and strangled her, cut her up with a scalpel and dumped the rest of the body in a sack on the slope of Tai Hang Road. On June 17 at four in the morning Leung Sau-wan, a twenty-nine-year-old street cleaner, took his taxi on Nathan Road after her shift and was killed soon afterward on Argyle Street. He set his camcorder on the bed to record the dismemberment of her body, a tape he called "Operation Rainy Night." Her limbs were left on Tai Hang Road. On July 2 Leung Wai-sum, seventeen, a student at St. Andrew's School, got into his cab outside the Sheraton on Salisbury Road at eleven at night after a school party, on her way home to Valley Road Estate. Her family searched Tsim Sha Tsui for her, and the police put out her photograph on August 5. Lam said later that he had talked to her in the cab about school, her future, her family, religion and her soul before he handcuffed and strangled her, and took her home to rape and dismember her. He filmed himself committing necrophilia with her body.
He had done all of it at home. His brother, who shared the room, knew nothing, and because Lam worked nights he could cut up the bodies in the daytime while his family was out. The brother was briefly a suspect before the police concluded Lam had acted alone. All four bodies were eventually found. Two lecturers at the University of Hong Kong's Prince Philip Dental Hospital identified the victims by superimposing their photographs on radiographs of the skulls, a method they developed for the case.
His trial lasted three weeks, and on April 8, 1983, a seven-man jury convicted him of four murders and he was sentenced to hang. He told a psychiatrist, Dr. William Green, that he had eaten part of a victim's intestine and that God had told him to kill. On August 29, 1984, the governor, Sir Edward Youde, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, as was then customary in Hong Kong, which abolished the death penalty in 1993. After the trial all his photographs and tapes were destroyed. He served his sentence first at Stanley Prison and later at the maximum-security Shek Pik Prison. The 1992 film Dr. Lamb, with Simon Yam, was based on the case.