Lin Yu-ju killed three members of her own family in the space of about eight months. Her mother died in Tainan in November 2008, her mother-in-law in Puli, Nantou County, in May 2009, and her husband in the same town in July 2009. Each of them had been insured shortly before, and the money was meant for gambling debts that Taiwanese reports put at more than NT$20 million, run up mostly on the illegal Mark Six lottery. She was 27 at the time of the killings, according to the Public Television Service (PTS) and SETN.
Taiwan's courts convicted her of all three murders. The killings of her mother and her mother-in-law brought life terms, final in 2012. The killing of her husband brought a death sentence, final on June 13, 2013, which made her the first woman on Taiwan's death row in 23 years. Her lawyers argued throughout that she has an intellectual disability, and in September 2024 the Constitutional Court ruled that people with mental disorders or intellectual disabilities may not be executed. She was one of three named prisoners it applied to. As of September 2026 she remained on death row, the only woman among 34 prisoners there.
Lin was born in 1981 in Tainan, in southern Taiwan, the Taipei Times and South Korea's Kyunghyang Shinmun reported. Her father died when she was young, and the family struggled for money afterward, according to the Taipei Times, which described her as close to her sister in childhood. After vocational high school she went to work as a hostess at a nightclub in Tainan. SETN reported that she became one of the club's top hostesses, but that she was already betting on the Mark Six lottery and spending more than she earned. SETN reported in 2024 that she had developed a dependence on drugs as well as on gambling.
At the club she met Liu Yu-hang, a customer. SETN describes him as a former national badminton player. His family ran a stinky tofu wholesale business in Puli that TVBS reported had been operating for about 70 years, and TVBS described the family as wealthy. Liu's family opposed the relationship. The Taipei Times reported that she became pregnant by him more than once and that the couple married after a third pregnancy, when she decided to have the child. She moved into the Liu family's home in Puli and worked in the tofu business. Their son was about three years old when the deaths were investigated, TVBS reported in 2010.
The Kyunghyang Shinmun, reviewing a 2026 Korean edition of a book on the case by the Taiwanese journalist Hu Mu-ching, wrote that people who knew Liu described him as a promising athlete whose gambling grew after his hopes in the sport faded.
The gambling did not stop with the marriage. SETN reported that her husband's family paid off her debts more than once, but never enough to clear them, and that she also borrowed from informal lenders. TVBS reported in 2010 that she could not stop betting and did not tell her family how much she owed.
The Taipei Times, in a 2022 feature, gave a wider picture. It reported that Lin, her husband and members of his family all bet tens of thousands of New Taiwan dollars at a time on an underground Mark Six lottery run by gangsters, and that the family as a whole ran up large debts. Lin said her husband beat her after their child was born, and her defense argued that he had grown up with violence himself. A family doctor's statements about her injuries were not admitted at trial because there were no police records of the beatings, the paper reported. She had not filed charges against him. Wu Chia-chen of the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty told the paper that such reluctance is common, especially for a wife living in her husband's family home.
According to the same feature, Lin and her mother-in-law were treated at the same clinic and both received prescription medications there. Lin became dependent on hers and attempted suicide more than once. Medical reports diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and a mild intellectual disability.
The Taipei Times also reported a different view of her husband's role. Her lawyers argued that the whole family was desperate for money, and Chuang Chen-fen, chair of the anti-death-penalty alliance, suggested that Lin may have believed that continued play would eventually bring a win.
In 2008 a stinky tofu shop in Puli stopped doing business with the Liu family after a dispute over supplies. SETN reported in 2024 that Lin, angered by the break, set fire to the shop, and that the series of killings began about three months later. TVBS reported in 2010 that the shop's owner had suspected her from the start. The fire was charged as arson. She was later sentenced to four years and six months, in a judgment that also covered forgery and insurance fraud, and by June 2012 that sentence was final and she was serving it, PTS reported.
In late September 2008 Lin took out life insurance on her mother and on her mother-in-law, the Taipei Times reported. SETN reported that the policies were bought about two months before the deaths. On November 10, 2008, she visited her mother in Tainan. They argued about Lin's gambling debts, and Lin killed her mother during the quarrel, the courts found. PTS reported that her mother had refused to lend her money, and that the death was made to look like an accident.
Police did not suspect anything at the time. About a week later Lin filed a claim, and the insurer paid out about NT$5 million on December 25, 2008, according to the Taipei Times. SETN also gives NT$5 million; PTS reported the figure as about NT$5.5 million.
Lin's mother-in-law, Cheng Hui-sheng, had been ill for some time, the Taipei Times reported. She died in Puli in late May 2009. Lin had poisoned her. TVBS reported that the death was put down to a heart attack, and the Taipei Times reported that no autopsy was performed.
The insurance claim on Cheng's life was large. TVBS reported a claim of about NT$10.7 million, made about 80 days after the policy took effect. SETN reported that Lin had also bought large policies on her sister-in-law and on her son.
About a month later her husband fell ill. In June 2009 Lin tried to poison Liu Yu-hang, and the attempt failed. In July 2009, in Puli, she poisoned him again and he died, within weeks of his mother. TVBS reported a policy on his life of about NT$4.65 million.
The case came apart through the insurance claims. An insurance company employee noticed that several of her relatives had died one after another and reported it to police, SETN reported. TVBS reported in 2010 that an insurance agent who came to settle the mother-in-law's claim was struck to find the Liu family holding another funeral, and that a report from hospital staff helped investigators. The deaths of the mother-in-law and the husband had come within about two months of each other, and PTS reported that it was their closeness that exposed the case. Agence France-Presse reported in 2013 that Lin drew suspicion because she was the sole beneficiary of the policies, and that the three deaths had come within nine months.
Investigators from the Criminal Investigation Bureau took the case, led by Hong Han-zhou of its first squad, TVBS reported. Police learned of the policies on her husband and mother-in-law, obtained a warrant to search her home and found substances they believed were similar to those used in the deaths, the Taipei Times reported. She was taken into custody and confessed under questioning.
TVBS reported in 2010 that she was calm and denied everything until investigators brought her young son into the room, and that she confessed when he cried and asked her to tell the truth. At first she admitted all three killings, SETN reported. She was arrested in 2009, PTS reported.
Prosecutors closed their investigation and asked for the death penalty on all three murder counts, TVBS reported on April 8, 2010, adding that she had obtained about NT$20 million in insurance money. Told of the request in the detention center, she showed little reaction and said she wanted no further contact with the outside world, the station reported. Asked about the case, the newly appointed justice minister, Tseng Yung-fu, said he respected the prosecutors' decision and would not comment on it.
Her trial in the Nantou District Court began in early 2010. The prosecution's case rested mainly on her confessions, the Taipei Times reported. At the first trial she withdrew her confessions to killing her mother and her mother-in-law, SETN reported, saying that police had pressed her to confess by threatening to draw her older sister into the case. She also said that her husband had been responsible for his mother's death and that she had copied him. Her lawyer, Lin Chih-chung, later told SETN that she had taken the blame because her husband was responsible, and that the confessions were the product of coercive questioning.
The defense also argued her mental condition. The Tsaotun Psychiatric Center in Nantou County tested her on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and SETN reported her scores as 65 verbal, 51 nonverbal and 57 overall, a result it described as falling between borderline and mild intellectual disability. Evaluators said her impairment showed most in decisions made under stress, the Taipei Times reported. The courts did not accept the test results. Prosecutors argued that her vocational schooling, her work in the family business and her gambling showed that she understood what she was doing. SETN reported that the court reasoned the same way, pointing to her education, her years of gambling and the killing of three relatives.
The district court sentenced her to death for the killing of her husband, PTS reported.
On appeal, the Taichung branch of the High Court reduced the death sentence for her husband's killing to life imprisonment, citing her previous good conduct and remorse. The presiding judge, Wu Huo-chuan, said she had confessed from the investigation through the trial, so the court believed she might be remorseful, PTS reported.
The Supreme Court then made the two life sentences for the killings of her mother and her mother-in-law final; PTS reported on June 8, 2012, that she would serve them as one life term. Storm Media reported in 2024 that the Supreme Court had found that those two killings met the legal requirements for voluntary surrender, the basis on which they drew life terms. On the husband's count the Supreme Court found that the High Court had not fully established the facts, overturned the life sentence and sent the case back for retrial. Relatives of the victims told PTS they found the outcome hard to accept and asked the judges for a heavier sentence.
On September 13, 2012, the Taichung High Court, on retrial, sentenced her to death for her husband's murder. Wu Huo-chuan again presided. He said she had acted for her own need for money, had disregarded the bond between husband and wife and had killed her husband with determination, and that such conduct was unforgivable. The court found that she needed to be kept apart from society. A relative told PTS that the family remained deeply distressed and that her father-in-law had been so affected that he had thought of taking his own life.
Her lawyers appealed, arguing that her IQ of 57 and her depression ruled out a death sentence. The Supreme Court held an oral hearing on the question of life or death in May 2013 and dismissed her appeal on June 13, 2013, making the death sentence final, with lifetime deprivation of civil rights. The presiding judge, Shih Mu-chin, said her intelligence was not markedly lower than normal, and the court weighed her education and background, the way the crimes were carried out, her conduct afterward and her long years of lottery betting, PTS reported. The ruling raised the number of prisoners awaiting execution in Taiwan to 51.
Agence France-Presse, in a report printed by Ahram Online and The Peninsula of Qatar, quoted the court as calling her conduct "cruel and merciless" and saying the pain she caused her husband's family was unendurable. The court's statement said she had admitted the three killings to obtain the insurance money and pay her gambling debts. A relative told local television that justice had come late. Her husband's sister told PTS that the ruling gave society an answer and that the family felt comforted, and the family set off firecrackers.
She was 32. She was the first woman sentenced to death in Taiwan in 23 years, and SETN reported that she was the fourth woman in Taiwan's history to be placed on death row. The Kyunghyang Shinmun reported in 2026 that four women had been sentenced to death for murder in Taiwan and that hers was the only sentence not carried out.
Lin was held in a single cell on death row at Taichung Women's Prison, the Taipei Times reported in 2022, when she had been waiting more than ten years. She spent much of her time writing letters, to her sister, to advocates working on her case and to a local journalist; the paper described the letters as rambling and hard to follow. At that time Taiwan had 38 people on death row, 37 men and Lin.
In 2018 SETN reported that her lawyers were trying to reopen the case on the strength of her IQ results. The victims' family disputed the claim of low intelligence, pointing to computer files they said she had made, and the forensic specialist Kao Ta-cheng told the station that her learning ability matched that of an adult in her late twenties. Lin wrote to her lawyer to thank him for his work.
She also joined other condemned prisoners in a lawsuit asking the president to grant clemency. The Liberty Times reported that she was one of seven plaintiffs, out of 13, who said they had mental or intellectual disabilities and that under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights they should not have been sentenced to death. The Taipei High Administrative Court dismissed the suit, holding that pardons and commutations are the president's own constitutional powers and outside the administrative courts' reach, and the Supreme Administrative Court upheld the dismissal.
She had also turned to the Constitutional Court. On August 11, 2023, the court, in ruling 112-Hsien-Tsai-102, dismissed parts of a petition she brought through three lawyers against her final Supreme Court judgment, 102 Tai-Shang 2392, and against several rules and provisions applied in it, and refused her request for interim relief; other parts of her petition were dealt with in a separate judgment or left pending.
The Hu Mu-ching book, published in Taiwan in 2024 and in Korean in 2026, drew on more than three years of visits and letters, beginning in 2022, and on an autobiography Lin wrote in prison. The Kyunghyang Shinmun's review said Taiwanese media at the time of the case had called her an "immoral daughter-in-law" and a "black widow spider," and that her own account contains contradictions that people close to her disputed. Taiwanese outlets also called her the "Nantou Black Widow" and the "Puli Black Widow," SETN reported.
In 2024 all 37 people then on Taiwan's death row, Lin among them, asked the Constitutional Court to rule on the death penalty. The court heard arguments on April 23, 2024, and delivered Judgment 113-Hsien-Pan-8 on September 20, 2024. It held that the death penalty is constitutional but may be imposed only for the most serious crimes, those involving direct intent to kill, and only under the strictest procedures, including mandatory defense counsel, oral argument at the Supreme Court and a unanimous decision by the judges, The Reporter reported. It also ruled that a death sentence may not be imposed on a defendant with a mental disorder or other mental or intellectual defect. The Reporter named three of the petitioners who met that condition, Shen Chi-wu, Lin Wang-jen and Lin Yu-ju, and said the judgment held that their executions may not proceed until the law is amended. Storm Media reported that the court found her final judgment had recognized mental disorder of varying degrees. The court gave the legislature two years to amend the related laws, according to an analysis by the Taiwanese lawyer Szu-Yu Chen in Taiwan Insight.
SETN reported that Lin was one of five petitioners who could ask the Prosecutor-General to bring an extraordinary appeal, on grounds that included the lack of mandatory defense, mental impairment and an insufficient ability to defend themselves. Her lawyer told the station that her execution could not lawfully go ahead until the law was changed. Her husband's sister said the family found that completely unacceptable. She said Lin had killed her mother and her brother, that the Liu family had been destroyed and forced to leave Puli, and that crimes planned so carefully made her doubt the claimed impairment.
On January 16, 2025, Taiwan executed Huang Lin-kai, the first execution since 2020. NOWnews reported the next day that 36 people remained on death row and that Lin was the only woman among them, still serving her sentence at Taichung Women's Prison. SETN reported that she learned of the execution from the small television and radio available to prisoners, and that prison staff saw no unusual behavior in her; her daily routine was the same as other prisoners'. The station reported that, because of the two-year period for amending the law and the possibility of an extraordinary appeal, she and four others would not be executed for at least two years.
In March 2026 she went back to the Constitutional Court and asked it to issue a supplementary judgment to 113-Hsien-Pan-8, arguing that the 2024 judgment had left a gap on the execution of people with mental disorders or intellectual impairments short of insanity. On March 23, 2026, a review panel of the court, in ruling 115-Shen-Tsai-621, denied the request and her application for interim relief, finding no omission in the judgment.
By September 15, 2026, the number on death row had fallen to 34, after Huang's execution and the deaths in custody of two other prisoners, one of them Lin Wang-jen, TVBS reported. Lin was the only woman among them. All 34 had petitioned for extraordinary appeals, which the Supreme Prosecutors Office had assigned to prosecutors for examination, and it was not yet clear how the process would affect future executions.
1981: Lin Yu-ju is born in Tainan.
Late September 2008: She takes out life insurance on her mother and her mother-in-law.
2008: A tofu shop in Puli that had stopped supplying the Liu family is set on fire; she is later convicted of arson.
November 10, 2008: Lin kills her mother in Tainan during a quarrel over money.
December 25, 2008: The insurer pays about NT$5 million on her mother's policy.
Late May 2009: Her mother-in-law, Cheng Hui-sheng, is poisoned and dies in Puli.
June 2009: An attempt on her husband's life fails.
July 2009: Her husband, Liu Yu-hang, is poisoned and dies in Puli.
2009: Police investigate after the insurer reports its suspicions; she is arrested and confesses.
April 2010: Prosecutors ask for three death sentences.
2010 to 2011: Trial in the Nantou District Court, which sentences her to death for her husband's murder.
Before June 2012: The Taichung branch of the High Court reduces the husband's count to life.
By June 8, 2012: The Supreme Court makes two life terms final and sends the husband's count back for retrial; her separate sentence of four years and six months for forgery, insurance fraud and arson is also final.
September 13, 2012: The Taichung High Court, on retrial, sentences her to death.
May 2013: The Supreme Court holds an oral hearing.
June 13, 2013: The Supreme Court dismisses her appeal; the death sentence is final.
January 2022: The Taipei Times reports that she is the only woman among 38 people on death row.
August 11, 2023: The Constitutional Court dismisses parts of her petition against the final judgment (112-Hsien-Tsai-102).
April 23, 2024: The Constitutional Court hears the petitions of 37 death row prisoners, including hers.
September 20, 2024: Judgment 113-Hsien-Pan-8 bars the execution of prisoners with mental disorders or intellectual disabilities until the law is amended; she is one of three named as meeting the condition.
January 16, 2025: Huang Lin-kai is executed; 36 remain on death row, with Lin the only woman.
March 23, 2026: The Constitutional Court denies her request for a supplementary judgment (115-Shen-Tsai-621).
May 2026: A Korean edition of Hu Mu-ching's book on her case is published.
September 15, 2026: TVBS reports 34 people on death row, Lin the only woman, all with extraordinary appeal petitions pending.