A 13-year-old girl approached police complaining of terrible nightmares and telling of how she was being haunted nightly by the ghost of a headless woman. Little did officers realise at first that they were about to embark on one of the most harrowing investigations ever recorded.
The teenage runaway, later referred to in court as Ah Fong, had been groomed and taken in by a dangerous gang, and testified to having witnessed, and at times taken part in, the horrifying torture of a young woman.
After being led to the apartment where the brutal acts took place, police, who initially believed the teen may have just been after attention, were immediately struck by the stench of rotting flesh.
It was then that they discovered the dismembered remains of missing woman Fan Man-yee, a 23-year-old nightclub hostess who had been abducted over a debt to a triad member. Even in death, Fan's body had been treated with unthinkable disrespect.
Reporting on the incident on May 27, 1999, the South China Morning Post told readers how Fan's body had been found "stuffed in three bags scattered around a flat and on a canopy" in a third-floor apartment in Hong Kong's Kowloon district, an area that has long been associated with various Triad gangs.
The following day, the same publication reported that officers were still searching for other missing body parts at the Granville Road apartment, which was strewn with Hello Kitty merchandise. It later emerged that Fan's skull had been found concealed inside a Hello Kitty mermaid plushie.
As officers made the devastating find, they began to piece together what exactly had happened to young mum Fan in her final weeks. It emerged that Fan had owed approximately HK$20,000 to local gangster Chan Man-lok, who, alongside accomplices Leung Shing-cho and Leung Wai-lun, abducted the hostess and kept her at the apartment for several hellish weeks.
As told by Ah Fong, who testified in exchange for immunity, Fan was burned with hot objects, beaten with water pipes, and once even tied to a rack with her hands crossed above her head for a number of hours. Ah Fong explained that this was "to stop her from peeling the scabs from her burned feet."
Free Malaysia Today reports that, on one occasion, evil Chan kicked and stamped on Fan approximately 50 times, with Ah Fong joining in. She later told police, "I had a feeling it was for fun."
Although they confessed to preventing Fan from receiving a lawful burial, Chan and his co-accused denied killing the mother, attempting to pass the blame onto each other throughout their trial, where jurors heard how Fan was attacked "almost every day".
The three men were convicted of manslaughter as opposed to murder, as jurors ruled that Fan's dismembered remains offered insufficient evidence to determine the exact nature of her death.
Sentencing the defendants to life imprisonment, as per The Washington Post, Hong Kong Justice Peter Nguyen said: "Never in Hong Kong in recent years has a court heard of such cruelty, depravity, callousness, brutality, violence and viciousness. The public is entitled to protection from people such as you."
Long after the nightmarish events unfolded, this terrible crime continued to cast a dark shadow over the neighbourhood, with residents abandoning the apartment building they believed was still haunted by Fan's ghost. In 2012, the building was bought by an investor and demolished, but it will be a long time before Hong Kong residents forget the so-called 'Hello Kitty murder'.