[1][2] The modest dining establishment, connected to the Eight Immortals Hotel, was owned and operated by Zheng Lin (鄭林), a former street hawker who had moved his business from a stand into a formal restaurant in the 1960s.

He fled to Guangzhou, where he cut off the tip of his left index finger and burned his fingerprints in an attempt to avoid being linked to the murder.

Huang would later claim that not only had the family failed to repay him but continued to lose money in further bets, allegedly owing a total of 600,000 patacas (or US$75,047).

Eventually, Huang became physically aggressive, taking Zheng's son hostage and forcing the other eight family members to bind and gag each other.

Huang later claimed that one family member broke free and started to scream, causing him to stab her in the neck with a broken bottle he had brandished as a weapon.

[4] Huang dismembered the bodies over the course of eight hours and wrapped them in plastic trash bags, which he then dumped into the ocean or threw into dumpsters.

[5][3] The next morning, the delivery man found the restaurant locked, with a note on the door stating that it would be closed for three days.

The delivery man visited the Zheng residence, where Huang answered the door and claimed the family had taken a trip to the mainland.

It was originally theorised that the body parts came from a group of illegal immigrants from the mainland who had been eaten by sharks, but an examination of the limbs revealed that precise cuts had been used to sever them.

Huang's arrest, and the fact that he had continued to run the restaurant after dismembering its former owners, resulted in the urban legend that he had baked his victims into pork buns.

The events surrounding the Eight Immortals Restaurant murders were depicted in the 1993 Hong Kong movie The Untold Story featuring Anthony Wong.