'Hello Kitty hidden body case') took place in Hong Kong in the spring of 1999, when a nightclub hostess was abducted in Lai Yiu Estate, tortured and raped in an apartment in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, after stealing a wallet owned by one of her frequent customers.

[1] Born in 1976 in Shenzhen, Fan Man-yee was abandoned by her family as a child, resulting in her being raised in an all girls' orphanage in Ma Tau Wai.

Becoming homeless and addicted to drugs, Fan was forced into street prostitution, and at age 21 began working at a brothel named Romance Villa, located in Sham Shui Po.

[1] Fan eventually married one of her clients, a fellow drug addict named Ng Chi-yuen (吳志遠; Wú Zhìyuǎn), in 1996.

[citation needed] Fan's husband was described as abusive and neighbors in their Mong Kok apartment building would report being awakened by sounds of the couple's fights and the child's screaming and crying.

She quit drugs and prostitution, got a job as a hostess at a nightclub named Empress Karaoke Club, and eventually left her violent husband shortly before her murder.

Spices were rubbed into Fan's wounds, her legs and feet were burned with candle wax and hot plastic so that she was unable to walk.

[1] Only her skull, one tooth, and some internal organs were recovered in a plastic bag, after Lau led the Yau Ma Tei police to the scene on 24 May.

[4] Other parts were recovered from trash dumps in Sham Shui Po, Wan Chai and Tai Kok Tsui.

After finding out the murder made it to the media via a Macau-based local newspaper, Leung Wai-lun fled to mainland China (Guangxi)[12] before getting caught by the police on 14 February 2000, after irregularities were found in his passport.

[14] On 7 December 2000, after a trial which started on 20 October,[14] the three men were convicted of manslaughter with a vote of 6:3,[15] as the eight-man and one-woman jury ruled the remains were not sufficient to show whether Fan was murdered or died from a drug overdose.

[15] Justice Peter Nguyen, who sentenced the trio to life in prison with the possibility of parole, stated, "Never in Hong Kong in recent years has a court heard of such cruelty, depravity, callousness, brutality, violence, and viciousness.

[19] Leung Shing-cho, who managed to reduce his sentence from life to eighteen years on appeal in March 2004,[20] was released in April 2014.