**Cold Cases of the Bamboo Curtain: Don’t Piss Off Your Wife?**

Everyone knows the names that dominate Western true-crime lore — Jack the Ripper, Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer. But beyond the English-speaking spotlight, there are just as many tragic, brutal, and deeply unsettling cases buried in the histories of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

In this experimental series, I want to take you through some of those lesser-known cases — stories that rarely surface in English, yet are no less chilling. Many of these crimes were documented only in their original languages, fragmented across court records, newspaper archives, and oral retellings. What you’re about to read is grounded in real events, but told in the spirit of the old storyteller’s phrase: **聽而言之，耳聽之** — listen as a story, not as a verbatim courtroom transcript. The goal isn’t forensic obsession. Sometimes, the simple fact that this really happened is horrifying enough.

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Long before anyone talked about murder, **Kornhill Garden, Block 1, Flat 312** was already infamous.

Neighbors whispered about it in lowered voices. New tenants never stayed long. People claimed to hear **chopping sounds late at night**, even when the unit was empty. Others swore they smelled something like cooked meat drifting through the hallway at odd hours. Some said water could be heard running endlessly behind locked doors, as if someone were still trying to wash something away.

Real estate agents avoided the apartment. Those who didn’t quickly learned why.

What haunted Flat 312 wasn’t a ghost.

It was memory.

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In **February 1988**, the apartment belonged to **Fu Tong**, a successful plastic dye factory owner, his wife **Ma Jiezhi**, and their daughters. On paper, it was a comfortable, middle-class Hong Kong household. Inside, it was something else entirely.

Fu Tong was controlling, chronically unfaithful, and openly abusive. He resented his wife for failing to give him a son, humiliated her in front of others, and kept multiple mistresses. **Ma Jiezhi**, a full-time housewife, lived for years under that pressure. She was physically smaller, emotionally fragile, and later diagnosed with schizophrenia. Their eldest daughter, **Fu Meiling**, grew up watching the same arguments play out again and again, loud enough that neighbors barely noticed them anymore.

A detailed page on the Kornhill Garden cooking-husband case.

On **February 22, 1988**, the fighting sounded no different.

The next day, Fu Meiling returned home and noticed blood on the living room floor. Her mother was mopping calmly. Blood still marked her face.

When Fu Meiling asked where her father was, Ma Jiezhi answered plainly:

“I killed him.”

The daughter didn’t believe her. She assumed it was another emotional outburst. In that household, violence had become background noise.

Fu Tong never came home.

Days passed. Then weeks. He stopped contacting relatives, business partners, and mistresses. His factory stalled. Furniture began disappearing from the apartment. Ma Jiezhi cleaned obsessively, then abruptly moved with her daughter to Wan Chai, claiming Fu Tong and his lovers were trying to kill her.

The silence finally broke when Fu Tong’s brother demanded answers.

On **March 31, 1988**, Fu Meiling reported her father missing — accompanied by a lawyer.

Police didn’t treat it as a routine disappearance.

They split into two teams: one to search the Kornhill Garden apartment, the other to question Ma Jiezhi.

At first, the apartment revealed nothing. No visible blood. No body. No remains. For a moment, even investigators wondered if the confession had been delusion.

Then Ma Jiezhi told them the rest.

Her original plan had not been murder. She had intended to kidnap her husband for ransom, recruiting her brother Ma Kun and hiring two men — Leung Kit-chung and Shek Chi-ming — for HKD 8,500. The plan unraveled almost immediately. Fu Tong recognized his brother-in-law’s voice and began mocking them, threatening divorce, exposure, and financial ruin. Realizing the situation was spiraling, the hired men panicked and left the apartment.

They left Fu Tong tied to the bed.

Alone with him, Ma Jiezhi tried to salvage the situation. She lowered the ransom amount, attempting to negotiate, to turn it back into something manageable. Fu Tong laughed at her. He taunted her, reiterated his threats, and made it clear that once he was free, there would be consequences — for her, for her family, for everyone involved.

It was after that laughter, after those threats, that she went to the kitchen and picked up the hammer.

She struck him repeatedly until he stopped moving.

Then came the part that cemented the case into Hong Kong infamy.

She attempted to cut up the body with an electric saw, abandoned it due to the mess, and switched to a manual saw. She dismembered him piece by piece. To reduce blood, odor, and recognition, she **boiled the remains in large pots** in the kitchen. The softened body parts were placed into garbage bags and disposed of in stages at the **Sai Wan Ho refuse station**. Carpets, furniture, and personal effects were thrown away. The apartment was scrubbed over and over again.

When police returned with forensic tools, chemical testing revealed **microscopic blood traces** — on the walls, curtains, ceiling, and inside drainpipes. There was no DNA testing available in Hong Kong at the time. No body was ever recovered.

Fu Tong was never seen again.

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A journalistic retrospective noting that this was Hong Kong’s first no-body murder case.

The trial began on **April 4, 1988**, and it made legal history.

Hong Kong prosecutors pursued a conviction **without a corpse**, relying on British legal precedent. The defense argued Ma Jiezhi’s schizophrenia rendered her confession unreliable. Psychiatric evaluations confirmed her mental illness but concluded she understood her actions.

The jury returned a **5–2 verdict for manslaughter**, not murder.

Ma Jiezhi was sentenced to **indefinite confinement in a psychiatric hospital**. Her brother received a suspended sentence. The hired men walked free as prosecution witnesses.

It was Hong Kong’s **first successful murder conviction without a body**.

Flat 312 never recovered.

To this day, people still whisper about chopping sounds, running water, and the smell of something cooking where no one lives anymore. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, some spaces absorb what happens inside them — and refuse to let it go.

Sometimes, the most terrifying hauntings aren’t spirits.

They’re consequences.

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