The following is a translation by the poster of an account found in the 1983 crime report, published in Hong Kong, originally entitled《外籍古董商裸體倒斃巫山雲屋》:
“Foreign Antiquarian Found Lying Naked in Wu San Cloud Villa”
Though already past fifty, Ian McLean was still a bachelor. Not only had he never married, he had never so much as expressed interest in a woman.
His friends were all young fellows – boys, really. The majority of them were ethnic Chinese, and, owing to this, there were rumours floating around that McLean preferred the intimate company of males – rumours he never sought to deny. McLean was Australian by birth, but he had obtained American citizenship. After residing in Hong Kong for over two decades, he regarded it as his second home. Among the local Cantonese, he went by the surname “Ma” ( 馬 ). The antique shop which he’d opened also bore the Chinese character 馬 as part of the store’s name.
His shop was located on Wyndham Street, in Central District, but his house was on Plantation Road in the exclusive district known as The Peak.
This house was a lavish, garden-ringed mansion in which he lived alone on the ground floor. It was called “Wu San Cloud Villa.” The architecture and décor was a hybrid of Chinese and Japanese styles, luxurious and refined, perfectly appropriate to the tastes of its owner.
When McLean went out on the town or to work at his shop, the Filipina maid would prepare breakfast and supper and clean the place.
There were also his three dogs, all imported foreign purebreds, which the Filipina maid also looked after. In the late evening, the maid would retire to her quarters elsewhere on the property, and, in the morning, she would return to her duties. Over the past two or three years during which she had been employed by McLean, she had settled comfortably into her routine.
McLean often said that he was a man who liked peace and quiet, and his home at Wu San Cloud Villa provided it. As huge as the house was, he was by himself in the evenings, while the Filipina maid would be off in the servants’ apartment behind the garage. The maid well knew her master’s temper: after dusk, unless she was specifically asked to attend to something, under no circumstances was she to set foot within the main house.
The maid – whose name was Maria – had a somewhat different impression from what things appeared like on the surface.
In the spacious living room of Wu San Cloud Villa, the lights would come on at odd hours and the sound of laughter could be heard, indicating that there were guests. This would continue into the wee hours.
Though Maria refrained from prying too much, there was one thing she could be sure of, and that was that the guests were always males. Maria knew that her employer did not appreciate woman guests, especially not at night.
Because of this, Maria thought that her employer was an odd fellow, maybe even mentally unbalanced.
She said, McLean’s mother, who lived in America, came to Hong Kong on vacation last year. When she stopped by the villa on Plantation Road, she appeared to be quite unsettled by her precious son’s unusual lifestyle. What bothered her most was that, despite his age, he did not have a wife to look after him. She made a great fuss, trying to encourage him to find a woman and to be done with his irregular habits.
McLean’s reaction?
As Maria told it, he hummed and hawed, made excuses and scrupulously avoided following through with any of his mother’s attempted matches. He kept this up for half a year. The master of Wu San Cloud Villa remained a queer bachelor.
Once, somebody told Maria that McLean’s lack of interest in women was due to a medical condition; that he had the desire but was lacking in some portion of his anatomy. Maria pretended to know nothing, but revealed later that, when McLean’s mother was staying in Hong Kong, she had mentioned to a neighbour that her son had an illness for which he had to take regular medication. The old woman said that it was something wrong with his heart, but it had nothing to do with relations between men and women.
On the 2nd of October, 1980, this bachelor with an alleged heart affliction was found lying deceased atop his bed. His death clearly had nothing to do with any physical ailment: it was an obvious case of murder. The body was completely nude, the hands and feet bound with electrical wire. McLean’s mouth had been stuffed with a bundle of cloth, leading to death by asphyxia.
The coroner found no signs of external injuries. However, owing to the fact that the victim was found unclothed and given his well-known predilection for wild escapades with young boys, it the coroner determined that the case had a sexual aspect.
At approximately 8:00 o’clock that morning, the Filipina maid, Maria, had just finished cooking breakfast. Carrying everything on a polished silver tray, she walked into the main dwelling, set the table and waited solemnly for her employer to come out to eat.
Ordinarily, by this time, McLean would have already risen and dressed. Moreover, he was exceedingly punctual and did not like to waste time on trivial activities, like meals taken alone. After he ate breakfast, he would drive out of the gate, leaving Maria to tidy his room and go about her other duties on the grounds.
There was something unusual about this morning. After waiting longer than she could recall ever waiting before, Maria’s employer still hadn’t emerged from his bedroom, nor was there any sound audible from within. She knocked on the door. There was no response.
Maria waited further, anxious of causing trouble as people in a subservient and insecure station in life often are. With there still being no sound or activity, she began to worry for her employer’s safety. Mustering her courage, she opened the door and charged inside.
The door had been left unlocked. McLean was indeed lying on his bed, but, scrutinizing the scene more closely, her ears grew hot and red – the scandal! She could hardly bear the embarrassment!
Her employer was laying unclothed, contorted, resembling a great pallid maggot. It was revolting! She thought to herself, her employer, despite his appearance as a mild-mannered businessman, was not only short-tempered but could become physically violent. Had he caught her barging in without permission…it made her wince to think of the punishment which would be meted out to her.
But, as she was retreating, she discovered something strange…Her employer’s feet and hands were both tightly bound with electrical wire and his mouth seemed to be stuffed or gagged with something. No wonder he didn’t react when she entered his room.
Could it really be as it looked like?
Maria speculated that there must have been a burglar who broke in during the night and hogtied her employer.
Some cash and valuables being stolen was a small matter. Most important was the issue of a human life: she glanced again towards the bed, at McLean, and saw that his face was ashen. Daring to shove him with her hand, he didn’t respond. If he wasn’t dead already, death was not far off.
This was no laughing matter. The first thing to do, obviously, was to call the police, but when she snatched up the receiver, there was no dial tone. The phone lines chad been cut; there was no way for her, a foreigner who didn’t speak Cantonese, isolated up on a mountain top, in that lonely walled mansion, to contact the outside world. However, just then, she remembered that there was another Filipina maid who worked in a neighbouring villa. She went to the gate of that premises, waving and shouting in Tagalog to get the attention of her sister from another mother, who immediately called the police.
Within a few minutes, police cars began pulling up outside the premises on Plantation Road. They quickly confirmed that McLean was, in fact, deceased and that he probably met his end sometime between 10:00 pm the previous night and 1:00 in the morning. The police also discovered that the door and window frames showed traces of being attacked with a pry bar or lock pick. Accordingly, they inferred that the killer or killers were known to the victim and were invited into the room by him. The struggle and eventual murder occurred after they were already safely inside.
There were signs that the contents of the room had been rifled through, as by a burglar. There might have been homicidal intent to begin with, but investigators were not willing to rule out the possibility of a robbery gone wrong.
The victim was tall and massively built, fat but also robust. It was not likely that one person, especially a small, underfed local petty criminal or street urchin, could have dealt with him by themselves, therefore the police concluded that there must have been at least two culprits.
McLean owned a navy blue Toyota Corona sedan, license number BT…He drove it everywhere, loathing to walk. Clerks at his store told investigators that they had seen him driving the car the previous day when he stopped by his business.
Later in the day, when the Corona could not be located either at McLean’s house or near his place of work, it was reported stolen. Presumably, the murderers had used it to escape the scene of the crime.
Subsequent events proved this supposition correct. The very next day, a neighbourhood patrol (all units having been alerted to be on the lookout for the navy blue Corona sedan), strolling along Ventris Road a couple hundred metres north of Happy Valley Racecourse, came across a traffic accident. A car which had been parked on the roadside had been struck and seriously damaged by another car, likely driven by someone driving under the influence. Thankfully, there was nobody inside the damaged car at the time.
This severely damaged vehicle was none other than McLean’s 1980 Toyota Corona sedan. In accordance with procedure, the car was towed to the Moreton Terrace impound lot in Causeway Bay, to be kept until its owner arrived to claim it. On being notified, the homicide investigators took charge of the vehicle and transferred it to the Central Police Station to carry out a thorough forensic examination.
As anticipated, the examination revealed a plethora of clues which assisted the police in speedily apprehending the careless suspects.
The victim was a fat man who could speak fluent Cantonese. He liked to refer to himself as an “Old China Hand,” borrowing the archaic term for an experienced Oriental trader or colonial official in the glory days of the British East India Company. Unlike a lot of tourists or ex-pats, who revel in their connection to the exotic while understanding practically nothing of the place they live, McLean could walk the walk. His knowledge of Chinese arts and crafts would qualify him for a position of director for Oriental Antiquities at a world-class museum. He often went on sojourns to the Mainland to purchase items that peasants and merchants had found, dug up or pilfered in all corners of the country. Through formalities and under-the-table arrangements in which he was well-versed, he brought them into Hong Kong and could earn a fine profit. Objects which he had authenticated and sold had been shipped across the world and his operation had branches in New York and Los Angeles.
Before he got into the antiquities trade, McLean had been a physicist. About nine years before the incident, he gave up his work as a university lecturer to focus on the antiquities business full time, rapidly becoming successful and a figure of note in the field.
After his death, a neighbour living down the street offered witness testimony confirming that the victim had homosexual tendencies. On one occasion, he had seen things with his own eyes. As this neighbour told it, that time, the weather was particularly sultry. He was walking behind the courtyard of Wu San Cloud Villa. The courtyard was walled off only by a low hedge and, in a moment of idle curiosity, this neighbour happened to let his eyes wander towards the house. Through the uncurtained window was revealed a picture of sinful lust.
He saw a foreigner, tall and massive, and a waifish runt of a Chinese youth in the living room, chasing each other. From the living room, they ran into the bedroom, then from the bedroom back into the living room.
What most caught his eye and burned into his memory was the fact that both individuals were completely naked. Granted, it was a summer heatwave, but, nevertheless….
This neighbour also said, even he felt a bit awkward and could not bear to continue watching. Following this, he avoiding passing too close to Wu San Cloud Villa.
Being a resident of the same street, he knew that the foreigner was McLean. The Chinese was awfully young. He did not recognize him as someone who lived in the neighbourhood.
McLean had no relatives in Hong Kong. Regarding his funeral arrangements, the police obtained from the employees at his store the contact information of McLean’s mother in America and duly informed her of her son’s death, requesting that she come to Hong Kong to handle that end of the affair.
At the time, most people assumed that, given McLean’s wide-ranging business interests, including the two branch stores in America, he must surely be possessed of a vast fortune. Yet, when the curtain was pulled back, the reality was shown to be not what most folks had imagined. It turned out that McLean’s business empire was a castle built on sand.
The entirety of McLean’s estate, including all the inventory of his business as well as the furnishings and artwork in his house totaled some $450,000.
Now, $450,000, especially considering that it was 1980, would not sound like a trifling sum to the ordinary man in the street. However, this figure did not take into account the victim’s debts.
Based on a rough estimate, these debts amounted to somewhere around four or five million dollars. Even if all of his estate were to be sold for its proper value, it would only allow for the paying back of ten percent or so of McLean’s debts.
The police were quite eager to find out what treasures the murderers had made off with, separate and distinct from those which remained to be cataloged in McLean’s house and shop. It was simple common sense that they would not have made their way into a house full of expensive luxuries, murdered the man, and then left empty-handed.
Mind, this was a tricky question as, since the owner was dead, they couldn’t exactly ask him what was missing.
Based on all the information they had obtained so far, the lead homicide detective on the case came up with the following theories:
1) The murderers were definitely young, possibly underaged. Possibly, they had engaged in unclean relations with the victim prior to his murder.
2) The murderers were homosexual.
3) After committing the murder, the killers must have taken some valuable objects, whether antiques, designer wristwatches or other easily-pocketable items, and perhaps some cash as well.
While surveying the crime scene, detectives found an empty soda can in the victim’s bedroom. There were fingerprints on its surface which did not match the victim’s, nor did they match the Filipina maid, Maria.
Upon questioning, Maria stated that she had never seen the beverage can before. She believed it must have been brought by the killers.
Taking these clues and pursuing their theories along their natural course, homicide detectives went to districts in Central, Kowloon and Tsim Sha Tsui which were notorious as centres of gay culture, with underground clubs and dens of cruising and other such activities. They question several hundred youth who belonged to the ‘scene,’ and conducted full-scale searches of a seedy dancing bar and a disco.
After exerting all this pressure, they were able to obtain details on the victim’s movements the night of the murder. He had been loitering about a disco in Wan Chai, nursing drinks and ogling the dancers. Eventually, he left with two handsome young boys.
As for these two lads, one was a ‘professional’ of sorts. He worked for an agency where he was referred to as a tai pan of dancing girls – a twink or rent boy, in North American parlance. He was nineteen.
The police checked his fingerprints and compared them against those found on the soda can. They were a match. Regardless, the dancer denied ever having contact with McLean.
Of course, none of the detectives were buying his fervent denials. After a stern interrogation, once they showed they would not play along, he confessed everything.
This lad’s name was Hwong Chi-Kiang. He already had a criminal record. He’d met McLean in a nightclub and quickly become “friends.” Every week or so, McLean would invite him and another youth to return with him to Wu San Cloud Villa, where they would do unmentionable things.
He said these acts made him feel very ashamed. He wanted to break away, but, right now, he just couldn’t.
Hwong Chi-Kiang recalled that, on the 20th of October in the morning, the deceased had arranged for him and another boy, even younger than himself, to go to his villa. He planned special games for them; oh, it would be a fun time for all!
At that time, everyone was in agreement. Hwong would wait in the living room while the victim and the youngest lad had a go together in the bedroom.
“This younger boy you’re speaking of, he’s the one named Ma?” a detective interjected.
“Y-yes, because he isn’t seventeen yet, most of us, his friends, we call him ‘Little Ma.’”
Accorring to Hwong Chi-Kiang, when McLean and Little Ma went into the bedroom together, he felt very bored. He sat in the living room, looking at the paintings and posters.
Suddenly, he heard shouting coming from the bedroom.
This wasn’t a small disagreement or a startled remark about something during their…activities…this was a serious fight. At first, it was only words being exchanged, but soon Little Ma heard the sound of fists striking flesh and bodies ramming against walls and closet doors.
Hwong wanted to ignore it, but as he heard things getting worse, he knew he had to step in. Entering the bedroom he saw the two men – or, rather, the man and the boy- had not yet put on their clothes, though they had already ceased fighting, physically, and were now merely swearing at each other.
Little Ma, seeing Hwong, was like a child seeing a parent after a traumatic experience. He began to cry and poured out his sorrows to Hwong, saying that old McLean was not a human being; that he made him do things that he did not want to do; things that people who were without shame did. He would not and could not obey. He begged Hwong to intercede on his behalf.
McLean was also agitated. In Cantonese, he cursed the boy, telling Hwong that all Chinese were dogs.
Yet, Hwong was himself a small, yellow-skinned, black-haired Chinese. As he told the cops, although he did not have any deep friendship with Little Ma, they were both ‘yellow men,’ and he could not endure being abused like this by a foreigner, who was insulting his entire race. Who could bear it?
He resolved to stand up for himself and defend his honour with force. Hwong had not studied self-defence or any kind of fighting, but he was young and strong and there were two against one. They quickly gained the upper hand. Although the foreigner was big, he was a soft businessman and not as strong as he appeared. Once the fight began in earnest, he was overwhelmed. At last, he collapsed on the bed, panting, his face blue and white.
Hwong, on realizing what was happening in front of him, panicked. “Let’s go!” he told Ma. “It’s no good for us if we stay here. I heard the old foreigner has a heart problem; if he dies, they’ll say we’re murderers and we’ll be screwed!”
Little Ma could see the sense in Hwong’s words. They looked at each other one last time and fled the bedroom.
“Where are you going?” McLean gasped from the bed. “You boys have broken many valuable things. You will have to compensate me, or else you cannot leave!”
“It was you who broke everything,” Hwong told police he replied to McLean. “If you hadn’t hit us, then nothing would be broken. Besides, everything in this house is so damn fancy, we’ll never be able to pay for it.”
“If it is so, then forget about leaving!” McLean smiled wickedly.
Hwong understood there was no easy way out. He stopped his friend and exchanged glances with him again. Each understood what the other meant to do. They would use their own two hands to remove the obstacle before them.
“I will slaughter you, white-skinned pig!” Hwong hissed as he pinned McLean’s legs. Little Ma rushed into action, grabbing a pillow off the bed and pressing it onto McLean’s face, suffocating him. It was not long before he ceased to struggle.
The two boys had no practice in the art of murder. They were not sure if McLean was really dead. They discussed it and agreed not to leave a witness. They managed to scrounge up some electrical wire, using it to tie McLean’s hands and feet. They took a nylon stocking and shoved it deep into his mouth.
The last step was to get rich. Hwong took a small number of Hong Kongese bills, a gold wristwatch and a piece of ancient jade jewelry that McLean had brought back from one of his trips to the Mainland. Little Mao took cash and four pieces of antique jade jewelry.
The police set up a reward of $25,000 for the capture of the killers. Hwong, by carelessly leaving his fingerprints on the soda can, ensured that they never needed to pay out the reward.
The other suspect, Little Ma, was, by the time of Hwong’s arrest already serving a sentence in the Pik Uk Correctional Facility for an extortion charge. Before the brief sentence could be completed, he was taken by police from the facility for interrogation.
Hwong Chi-Kiang was arrested on the 29th of October. Little Ma’s turn came at the beginning of November.
Hwong went to trial first in the Western District Court. He declared that he was nineteen years old, a tai pan of the dance floor. He was charged with murder, burglary, car theft and driving without insurance.
In the middle of May, 1981, the case was moved to the High Court. The charges were amended as follows: One, murder, two, burglary, three, car theft. Hwong denied the murder charge but plead guilty to unintentional manslaughter and the other two charges.
The presiding judge, Justice Robbins, in deciding the case stated that the accused had come from an impoverished family. His level of schooling was dreadfully low. Two years prior, he had been sentenced to hard labour at a youth correctional facility and claimed to have reformed himself and found a new direction in life. In light of the present case, this was clearly not true.
The judge further stated that the accused had joined in beating the victim and that the charge of manslaughter was made out. Accordingly, he sentenced Hwong to three years’ imprisonment. For the burglary he imposed a sentence of nine months and for the car theft, three months, but this latter was to be served concurrently. Therefore, Hwong would be sentenced to a total of three years and nine months in jail.
As for the other accused in the case, Little Ma, because he denied the murder charge and also refused to plead guilty to manslaughter, he would be tried separately. In July of 1981, the High Court, with Judge Hope presiding, set down its judgment. The accused, Ma (given name unstated), sixteen and a half years of age, was charged with the same three crimes as Hwong Chi-Kiang. During the trial, Ma changed his plea to guilt on all counts. Based on the precedent set by Judge Robbins, Judge Hope sentenced Ma to the same three years and nine months in prison.
終
Snow to Sand: Poetry, Stories and Musings from Canada, the Caribbean and Ukraine 