Hong Kong man who salted and cooked parents jailed for life

A Hong Kong man who killed, dismembered, salted and cooked his parents was sent to prison for life on Monday after being found guilty of double murder. The conviction of Henry Chau, 31, on Friday concluded a gruesome case that shocked the city in 2013 when the severed heads of Chau’s elderly parents were found stuffed into two refrigerators.

During the 20-day trial at the city’s high court, the jury heard how Chau had dismembered his elderly parents before salting, cooking and packing their body parts into lunchboxes “like barbecued pork”.
“Your sentence on Count 1 and Count 2 is that you go to prison for life,” judge Michael Stuart-Moore told Chau, referring to the double murder charges. Sitting in the defendant’s dock, Chau, who wore a loose-fitting grey suit, looked impassive as the sentence was passed down.

Stuart-Moore handed Chau an additional nine years and four months in jail for two separate charges of preventing the lawful burials of his parents, which he admitted earlier. The sentences will be served concurrently, he said.

Stuart-Moore described Chau as “narcissistic” and “preoccupied with fantasies for success”.  He said: “In practice, you have no feelings for other people”, adding he was a “highly dangerous individual”.   A friend who was earlier accused of being involved in the killings was found not guilty Friday. Both had pleaded not guilty to the murder charges. The heads of 65-year-old Chau Wing-ki and his wife Siu Yuet-yee, 62, were found in March 2013 in two fridges in a bloodstained apartment, days after the elderly couple were reported missing.

Other remains were found in a rubbish bin and packed into lunchboxes with rice. Chau initially told police that his parents had gone to mainland China, but later admitted the murder to a friend via a mobile messaging app. In evidence read to the court last year, Chau claimed that he planned to mislead the police in order to buy himself some time to say goodbye to friends. “My murdering partner and I were planning to make it a missing person case and dump the body piece by piece,” he said in a message. Chau also called himself a “psychopath” in the messages and said: “I cannot empathise with people’s pain because of my experience from childhood and adolescence.”