The common-law wife of the purported ringleader of a torture-killing trio does not know how she will be able to tell their young sons of their father's gruesome past.
Chan Man-lok, 34, Leung Shing-cho, 27, and Leung Wai-lun, 20, all unemployed, last night were found guilty of manslaughter. They had denied murdering nightclub hostess Fan Man-yee, but admitted preventing her lawful burial.
Fan, 23, was tortured and her body dismembered, cooked and dumped, with her head stuffed in a Hello Kitty doll.
'I never imagined she had been so severely beaten up,' Tsang Ka-pui, 24, said of the weeks-long assault that ended with the death of her friend.
Ms Tsang, the live-in lover of Chan, hardly missed a day of the six-week trial in the Court of First Instance. She sat in the public gallery to hear graphic details of how Fan met her end.
'I was not here every day, but almost. I came here not as the wife of someone on trial for murder, but simply as a spectator,' Ms Tsang said.
Her boys, aged three and one, were too young to know what was happening, she said, but there would come a time when they would be old enough to understand.