SAINT Valentine's Day, as everybody knows, was founded on love, not on murder. Raymond Ng Kin-ming, as everybody was soon to find out, no longer cared about the difference.
Among men, Ng was a weed. A skinny, shy, 160-centimetre-tall, 35-year-old weed. His Castle Peak Road electronics business and his career as an electronics inventor were failures. The brass-plaque certificates and framed university degrees hanging from his office walls were forgeries. His male friends were few. Yet among women he was a bedroom guru and curator of a harem-sized collection of girlfriends. He preyed on Hong Kong's lost women - the plain Janes from public housing estates who had neither money, looks nor education, and had been passed over by men their own age.
Ng would shower his entourage with gifts, weekends at the Grand Hyatt, and romantic dinners a deux. Intoxicate them with his attentions, hints of marriage and the promise that very soon one of his brilliant electronic inventions would revolutionise the world and make them both rich beyond their dreams. He toyed with women as he toyed with the broken radios and televisions that littered his flat. They were things to fix up. Things to absorb his attention until they worked as he wanted. Then, tiring of them, he would lose interest, let them go and move on to his next broken toy.
Naturally, the biggest festival of the year for this sexual Napoleon was St Valentine's Day and in 1991 he was waging campaigns with at least a dozen women. By February 12, his 700-square-foot Kwun Tong flat was a cottage industry dedicated to romance. The broken radios, televisions and piles of electronic equipment that usually choked the second bedroom had given way to stacks of neatly wrapped love gifts, bunches of flowers and boxes of chocolates.
There were almost 20 parcels ready to be divided among Ng's harem. There were chocolates for Chan Woo-hung, the 37-year-old he had promised to marry. There were flowers and chocolates for Patricia Wong, the 25-year-old he had promised to marry. Lau Qi-hing, the 27-year-old he had been dating for 10 years was to get a parcel in the post, as was Lai Lai-ying, the 25-year-old lover he had installed at his company, Keytrone Electronics. But neither they nor the other women on Ng's list would ever receive their gifts.
On February 12, Ng was far too busy lavishing his attention on Anna Cheng, the one woman who had eluded him, the only 'broken toy' he could not fix. When she had dumped him three years earlier, she had said he was 'strange'. Six months earlier, she had married Lam Man-tat, an assistant manager at the Holiday Inn Golden Mile - a man who was younger, handsome and more successful. She refused Ng's calls and did not respond to his letters.