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Joyce Man

A mainland decorator who killed his cousin's family of four then buried them in the yard of their New Territories home has been jailed for life.
The sentence was passed on Xu Shengqi, 43,  in the Court of First Instance after  he was found guilty by a jury yesterday on three counts  murder.
He was also sentenced to nine years in jail on one charge  of  manslaughter.
'Within a short time, a whole family was wiped out by you,' Mr Justice Derek Pang Wai-cheong  told Xu. 'The ways in which they met their deaths were brutal.'
The bodies of Tam Shing-fai, 43,  his wife Helen Tong Yan-yee, 34,  and their two daughters, Tam Hiu-man,  10, and Tam Hiu-ying,  seven, were excavated from a pit that had been covered in concrete in the courtyard of their house in Ping Che village in July last year. Tam Shing-fai had been stabbed almost 80 times.
Xu had denied four murder charges and the jury found him not guilty by a 5-2 majority on the charge in respect of the elder daughter but guilty of manslaughter - an option the judge had left open in his  instructions.
 The jury took six hours to reach a verdict. All of the terms are to run concurrently.
A postmortem examination on the victims found that Tam Shing-fai - who was Xu's cousin - had been stabbed more than 60 times in the abdomen, nine times in the head and neck, three in his upper limbs and seven times in his lower limbs, the court heard during the trial.
His wife and daughters were bound and gagged with various items, including tape and yellow cable. The younger daughter was  found in a nylon bag. 
Tong was found with a white vest stuffed in her mouth, and her head was wrapped in a woollen jacket,  then a plastic bag, and bound with adhesive tape and cable. 
Pang said Xu had  given 'the most ridiculous of defences', including a claim that he had had a relationship with Tong, and that the children had died by accident.
Xu had been in Hong Kong on a seven-day, two-way permit at the time of the killings.
Tam died of multiple stab wounds, his wife and Hiu-ying of suffocation, and Hiu-man of ligature strangulation.
The court heard from prosecutor Peter Chapman  that Xu had been coming to Hong Kong  since 2002. He stayed with an uncle in the village near Tam's family, and worked on renovations to the family's home. 
Xu made several attempts to withdraw money using Tong's bank cards after he killed the family, Chapman said. 
The bodies were found after colleagues of the couple called them when they did not turn up for work the next day.  
According to colleagues of Tam  and his wife,  the two were industrious, responsible employees who would not be absent from work without calling the office.
The police were notified  after  calls to the couple's phones were answered by a man speaking with an accent, who claimed the family had gone to Dongguan. 
Xu offered various defences during interviews with police, including that Tam had provoked him and attempted to strike him, that he had been acting in self-defence, and that he had killed the family by accident.



Mainlander gets life for slaughtering family of 4