Gay Hong Kong policeman’s 1980 gun death: unanswered questions remain
Thirty-eight years ago this week, John MacLennan died of gunshot wounds; a public inquiry heard claims he’d been hounded into killing himself because of his homosexuality. It’s a case with lessons still for a socially conservative city
On this day 38 years ago two senior officers from the then Royal Hong Kong Police Force’s Special Investigations Unit broke into the flat of 29-year-old Scottish inspector John MacLennan and found him sprawled on the floor with five bullet wounds in his chest.
The police were convinced MacLennan had taken his own life, but there were many who suspected he had been murdered and the public furore around the case led to a year-long public inquiry. Even after the HK$16 million investigation – the most expensive in Hong Kong history – there were still those who doubted the verdict of suicide.
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I included MacLennan in my book, Hong Kong Murders, and in the late 1990s interviewed legislator Elsie Tu about the case. MacLennan had told her about his ordeal and he’d said the police had been hounding him. He also told her about the secret files he’d seen when he worked at Special Branch.
Tu was never convinced of the inquiry’s verdict. Pushed on the decision, she admitted the evidence did point towards suicide but insisted it was still a murder of sorts.
“He was potentially murdered in so far as he hadn’t a way out, he was pushed into killing himself,” Tu said.
Nigel Collett, a former British Army officer who has lived in Hong Kong since 1985 and has a book coming out next month on MacLennan – A Death in Hong Kong: The Suppression of a Scandal – agrees that the Scottish inspector was pressured into killing himself.
