Taiwanese man hires incompetent hit man to kill his wife
Staff Reporter
2015-02-21
The residence where Zhou Xuan's parents live in Jiangsu province. (Internet photo)
A Taiwanese man reportedly attempted to kill his Chinese wife by hiring a hit man on three occassions but was unsuccessful. The killers who he hired to murder his wife have been convicted, while the intended victim chose to forgive her husband, reports the press office of the Supreme People's Procuratorate.
Taiwanese engineer Chang Kuo-chen, 36, reportedly hired Yang Lei a would-be hit man from Shandong province, giving him 100,000 yuan (US$16,000) to murder his 28-year-old wife Zhou Xuan, a Jiangsu-native whom he married in 2009.
Chang's first attempt was in Oct. 2013, when Zhou visited her hometown in Jiangsu. According to Yang, Chang wired him a down payment of 13,000 yuan (US$2,080) in advance. "I saw Chang's message online looking for a hit man to kill his wife and I replied to his message," said Yang, who added that after he received the money, he only briefly visited Zhou's residence and took several photos of it in Jiangsu because he did not really want to kill anyone. "I just wanted to cheat the Taiwanese man out of his money."
Yang told Chang that he failed to find Zhou, which Chang believed and asked him to carry out the mission again later in January, 2014, when he and Zhou would take their son on a trip to Fujian province.
Yang played a similar trick on the trip, and Chang then asked him to kill his wife later that year, when she would be visiting her parents in Jiangsu in early March.
Yang received another payment and this time, he "outsourced" the job and hired two other men online, both inexperienced hit men like himself, to carry out the task.
The plan was to ring the bell of Zhou's house and to then force entry. The three say they were not planning to kill her, but the mission failed anyway, because Zhou and her neighbor, who happened to be at the scene, grew suspicious of the three men knocking on her door.
Zhou called the police. Soon the three hit men were arrested and sentenced to prison for prison terms of three years and nine months and four years and six months. Chang has admitted his role as the main conspirator and the case is being handled by Taiwan's judiciary, said the report.
Zhou Xuan was surprised to learn that her husband had tried multiple times to murder her, claiming that she had never sensed anything wrong with Chang and her family. The couple had never quarreled and Chang had always been sweet to her, she said. As of now, Zhou has "forgiven her husband" and has decided to continue living with him, according to the report.
