How has Hong Kong’s notorious serial pet killer – the Bowen Road dog poisoner – gone undetected for 30 years?
- Hundreds of dogs – including a Norfolk terrier belonging to last governor Chris Patten – have been poisoned in an affluent area of Hong Kong down the years
- Despite regular patrols and one suspected sighting of the perpetrator, the killer remains at large
The most startling thing Sarah James remembers about Max’s 2007 poisoning was that he cried black tears.
Dying, coat slathered in his own vomit, the dog shook as a vet hurriedly administered activated charcoal, hoping the decontaminant would bind with the deadly poison in Max’s gut to stop it entering the bloodstream. Some had splashed into the suffering animal’s pleading eyes.
A teenage Island School student living in Hong Kong’s Mid-Levels at the time, James had become aware of her dog’s life-or-death struggle through an urgent call from her parents. “I immediately rushed to the vet, which was on Mosque Street, off Robinson Road,” she says, recalling the shock that somebody could have targeted her beloved pet, “and when I saw him he was in a massive metal tub … He was shaking, he was cold, and I didn’t really know what to do.”
Born in Hong Kong to British parents, 27-year-old James now works in a management role at a five-star hotel in Kowloon. In the comfortable living room of the Sai Kung home she shares with her father today, she tenderly strokes Holly, “the queen” of their dog-crazy household.
Like Max, Holly was adopted from animal-welfare charity Hong Kong Dog Rescue. James’ face brightens when she recalls her father giving her the helpless, mixed-breed pup on her 14th birthday, in 2005. “She was just the smallest, cutest, wrinkliest thing I’d ever seen in my life.”
And then, like Max before her, Holly was also poisoned. “There was just vomit and diarrhoea all over the house … She was panting and sweating and shaking; it was like she was going mad in her head,” James says. “She was standing and then … done … and her body stopped moving. I think at that point I started screaming.”
Both Max and Holly were poisoned within months of each other on Bowen Road, a sleepy, banyan-bordered route – partly open to vehicles, partly no more than a footpath – that snakes from the Mid-Levels, above Central, to the southern edge of Happy Valley, linking some of Hong Kong Island’s most affluent residential neighbourhoods. It is believed there have been hundreds of malicious poisonings of dogs on and around this route since 1989.
In the most recently reported cases – two separate instances on the morning of Saturday, January 7, 2017 – the victims ingested chicken meat laced with a lethal poison.
