When a head teacher killed a clerk at a Hong Kong school and set fire to her body
- A head teacher bludgeoned and strangled a clerk after confronting her over missing school funds, then set fire to a car containing her body
- Cleared of murder but convicted of manslaughter, Wong Sai-ming was sentenced to nine years’ jail in 1994. A judge called the killing ‘very brutal and violent’
“A headmaster was arrested yesterday, suspected of having murdered his school accounts clerk and burning her body,” reported the South China Morning Post on July 15, 1993.
The High Court subsequently heard that headmaster Wong Sai-ming, from Good Shepherd Primary School, in To Kwa Wan in Kowloon, Hong Kong, killed Lau Yung-mui on July 13, before a morning board meeting to discuss missing funds. Having struck Lau with a piece of concrete and then strangled her, Wong “hid her body in the conference room” where they had met before the meeting, the Post reported on May 27, 1994.
The court heard that Wong put Lau’s body in a boot, “placed it in the boot of his car and drove to a car park in Quarry Bay” on Hong Kong Island and “there he doused the boot with petrol and set fire to it”. The police were alerted by two passers-by who saw the flames, and Wong was arrested as he tried to escape.
While admitting to killing Lau, Wong denied murdering her. In a statement he told police that, years earlier, Lau had come up with a plan to siphon off some student enrolment fees, and that later “he wanted to stop but Lau said he could not back down”. After three years, “the school’s board of directors became concerned about the state of the accounts”.
Wong was quoted on June 2, 1994, as saying he had thought about committing suicide after Lau’s death, but he “wanted to tell the whole truth of the incident”, adding that “he went mad after Lau grabbed his testicles during a vicious fight” because “he seized a cheque from her that she intended to pay into the school account to cover her tracks” in the conference room.
On June 4, the Post reported that Wong had been cleared of murder but convicted of manslaughter. Three days later, he was sentenced to nine years in jail, the judge saying he “had committed a very brutal and violent act” and “had shown no remorse for what he had done”.
Wong appealed to reduce his sentence, but the court ruled on October 26 that “there was plenty of evidence the headmaster had benefited from the pilfering”.
