Exclusive | ‘Professor Kim’, Hong Kong’s yoga ball murderer, was my landlord
Khaw Kim Sun was found guilty on Wednesday of murdering his wife and daughter using a gas-filled yoga ball, in a case that has gripped the city. A former Lantau resident tells how she came to rent his decrepit 1,400 sq ft house in the tiny village of Tong Fuk, and how Khaw kept up the pretence of a popular and sociable family man struggling to deal with personal tragedy. The writer of this article asked to be identified only as H.E.B.
I needed a new home in a hurry. It was early June 2015 and my neighbours’ dogs in Mui Wo, on Lantau Island, had on May 30 savagely bitten my leg. I was frightened they would strike again. Knowing the mutts would not be destroyed meant staying put was not an option. I needed a place to rent with a garden for me and my own dogs.
“Tropicana”, an oddly English-looking, creeper-covered house in the seaside village of Tong Fuk, was being offered in Mui Wo property agents’ windows. But there was a problem. The agents told me that because the landlord’s wife and teenage daughter had died in a tragic carbon monoxide poisoning accident in their car just two weeks ago, I could not rent the house. The landlord, Khaw Kim Sun, referred to simply as “Professor Kim”, was still so grief stricken that no agent was prepared to disturb him.
A week went by, and I was anxious to move. Perhaps the bereaved landlord would welcome a tenant who would clean up the place, since the 6,000 sq ft garden was wild and overgrown, I reasoned. Perhaps he would welcome it being taken off his hands at this terrible time – one less thing to worry about.
Finally, one agent who knew Professor Kim quite well agreed to give it a go, but warned me she was unlikely to make any progress. How wrong she was. Khaw was immediately open to negotiation, and in a few days I had the keys. My lease started on July 1, 2015, some five weeks after the gas poisoning.
It was a singular house: the picturesque Virginia creeper looked less charming inside the bedrooms, where it had been growing untrimmed through windows and across the ceilings. Pull it down, advised my new landlord, who had established a WhatsApp group to discuss house matters. But the creeper resisted all my attempts to remove it, clinging tenaciously to the plaster.
