Recent updates to a really old news
nextmag.com.tw/breaking-news … 8/25590848
nextmag.com.tw/breaking-news … 0/25873322
zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%82%B1 … 6%E6%A1%88
The 1987 kidnap and murder of Lu Zheng (陸正) was the first child abduction and ransom case in Taiwan that drew national attention. Lu Zheng was a 9 year-old boy, taken away after finishing Buxiban classes in Hsinchu city. The parents of Lu delivered the ransom as the perpetrators demanded, but Lu Zheng never returned.
The police were under immense pressure to solve the case. They declared the case solved 9 months later and captured a group of suspects led by Chiu Heshun (邱和順). However, as the case went into trial, all of the suspects denied their involvement. The cases went on over 20 years, until in 2011 a judge finally closed the case, and gave Chiu a death sentence.
This case is close to me because I went to the same elementary school as Lu Zheng. The school had all sorts of self-protection experts come and speak to us after Lu’s abduction. Students were talked into buying all sorts of self-protection gadgets, such as pepper sprays and alarms. My classmates would work out a plan in case we were ever abducted. We were also told that Lu’s body was chopped up in pieces and put into garbage bags, then dumped into the sea. That’s something really hard to forget if you hear it at an young age. Turns out that’s not at all true. Lu’s body remains not found. The police only made up the story about founding the body. As I grew older, I found out a lot more stuff that weren’t true about this case. Whenever news about this case pops up, I always pay attention, and grow increasingly frustrated at Taiwan’s “justice system.”
Recently, a retired police officer came out and told Apply Daily that he was certain Chiu only confessed to the crime because he was tortured. The police would then feed him information he has to say to incriminate himself. Not only that, police from other cities would also chime in and pinned another unsolved murder case on Chiu. Lu’s father was so convinced that Chiu is the one who murdered his son, he simply would not consider the possibility that Chiu only knew so many intimate details about the crime because the police feed him those info.
According to the retired police officer,
[quote]back then he was a new recruit and his unit was assigned to support the investigation. His unit spent an amazing amount of time on the case, unable to turn up any body, or murder weapon, and then suddenly hears that police in Taipei have declare the case solved.
He could hear the suspect crying out in pain next door when the others tortured him. Everyone in his unit knew Chiu wasn’t the perpetrator, but were all too afraid to offend their senior officers. After Chiu finally gave in and confessed, his girlfriend, who is another suspect, knelt down to Lu’s father asking for forgiveness. It’s the other thing that made Lu’s family convinced the police had the right people. However, it was only an exchange of deals. Chiu wanted to see his mother, and the police said if you admit your guilt and beg Lu’s family for forgiveness in public, then we would let you see your mother.
Chiu has been in prison for almost 30 years, he was only 28 when arrested, and now is very ill. The retired police officer once asked him why did he admit his guilt, Chiu said the police were torturing him, so he had to admit to everything the police asked. He thought he would just deny the charges in court, because the DAs and the judges wouldn’t beat him. He didn’t expect that he would be found guilty in court.
After the officer retired, he made several calls to the Judicial Reform Foundation. At the time the case still wasn’t closed, but the judges wouldn’t summon him. So he would always pays attention to the government announcement of new death rows, to see if Chiu is on it. So in the end the retired officer decided to go to the media to expose the case.[/quote]
It is a lot more likely that the case was committed by Hu Guan-bao (胡關寶). It simply fits his MO. In fact Hu admitted to killing Lu right before his execution back in 1990. However, the police discounted the confession, because the only finger print on the only piece of evidence that actually had a finger print on it, the ransom note, doesn’t match Hu’s prints.
In 1989, 1 year after Chi’s arrest, there was a child’s body found inside an old well in Hsinchu city. The body was tied to a dumbbell so it was no accident. The kid matched Lu’s age. Local police asked Lu’s father to come and check it out, and because it’s so far away from what the police in Taipei told him about what went down, Lu’s father declined. The police just closed the case after that, the mystery kid’s body was buried without an autopsy. A mystery murder of a child, and no one gives a two shit about finding out the real killer or who that child even was. After some media exposed this case, the bury site of the body was conveniently forgotten and the mystery body never rediscovered.
It saddens me to think that the family of Lu Zheng still hasn’t gotten justice after all these time, and there are people not at all responsible wasting their lives in prison. One of them was framed by the police and could still be put on death row at any moment. It’s even more depressing that anyone with half a brain could see that Taiwan’s judicial system is far from “not doing evil” and yet the majority of the Taiwanese people would still criticize those who advocate to abolish the death sentence for being “soft on crime.”