The Fatal Honeymoon

Our story began like a fairy tale:  At a New York City social gathering, a handsome, suave young Chinese lawyer meets the pretty, cultured daughter of a wealthy merchant prince from Macao, and the pair fall in love virtually at first sight.  Seven months later, in May 1928, the two are married, and go off on a romantic honeymoon trip, after which they live happily ever after…

Well, scratch that last part.

After they were wed, Chung Yi Miao and his bride, Wai Sheung Siu, traveled to Montreal, where they took an ocean liner to Glasgow.  After seeing the sights in Scotland, they headed for London, prefaced by a side trip to the Lake District.

The newlyweds checked into the Borrowdale Gates hotel at Grange-in-Borrowdale, in Cumbria, on June 18, 1928.  Chinese tourists were at the time a rarity in the area, so the young couple attracted a good deal of attention, especially since the new Mrs. Miao was fond of bedecking herself with striking and extremely costly jewelry of pearls, jade, and gold.  The pair seemed to be as happy and affectionate as you would hope to see from any honeymooners.

The day after their arrival at the hotel, the couple had lunch, and then went out arm-in-arm for a walk to enjoy the beauty of their surroundings.  Around 4 p.m., Chung returned to the hotel alone.  When a staffer asked if he wanted to wait for his wife before having tea, he said “no.”  Chung explained that she had gone shopping, and wouldn’t return until six.

6 p.m. came and went.  No Wai.  At 7 p.m., Chung dined alone, seemingly completely unconcerned about his bride’s absence.  Two hours later, the hotel’s manager, a Miss Crossley, asked him about Wai’s non-arrival.  He said calmly that he had a slight cold, and so Wai had gone to Keswick to buy him some medicine and warmer clothes for herself.  At 10:30, Chung casually asked a maid, “What do you think we ought to do?  Should we inform the police?”  Instead, he went to bed.  

Meanwhile, around 7:30 that evening, a farmer named Thomas Wilson was walking near a river about a mile outside of Grange.  He saw a woman wearing a fur coat sleeping--at least, that’s what he thought she was doing--under an open umbrella.  Odd, that.  When he mentioned this to friends, one of them, a police detective who was vacationing in Grange, decided to turn his leisure time into a busman’s holiday, and went to see the woman for himself.

The “sleeping” woman proved to be the missing Mrs. Miao, quite dead.  She had been strangled with a piece of string and two lengths of cord from a window blind.  (The cord was established to be identical to those used at the Borrowdale.)  She had also been badly beaten around the head and face.  The expensive jewelry she had been wearing was gone, and the murderer had arranged her legs and clothing in a way to suggest that she had been raped, but the autopsy found no sign of sexual assault.

Despite these attempts to make Wai look like a victim of some random footpad, investigators had no trouble focusing on one particular suspect.  By 11 p.m., the dead woman’s husband received a visit from the police.  When told only that his wife was dead--without anyone relating the circumstances of her death--Chung immediately exclaimed, “It’s terrible--my wife assaulted, robbed, murdered!”  He continued to behave in a strange manner while being questioned by detectives--for some reason, he was anxious to know whether his wife was still wearing “knickers” when she was found.

Chung’s trial, which was held at Carlisle Assizes, was relatively brief and lacking in drama.  The young lawyer insisted he was innocent--that his wife was the victim of Chinese jewel thieves.  (This argument was considerably weakened after the jewels Wai had been wearing were found hidden in Chung’s luggage.  However, Chung claimed that Wai herself had put the jewelry there, for safety.)  The defense pointed to the fact that shortly before the murder, locals had observed two unknown Chinese men around Grange. These men were seen getting on a train for parts unknown the morning after the murder.  Chung claimed that these men had been following him and his bride ever since they were in Glasgow.  He also stated that under Chinese law, Wai’s considerable property reverted to her family, leaving him with no financial reason to want her dead.  His seemingly incriminating remarks to police were, he said, a misinterpretation of his imperfect English.

The prosecution did not bother to offer a motive for the murder--their case was essentially, “We don’t know why he did it, but we know he did it.”  The case against him was largely circumstantial, but such evidence can be remarkably convincing.  The jury had little difficulty delivering a guilty verdict, and Chung was accordingly hanged at Strangeways, Manchester, on December 6, 1928.  He maintained his innocence to the end, bitterly complaining about the police “not trying to trace the real murderer.”

Crime historians generally agree that the jury made the right decision.  What makes this case unique is that no one has ever been able to find a reason why this educated, sophisticated young man, who appeared to have a golden future ahead of him, threw it all away by committing the cold-blooded murder of his new wife.  (And in a remarkably bungling fashion, at that.)  This gaping hole at the center of the story has led to a number of possible theories, each more baroque than the last.  It has been pointed out that soon after the wedding, Wai went to a female doctor with a very intimate problem: she was physically unable to consummate her marriage.  Did this lead Chung to kill his bride in a burst of sexual frustration?  Alas for this proposal, it is also known that on May 25, Wai had minor surgery which presumably resolved the issue.

A newspaper article of questionable validity claimed that after discovering that his wife would never be able to bear children, Chung felt he had no choice but to murder Wai so he could marry someone who could perpetuate his bloodline.  It seems most likely that this story emerged from some reporter’s over-imaginative fancy.

Did the Chinese tongs have something to do with the murder?  At the time of Chung’s trial, there was a rumor afloat that he had belonged to the Chapa tong, which led to the suggestion that the tong had ordered him to marry and then murder Wai, in order to gain her wealth for the secret society’s benefit.

Or did the tong instruct Chung to kill Wai out of some revenge plot against her rich and powerful family?  Or perhaps--just perhaps--did some Chinese tong murder Wai themselves, meaning that Chung was guilty of nothing more than possible prior knowledge of the deed?  After all, no one has ever been able to explain the presence of those two unknown Chinese men in Grange…