The Misery Machine - The Jars Killer | The Rainy Night Butcher| Hong Kong's First Serial Killer | Monday Mini-sode |

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

Lam Kor-wan, Hong Kong's first known serial killer, worked as a taxi driver, which conveniently allowed him to pick up female passengers, strangle them with electrical wire, take them to his family home, and dismember them. Lam's English moniker, "The Jars Murderer", was coined after the police revealed that he had kept sexual organs in Tupperware locked away in a metal ammunition container under his bed.  A very special thank you to Levi for supporting our show as our highest tier patron! Join Our Facebook Group to Request a Topic: https://t.co/DeSZIIMgXs?amp=1 Support Our Patreon For More Unreleased Content: https://www.patreon.com/themiserymachine PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/themiserymachine Instagram: miserymachinepodcast Twitter: misery_podcast Discord: https://discord.gg/kCCzjZM #themiserymachine #podcast #truecrime Source Material: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lam_Kor-wan https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/2106697/remembering-jars-killer-35-years-after-he-was-caught https://worldofbuzz.com/hong-kongs-first-gruesome-serial-killer-malaysian-man/  

Hi, with the Misery Machine. I'm Yergy. And I'm Drewby. This is Callie, the Calico Cow. And this week, we're doing another viewer suggested video. So thank you FancyCuber for this suggestion. I had never heard of this before. I had neither.

I was surprised because this seems like something that would be right up our alley. Yeah, exactly. And I had never heard of it until you told us about it. It's Hong Kong's first serial killer, the Rainy Night Butcher, or better known as the Jars killer. There's not a whole lot of information on this. So this is going to be a short episode. We're actually doing two episodes this week, both from Hong Kong. So today, this one's coming out on Monday.

We're going to have the other one out on Wednesday. And that was another one that I found when we were researching this. It's the milkshake murders. And again, thank you, Fancy Kuber, because I wouldn't have known about this if we didn't look up the whole jars murderers. But we'll get to that Wednesday. So if you're listening on YouTube, please hit like and subscribe. You won't miss out on any of our videos that we release. We need your help by hitting subscribe.

You'll get us up there in the algorithm. Hitting the bell notification and sharing this video also helps us too. So without further ado. The Jars Killer. In Hong Kong, there are a handful of crimes best known by catchy monikers. Most famous being the Hello Kitty murder, where Nightclub hostess Fanman Yee was kidnapped and brutally killed by three men. Then there was the milkshake murder,

where American expat Nancy Kessel drugged and bludgeoned her husband Robert to death. But long before these crimes, there was Lamb Corwan dubbed the Jars killer or the Rainy Night Butcher. Lamb is now 62 in serving a life sentence at the maximum security check pick prison on Lantau Islands for a string of grisly murders in the early 80s. He holds the dubious distinction of being Hong Kong's first serial killer. His reign of terror came to an end when he was apprehended on August 17, 1982 at the age of 27. Lamb was often abused by his own father and faced daily beatings

and also had to watch his mother receive the same treatment. This was his life of suffering until his whole family moved to Hong Kong from Malaysia. Unfortunately, Lamb couldn't seem to make friends and ended up as a loner throughout his teenage years. As he became an adult, he worked as a night shift taxi driver. When he wasn't driving people around, Lamb enjoyed taking pictures of his porn magazines. That's a little interesting.

I mean, I guess maybe it was different back then. Why of the magazines? Why take a picture of a picture? I mean, I don't know. I knew somebody in middle school who used to make money taking pictures of his dad's porn magazines or ripping out some of the pages if you paid him enough. And he made like bank off that selling it to kids at school. Interesting. I have no idea.

I have no idea either. Anyway, soon he didn't find that exhilarating anymore. so he moved on to more perverse acts. He bought a Polaroid camera and started taking pictures of women from underneath toilet cubicle doors. So when these women would notice, of course, they would chase them down the streets. And unfortunately on February 3, 1982, he found a new hobby. Lamb picked up a passenger who was 21-year-old Chan Feng Lan at about 4 a.m. The woman had just ended her shift at the Chinese Palace Nightclub in,

Sim Shasui, I hope I said that right, and went out to dinner with her sister and friends. She decided to go home and hail the taxi. Due to being so drunk, she asked Lamb to stop the car to let her throw up. After, she asked him to send her back to Sim Shasui. A few minutes later, she changed her mind once more. So at this point, Lamb snapped. He stopped his car, took an electrical wire out, and strangled the intoxicated Shanfung Land to death. He drove home with her body still in the car. and dragged it to his flat, past the sleeping security guard, and then kept the body under his sofa. He waited for his family to wake up and leave for work before, laying her body on a plastic-covered bedroom floor where he used an electric saw to dismember her,

even taking time to document his axe in photos. Lamb then wrapped her body parts and discarded them in the Shin Mun River. I believe he wrapped them up in plastic and newspaper. A week later, news reports of body parts washing up in the road, Banks popped up. However, they couldn't identify the body, nor did they know who the murderer was. I believe they found her in seven different pieces. At the time, there were no digital cameras or printers to print photographs. So Lamb had to send them to the Kodak shop in SimShah Sweet to get them developed. I thought they had Polaroid cameras where you just snap and it would print it out. So he did have a Polaroid camera, but he was using his point and click camera for this. Okay, I understand. So he actually sent them to get developed. The film developer questioned,

Lamb about the pictures, but he claimed that he was a university lab technician doing medical research. Lamb was a bit more prepared. I'm surprised that worked. I'm surprised that flew. Wow. Okay. If anyone's worked at a photo developing store in the 80s, 90s, leave a comment or send us an email. I want to hear more about stories like this and just crazy things that people developed. I was just way too young at the time. I remember seeing the developing place at the mall, but I never really knew what went on there. As a teenager, I used a lot of just the disposable cameras and you'd go drop them off it right. I'd get your pictures back. But I never thought that anybody actually looked at any of them just based on the fact that I'd get so many with my fingers

in front of it. Things you'd think they'd throw away. Pictures where LaFash went off in such a way that it was just white. I just think it was easy to think that nobody looked at the pictures and they were just being developed in a way that protected your privacy. But I highly doubt that was the case. So Lamb was a bit more prepared for his next murder. However, one that was more depraved than the last. He bought surgical instruments and formaldehyde, which is a chemical liquid commonly used in preserving dead bodies. After murdering his second victim, 31-year-old Chan Wan Kit, he had sex with her corpse and dismembered her in the same fashion he had done with Chan Fengland. It has been claimed that this was Lamb's first time engaging in intercourse. Her

body was found in a rice bag near Taihang Road, which is on Hong Kong Island. He also performed necrophilia on his third victim, 29-year-old Lung Su Wan, whose body was found in the same manner and location. His fourth and final victim was 17-year-old Lung Wai Sam, who had just attended a dinner with her classmates. She didn't want to join them for a second round of drink, so they hailed her a taxi to ensure that she got home safely. Sadly, she never got home that night. It was 9.30 p.m. when she entered the taxi and she was handcuffed by Lamb, who then spoke to her until about 4 a.m. when she eventually fell asleep. He then strangled her and took her body home just like he had done with the previous victims. This time, though, while photographing her body, one of his lighting fixtures

fell and burned her on the thigh. Her body was then found again in a rice bag near Tai Hong Road in Hong Kong, just like the women before her. Lam was arrested by plainclothes officers on August 17, 1982. He'd attempted to develop photographs of his last victim at a Kodak shop. The manager of the shop tipped off the police and they were waiting for him when he returned to pick up the photos. When confronted, Lamb claimed that the photographs belonged to a friend of his who worked on a ship who would meet him shortly.

When the man did not appear, the police accompanied Lamb to his parents' first floor apartment on Kwai Chow Street and performed a search. The police located an old ammunition box in the bedroom he shared with his brother. The box contained pornography and more photographs of body parts, videotapes, and several Tupperware containers contained in women's sexual organs. His brother was initially a suspect in the investigation, but police later determined that Lamb acted alone. So that's where I find it very interesting. They call him the jars killer, but nothing was actually found in jars. He was found in Tupperware containers.

And that was a very actually minor piece of what he was doing. I find like the Rainy Night Butcher to be a better name. Yeah. Quite honestly. What I'm unsure of is the Jars Killer was that a netherware? Was that a nickname given by English speakers or is that given to him by people from Hong Kong? I think the English did it. And then it was translated because this could be a real bad translation.

Yeah, I found online that that was an English moniker. Okay, I thought so. On April 8, 1983, at the end of a three-week-long trial, Lam was found guilty on four counts of murder and was sentenced to death by hanging. Lamb's crimes were so shocking that a female forensic scientist was removed from the case, and only men were allowed to serve on the jury. I believe there were seven men on this jury. On August 29, 1984, Lamb's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment,

as was the tradition before the abolition of the death penalty in Hong Kong in 1993. So when speaking to psychiatrists, Lamb had stated that he ate parts of the intestines of one of his victims and that his motivation was not primarily sexual, but that it was God who told him to kill the victims. I would disagree with that. I think it was sexual. he's just trying to get insanity. I mean, I don't know how the Chinese court systems work. I mean,

obviously it's sexual. If one, he's keeping sexual organs, I believe there are like breasts and genitals and these Tupperwares. He's keeping it with pornography. This escalated from voyeurism and taking pictures of his pornographic magazines. Yeah, exactly. Clearly, we have a trend here. Yeah, absolutely. It seems clear as day. The other thing I wanted to mention is that, I get it's the 80s, but it still seems very wrong that only men could serve on the jury. It seems quite sexist, and they pulled the poor forensic scientist off. I'm sure at the time they're like, this is way too sensitive for women. We're just trying to protect them.

But, I mean, I think there should be women on the jury for a crime like this. I just, I don't know. I don't think that would happen nowadays, but I know absolutely nothing about the Chinese court systems. So the victims in this case were identified by two lecturers from the Prince Philip Dental Hospital. part of the University of Hong Kong who created and perfected a new system of photo superimposition. This involved taking an anti-mortem photograph of the possible victim with an x-ray of the post-mortem skull of the possible victim

and superimposing the photo on the skull and matching similarities just as is done with fingerprints. So that's really the extent of information that we have on the case. There could be more, but I would need to be able to read written Cantonese. I assume it's written Cantonese because from my understanding, I don't know this for fact, but I believe Cantonese is the most spoken language in Hong Kong. It is. It's 88%. Okay. So that aside, this is the extent of our English resources exhausted. Now, there are some YouTube channels, one in particular that alleges other things, like that he cut up the bodies with an electric chainsaw or that the. Hong Kong government intentionally kept the murders from leaking to the media for some reason

or put a gag order on the media. But if you happen across this information on this particular YouTube channel, which I will not name, I do know that this person tends to dramatize some things. Is that a word? Yeah. He does dramatize things. Basically for the point of entertainment, which I guess is fine if that's what you're into. I just feel it's disrespectful to the victims to not tell the story accurately.

Okay, it's not something to make some sensationalist work of fiction out of. There were people that unfortunately died here. So if you're somebody that has followed this case before I'm wondering, well, why didn't they mention this? Well, that's why. And if you are able to read Cantonese and there's more information, I would love to hear about it, Misery Machine Podcast at gmail.com or leave us a comment if you're on YouTube. Now, this is, as we mentioned before, the first serial killer in Hong Kong in known history anyways. Now, I didn't expect this episode to be so short, so I figure we could touch on the milkshake

murder, which we mentioned earlier, which wasn't a serial killing, but it is a famous Hong Kong murder. Right. Since we already did Hello Kitty murders previously. Yeah, exactly. So that's basically all we have for the Jars killer. Now, as we mentioned, around the intro, this is going to be, I wouldn't call it a two-parter, but a mini episode, the second one is going to be another Hong Kong murder case that's going to be out on Wednesday. It is the milkshake murder. We figured we would split these up into two cases since neither of these cases have enough

information to warrant their own episode. Now you get a couple this week rather than one long one. Yeah. And let me know what you think about these shorter episodes. Leave a comment or Misery Machine Podcast at gmail. Or leave us a comment on Instagram. I want to know what people think of these shorter episodes because I'm willing to do something like this again.

I had never heard of this before. And I was very surprised that I had not heard of it. And by researching this, then I found out about the milkshake murder, which I'm very surprised I didn't know about it because it was fairly recent. It was 2003. You would think that would have made national news given they were expats. I mean, it did. I guess I just didn't know about it.

Yeah, I guess not. I mean, even nowadays I'll be looking through. Reddit or I'll be looking through the news and I'll hear somebody or see someone mention a case that happened recently that I feel like I should have seen or was incredibly violent or something like that. I'll be like, how did I miss that? So I'm assuming this just happens all the time. But if you're listening on YouTube, please hit like and subscribe. YouTube has Shadow Band or Sylvia Likens video. We are as a whole channel in very few suggested feeds anymore. YouTube has intentionally done this. I have. screenshot proof of all of this. So what can you do to help us? You can help us get back into the algorithm and by hitting like and subscribe, you get us a fighting chance to hitting our goal of 100,000 subscribers by the end of the year. So with that out of the way, it's time to thank our patrons. So I would like to thank Eddie, Rowan, Markey, Holly, Ashley, Voo, Anna, Lauren, Serena, Chloe, Mark, Tara, Sophie, Karen with an EA, Neil and Karen, Dave and Karina, Madison, and welcome, Dom and

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