Hello Kitty is a globally famous and cute fictional character produced by a Japanese company Sanrio, first designed by Yuko Shimizu in 1974.
The character is portrayed as a female white Japanese bobtail cat with a red bow and became hugely and immensely popular among children and youngsters particularly female, not only in Japan but also Asia and all over the world including the United States of America.
Sanrio earned over USD $1 billion annually in sales outside of Japan, as of 2003.
It has a cult-like following around the globe where Hello Kitty adorns cars, purses, jewelry, dolls, stickers, greeting cards, clothes, accessories, school supplies, dishes and home appliances and many other high-end consumers products.
So popular that Hello Kitty once jolted Hong Kong. Why?
This is because on 6 December 2000, three vicious and heartless men were sentenced to life imprisonment by a Hong Kong court for abducting and torturing a nightclub hostess for a month in March 1999, before murdering her and cutting up her body and stuffing her skull into a Hello Kitty doll.
Thus, earning the infamous nickname, The Hello Kitty murder.
This is one of the most gruesome cases in the history of Hong Kong.
Before sentencing, Justice Peter Nguyen said that never had a Hong Kong court heard evidence of such ''cruelty, brutality, depravity, callousness, violence and viciousness'' committed by ''a human being on another human being.''
The court was told that the 3 men, Chan Man-lok, 34, Leung Shing-cho, 27, and Leung Wai-lun, 21, kidnapped Fan Man-yee, 23, in March 1999 and tortured her for a month in a flat in Tsim Sha Tsui, a shopping district in Hong Kong, apparently over a debt dispute.
Fan was beaten and tortured daily by the three, who are all triad members, the court heard.
After the woman's death, the gang was said to have spent hours dismembering and then boiling down her body.
They hid her skull in a giant-sized Hello Kitty mermaid doll and discarded most other body parts.
Only the woman's skull, one tooth and some internal organs have been recovered and the exact cause of her death has not been established, the court heard.
The killing was exposed after the 14-year-old girlfriend of one of three men reported the case to police in May 1999, 2 months after the gruesome crime was committed.
She said she was frequently haunted by Fan's ghost...!!!!!
Apparently the young girl took part in the daily beatings of poor Fan but was not involved in killing her. She became the prosecution's main witness during the 6 week trial of the Hello Kitty murder.
God bless Fan Man-yee, Rest in Peace.
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