1816: Camilo Torres, Manuel Rodriguez, and other leaders of independent New Granada Unspecified date: British soldiers by urophagia

1999: Chen Chin-hsing, Taiwan’s most notorious criminal

October 6th, 2011 Headsman

On this date in 1999, Taiwan put to death a man who, as the Reuters story about his case led it, “shook public confidence in law and government with the kidnap-murder of a TV celebrity’s daughter and a string of subsequent gun battles, killings, rapes and a hostage drama.”

Dramatic enough for you?

This operatic crime spree was the work of three men, Chen Chin-hsing, Lin Chun-sheng, and Kao Tien-min.

They punched their ticket to popular infamy when they snatched 16-year-old schoolgirl Pai Hsiao-yen in New Taipei City on April 14, 1997.

Her family received terrifying photos of the girl stripped naked and bound, a severed pinkie finger, and a demand for $5 million U.S. And they were in a position to get it, because Pai’s mother was celebrity singer and TV personality Pai Ping-ping. (Alternatively: Bai Bing-bing.)

However, despite multiple attempts to drop the ransom, the kidnappers kept not showing up, and the captive, who’d been brutalized and raped during her captivity, was eventually murdered and dumped in a drainage ditch.

Pai Hsiao-yen’s murder not only captivated media but crystallized public backlash against politicians and police who showed as ineffective in the midst of a massive crime wave. It helped cave in the government of Taiwan’s first democratically elected president.

The criminals themselves magnified the case by drawing out the initial public horror into a seven-month drama as they eluded police manhunts. At one point, they forced a plastic surgeon at gunpoint to alter their appearances, then murdered him after he was finished.

Chen Chin-hsing was finally captured (after the other two had judiciously committed suicide when about to be apprehended) after a televised standoff wherein Chen gave self-valorizing media interviews while holding a South African ambassador’s family hostage.

All this made Chen a dead man, and few in the Republic of China much pitied the serial rapist and spree killer’s fate of taking a magazine of automatic rifle ammunition in the chest. (Several others in this dreadful affair also got non-capital sentences for various forms of aiding and abetting.)

It also made Pai Ping-ping into a tough-on-crime social activist. Taiwan’s death penalty has been in the news recently with the government’s admission that it executed an innocent man in an unrelated case. Pai vehemently opposes the resulting abolition efforts that other case has helped along; in 2010, she helped to break a 52-month death penalty moratorium and force a resumption in executions when she threatened to commit suicide if Taiwan went through with abolition. That would be operatic indeed.

On this day..

Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Cycle of Violence,Death Penalty,Execution,History,Infamous,Kidnapping,Murder,Notable for their Victims,Popular Culture,Rape,Ripped from the Headlines,Shot,Taiwan

Tags: , , , , , , ,


Calendar

October 2011
M T W T F S S
« Sep   Nov »
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31  

Archives

Categories

Execution Playing Cards

Exclusively available on this site: our one-of-a-kind custom playing card deck.

Every card features a historical execution from England, France, Germany, or Russia!