no proof [Lucy Lu] killed her husband
Whig Standard Staff Writer
March 10, 2001
If she comes out of the church, she will almost certainly be arrested. She could be on a flight to China by nightfall, regardless of other possible appeals.
She's trapped, she's scared and she has no intention of leaving the sanctuary that has so far kept police and Immigration from forcibly removing her.
The Immigration Appeal Board has rejected four separate appeals since the initial deportation order was issued in 1991.
Because she admitted to committing a crime, she is ineligible for admission to Canada.
If Immigration officials were inclined to make an exception, the heinous nature of the crime to which Lu confessed has precluded empathy for the dire straits she is now in.
Tuesday, March 13, marks 16 years since death of 27-year-old He Zhang Zhao. According to Crown prosecutors, the Chinese immigrant was hacked to unconsciousness with a meat cleaver in the bedroom of his Chinatown apartment in Toronto and carried to the back yard of the dingy three-storey walkup, where he died, after several hours, in the snow.
The killer, they believe, was Lucy Lu, aka Mrs. Kwai Kwan Zhao, aka Mrs. Kuei Fuen Zhao, aka Lucy Lu.
Lu was tried three separate times on charges of first-degree murder. Her first trial ended in a hung jury, when jurors couldn't agree on a verdict. The second ended in a mistrial when her lawyers found a cryptic note pointing blame at someone else.
Lu negotiated a plea bargain on a lesser charge of manslaughter at the third trial.
She was handed a 10-year sentence at the Prison for Women but served less than two years of that time.
Lu claims she never killed her husband.
Is it possible?
The original record of Lu's trial is found in an incomplete set of transcripts held at Toronto's York County Courthouse, and in a copy of the plea proceeding obtained by The Whig-Standard.
A transcript of the second trial was never made, or has been lost.
With the help of Susan McNardy, manager of court reporting, and her assistant, Yvonne Dixon, The Whig-Standard gained access to the transcripts and therein found a compelling story and circumstances that detail how and why the web of evidence surrounding Zhao's death snared Lucy Lu.
What the transcripts also show is that police failed to uncover a single shred of proof that Lu was, in fact, guilty of murdering He Zhang Zhao.
Prosecutors were only guessing that the meat cleaver was indeed the murder weapon.
In one of three apartments subdividing the top floor of the seedy Zhao abode lived at various times, He Zhang Zhao, 27; his wife of eight months, Lucy Lu; Zhao's parents and his sister, Lisa.
The mail order-like marriage of Zhao and Lu appeared doomed from the start. Zhao was a deadbeat who couldn't - or wouldn't - hold a job.
He wouldn't study English enough to become fluent in the language, was criticized by his family and within weeks of the marriage, began disappearing from the home for days and weeks at a time.
The marriage was never consummated, though it appears there was to some degree a mutual understanding to wait two years before having children and a mutual ignorance of birth control measures.
In a letter to Lu on one of the occasions he left home, her husband wrote of his anguish in his broken English.
"The reasons why I left you not because I don't like you but because something else happened," Zhao wrote.
"I know the family always look down on me, never care about me, treat me like dog. I can't never get ahead."
"This time I left the family, I don't want to do it, but the family made me to do so. I think I'm a useless husband."
In time, Zhao started to pressure his wife for sex. His parents accused her of being a bad wife. They wrote a letter of complaint to her family in China, which Lu intercepted and threw out. They talked to the Chinese community about sending her back to China.
Lucy wanted a way out. She sought advice on divorce and found her citizenship would be in jeopardy if she left Zhao. She told a friend she wished her husband was dead.
To police, that spelled motive.
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