What Kills Us This Week!

HK Police are asking the public to stop this incessant talk, rumour and gossip about last week's murder on Lamma Island because they say they want to nail the guy seriously and forever, and none of it is helping.  So I won't talk about it here.  And I won't talk about what I've heard, although I've heard a great deal.

Instead, I'll talk about the "Hello Kitty" murder several years back.

But, first, I must make excuses and tell you upfront that HK is such a safe place to live that the police are - thankfully? - very inexperienced in dealing with murder cases, which is probably - no, undoubtedly! - the reason why they usually take so many botched steps, and why they so often take really quite silly diversions and apply such strange significance to the oddest things, during the process of their investigations.

However, it's most usually those very botched steps and strange significances that cause most all of these HK murders to become so very very absorbing and such a reason for all the talk.

I wasn't here for the "Hello Kitty" murder investigation several years ago, but it was so bizarre I followed the story: a young girl found in pieces in a box with her head stuffed inside a "Hello Kitty" doll; a fact which caused the police to go overboard with very silly theories about what it meant.

I didn't know HK then and so, in my innocence, thought "Any decent profiler on their force would tell them that anything over the face means that the killer knew the victim and felt a great deal of remorse and guilt, so they need to look close to home." and reasoned that if the police knew that and were discounting it - and making a big deal out of that stuffed toy - that they had to be right and the toy was indeed important!

It wasn't!  As that decent profiler would have told them, the killer/s would see the dead girls face and, in horrified remorse, grab the nearest thing to hand and since HK girls love "Hello Kitty" and so many collect these soft toys and other paraphernalia, what this toy represented really had no significance whatsoever.

At least that's what the profiler would have said if HK had profilers.  They don't!  In fact, they aren't really set up for murder investigations.  And since they really do such a sincerely good job of making HK a safe place for all of us, I really do feel desperately sorry for them in this latest Lamma Drama because they know the world is watching them and know that they're not coming over very well, so let's all get behind them.

And yes, I know, their most frequent response to these sorts of crimes is to arrest the nearest 'hakgwei', and, sure, that seems to be what's happened here, however we do need to keep in mind that sometimes those 'hakgwei' really are guilty!  And, from everything I've heard that I'm not talking about in here, I do think that's the case in our latest desperately tragic murder on Hong Kong's gentle, low-key, away-from-the-rat-race, very-nod-to-the-1960s Flower-Power, "Peace, Love and let's all be Hippies" Lamma Island!

But to choose a threatdown for this week?

THREATDOWN

Resisting the urge: