On the same day that Hong Kong police detectives discovered the butchered remains of Abby Choi, February 24, 2023, they publicly accused her ex-husband, his father, and his older brother of having murdered the 28-year-old fashion influencer and mother of four. It was purported to be part of a twisted plot to gain control of her fortune, which included a $9.3 million apartment where some of them lived.
Choi was reported missing on the night of February 21, 2023, by her second husband, Chris Tam, and Choi’s mother, Cheung Yin-fa, several hours after she was last seen getting into a white Toyota minivan driven by her former brother-in-law, Anthony Kwong, who was working as her chauffeur. Parts of Choi’s body, including her skull and her ribs, were found three days later in a house in a remote village, cooked into a soup along with radishes and carrots. Her legs were stuffed inside a refrigerator.
More than two years after Choi’s murder, the case remains a flash point in the city, and sometimes the subject of morbid humor. This week, the Ocean Park amusement park on Hong Kong Island caused an uproar when its Halloween Fest attractions included a haunted house with a kitchen, where a ghoulishly costumed actor lifted a fake head out of a pot and asked visitors, “Would you like a carrot soup?”
Two trials stemming from the murder case this year have raised even more questions about Alex Kwong, Choi’s ex-husband. He had been a wanted man and had evaded incarceration since he was first arrested, in February 2015, for gold and jewelry thefts—targeting men he approached using a dating app—that happened while he was married to Choi and they were starting a family together.
The Hong Kong courts heard that Kwong skipped bail that summer and fled to the neighboring Guangdong province of China, where he effectively started a new life working for a catering business and as a property agent. Meanwhile, Choi re-married, into a wealthy family, and established a beachhead in Hong Kong society, posting glamorous images of herself at the couture shows in Paris and partying around the world. She had two children with Kwong, whom she began dating at 16, and two with Tam, whose father and uncles created the now ubiquitous TamJai Yunnan Mixian rice-noodle-soup restaurant chain in the 1990s.
But Kwong didn’t remain out of their lives for long. In fact, it seems he misled Choi into believing that the charges had been resolved. He met her, along with the couple’s two children and Choi’s mother, in Hainan several times. He also returned to visit them in Hong Kong on numerous occasions, at least since 2019, without ever triggering scrutiny. And yet prosecutors noted that there are no records of Kwong entering the city through legal channels since 2015, making it likely that he was getting help somewhere. Anyone familiar with Hong Kong’s rich history of gangster films could speculate about how this could have been done—smuggling by boat through international waters, bribing someone in the customs process, using falsified documents.
On September 30, a district-court judge convicted Kwong’s mother, Jenny Li, of obstruction, for having hidden her son’s whereabouts for years when the police came looking for him, and for urging him to leave Hong Kong again once they began their investigation into Choi’s disappearance.
During the strange trial of Kwong’s mother, in which she and Choi’s mother traded accusations over the care and living expenses of Choi’s older children, the focus on Kwong’s earlier crimes and his escape from punishment for so many years seemed to reflect a pattern in his family of expecting impunity for their misdeeds that would extend all the way to the events of Choi’s murder.
Cheung, wearing a Chanel brooch and sequined black tweed jacket, testified that Kwong once told her that the earlier charges had been “dealt with” by his father, Kwong Kau, a retired police sergeant who is now accused of orchestrating the murder plot.
Although it was not mentioned in court, it has been widely reported in the Hong Kong media that the senior Kwong left the force in 2005 under a cloud of suspicion “after allegedly being involved in a rape case,” as the Hong Kong newspaper The Standard noted. Apparently, he was never charged.
Kwong’s mother, who said in court that she had broken away from her husband about a decade ago, was also accused of having called Choi’s mother several times on February 23, 2023, two days after Choi’s disappearance, pleading with her not to answer any questions about Alex Kwong if the police asked about him. Cheung and Kwong’s relationship had been described as mostly amicable until a dispute between the families emerged over the ownership of the luxury apartment, which Cheung said was purchased only a few years earlier using funds given to the Kwong family by her daughter. Li had been living in the apartment since then with Choi’s older two children and was paid a monthly salary of about $6,400 to look after them.
Recordings from surveillance cameras Choi had installed inside the kitchen and living room, which were played in court, showed that Alex Kwong had been staying there as well for at least 10 days before the murder took place, and had dinner in the apartment with Li, Choi, and the two children on February 15.
Li claimed that she had no knowledge that her son was a fugitive, but she is heard in the recordings telling Cheung that she refused to allow the police inside the apartment during the investigation for fear they would find Kwong’s belongings. “It’s because I have a skeleton in the closet,” Li said, as translated in the South China Morning Post. “You know what happened to Alex.”
Cheung testified she took that to mean Li “was telling me to keep mum” about Kwong’s gold thefts, although the police had already connected the two cases by then.
News reports of the earlier crimes resurfaced only a few days after Choi’s murder. At a press conference on the night of his arrest in 2015, when he was 20, detectives at the Wong Tai Sin police station said Kwong had targeted at least seven men he had met through online forums or the dating app over a period of 18 months, each time using a slightly different alias, and persuaded them to hand over a total of more than $800,000 worth of gold items that he promised to later try to resell when the market rebounded. He then ghosted them.
While the police continued to search for Kwong after he absconded from Hong Kong that year, how he traveled across the border repeatedly remains a mystery. At the time he was arrested again, on February 25, 2023, he was heading to the Tung Chung Development Pier while allegedly trying to flee the city by speedboat. In addition to $64,000 and several watches worth about $500,000 in his possession, he was carrying his older brother’s passport and mainland-China driver’s license, leading to speculation that he might have been using them to pass for Anthony Kwong.
In a separate trial earlier this year, two other defendants were convicted for their efforts to help Kwong escape, though they claimed they had not known the identity of the man who approached them through a friend seeking an urgent “boat-to-boat” transfer to Macau at the time. Irene Pun, who creates food-related social-media content, and Henry Lam Shun, a yacht-rental agent, were found guilty of a joint charge of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and sentenced to six months in jail. Pun remains free while her case is on appeal.
After finally pleading guilty to the outstanding theft charges in June 2024, Alex Kwong was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for those crimes, including a six-month penalty for his earlier flight from justice. He, Anthony Kwong, and Kwong Kau remain in custody while still awaiting trial in the High Court of Hong Kong on the charges of Abby Choi’s murder and preventing the lawful burial of her body.
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, the sordid tale continues to captivate—although the haunted-house display on Hong Kong Island has since been altered for taste.
Eric Wilson is a veteran fashion reporter currently based in Hong Kong. He was previously editorial director of Tatler Asia Group, fashion-news director at InStyle, and a reporter at The New York Times and WWD
