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When authorities pulled the body of a man out of New York City’s East River it began a chilling mystery.
The individual was discovered wearing pajamas, with a cloth belt secured around his neck, and enclosed in three large laundry bags, according to the show The Death Investigator with Barbara Butcher, which airs on Saturdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Oxygen.
“Right from the start, this appears to be a homicide,” Butcher commented on the murder that took place in November 2000, during the October 4 episode. “Judging by the state in which he was discovered and what we observe externally, it seems obvious.”
Detectives learn The Leung family is missing
Butcher, who was a forensic scientist with the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office at the time, hypothesized that the victim, due to the body’s condition, was likely killed by ligature strangulation days prior and had begun decomposing before being discarded into the river.
“I figured he had been in the water one day, maybe two,” she explained. “He can’t get this decomposed in the river, it’s too cold.”
With no identification on the body, detectives faced significant challenges as they attempted to identify the victim using fingerprints and clothing brand, but to no avail.
The breakthrough came when Teresa Leung contacted the NYPD’s missing persons division to report her parents, Stephen and Chilin Leung, and her teenage sister Connie as missing, leading to the first major break in the case. Teresa identified the river victim as her father through his garments.
Search begins for Chilin and Connie Leung
With one of the missing family members now accounted for the race was on to find Chilin and Connie.
NYPD homicide Sgt. Bill Cannon expressed concern: “We’re very worried because the victim’s wife and daughter are missing and might possibly be subjected to something even more dire.”
The detectives set out to learn all they could about the Leung family. At the time of Stephen’s death, he had been working as a waiter at the Meridian Hotel, while his wife Chilin worked at a Chinese restaurant. Both parents, who migrated from Hong Kong in the 1970s to give their children more opportunities, worked long hours and were often away from their Spanish Harlem apartment.
Connie, 17, was a bright student attending the Manhattan Center for Science and Math and hoped to one day become a doctor.
The Leungs’ 19-year-old son Fred also lived at the apartment, but he told police he hadn’t seen his family in days. According to his account, he last saw his sister Connie a few days earlier when she told him that their dad was busy working overtime and their mom had taken a babysitting job.
According to Cannon, Fred never filed a missing persons report because “he had no reason to think that they were missing.”
Connie Leung is found at YMCA
The case took a surprising turn when detectives tracked Connie down at a local YMCA, where she was staying with her older boyfriend Eric Louissant.
Connie initially told detectives that her mother and father were working overtime and she hadn’t seen them. She claimed that she was staying at the YMCA because her parents didn’t approve of her relationship with Louissant.
NYPD Homicide Detective John Flannery said the couple claimed “they were just gonna run away so that they could keep their relationship going.”
But back at the station, after the pair were placed into separate interrogation rooms, a much darker story began to emerge.
Who Killed Stephen and Chilin Leung?
Connie explained that despite her parents’ disapproval of the relationship, when Louissant lost his housing, she allowed him to secretly stay in her room in a bed she’d set up hidden underneath her own bed.
As Dr. Julie Cao, a clinical psychologist, explained of the forbidden romance: “To her Eric represented happiness and love and attention and when the parents forbid the relationship, to her, that was devastating.”
The covert arrangement unexpectedly fell apart, however, on the morning of Nov. 2, 2000. While Connie was at school meeting her a guidance counselor, Stephen came home and discovered his daughter’s suitor inside her bedroom and, according to Flannery, “got very upset.”
Eric waited outside for Connie to come home and together the two decided how they wanted to handle the problem. While they initially thought about running away to Japan so Louissant could attend “ninja school,” they realized Louissant didn’t have a passport and decided to kill Connie’s parents instead.
Stephen came home from work that night around 6 p.m. and went to his room to put on his pajamas. He was relaxing in a recliner when Eric put a towel on his head and fought him to the floor, authorities said.
“Eric was saying that he was fighting back hard. And that he needed me,” Connie told investigators as she stoically confessed to the murder. “And I panicked and didn’t know what to do. And he told me to hold him down. So I just sat on my dad’s back.”
Eric put Stephen in a headlock until he passed out, then tied a belt around his neck.
According to Flannery, “Once it was done they took the body and they put it on the side of the bed where you couldn’t see if you walked into the room.”
Then they waited for Chilin to come home and Louissant attacked her, once again using a towel to gain control of her.
Eric told investigators that Chilin “fought more than” Stephen did and he needed Connie’s help to finish strangling her to death.
Then the pair placed her body behind the bed with Stephen’s. They left the bodies there for days, once even being “intimate” on the bed next to the bodies.
Butcher described the move as “cold blooded.”
Four days later, on Nov. 6, 2000, the couple stuffed Chilin’s body into a disposable shopping cart and took it to the river around 3 a.m., where they dumped it into the water. The next night they made the same trek to the water with Stephen’s body.
Connie and Louissant were both arrested and later pled guilty to two counts of second-degree murder. Each received a 30-year sentence behind bars for the killings.
