'Puppet master' double murders: Axe killer guilty of odd revenge plots

Jurors took three hours today to find an Auckland man guilty of murdering a soon-to-be-pensioner couple in a bizarre revenge plot home invasion, as well as an unrealised plot to kill his landlord over similarly minor grievances.

Prosecutors had described Lok Fung Lorrence Li, 29, as the mastermind behind the November 2023 killings of North Shore Hospital surgical suite nurse Fuk-Fu Joseph Kwok, 66, and his wife, 67-year-old Mei Han Chong.

Co-defendant Shu Man Poon, 45, pleaded guilty to both plots at the start of the pair’s short-lived first trial last year, but prosecutors said Li had the motive and a critical piece of information: court documents revealing the couple’s Ellerslie address.

“Were it not for Mr Li, these two men would never have gone to the Kwoks’ address at all,” Crown Solicitor Alysha McClintock told jurors during her closing address last week in the High Court at Auckland. “Mr Li was the manipulator, the architect, the puppet master of these events.”

The prosecutor’s line was catchy enough that defence lawyer Paul Dacre, KC, repurposed it for his closing, tweaking it only to insist Poon was the manipulator, architect and puppet master.

“Why did he do it? He was there to fulfil a twisted and perverted fantasy,” Dacre said of Poon, who had met Li at a North Shore church months earlier. “That is the only proper conclusion you can reach on the evidence.”

Jurors, however, disagreed.

Both men were arrested on murder charges in November 2023, after the couple’s physician son discovered a horror scene inside his parents’ home. Kwok had been repeatedly shot in the forehead with an air pistol, his head stomped on and there were multiple stab-like wounds to his torso and neck. Poon, who gave evidence against Li, said both men took turns inflicting the wounds with a tomahawk he had bought online two months earlier.

Chong’s body was found days later, dumped in a bush area in Greenhithe after she died from blunt force head trauma – the result, Poon said, of Li repeatedly stomping on her. Poon told jurors they intended to dump both bodies but could only manage to lift Chong, who weighed 55kg.

Detective Inspector Scott Beard (left) and Crown prosecutor Matthew Nathan visit the scene in Greenhithe, Auckland, where Mei Han Chong’s body was found in November 2023. Photo / Hayden Woodward

Police would later find on Li’s phone a photo of a handwritten list appearing to describe places to discard a dismembered body.

“Body: Greenhithe,” the list read in part.

The photo was taken five days before the couple were killed.

But Dacre said Poon was 15 years older than his client, considering himself a “big brother” while Li was seen as an “apprentice”. Dacre described the other defendant’s testimony over four days during the month-long trial as fanciful and insulting to jurors’ intelligence.

Poon was a “shaky foundation” on which the Crown based its case, he argued, describing the former co-defendant as “neither credible nor reliable”.

“Mr Kwok was murdered by Mr Poon, using a tomahawk he had purchased, which he had sharpened, which he kept in his cupboard, which he put in his backpack, which he took to the Kwok household, smuggling it without anybody else knowing, and using it on Mr Kwok,” the defence lawyer said.

“This was a fantasy that started with Mr Poon’s fascination with being a hero, with being a kung fu expert, with being a person who is admired and respected. He set out to prove he wasn’t inadequate... He set out to prove he was somebody.”

Shu Poon (left) and Lok Li were each charged with two counts of murder and one count of conspiracy to murder. Photos / Michael Craig

But while prosecutors argued the evidence clearly showed Li was the leader, in the end that detail didn’t matter. As long as both men were aware of a plan to kill and assisted or encouraged each other, both were guilty of murder regardless of who was in charge or who inflicted the fatal blows, McClintock said.

Jurors didn’t need to be sure the pair had a premeditated plan to kill, although messages obtained from their phones seemed to confirm Poon’s evidence that they did. Even if Li only intended to rob the couple, both men were guilty of murder if either intended to cause serious injury knowing the victims might die, prosecutors said.

One scenario jurors were not asked to consider was manslaughter, even though Li started his trial by telling jurors he was “not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter”. In discussions outside the jury’s presence, after it was made clear Li did not intend to testify on his own behalf, prosecutors argued there had been no evidential foundation for jurors to consider any charge other than murder.

Justice Jane Anderson agreed. She mentioned Li’s manslaughter comment in her summing up on Friday but only to instruct jurors with purposeful vagueness that it was a matter for her to consider, not them.

McClintock started her closing address by replaying CCTV for jurors of Li limping as he returned to his apartment on the morning of the double murder. He injured his ankle stomping on the couple’s heads and considered filing a fraudulent slip-and-fall ACC claim, Poon had said.

A tomahawk used in the killing of an Ellerslie couple inside their Auckland home is displayed for jurors behind a glass case in the High Court at Auckland. Photo / Craig Kapitan

The prosecutor then directed jurors to messages between the two in which Poon appeared to have cold feet about an initial plan to rob and kill Li’s former landlord. Li had formed a grudge, prosecutors said, because the landlord wouldn’t let his mother share his single boarding house bedroom with him. Poon went along with the plan, he told jurors, because he owed Li $7000 for an online shopping spree that included the tomahawk, night-vision goggles and a coffee machine.

“You have to know that what we do has significant meaning,” Li told his friend in the recovered messages, emphasising that people looked down on Poon as incompetent even in their church.

But if he took initiative, Li suggested, Poon could buy a house, “drive a sports car to your old church and show them how impressive you are”, and maybe open a “chicken shop” as they had dreamed. Poon later explained to jurors that “chicken shop” was Cantonese slang for a brothel.

“You need to know this bitch deserved it,” Li concluded.

McClintock said it was a telling exchange.

“That message takes you directly inside Mr Li’s mind,” she said.

Mei Han Chong and husband Fuk-Fu Joseph Kwok were murdered inside their Ellerslie, Auckland home by armed intruders in November 2023. Lok Li and Shu Man Poon were later charged with the double-homicide. Photo / NZ Police

It wasn’t the only time Poon harboured second thoughts. Two months before the killings, he went to church pastors and confessed the plan to target the landlord. The pastors took him to a police station, where he again confessed at a front counter before having a mental health episode – possibly a panic attack – and leaving for the hospital.

Poon’s report to police was never investigated.

Detective Inspector Scott Beard told jurors this month that he requested an internal investigation into why the report was not followed up until after the Kwoks’ murders. The process for taking reports has since been changed to minimise the chance of something like that happening again, he said.

The initial plot to target the landlord included hiding a tracking device on her car to find out where she lived, jurors were told. CCTV showed the accused pair lurking outside her house in the middle of the night, wearing black and with their faces covered, in early November 2023. They went on to her property and spray-painted over the lens of her security camera but got spooked and did not follow through.

Then, prosecutors said, Li’s plan took a sudden “pivot” when he received an email from the Disputes Tribunal with Joseph Kwok’s home address, even though Kwok had asked that it not be disclosed.

Li met Kwok only briefly, just over 10 months earlier, after a minor traffic accident on the Southern Motorway. Kwok’s insurance had found Li at fault and filed the Disputes Tribunal case on his behalf, seeking about $4500 in compensation.

A photo taken on Decemebr 31, 2022, shows Lok Li after a minor accident on Auckland's Southern Motorway. The picture would later be provided to jurors at Li's double murder trial.

“It was murder over the most benign of things”, but it was relatively easy to transfer the “ready-made” revenge plan for Li’s landlord to the Kwok household, McClintock said.

After Kwok and his wife were killed, there didn’t appear to be “a shred of panic or surprise in Mr Li”, as one might expect if Poon had killed the couple without consulting him, McClintock said. Instead of panicking and fleeing, the pair stayed inside the house for two and a half hours, cleaning it extensively.

“These two men are just going about executing their plan in an almost clinical and business-like manner – simply carrying it out,” McClintock argued.

“It’s hard to believe, reading the messages beforehand, that this was serious. However, it’s all there.

“It was a warped plan. It seemed like a fantasy. But they took steps towards it with [the landlord] and, most importantly, they carried it out with the Kwoks.

“The driver of all of this was Mr Li and his animosity. It was Mr Li who was the aggrieved... He never expresses a single solitary doubt about any of this... Mr Li was no innocent dupe. He was the puppet master.”

Crown Solicitor Alysha McClintock. Photo / Michael Craig

Justice Anderson set a sentencing date for December.

Poon was sentenced last year to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 19 years before he can begin to apply for parole. However, he is appealing the sentence – a fact, the defence argued, that should cause jurors to treat his testimony with suspicion.

Justice David Johnstone set a 24-year starting point at Poon’s hearing but allowed discounts for his guilty pleas, the assistance to police and his remorse.

“It does appear Mr Li took advantage of your intellectual and emotional insecurities,” the judge told Poon. “But without a weak person like yourself to offer him physical and moral support, it’s much less likely Mr and Mrs Kwok would have been killed.”

The majority of Poon’s sentencing has been suppressed until now to protect Li’s right to a fair trial. The suppression included a victim impact statement delivered by the couple’s only child.

“They were taken from me violently – without mercy, without a reason,” Dr Ricky Kwok said through tears as Poon also wept. “He desecrated them.”

Dr Ricky Kowk (centre) with parents Mei Han Chong and Fuk-Fu Joseph Kwok.

His father, he said, was “left like garbage, stripped of dignity, a grotesque spectacle” while his mother was “discarded as though her life meant nothing”.

“The grief I carry is constant, but it’s not just grief,” he said. “It’s trauma. It’s infiltrated every part of my being.

“Everything ordinary and beautiful has been poisoned by the actions this man took.”

Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.