Nantou prosecutors announced yesterday that they had detained a Chiayi County man who confessed to the murder of a Chiayi woman, but they suspect he may have also killed five of his relatives to gain NT$22 million in life insurance payouts.
The Nantou District Court yesterday approved prosecutors' request to detain Chen Jui-chin (
Around 10pm Thursday night, Nantou Prosecutor Wang Jeh-tuo (王捷拓) led a team of police officers to arrest Chen at the Chiayi Christian Hospital, where he had been hospitalized after being severely beaten -- reportedly by some people he owned money to.
Wang said yesterday that Chen Jui-chin had admitted to police that he choked Chen Yi-ling to death and abandoned her body on May 11 after quarreling with her about his financial problems as they were on their way to Shanlinshi.
"We had discovered that Chen Yi-ling made a lot of phone calls to Chen Jui-chin on the day she was killed," Wang said.
"The license plate number of Chen Jui-chin's SUV -- 3M-5283 -- was recorded by security cameras installed at the corner of Chishan and Tzuchiang roads in Chushan township near where Chen Yi-ling's body was discovered," Wang said. "That's how we knew he was the man we wanted."
Wang said Chen Jui-chin had confessed to the crime after he was arrested and that is why the court had approved the detention request right away.
But now prosecutors and police in Nantou and Chiayi counties want to know more about Chen Jui-chin's past.
Wang said his office had discovered that five of Chen's relatives, including his son, had died in what appears to be an unusual string of accidents within a 13-year period.
Wang said Chen Jui-chin apparently bought life insurance policies for each of the five without telling them and that he was the beneficiary of all of the policies.
Wang said that Chen's first wife, Tseng Bi-hsia (
According to Wang, in 1988, Chen Jui-chin's 15-year-old stepson, Chen Yi-chi (陳一志) -- the son of his second wife Wang Shu-ying
(
Chen Jui-chin had reportedly purchased policies on his stepson from five insurance companies.
Wang said that in 1995, Chen Jui-chin's own son, Chen Chien-hung (
The prosecutor said Wang Shu-ying then died in a car accident in 1996 and that a third wife's son -- Chen Tsung-ching (
Prosecutors say Chen Jui-chin has not been able to explain the coincidence of all these people dying shortly after he had taken out insurance policies on them.
"Nantou and Chiayi prosecutors as well as police officers from Nantou, Chiayi and the Criminal Investigation Bureau are now re-investigating these five deaths," Wang said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,