Sat, Aug 17, 2002 page2

• Ten months later, woman is still waiting for justice

  • By David Frazier / STAFF REPORTER
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  It took eight years for police to apprehend Huang Chi-feng (黃啟峰), the suspected killer of primary school teacher Wu Hsiao-hui (吳曉蕙), but had they not blundered the investigation of another rape he had allegedly committed nearly a year ago, they would have caught him sooner.

  The woman Huang allegedly raped last year, a 24-year-old Canadian whose identity police reports confirm but whose name will not be disclosed in order to protect her privacy, now wonders why Taiwan's legal system has ignored her case, why she had to read about Huang's fate by reading about it in news-papers, and how many other women Huang attacked while the police did nothing.

  "If they're talking now about protecting women under the law, they have to look at who's doing the protecting. It's supposed to be the police, but they didn't protect me," she said.

  "This guy [Huang] did something to me that was real hard to get over, and the police made it worse."

  Brutal assault

  It is only since Huang was apprehended for Wu's murder 10 days ago that the woman finally learned what became of the man who she says brutally beat and strangled her, who held her down, ripped her clothes off and violated her with his hands, and who would have forced intercourse had he not been stopped.

  Though she says, "I'm a strong woman, and I can get on with my life," it disturbs her that the police have done nothing to investigate the crime, and she fears that many other female rape victims have had similar experiences -- possibly some of them at the hands of Huang.

  "My case is important because it shows he's not a one-time offender," she said.

  "He didn't know me and he wanted to kill me," and then she paused before continuing, "How many times has this happened to some poor Taiwanese girl?"

  In the early hours of Sunday, Oct. 14, the woman said she met Huang and four of his friends at the Taipei nightclub Texound. The group invited her back to an apartment for what she thought was a party at which others would be present.

  When she arrived, she said she found herself the only woman among the four men. It was about 4am, and when she became uncomfortable and asked to leave, Huang asked to speak to her privately in another room.

  "I had been drinking, and I really wasn't thinking. As soon as I got in there he pushed me down and I started screaming. He was tearing at my clothes and I was screaming, screaming, screaming," she said.

  She described the scene in the room as follows: "He's punching me, and strangling me, and when he's strangling me I'm passing out. He does it about four or five times, and I pass out and wake up and start screaming again. And all the time he's telling me he's gonna kill me. He's saying it in English: `I'm gonna kill you! I'm gonna kill you! Shut the fuck up! I'm gonna kill you!'"

  Soon after Huang began raping the woman, one of the four men in a second room entered and said something briefly in Taiwanese, then left. The woman believes it was about 10 or 20 minutes before he returned. At this point, "Huang had his pants down and was about to ... " But the second man pulled Huang away from her, told her to get her clothes together, then took her out of the apartment and gave her a ride to a corner near her home on his scooter.

  The second man apologized to her, saying, "He's always like this when he's drunk." He also scribbled a name and cellphone number on a business card and handed it to her.

  Deaf ears

  A few hours later the woman, with bruises on her face and neck and still deeply distressed, handed that business card to officers at the Chungcheng First Precinct and told them her story. They sent her to National Taiwan University Hospital for an examination, and when she returned, they told her she would have to call back the man who had dropped her off and arrange to meet him on her own and, if possible, return to the apartment.

  The purpose was to determine the crime scene's location. The woman had only been living in Taipei for eight months, spoke little Chinese, and could not remember the apartment's address. But she was also physically and psychologically traumatized and feared going back.

  In the end she did, because the police refused to act otherwise. A male friend, an American, accompanied her to meet Huang's cohort, who returned some money she'd "dropped" but he refused to reveal the apartment's address. The American friend held him at the location by taking away his motorcycle keys, and the woman ran to a nearby police station at the corner of Chungshan N Road and Chang-an W Road.

  There she found an officer playing solitaire on a computer. Over the phone, she put him in touch with her case officer at the Chungcheng station, but in the end, he "just waved me off with his hand, then went back to playing solitaire."

  That night she called her parents in Canada. "I was so upset and didn't know what to do, so I just called them and I was bawling and bawling."

  They contacted her uncle, a high-ranking official in Canadian law enforcement, who sent inquiries back to Taiwan through the Canadian Trade Office and other channels.

  Two days later the police called the woman, asking her to come to the station.

  This time they seemed interested in her case, took extensive statements and kept introducing her to a man they referred to as "the chief."

  Sudden change

  "It's almost like suddenly they're offering me foot massages and coffee," she said.

  They had apprehended the five men present at the crime scene, all of whom she identified. It was then that she learned the man who had allegedly raped her was named Huang Chi-feng.

  And that was the last she ever heard of her case. She has returned to the Chungcheng First Precinct a few times, "but it was always the exact same thing: `You have to wait for the prosecutor to call you.'"

  According to the Shihlin District Prosecutor's Office her case is still pending, but no prosecutor has called.

  It is now almost 10 months after the crime.

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