Police are investigating an apparent suicide pact following the discovery of four bodies in Tainan’s Yenshui District (鹽水) on Wednesday.
Officials from the Tainan District Prosecutors’ Office on Thursday examined the bodies of the three males and one female university student, as well as their belongings, after preliminary findings indicated they committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning by burning charcoal in an enclosed room.
Tainan Sinying Precinct Police Chief Chang Jung-hsin (張榮興) said that after the examination of the bodies and evidence, forensic pathologists yesterday performed autopsies to verify the cause of the death and determine whether there was any possibility of foul play.
Chang said police identified the four bodies as a 25-year-old man surnamed Wu (吳), his 22-year-old girlfriend surnamed Liu (劉), a cousin of Wu’s surnamed Kuo (郭), 31, and a friend of Kuo’s, a 35-year-old man.
“Although the bodies were swollen, their clothing had not been tampered with, they displayed no signs of trauma and it appeared that no foul play was involved,” Chang said.
They left suicide notes, which mentioned that the three men were embroiled in a dispute over debt which had led to them being sued, but that it was all due to a misunderstanding and they had had to borrow money from relatives and friends for living expenses for the past year, Chang said.
Chang said Liu left a note in which she apologized to her mother for her action and said she chose to commit suicide with her boyfriend because she could not bear him going to jail.
The two were found tied by a red string in reference to the Chinese “red string of fate” lovers’ suicide mythology.
Police investigators said it was likely the men decided to die together because of the lawsuit, and because they could not pay their debts and felt life was not worth living, while Liu decided to die alongside her boyfriend.
However, Liu’s parents believed their daughter had no reason to die and that she was “brainwashed” by the men, and had asked police to investigate further.
Local residents said the men had displayed some emotional disturbance at a temple during Taoist religious ceremonies, where certain rituals call for worshipers to be possessed by forces from the spiritual realm, resulting in agitated body motions and speaking in strange voices, and that they suspected this might have contributed to their deaths.
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