Man charged with murdering his mother tells court how he disposed of weapon and body

BY KEITH FRASER, THE PROVINCE OCTOBER 22, 2015

A man who admits he beat his mother to death with a hammer on Thursday described how he threw the weapon and a suitcase containing the body into the Fraser River.

A man who admits he beat his mother to death with a hammer described Thursday how he threw the weapon and a suitcase containing the body into the Fraser River.

Yuan Xi Tang, 28, has pleaded not guilty to the June 2012 first-degree murder of Lianjie Guo, 47, in a Richmond rooming house.

A jury was shown video of Tang confessing to the killing, admitting to undercover police officers that he planned to murder his mother, who he believed was too controlling and had destroyed his life.

On Wednesday, Tang testified he had used a hammer to strike his mother over the head but insisted it was not a planned attack.

He said he stuffed her body into a suitcase and placed the suitcase in a storage locker, along with the hammer in a school bag.

On Thursday, he testified that at first he didn’t know what to do with the body and did some Internet research on how to dispose of bodies, but determined the methods were too “brutal” for him to try.

Then he recalled there was a river near No. 2 Road in Richmond and that the river would lead out to the sea, he testified Thursday.

In the early morning hours of June 8, 2012, he collected the suitcase and the hammer and drove to the No. 2 Road bridge, which crosses the middle arm of the Fraser River.

He parked in a nearby parking lot and walked with the bag containing the hammer to the middle of the bridge, he said.

“I took the opportunity when there were no cars passing to throw the school bag with the hammer, with great force, into the middle of the river,” he told a B.C. Supreme Court jury.

Tang said he decided not to throw the suitcase containing the body off the bridge because it might raise suspicion.

Instead, he carried the suitcase underneath the bridge, walked into the river and released the suitcase.

“I saw the suitcase being carried away by the water and drifting into the river.”

Tang’s mother and his father were visiting him from China at the time of the slaying.

After he killed his mother, Tang told his dad she was missing and contacted the police.

Several months later, RCMP launched an undercover operation aimed at wringing a confession out of Tang.

Posing as gangsters trying to extort money from him, the cops showed him photos of a suitcase containing a body that Tang believed was his mother.

Tang said he was “very shocked” when he was shown the photos.

“I thought the gangsters were trying to use my mother’s body to threaten me.”

He said he felt his personal safety was threatened but became calmer when they told him they wanted $20,000.

Tang — who in the surveillance video appears relaxed, even laughing at times with the undercover cops — said he didn’t feel he had any option other than to confess to the crime to the officers.

He said he felt “uncomfortable” when the cops laughed while discussing violence and laughed along with them in order to “match up” with them.

“For me this matter was entirely tragic and they were treating it as if it was a game. Their mindset, they were playing around.”

Though he told the cops several times that he had planned to kill his mother, on Thursday he insisted he was lying to them. He described the undercover cops as being “cold-blooded.”

“The fact is that I didn’t plan to kill my mother.”