A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel
Page 21
Gu Kailai would probably never have imagined that she would one day stand on the other side of the law and experience firsthand the “efficiency” of China’s legal system.
Her murder trial took place on August 9, 2012, when most of the world was preoccupied with the summer Olympic Games in London. The proceedings, carefully choreographed like the Olympic opening ceremony, lasted seven hours and the majority of the people I interviewed were not even aware of the trial. They were fixated on an exciting sports milestone. On that day, the country rejoiced at a history-making victory. With the three–nil win over South Korea in the men’s team final, China snatched all four ping-pong titles, repeating its results from Beijing four years earlier. The win pushed up China’s gold-medal count to thirty-six, two more than that of the US.
The timing of Gu Kailai’s trial had other political considerations. It happened a week before an important conference in Beidaihe, a summer resort outside Beijing, where senior leaders would discuss succession plans for the upcoming 18th Party Congress. A guilty verdict against Gu Kailai could effectively justify the ouster of her husband, Bo Xilai.
The government moved the venue of the trial from Bo’s home base of Chongqing, the scene of the alleged murder, to Hefei in the eastern province of Anhui so the trial could be free from the interference of local government officials. More important, the venue carried a symbolic meaning for ordinary Chinese—Hefei was home to Bao Zheng, a legendary judge in China’s Song Dynasty nearly 1,000 years ago. Legend has it that Bao Zheng possessed an imperial sword granted by the emperor and whenever he displayed it in court, the accused, regardless of their social and political classes, had to bow to its imperial power. With the sword, Bao Zheng could execute any royals who committed crimes without worrying about retaliation. Throughout his life, Bao Zheng had made a name for his uncompromising stance against corruption and he has become synonymous with fairness and justice.
However, the symbolic meanings of Bao Zheng were lost on journalists who covered the trial, which began at about half past eight in the morning. Hefei was battered by torrential rain and wind from a typhoon that had hit the southeast coast the previous day. A Chinese journalist friend who traveled to Hefei said the city had deployed nearly 5,000 police wearing black raincoats over their dark, short-sleeved uniforms. Police blocked all the streets near the courthouse, hustling away a few pro-Bo protesters who identified themselves as residents of Dalian and shouted “Long Live Chairman Mao.”
“Those forbidding, dark figures of police in the heavy rain and the secret trial proceedings reminded me of the mafia,” quipped my friend. In Chinese, “mafia” is translated as “black society.”
The mafia reference could not be more fitting. The so-called open trial was attended by only 140 selected government officials, delegates of the Municipal People’s Congress, a few relatives, two diplomats from the British Embassy, and seven state media representatives. No recording devices or pens were allowed inside the courtroom. Outside, several dozen Chinese and foreign journalists as well as other observers were “enduring the pounding rain, under the watchful eye of a roughly equal number of police, some in uniforms and many more in plainclothes pretending to be ordinary passersby,” said Keith Richburg of the Washington Post.
A month before the trial, Gu Kailai’s ninety-year-old mother, who had lived in Chongqing for the past few years, returned to Beijing and tried to rescue her daughter and son-in-law. She hired two high-flying lawyers who had represented disgraced senior officials in corruption cases, but authorities forbade out-of-town lawyers from interfering in the case and declined the request. Instead the court appointed “through meticulous selection” two local lawyers: Jiang Min, chairman of the Hefei Bar Association, and Zhou Yuhao, chairman of the Bar Association in Wuhu, a city near Hefei.
Given the complexities of the case and the tremendous amount of media attention, many expected that the Chinese government would take the case seriously or at least attempt to honor due process for the watching international community. Instead the trial was over in one day. No witnesses were called, so there was no cross-examination. “What is being anticipated as ‘the murder trial of the century’ is, more precisely, shaping up to be the opposite of a trial,” wrote Evan Osnos for a New Yorker article titled “The Non-Trial of the Century.”
At seven o’clock that night, the public was given some trial details in a brief report on Central China Television during the prime-time evening news. Footage showed Gu Kailai strutting into the courtroom, with her head high and a slight smile on her face, a uniformed policewoman on either side. She wasn’t handcuffed. Dressed in a white shirt and black business suit, she acted as if she were a lawyer there to defend a client, rather than standing trial for murder. Having seen photo after photo of her splashed across the Internet—one of her in a bright red Hawaiian shirt strolling next to her husband in what looked to be Honolulu, another in a dark suit, ominous and brooding at her father-in-law’s funeral, many observers, including me, were surprised. The once-glamorous thin face with high cheekbones had filled out and the formerly svelte figure was nowhere to be seen. “Sister Gu looked like she just came back from a vacation,” one netizen teased. “The food must be really good in jail.”
Gu Kailai’s weight gain triggered widespread speculation that it was not her in the court but a double. One Chinese blogger carefully compared Gu Kailai’s image on TV with previous pictures and listed twenty physical differences, including her eyes, cheekbones, ears, teeth, and even her accent to illustrate that the woman in the courtroom was a fake. Another blogger posted an “exclusive,” saying Gu Kailai’s double was actually a forty-six-year-old worker named Zhao, who lived outside Beijing. The double was said to have been discovered by the wife of Premier Wen Jiabao, who had paid the woman a large sum of money. The real Gu Kailai, said the blogger, was still in police custody in Beijing.
Those who actually knew Gu Kailai ignored such fabrications, and a Chinese-American psychiatrist told me her weight gain was probably due to the medication she was taking for her depression.
A few hours after the trial ended, Zhao Xiangcha, one of the observers, e-mailed several overseas media organizations his account of the trial after his initial posting on the Internet in China was deleted by government censors. Zhao said his notes were compiled from memory because his pencil was confiscated before he entered the courtroom. Details in his account were corroborated by two other observers and have been incorporated in the previous chapter. The next day, Xinhua news agency issued an official version of the court proceedings, omitting many details laid out in Zhao Xiangcha’s version.
“The government faces a dilemma in Gu Kailai’s trial,” said a legal scholar in Beijing. “If senior officials allow the court to give out too many investigation details relating to the Heywood murder and Bo family corruption, they run the risk of implicating more people in power and generating more public outcry. However, when the court details are too sketchy, people don’t believe in the verdict.”
Even so, Zhao Xiangcha, who attended the trial, remarked at the end of his observation:
I feel that the entire courtroom adjudication process was fairly objective and just. There was a slight feeling that things had been rehearsed beforehand. But that didn’t affect the ultimate defining of the case. The facts were really clear and the evidence was copious. The prosecutor didn’t bully people and the defense lawyers did everything they could. The written testimonies were just and unbiased. To convict these two is absolutely just. In the final statements of the accused, they both admitted guilt and showed relatively sincere repentance. I felt this genuinely came from the heart; there was no trace of acting or of their having been compelled.
But Zhao also noted that he had overheard the sigh of a lawyer, who had originally been hired by Gu Kailai’s mother to defend her daughter. The lawyer complained that the defense attorneys were not allowed to do their jobs properly.
LEGAL EXPERTS ASK: DID GU KAILAI KILL NEIL HEYWO
OD?
DESPITE THE GOVERNMENT’s meticulous efforts to convince the public at the trial that the cases of Gu Kailai and Wang Lijun were criminal in nature, rather than politically motivated, the lack of due process and transparency failed to change the minds of skeptics.
Gao Guanjun, a US-based attorney who graduated from the Southeast University of Politics and Law in Sichuan, specializes in criminal investigations. He taught the subject for several years at the Chinese People’s Public Security University in Beijing. I consulted him about the Gu Kailai trial and interviewed four journalists and legal experts. After combing through the official indictments against Gu Kailai, we have found a dozen important legal issues, which might have resulted in either a dismissal of charges or an acquittal if the defense had been allowed to address them properly.
1. Gu Kailai had been officially diagnosed by court-designated medical experts as suffering from bipolar disorder and moderate schizophrenia. People close to the Bo Xilai family told the overseas Chinese media in April that she suffered from anxiety, paranoia, and depression after the “lead poisoning incident” and that the doctor had prescribed medication for her deteriorating mental condition. Gu sometimes refused to take the medicine due to its debilitating side effects. Moreover, on October 4, 2011, she walked into a conference on how writers should promote the “Smashing Black” campaign in Chongqing wearing a major general insignia that belonged to her father. “First she said that she was under secret orders from the Ministry of Public Security to effectively protect Comrade Wang Lijun’s personal safety in Chongqing,” a source told Reuters. “It was a mess. She was incoherent and I reached the conclusion that she would be trouble.” At Gu’s trial, the defense also brought up the issue of her mental illness. The forensic examination institute under the Shanghai Mental Health Center had given Gu a psychiatric evaluation and concluded that she had been treated for chronic insomnia, anxiety, depression, and paranoia in the past:
She used to take anxiolytics, antidepressants, and sedative hypnotic drugs, and she also received combined treatment by taking antipsychotic drugs, but the curative effect was not enduring. She developed a certain degree of physical and psychological dependence on sedative hypnotic drugs, which resulted in mental disorders.
Because the indictment is largely based on her confession and in the absence of any corroborating witness accounts, one has to wonder how reliable her memory was, especially relating to the criminal process. Did her mental illness affect criminal intent or capacity?
2. The motivation was not clear. The prosecution stated that Gu Kailai hatched the plot to kill Heywood when she learned that he had detained her son in Britain. Evidence shown to the court only included e-mail exchanges between Heywood and Bo Guagua. However, Guo Weiguo, the deputy police chief in Chongqing who had been briefed on the threats by Gu Kailai (before Heywood’s death), examined all the e-mails and said in his testimony that he did not detect any serious threats made on Bo Guagua’s life.
3. The indictment said Gu Kailai had illegally obtained the poison from local drug dealers, but no proof was offered that she actually did so. Who were the drug dealers? With the government’s tight control over highly toxic materials, where did they get the poison? The indictment failed to clarify such critical issues. According to a police officer in Chongqing, the former district party chief, Xia Zeliang, provided Gu with rat poison he had obtained from a private pest control source. Under normal circumstances rat poison contains cyanide but only a tiny amount—not enough to kill a person. If such questions surrounding the murder tools are unclear, how reliable was the rest of the investigative work?
4. Did Heywood die of natural causes? Gu Kailai admitted getting Heywood drunk and then giving him tea laced with cyanide. However, the initial forensic report displayed no primary signs of cyanide poisoning. A CT scan performed on the victim’s body before it was cremated and an initial blood test found no traces of cyanide. All the tests, according to Wang Lijun’s testimony, were conducted prior to police knowledge of Gu Kailai’s involvement and should be considered objective.
5. From Gu Kailai’s description, Heywood’s death seemed to have occurred peacefully. He rested his head against the headboard while Gu Kailai fed him poisoned tea. Attorney Gao Guanjun did not believe it was cyanide poison, which normally causes a violent physical reaction—struggling for air, spasms, and incontinence. Because Heywood had a family history of cardiovascular disease and he was not a heavy drinker, could it be possible that he died naturally of a heart attack induced by a bout of atypical excessive drinking?
6. Was Heywood really dead before Gu Kailai left the room? The indictment stated that Gu felt for Heywood’s pulse and there was no blood pressure. She was not sure if Heywood was dead or not. By then, Heywood lay in bed, his head resting against the headboard. When the police discovered Heywood’s body two days later, however, he was lying flat on the bed, and the mattress showed signs of having been rolled on. Considering this evidence, Heywood was probably not killed by cyanide, which tends to kill quickly, or there was not sufficient poison to kill him right away.
7. According to the defense, strangers’ footprints were found on the balcony, left between the time Gu Kailai committed the murder and police discovered Heywood’s body, but there were no signs of a break-in. Wang Lijun confessed in his testimony that he had installed bugging devices in Heywood’s room. Why did the court not investigate where the footprints came from and to whom they belonged?
8. The prosecution said Wang Lijun took a second blood sample secretly from Heywood’s body before it was cremated (the first blood sample showed no traces of cyanide) and ordered his staff member to transfer the sample to Beijing and hide it in a friend’s refrigerator. Four months later, tests on the second blood sample showed cyanide, but this time in an exact amount needed to kill a person. There is no chain of custody to prove the integrity of this second sample.
9. One assumes that as an experienced lawyer, Gu Kailai would have taken a class on criminal investigation, a mandatory course for law students in China. Gu Kailai seemed to act like someone who had no education in this area, let alone legal training. Based on the indictment, Gu Kailai did not wear gloves and left her fingerprints on the water cup and bottle caps. In addition, Gu Kailai spread drug capsules on the floor. With her criminal training, how could she not know cyanide or drugs would be detected in blood tests?
10. During Gu Kailai’s trial, the prosecution claimed to have collected 394 witness testimonies and 212 written statements, but there was no direct participation or cross-examination of key witnesses throughout the trial, not even Wang Lijun, the Chongqing police chief, who was asked to cover up the crime and later revealed all after visiting the US Consulate in Chengdu. Gu’s son, Bo Guagua, was also considered a key witness. According to CNN, Bo Guagua had submitted a copy of his written testimony to the court, but there is nothing to confirm it was actually accepted.
11. The Chinese government assigned Gu Kailai two defense lawyers a month before the trial. The lawyers, who have been said to have delivered as good a defense as was possible under the circumstances, met Gu Kailai only ten times and had to review 1,468 pages of documents within a short time. Moreover, Gu’s lawyers were not even given the chance to question key witnesses during the trial. Even so, the defense identified several discrepancies in the investigation and raised questions regarding Gu’s mental competence and the final conclusions surrounding Heywood’s death. But the court did not deliberate on any of the issues presented by Gu’s lawyers. Lastly, Gu repeatedly called Wang Lijun an “insidious” man and discredited his accusations. Many saw it as an indication that Gu felt the murder charges had been forced on her. The court ignored her statements. Obviously, Gu’s guilty verdict had been predetermined. The presence of the defense lawyers was largely symbolic.
12. Throughout the trial, there was no mention of Bo Xilai, who was the husband of the accused and the boss of police officers charged with covering up the murder. Did he pa
rticipate? Did he know in advance what was going to happen? Did he order the police to cover up for his wife? Murdering a foreign citizen is normally considered a serious offense because of the likelihood it can explode into an international incident. Therefore, it is inconceivable that Wang Lijun, the police chief, and other investigators did not notify Bo Xilai of the incident until January 28, 2012. As the mayor in Dalian and the party chief of Chongqing, Bo Xilai was known as a hands-on manager, controlling every decision made by his administration that could affect his political future. Story has it that he would even supervise the repair of a leaky bathroom pipe that he had accidentally encountered one night. It would seem preposterous that he did not suspect anything.
Six weeks after the Gu Kailai trial, Wang Xuemei, a top forensic expert in China, brought up similar issues about what she called “glaring inconsistencies” in the theory that the British businessman was killed from cyanide poisoning. Wang rose to fame as the first female forensic scientist to sit on China’s highest prosecution body, and her frequent television appearances have made her a household name. In her blog, she said the account of the murder accepted by the Chinese justice system was “seriously lacking in fact and scientific basis.”
From the secret recording of Gu’s confession to the murder and the court testimony provided by Gu and her assistant Zhang, Wang Xuemei said there was no indication that the perpetrators witnessed a death that “involved the characteristics of cyanide poisoning.” According to Wang Xuemei, the symptoms normally include scream reflex that would have occurred during “lightning-fast” suffocation, convulsions that would have been apparent as the cyanide reached Heywood’s central nervous system, stupor that would have followed, and eventual cardiopulmonary arrest just prior to his death.