In May 1999, a police station in Hong Kong received a strange and gruesome report from a 13-year-old girl.

She claimed that she, her boyfriend and two of his friends had held a woman captive in their Granville Road flat in the Kowloon district and tortured her for weeks, until she died of her injuries.

The police doubted the girl’s story since she said she was reporting the crime because the victim’s spirit was haunting her dreams.

It seemed more logical to them that the girl was making up stories to get attention or was mentally ill. She was also known to associate with triad members, one of whom was her boyfriend.

However, to rule out her story, several officers were despatched to the third-floor flat to check the alleged crime scene. Upon entering the flat, they were hit by the distinct stench of rotting flesh.

Ironically, the flat was filled with innocent-looking Hello Kitty merchandise. But police were horrified to find a human skull stuffed inside a giant Hello Kitty mermaid doll.

The skull belonged to Fan Man-yee, whose brief life of 23 years was cut short by this group of depraved monsters.

Even before her cruel end, Fan led a life that was fraught with misery. She was abandoned as a child and turned to drugs in her teenage years. One thing led to another and for a time she worked as a prostitute.

When she turned 23, she tried to change her life for the better and worked as a club hostess, though she was still battling addiction.

In 1996, she found some respite in marriage and the birth of her son. But the marriage soured when her drug-addicted husband began to abuse her.

Sometime in 1997, she encountered Chan Man-lok, a pimp and drug dealer. Desperate for money, she stole a wallet containing HK$4,000 from Chan.

He demanded compensation and, fearing for her life, she returned the money with an additional HK$10,000 as “interest”. Chan was far from satisfied and he demanded an additional HK$16,000, which Fan was unable to pay.

With two other men, Chan kidnapped Fan from her home, with the intention to force her into prostitution to earn the money he had supposedly lost.

But Chan and his goons started torturing Fan as punishment instead. His 13-year-old girlfriend not only witnessed but participated in the atrocities committed against Fan.

In one instance, Chan kicked and stomped on Fan about 50 times and the girl joined in, later telling police, “I had a feeling it was for fun.”

Fan was not only beaten and kicked, the group also forced her to drink their urine and eat the girl’s faeces.

Chan and his friends burnt Fan with melting straws and dripped boiling plastic onto her skin. His girlfriend later admitted to pouring chilli oil onto these burns as well as in her eyes, causing even more horrendous pain.

Hanging Fan from the ceiling with wire, the gangsters bludgeoned her with metal pipes and wooden blocks until her bones broke and her head was bloodied.

After a month of unimaginable torment, Fan died in April, but her ordeal was not over yet.

As idiotic as they were monstrous, the group tried to convince themselves she had died of a drug overdose, even though they were the ones who were high on drugs most of the time.

They placed her broken body in a bathtub and dismembered it with a saw. In an attempt to prevent the tell-tale smell of decomposition, they cooked the body parts, apparently on the stove next to the pot where they cooked their food, allegedly using the same utensils in both pots.

After boiling Fan’s remains, they dumped most in the garbage but they kept Fan’s skull as a trophy. The skull, along with a bag of rotting internal organs and a single tooth, were found in that flat.

Chan and his partners were arrested for their heinous crimes, and the teenage girlfriend was granted legal immunity in return for her cooperation with the investigation.

Throughout the trial, Chan’s posse denied killing her, though they admitted to preventing Fan from receiving a lawful burial. They turned on each other, each trying to suggest they had had the least to do with Fan’s death while blaming one another.

Given the absence of a body to determine how Fan had died, the jury could not find the three guilty of murder, instead convicting them of manslaughter. They were sentenced to life in prison with a possibility of parole in 2020.

Because of the suffering that took place there, the building was eventually abandoned by the residents, some of whom claimed Fan still haunted the place.

The building was bought by an investor in 2012 and demolished to wipe away the dark stain of its evil history.