Supreme Court upholds 27.5-year jail sentence for woman over murder

Taipei, Oct. 7 (CNA) Taiwan's Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal by a Taichung woman found guilty of murdering her boyfriend over five years ago, upholding the sentence of 27 years and six months in prison she received from a lower court.

The verdict against the woman surnamed Tsai (蔡), who is in her 30s, was final and cannot be appealed, it said.

Tsai was first indicted for the murder of her boyfriend, surnamed Chen (陳), and other offenses in March 2023, and the Taichung District Court found Tsai guilty and sentenced her in March 2024.

It gave her an 18-year jail sentence for murder, five years for abandoning a corpse, three years for communication equipment theft, and two years for document forgery, and she ended up with a combined sentence of 27.5 years.

Tsai appealed the case to the Taiwan High Court in July, but her appeal was rejected, and the Supreme Court upheld the lower court's decision Monday and the case was closed.

According to court documents, Tsai met Chen in 2013, and they later began living together in a rented apartment in Taichung's Shengang District.

During their relationship, she frequently borrowed sums of between NT$100,000 (US$3,105) and NT$170,000 from Chen, who asked her to sign a promissory note each time a loan was made.

Money matters as well as other issues soon became a source of tension between the two, the documents said.

She eventually came to owe him about NT$1.57 million.

On March 4, 2019, Tsai hit Chen with a sharp, heavy object multiple times, killing him, and then stashed his dead body in a huge plastic barrel and filled it with concrete.

To prevent the stench of the dead body from arousing attention, the barrel was stored in a vacant warehouse that Tsai had rented, also in Shengang, the documents said.

After committing the crime, the woman forged Chen's name on a document related to the settlement of her debt and used his phone after his death to message his daughter, who was convinced for a time that her father was in hiding because he owed other people money.

Chen's body was found more than three years later on Oct. 26, 2022, after members of the public discovered the barrel by accident.

Tsai was subsequently arrested that same year and detained by prosecutors as a primary suspect before being indicted on several charges.