Abandoned little girl and body in boot of car

Nai Yin Xue. Photo / Paul Estcourt

The sight of little Qian Xue standing alone, abandoned at a busy Melbourne railway station by her father who left her and walked away without even a backwards glance was a scene that shocked most New Zealanders.

So too was the one outside her family's Mt Roskill, Auckland, home where the body of her mother, An An Liu, lay in the boot of her husband's car for days undiscovered by police who hadn't opened it because they didn't have a search warrant.

Her husband, and the girl's father, Nai Yin Xue became one of New Zealand's best known fugitives.

A Chinese-language newspaper publisher by day and a martial arts expert by night, he fled to the United States and stayed under the radar for months until he was caught by a group of Asian Americans who recognised him from media reports.

They seized him, tied him up and called police. He was extradited to New Zealand, setting the scene for one of the country's most high-profile murder trials.

Xue continued to deny strangling his wife. But his tie, carrying his DNA, was found knotted around her neck in the boot of his car.

And within hours of her death he fled the country, leaving Qian in Melbourne and catching a flight to the States. He was desperate to leave Australia, telling the travel agent he would go anywhere and pointing at several faraway destinations.

At the trial, evidence about Xue's character - his mood swings and jealousy in particular - was presented to the jury.

He'd threatened his wife before and was convicted of domestic violence a year before she died after he punched her in the head and menaced her with a knife.

That incident caused her to move to a women's shelter and eventually to Wellington. Xue is said to have broken into the building where she was staying, creeping around in the dark as he looked for her armed with an axe.

With the prosecution case over, the defence was able to outline what it said happened to An An Liu.

It wouldn't be enough to simply deny involvement. So Xue accused his wife of extramarital sex and through his lawyer Chris Comeskey suggested her death could have been the result of a bizarre sexual act gone wrong.

The suggestion was An An Liu died as a result of auto-erotic asphyxiation and her body was dumped by her terrified lover in Xue's car to frame him or to dispose of the body quickly.

The all-female jury didn't take long to reject this story, finding him guilty of murder.