Fang Sun appears at Manukau District Court in February 2021, charged with Elizabeth Zhong's murder. Photo / Alex Burton
Fang Sun appears at Manukau District Court in February 2021, charged with Elizabeth Zhong's murder. Photo / Alex Burton
Twelve months before the grisly discovery of Elizabeth Zhong's body in the boot of her own vehicle, the Auckland businesswoman had confided to one of her closest friends that she wanted to get a gun so she could "struggle till the end" if business partner Fang Sun tried to kill her.
"She said that...he wanted to kill her," Wendy Wu testified through a Mandarin interpreter today at Sun's murder trial. "She said she would not be afraid.
"She said, 'I won't give up. I'm not afraid of death.' She said if Fang Sun were to come into the house to kill her, since she had a gun she would be able to protect herself."
Police interviewed Wu as a referee for the gun licence on November 24, 2019 but Zhong didn't end up pursuing it, prosecutors said.
Auckland businesswoman Elizabeth Zhong, 55, was found dead in November 2020. Photo / Supplied
Authorities allege the defendant broke into Zhong's east Auckland home on the night of 27 November 2020 and stabbed her over 20 times in her bedroom - furious about more than $25 million in financial losses to him and his family that he blamed her for.
The 55-year-old's body was discovered by police the following afternoon wrapped in a blanket in the boot of her blood-smeared Land Rover, which was parked in the same Sunnyhills neighbourhood where both she and Sun lived.
Wu appeared shaken, wiping away tears, as prosecutors played for her three short cellphone video clips that seemed to be surreptitiously filmed while she and Zhong dined at a Panmure noodle restaurant six days before her friend's death.
The defendant had hired a private investigator to follow Zhong for months, sometimes filming her and sending Sun the videos, prosecutors have previously explained.
Wu, a real estate agent who met Zhong and her then-husband through work when they bought their Sunnyhills home in 2016, described the mounting stress on her friend in the final years of her life as her marriage dissolved and her multiple businesses started to fail.
Police and forensics examine the home of Elizabeth Zhong in east Auckland suburb Sunnyhills after the discovery of her body in a vehicle parked nearby. Photo / Sylvie Whinray
Amid the "devastating" financial setbacks were Zhong's requests for loans, including a $25,000 payment from Wu's daughter in 2018 that Wu said was never repaid and a $100,000 loan from Zhong's own daughter.
"She was very moved and also very sad [by the loan offer], because she knew that at the time [Wu's daughter] was still a student," the witness recalled of her friend, who she would always refer to as Elder Sister Zhong. "This amount of money had been weighing on her heart a long time."
From 2019, some of Zhong's businesses began going into liquidation, including a winery on Waiheke and one in Otago. When Kennedy Point Vineyard was sold by the bank, Zhong told her friend she lost $500,000. Her Epsom-based company Digipost, meanwhile, lost $3 million during the first lockdown and was also sold off to repay bank debt, Wu said she learned from her friend.
"She was sad," Wu recalled. "At that time she was under heavy pressure."
Wu broke into tears as she recalled the aftermath of an October 30, 2020 hearing in which Zhong was declared bankrupt.
"I received a WeChat [message] from her lawyer asking me to visit Elder Sister Zhong because she was in a very poor mental state," she said, explaining that she spent the night at Zhong's house but had to leave the next day for work, followed by her brother-in-law's 50th birthday party.
She returned to Zhong's home around 9 or 10pm that night and found her friend unresponsive in her bedroom.
Fang Sun is on trial for murder in the High Court at Auckland. Photo / Michael Craig
"She couldn't wake up. I was so scared. I did not know what to do," she said.
"I stayed in hospital overnight. During the whole month we were worried that she might commit suicide again. We did not allow her to drive a car or anything else, but she just kept saying that she was very well."
It was after the sale of the Otago vineyard that Zhong told Wu she was no longer friends with the defendant, who had once been so close to Zhong that he lived in her home.
She also described how Zhong's business ventures contributed to the end of her marriage. Wu recalled accompanying Zhong to a police station in November 2017 to obtain a trespass notice against her husband.
"I asked her what had gone wrong," Wu said, explaining that Zhong described a fight with husband Frank Fu. "Frank did not trust her business. She did not want Frank to be involved in any of her businesses."
Wu is set to continue testifying tomorrow. Fu is expected to take the witness stand later in the trial.
