Tingjun Cao denied murdering Christchurch real estate agent Yanfei Bao. Photos / NZME
Tingjun Cao denied murdering Christchurch real estate agent Yanfei Bao. Photos / NZME
Christchurch real estate agent Yanfei Bao went missing in July last year.
Her body was found in a shallow grave on a farm outside the city just over a year later.
A high-profile trial ended at the High Court yesterday with a jury finding Tingjun Cao guilty.
A former inmate says a fellow prisoner coughed up how he killed Yanfei Bao one day in the prison yard. It was a graphic, cold-blooded confession that prompted other inmates to try to get the shy, retiring Chinese national to reveal where he had dumped herbody. Kurt Bayer reports.
The shrill foreign voice bounced around the concrete tomb-like walls. Tingjun Cao was making a scene. Prison guards rushed to the one-man cell.
Like most things behind bars, nothing escaped the attention of the other inmates. And, as ever, it was them against the screws. They came to the defence of Cao who seemed to simply want a change of clothes. They started braying, yelling for the Corrections officers to back off.
“We were shouting, ‘Leave him alone’. We were all behind him,” recalls former Christchurch Men’s Prison inmate Steve*.
Police alleged that Cao – who had pleaded not guilty and would fight his case in court, and ultimately fail – had met her at a house she was selling in the suburb of Hornby, attacked her with a knife, and dumped her body in a shallow grave on a farm outside of the city.
Until the ruckus at the cell, Steve didn’t know who Cao was. But after that incident, he slowly got to know him.
“I’m a friendly person and so I spoke to him, even though he didn’t speak English. It was hard to communicate with him. But over time, you get a rapport,” says Steve who has since rejoined the community.
The pair started chatting – using a lot of sign language. Cao revealed why he was inside. Given the collegiate prison environment, the inmates generally felt they were in the same situation and supported each other – an “us against them” situation.
“I would jokingly say to him, ‘F*** them, they don’t have nothing on you’, so we got talking and he ended up bringing his disclosure [legal documents] out into the yard with him. Then I saw what they [the police] had on him.”
Tingjun Cao was arrested at Christchurch International Airport where police say he was trying to flee the country. Photo / Supplied
He specifically recalls information about a partial palm print – allegedly identified by an experienced fingerprint specialist as belonging to Cao – found on the battery inside Bao’s cellphone.
Her phone was found by police, snapped in half and discarded on the city’s Southern Motorway roadside near Blakes Rd the day after she vanished after a tip-off by a local resident who saw a “dirty four-door silver sedan” which would match Cao’s silver Mitsubishi being used strangely in the area on the night of July 19.
Tingjun Cao's car. Photo / Supplied
The former inmate says paperwork he saw showed Cao being interrogated by police twice over the partial palm print, asked to explain how it possibly got there. He claims that the paperwork shows Cao answering differently on each occasion.
“It might have been a language barrier, but it didn’t look good for him. I thought: ‘You’re sunk, mate’,” Steve says.
The Crown would later agree, calling the overwhelming evidence against Cao an “absolute slam dunk”, despite Cao’s claims that much of the case against him had been fabricated or false. Cao would also claim he was mistaken for a mystery “Mr Tang” character and that he had nothing to do with Bao’s vanishing.
Yanfei Bao's discarded and damaged phone which was found on a roadside the day after she disappeared. Photo / Supplied
One day, Steve vividly recalls that Cao – who had a single cell to himself – came into the prison yard holding a piece of paper. Written by hand, it had two dates from July last year.
The inmate says Cao tapped his finger on the first date and gestured putting a tourniquet around his left arm and “motioning injecting down by his wrist ... like he’s drugged her or knocked her out ... fainting or going unconscious”.
“He came out with it all on his own,” the former inmate says.
The body of Yanfei Bao (inset) was eventually found in a shallow grave on the outskirts of Christchurch. Photo / Joe Allison
He then allegedly pointed at the next date on the piece of paper – the following day – and made a throat-slitting gesture, the inmate claims. However, he wasn’t sure whether Cao meant a general “he killed her that day” gesture or whether he killed her by cutting her throat.
The dates related to when Bao went missing on July 19 last year – not to be seen for more than a year, until police finally discovered her remains.
After that incident with the dates on the paper, the inmate says he knew Cao had murdered the real estate agent.
“It was like, ‘Oh shit, okay he did it. So where is the body?’ After that, our whole thing was trying to get him to tell us where she was.”
Tingjun Cao at an early court appearance after being charged with murdering Yanfei Bao. Photo / George Heard
The inmate said there were 10-15 others in the yard who knew about the incident with the dates on the paper, and word soon spread throughout the rest of the prison population.
But Cao – who never offered an explanation of what happened that day, although the Crown suggested there could have been a “sexual element” to his brutal offending after finding a graphic photograph on his phone allegedly of Bao bloodied and naked from the waist down – wouldn’t say where he buried his victim.
“Either he didn’t understand us or else he played the ‘don’t understand’ card well. But we were like, ‘He’s f***ing done’,” Steve said.
“It ended up being a kangaroo court in the yard.”
However, Cao wasn’t given much of a hard time by other prisoners, he said.
“You’ve got to realise the environment that we’re all in. Anybody who’s done anything bad is going to have their fans in there. He was sort of safe in a way. In amongst an environment like that, he wasn’t a threat.”
But there were many who felt that Cao – who he described as being quiet, reserved and kept to himself behind bars – needed to front up for what he had done.
“We were like, ‘You did it, you just have to get on with it’,” Steve says.
However, he wasn’t surprised when Cao pleaded not guilty and took his case to court – where he often acted frustrated in the courtroom, speaking loudly in Mandarin, waving around documents and arguing with his lawyers who he would ultimately sack mid-trial.
A lot of inmates were telling him to fight the charge and that the police had nothing on him, but much of it was prison talk and “humour or sarcasm”, Steve said.
“Whether it was the language barrier again or what, I don’t know. Maybe he was always going to fight it. But we were all just trying to get out of him: Where’s the body?”
Steve says he watched news coverage of Cao’s trial at the High Court in Christchurch with a particularly vested interest.
And he would not have been surprised when the jury of six men and six women today took just 97 minutes to come back with a unanimous verdict of guilty.
Cao now faces a life sentence behind bars.
*Steve is not the former inmate’s real name. The Herald agreed not to publish his true identity.
