Filipina DH in HK Killed Boss in ‘Psychotic’ Attack

A schizophrenic Filipino domestic helper chopped her employer, a senior civil servant, to death – severing her spine and exposing her internal organs – because she believed the woman had “taken her body and soul”.

Maria Jestle Guarin San Jose, 37, told police after the attack that a neighbour had hypnotised her and told her that victim Kei Yin-lam, 47, was a witch.

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She was arrested by a team of officers who broke into the flat after a security guard heard screaming and saw bloody fingerprints on the door.

Senior prosecutor Isaac Tam Sze-lok told the Court of First Instance that the maid believed the neighbour had stolen her brain.

She said people whom she called “they” had “told her to get at the deceased’s heart, because the deceased had wanted [her] body and soul”, and that the neighbour had told her to chop Kei in the back because that was where the heart was located.

San Jose, described by one psychiatrist as “floridly psychotic” at the time of attack, pleaded not guilty to murder, but guilty to manslaughter, on the basis of diminished responsibility. She was sent to a psychiatric centre for an unspecified term.

The former helper admitted that she had killed Kei, an Architectural Services Department senior project manager, early on June 11 last year at her flat in Illumination Terrace, Happy Valley.

Kei lived alone and San Jose had worked for her for several months before the attack.

San Jose was believed to have developed schizophrenia suddenly a month before the attack. She inflicted multiple wounds to Kei’s arms, fingers, torso, buttocks, and thighs. Police found the employer with no vital signs, covered in blood, with her vertebral column completely transected and pieces of her internal organs lying around her body.

A security guard had gone to the apartment after receiving a noise complaint from a neighbour and heard screaming. Because he saw bloody fingerprints on the door, he called the police, who monitored the unlit flat from an opposite building before breaking in wearing body armour.

San Jose had wrapped the weapon in white trousers, saying “they” had instructed her to do so.

” ‘They’ told her not to put it in black trousers as that may awaken the bad spirit or soul of the deceased,” Tam said, recounting what San Jose had told police.

There appeared to be no hard evidence of any maltreatment by Kei. San Jose told police that her employer was sometimes good to her and sometimes angry about the food she prepared, Tam said.

One psychiatrist said San Jose was mentally ill as early as two months before the attack, and that she was having delusions and hallucinations during the killing, including that Kei was trying to kill her, the prosecutor said. The doctor had no doubt that the accused was “grossly mentally disturbed”.

Mr Justice Peter Line told San Jose: “The attack was ferocious and reflected that at the time you were mentally ill.”

Although some psychiatrists suggested fixed terms of one to six years for the hospital order, the judge noted San Jose’s symptoms had persisted since the attack, her prognosis was uncertain, and that it was impossible for the court to say when she would be fit for release. With an unspecified period in the hospital order, San Jose’s release could come up for review by the Mental Health Tribunal, the judge said.

Barrister Paul Loughran said San Jose had been so overcome by the power of her schizophrenia that she was not herself.

It was unclear whether the death a year earlier of San Jose’s husband – whom she had married in 1999 in the Philippines and with whom she had two sons, aged seven and nine – was connected to the attack, he said. Details of her illness were also not clear.

The United Filipinos in Hong Kong said it had received no complaints from San Jose about ill-treatment. Vice-chairwoman Sol Pillas said it was the first case she had seen of a domestic helper killing an employer in her 25 years of living in Hong Kong, and that she did not know of any other such cases in the city. She said she has seen many Filipino domestic helpers become stressed by the pressure of work, even to a point bordering on psychiatric illness, although her organisation had not seen any diagnosed cases.

Source: SCMP

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