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On a June night in 1996, in a basement apartment in Boston’s Chinatown, a killer put a pistol to the back of a young man’s head and pulled the trigger. The victim’s body was wrapped in quilts, lowered into the trunk of a car and driven about 20 miles southwest of the city, where it was dumped in the woods. It lay undiscovered through two New England winters until a dog walked home carrying a human bone.
For three decades, authorities did not release the victim’s name to the public. He is listed in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) as #UP12385, one of 202 unidentified people recorded in the state of Massachusetts. The circumstances of his discovery are reduced to five words: “Skeletal remains found in woods.” The case remains unsolved.
Bellingcat spent more than a year investigating in an effort to put a name to the victim. Using open sources, including freedom-of-information requests and newspaper archives, as well as interviews with investigators who worked on the case, we pieced together the story of the man’s life and death in an era before the internet kept a digital record. In total, we submitted 27 public records requests to 18 local, state and federal law enforcement agencies. We also contacted more than two dozen investigators, prosecutors, crime victims, journalists, experts and community groups connected to the case, though most said they did not recall the 30-year-old murder.
We learned that authorities identified the victim as Fu Chun Wang, a 26-year-old undocumented Chinese immigrant who did not speak English. We also learned of a sweeping investigation into Chinese organised crime in New England in the late 1990s. Authorities suspected Wang was a member of the Fukienese Flying Dragons, a gang the FBI described at the time as a “violent offshoot” of the larger Flying Dragons crime ring.
Based in New York’s Chinatown, the Fukienese Flying Dragons were active across much of the East Coast. The gang trafficked migrants, extorted and robbed businesses, kidnapped for ransom and murdered rivals. Authorities believed Wang belonged to the Boston faction of the group, which was suspected of carrying out home invasions targeting Asian and Asian-American restaurant owners and staff across New England in 1996.
Heavily redacted FBI documents and correspondence between local and state authorities show that a federal operation investigating the home invasions uncovered information about Wang’s murder and other crimes. The operation, whose name is redacted, was led by the US Attorney for the District of New Hampshire.
Authorities suspected that the Boston-based members of the Fukienese Flying Dragons were also involved in prostitution, illegal gambling and kidnappings in multiple states. Investigators examined possible ties between the gang and a suspect in one of Boston’s deadliest mass killings: the 1991 Chinatown Massacre.
According to these newly released files, investigators received information that Wang had been murdered by members of his own gang shortly after Boston Police arrested and charged him for using credit cards stolen in one of the home invasions. While some gang members were identified as suspects and investigated, none were ever charged and convicted for the murder.
A Dog with a Bone
On April 10, 1998, a resident in Sharon, an affluent suburb southwest of Boston, called the police. Their black Labrador retriever had returned from the woods carrying a large bone. Four days later, testing by the coroner’s office in Boston determined it was a human femur likely belonging to an adult male. Police searched the woods, where a detective uncovered more bones near a bundle of quilts. Inside, they found a decomposed skeleton.
A coroner ruled that the victim was a man in his twenties or thirties who was possibly Asian or Native American. He had long black hair with blonde streaks. There were at least two overlapping bullet holes in the back of his skull. Local media reported at the time that the victim had been shot “execution style”. A single, corroded .380 calibre shell casing was found inside the quilt. The victim was wearing a green-and-white striped rugby shirt, denim jeans and white leather sneakers on the night he died. Loose change, a pocket knife and a tarnished set of keys were found nearby on the forest floor.
A botanist from Harvard University determined the body had likely been in the woods for at least 18 months. Experts from The Smithsonian Institution told police that forensic facial reconstruction would be “of questionable value” due to the damage caused by the gunshot injuries.
Before his murder, open source records of Wang’s life amounted to a few scattered data points: interactions with authorities, apartment rentals, a loan application and a hospitalisation following a car accident.
Police reports after his death show investigators pieced together a patchy collection of biographical data. He was from a family of five in Dongshan, a village in the southeastern Chinese province of Fujian, and was likely born into poverty. During his autopsy, it was noted that his teeth showed signs he had been “undernourished” as a child. He moved to the US to work in the restaurant industry and eventually joined a gang.
Wang migrated at a time when thousands of Fujianese were arriving in the US every month in search of a better life. Like many migrants at the time, he entered the country without documentation. By 1994, when Wang met with immigration authorities in Boston, he gave his address as an apartment on East Broadway in New York’s Chinatown. Two years later, he was issued an employment authorisation card. Boston Police would learn from the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) that Wang had been granted political asylum.
Search results on Ancestry.com suggest that prior to living in Massachusetts, Wang had also lived in Virginia and Vermont. Records from the Sharon Police Department corroborate these findings. In Virginia, police learned that he worked in restaurants and had applied for a loan to buy a car, a 1994 green Mitsubishi Mirage.
In Vermont, Wang worked at a Chinese restaurant called Men-at-Wok until he was injured in a car accident in May 1996. After he was reported missing a month later, his car sat unclaimed in an auto body shop in Vermont until a bank sought to reclaim it.
Unclaimed checking and savings accounts at Fleet National Bank are listed under Wang’s name and the Quincy address in the Massachusetts unclaimed property database. The amount of money in these accounts is not publicly available, but the presence of unclaimed funds in his name, along with his abandoned car, are some of the many indicators that he met with foul play.
‘We’ll Kill Your Family’
In the summer of 1996, Chinese restaurant owners and their staff in suburban Boston and New Hampshire were terrorised by a wave of violent home invasions and robberies. Police described the suspects as “an organised group of Asian individuals”.
The modus operandi was often the same. In the early morning hours, young men barged into rooming houses while Chinese restaurant workers slept. Sometimes they robbed the business owners’ homes. Armed with guns and knives, the intruders tied up their victims before stealing cash and valuables. One woman who was attacked at knifepoint told police an assailant threatened: “Shut up or I will kill you”. In another case, a victim was stabbed.
The assailants were described as young men or teenagers. In several cases, victims reported that they spoke Fuzhou, also known as Foochow, a language originating from eastern Fujian Province.
Jim Keating, a retired Sharon Police detective, told Bellingcat that many Asian gang extortions and robberies in the Boston area at the time were not reported. “They were all afraid of these guys, because they said, ‘We’ll come back and we’ll kill your family.’ And they would.”
In the span of a few months in 1996, similar robberies occurred in the Massachusetts towns of Bedford and Westborough, as well as Malden, a city about 10 kilometres north of Boston. These were followed by home invasions in the bordering state of New Hampshire, in Wolfeboro, Merrimack, Lebanon and Manchester. It is unclear if the home invasions and robberies were connected, but Bellingcat’s review of historic newspaper clippings and newly released police documents suggest that at least one other gang may have been responsible for some of the crimes.
In response to the crime spree, local, state and federal law enforcement agencies coordinated investigative efforts. Bellingcat obtained files detailing a federal operation led by the US Attorney for the District of New Hampshire. It included agents from the FBI, INS, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Customs Service, Border Patrol and Royal Canadian Mounted Police, along with officers from state, county, and local law enforcement agencies in New England.
Ben Leong, a retired Boston Police detective, said Asian gangs committing robberies, extortion and home invasions against restaurant owners and their staff were common in the 1990s. He said many of these crimes went unreported for cultural reasons, over fears of gang retaliation, and because victims did not trust law enforcement.
“Back then there were many factions of gangs,” he said. “The gang members were recruited throughout the country, nationally and internationally. Law enforcement was always playing catch up to identify the prevalent groups, and the individual members and leaders committing illegal activity.”
Leong, who is president of the International Organisation of Asian Crime Investigators and Specialists (IOACIS), said authorities had a better understanding of gang culture in Boston by around 1996 when local, state and federal agencies began sharing information.
Murdered in Chinatown
On June 10, 1996, one day after a home invasion in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, Boston police were called to a Macy’s department store when a man tried to use credit cards stolen in the robbery to buy jewellery and electronics. He was arrested and booked on charges of receiving stolen property. The man was Fu Chun Wang.
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In Sharon Police records, Wang was described as “very depressed” and “possibly suicidal”. He told a Boston Police detective that he urgently needed to send $1,000 to his family in China. Other records said his father was ill and needed money. Files found on Judyrecords.com, a free database that purports to include more than 770 million US court case records, show that Wang was arraigned and a court appointed a defence attorney to him. He was bailed out after pleading not guilty.
Less than two weeks later, on June 21, Wang was reported missing to the Quincy Police Department in Massachusetts. The police report said Wang was last seen in Boston’s Chinatown on June 13, two days after he left jail. Police records indicate that a female friend of Wang’s had asked an attorney to file the missing persons report. The attorney who reported him missing told Bellingcat that he did not remember Wang.
The Sharon Police Department’s murder case file notes that within weeks of finding the human remains in the woods, they received information from Boston Police and the FBI that “Wang was murdered in Chinatown” in June 1996 and “his body [was] never found”.
Not all documents were released to Bellingcat, and some names were redacted. Fragmentary notes and witness statements provide the only clues to Wang’s final days. In handwritten records, Sharon Police said a man who was described as the “head of [an] Asian gang in Boston” had Wang killed over the New Hampshire breaking-and-entering incident.
A note in the Sharon Police file described a witness to Wang’s murder as a “Flying Dra” and a “NY gangster”. Retired detective Jim Keating confirmed to Bellingcat that Wang, along with his associates and killer, were suspected members of the Fukienese Flying Dragons. He said he believed Wang was murdered because he posed a risk to the gang following his arrest.
Documents released by the Merrimack Police Department and Sharon Police Department said that an inmate in New York who, in 1997, was serving a 25-year sentence for attempted kidnapping, offered to share information about Wang’s murder with the FBI in return “for a reduction (sentence)”. The inmate implicated the gang in at least two 1996 New Hampshire home invasions and also gave authorities information about the murder.
The account is heavily redacted but includes a note that the US Attorney for New Hampshire was making arrangements to interview the man. Police in New Hampshire said they believed the inmate “was truthful in his statements and has knowledge about the murder of Mr Wang”. Keating confirmed to Bellingcat that he and investigators from other law enforcement agencies traveled to New York to interview the man. He said the inmate, a suspected member of the Fukienese Flying Dragons, gave a statement on Wang’s murder.
Keating said that investigators had learned of a dispute on the night of the murder between Wang and the gang’s leader. He said Wang had planned to run an illegal gambling operation at an apartment, which the gang boss was using as a prostitution venue. This led to an argument at another location, and when Wang left for the apartment the boss followed him.
But Keating said that based on the information gathered throughout the investigation, he believes the primary motive for Wang’s murder was his arrest over the use of credit cards stolen in the Wolfeboro home invasion. With that arrest, Wang presented a risk to the rest of the gang because investigators could tie them to the home invasions. “Wang broke the basic rules by taking something that was identifiable and using it, and that’s what the whole damn thing was about,” Keating said.
Keating told Bellingcat that the crime scene had been damaged by flooding after the murder. He said he used a power saw to cut off the bottom of a door in the unit and that lab testing revealed the presence of Wang’s blood.
Investigators also worked to confirm Wang’s identity by testing the DNA of the remains found in the woods. In a 1999 case summary written by a Massachusetts State Police Trooper, it was noted that the FBI was attempting to locate Wang’s parents through police in China.
Three months later, the FBI’s Hong Kong office sent a communique to Boston confirming that the Chinese Ministry of Public Security and Interpol had located Wang’s parents. Wang’s mother, it said, was willing to provide a DNA sample for comparison.
The FBI communique is the final document in the newly released files that details the efforts to confirm Wang’s identity with DNA. However, Keating told Bellingcat that a DNA sample was obtained from Wang’s mother in China. It was brought back to the US for testing and confirmed to be a match, he said. “I don’t know when the DNA was collected or who did it. But I know that they did that,” Keating said. “There is no question about who he was.”
Bellingcat contacted both the Norfolk and the Suffolk County District Attorneys to confirm the DNA match, but did not receive a response to questions about DNA testing or the victim’s identity. Other former law enforcement officers named in the files released to Bellingcat have not responded to requests for comment.
One document included in the murder file references discussions between homicide investigators and the FBI about charging Wang’s killer with home invasion offences. The note discusses the potential to have a witness testify against Wang’s suspected killer. It is unknown whether he was ever charged.
The Shooter
The man authorities suspected of shooting Wang, or ordering his killing, was described in the documents as the head of the Fukienese Flying Dragons in Boston. Police said he was an undocumented immigrant from Fujian Province who ran a sex trafficking ring.
A redacted note in the Sharon Police Department murder file references Wang’s suspected killer as “a player” in the Chinatown Massacre, an infamous 1991 case in which five men were shot dead in a basement gambling parlour in Boston. In another note in the case file, investigators wrote that he was “thought to be a federal informant”.
The name of the gang boss was redacted in the police file released to Bellingcat.
Keating said Wang’s identity was confirmed by DNA and that blood evidence, corroborated by witness statements, placed his killing in the Boston Chinatown apartment. The retired Sharon detective said at that point, the Boston Police Department and the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office should have, respectively, taken over the investigation and prosecution of the case.
The Boston Police Department did not respond to questions from Bellingcat. It does not include the killing in its list of unsolved homicides.
The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office said it did not have records for Wang’s murder. “Unfortunately, after a thorough search with assistance from our homicide unit, no responsive records could be located,” it said.
In response to Bellingcat’s original public records request, the Norfolk County District Attorney’s office, which covers Sharon, said the files were exempt from public disclosure because they pertained to “an active and ongoing criminal investigation”.
A spokesman for the office said last week that the circumstances surrounding the remains of an adult male discovered in Sharon in April 1998 “remain under investigation” by a state police detective assigned to the Norfolk District Attorney’s Unsolved Case Unit.
The FBI confirmed that the agency assisted state and local partners in an operation investigating home invasions in the late 1990s but did not answer questions about Wang’s murder or his suspected killer. “Given that we’re not the lead, we’ll refer you to Massachusetts State Police,” a spokeswoman said.
Massachusetts State Police referred questions to the Suffolk and Norfolk County District Attorney’s offices.
It remains a mystery why Wang’s killer was never charged and prosecuted for his murder. “They got away with so much. Blatantly got away with so much,” Keating said of the gang. “Killing people for these guys was like … these guys were all expendable.”
The Norfolk District Attorney’s Office encouraged anyone with any information about the case to contact the Massachusetts State Police Tip Line or the Sharon Police Department.
Melissa Zhu contributed research to this article.
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