A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel (27 page)

On November 16, Heywood’s widow, Wang Lulu, arrived in Chongqing. Gu met Wang Lulu in an empty coffeehouse near the Chongqing police headquarters and persuaded her to accept the investigators’ conclusion and agree to have the body cremated without performing an autopsy.

On November 17, Wang Lijun gave Gu Kailai the hotel security tape that showed she was with Heywood before his death and that no one visited after she left. Wang lied to Gu, telling her it was the only copy.

Heywood was cremated on November 19. That evening, Wang phoned Gu Kailai, telling her that Heywood had become “smoke and ashes, gone to the west.”

As noted earlier, a week after Heywood’s death, Wang Lijun revealed his true intentions and allegedly pressured Gu to talk with Bo Xilai and persuade him to help with Wang’s friends in Tieling. And after Gu tried lobbying her husband without success, Wang turned hostile and issued veiled threats against Gu. Seeing that she had unwittingly fallen into Wang Lijun’s trap, Gu panicked. According to court papers, Gu contacted the deputy police chief without Wang’s knowledge and sought his help in destroying evidence. After Wang found out, he grew upset that “Gu Kailai turned up the heat by allowing an increasing number of people to learn about the murder.”

On December 14, 2011, Gu Kailai used Wang Lijun’s name to invite the four investigators to her house for dinner. Over drinks, Gu expressed her concerns that the evidence relating to Heywood’s murder might fall into the wrong hands if not completely destroyed. To give Gu Kailai peace of mind, one officer, Li Yang, sent one of Gu’s family assistants to his office and brought all the shredded files back to Gu’s house to prove that everything had been obliterated. The next day, all four officers claimed that they could not remember a single thing about what had happened the previous night and they suspected that Gu had put knockout drops in their wine.

Afterward, Wang scolded the four investigators, all of whom were his former colleagues in northeast China who had followed him to Chongqing. Wang told them to guard themselves around Gu. Little
did Wang know that one investigator had betrayed him and reported those warnings to Gu.

At the end of December 2011, the paranoid Gu secretly probed several of Wang Lijun’s staff members in search of any incriminating evidence that Wang had kept against her. At the same time, Gu also raided Wang’s office while he was attending a conference in Beijing, carting away boxes of Wang’s shoes, suits, and clothes; bottles of cologne and liquor; packages of cigarettes; name-brand watches and gold jewelry. When Wang confronted Gu, she claimed that Wang was being secretly investigated by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and she had tried to protect him by hauling away the soiled goods before investigators from Beijing came in. Afterward, at an informal gathering, Gu allegedly told Wang’s daughter that her father was a corrupt police officer like Wen Qiang.

Realizing that Gu was collecting evidence against him, Wang phoned Xu Ming on January 26, 2012, beseeching him to tell Bo Xilai about how his wife had bullied many members of Wang’s staff. Xu hesitated, worrying that Wang’s words could trigger fights between Bo and his wife. Noting that Xu was reluctant, Wang warned, “If you tell Bo the truth, you are doing a huge favor for the party and for our country. If you don’t follow what I say, an explosive and earth-shattering incident would happen. By then, it’s going to be irreversible.” Wang’s remarks indicated that he had pondered exposing Gu Kailai’s crime to senior officials in Beijing or to Western governments and media
before
his open split with Bo Xilai.

Henry Chang-yu Lee, a well-known Taiwan-born American forensic scientist, told the New York-based Chinese-language newspaper
World Journal
in May 2012 that Wang had contacted him at the end of January 2002, saying a person was found dead from alcohol poisoning and asking if Lee could offer his help to conduct laboratory tests on the evidence. Lee agreed. Wang promised to send one of his assistants to the US with the sample, but he never did. “Wang had apparently attempted to leak Gu Kailai’s case and use Lee to boost his claims,” said Lee.

Alarmed by Wang’s threats, Xu flew to Chongqing and met with Bo and his wife, but did not broach the subject.

But Wang went ahead and scheduled that fateful meeting with Bo and revealed Gu’s role in Heywood’s death. He also alleged that Gu was suffering from a mental breakdown because she had ordered him to arrest Bo’s ex-wife, his first son, and Gu’s fourth sister—for poisoning her.

At the end of that conversation,
Nandu Weekly
reported that Bo shook Wang’s hand and thanked him. But after Wang left, Bo questioned his wife, who accused Wang of blackmailing her. Outraged by Wang’s betrayal, Bo called Wang and his deputy into his office the next day and delivered the notorious face slap that kicked off the political scandal that led to the destruction of both men.

Wang immediately ordered the four investigators to re-create the Heywood file when the split with Bo became public—before the materials could be detained by Bo Xilai. And this was when investigator Wang Pengfei obtained Heywood’s blood sample from Wang Lijun and transferred it to a friend’s house in Beijing.

In February 2012—after Wang Lijun entered the US Consulate—prosecutors said they reexamined the evidence submitted by Wang Lijun. Video footage from the hotel security camera showed the appearances of Gu and Zhang on the night of Heywood’s death. Fingerprints from Gu and Zhang were found on bottle caps and cup lids at the crime scene. Based on the samples of Heywood’s blood and vomit collected at the crime scene, investigators in Beijing determined that Heywood’s death was caused by cyanide poisoning and that Heywood had been the victim of homicide. Gu—and her personal assistant, Zhang—were put under residential surveillance on March 15, 2012, and officially arrested in July 2012.

I
N HER
Winning a Lawsuit in America
, published in 1998, Gu Kailai commented on the O.J. Simpson murder trial and criticized what she considered to be the cumbersome and declining American legal system for paying too much attention to due process:

       
While developing its legal principles, China has learned a lesson from the pitfalls of the system in the United States, where, even if everyone knows that John Smith has committed the murder, the court can still find the person innocent and release him if the prosecution does not produce the evidence required by law. China has formulated “fact-based” principles. The Chinese law does not play with words. If we know for sure that a certain Mr. Zhang has killed someone, he will be arrested, prosecuted and executed.

Gu Kailai would probably never have imagined that she would one day stand on the other side of the law and experience firsthand the “efficiency” of China’s legal system.

Her murder trial took place on August 9, 2012, when most of the world was preoccupied with the summer Olympic Games in London. The proceedings, carefully choreographed like the Olympic opening ceremony, lasted seven hours and the majority of the people I interviewed were not even aware of the trial. They were fixated on an exciting sports milestone. On that day, the country rejoiced at a history-making victory. With the three–nil win over South Korea in the men’s team final, China snatched all four ping-pong titles, repeating its results from Beijing four years earlier. The win pushed up China’s gold-medal count to thirty-six, two more than that of the US.

The timing of Gu Kailai’s trial had other political considerations. It happened a week before an important conference in Beidaihe, a summer resort outside Beijing, where senior leaders would discuss succession plans for the upcoming 18th Party Congress. A guilty verdict against Gu Kailai could effectively justify the ouster of her husband, Bo Xilai.

The government moved the venue of the trial from Bo’s home base of Chongqing, the scene of the alleged murder, to Hefei in the eastern province of Anhui so the trial could be free from the interference of local government officials. More important, the venue carried a symbolic meaning for ordinary Chinese—Hefei was home to Bao Zheng, a legendary judge in China’s Song Dynasty nearly 1,000 years ago. Legend has it that Bao Zheng possessed an imperial sword
granted by the emperor and whenever he displayed it in court, the accused, regardless of their social and political classes, had to bow to its imperial power. With the sword, Bao Zheng could execute any royals who committed crimes without worrying about retaliation. Throughout his life, Bao Zheng had made a name for his uncompromising stance against corruption and he has become synonymous with fairness and justice.

However, the symbolic meanings of Bao Zheng were lost on journalists who covered the trial, which began at about half past eight in the morning. Hefei was battered by torrential rain and wind from a typhoon that had hit the southeast coast the previous day. A Chinese journalist friend who traveled to Hefei said the city had deployed nearly 5,000 police wearing black raincoats over their dark, short-sleeved uniforms. Police blocked all the streets near the courthouse, hustling away a few pro-Bo protesters who identified themselves as residents of Dalian and shouted “Long Live Chairman Mao.”

“Those forbidding, dark figures of police in the heavy rain and the secret trial proceedings reminded me of the mafia,” quipped my friend. In Chinese, “mafia” is translated as “black society.”

The mafia reference could not be more fitting. The so-called open trial was attended by only 140 selected government officials, delegates of the Municipal People’s Congress, a few relatives, two diplomats from the British Embassy, and seven state media representatives. No recording devices or pens were allowed inside the courtroom. Outside, several dozen Chinese and foreign journalists as well as other observers were “enduring the pounding rain, under the watchful eye of a roughly equal number of police, some in uniforms and many more in plainclothes pretending to be ordinary passersby,” said Keith Richburg of the
Washington Post
.

A month before the trial, Gu Kailai’s ninety-year-old mother, who had lived in Chongqing for the past few years, returned to Beijing and tried to rescue her daughter and son-in-law. She hired two high-flying lawyers who had represented disgraced senior officials in corruption cases, but authorities forbade out-of-town lawyers from interfering in the case and declined the request. Instead the court appointed “through meticulous selection” two local lawyers: Jiang Min, chairman
of the Hefei Bar Association, and Zhou Yuhao, chairman of the Bar Association in Wuhu, a city near Hefei.

Given the complexities of the case and the tremendous amount of media attention, many expected that the Chinese government would take the case seriously or at least attempt to honor due process for the watching international community. Instead the trial was over in one day. No witnesses were called, so there was no cross-examination. “What is being anticipated as ‘the murder trial of the century’ is, more precisely, shaping up to be the opposite of a trial,” wrote Evan Osnos for a
New Yorker
article titled “The Non-Trial of the Century.”

At seven o’clock that night, the public was given some trial details in a brief report on Central China Television during the prime-time evening news. Footage showed Gu Kailai strutting into the courtroom, with her head high and a slight smile on her face, a uniformed policewoman on either side. She wasn’t handcuffed. Dressed in a white shirt and black business suit, she acted as if she were a lawyer there to defend a client, rather than standing trial for murder. Having seen photo after photo of her splashed across the Internet—one of her in a bright red Hawaiian shirt strolling next to her husband in what looked to be Honolulu, another in a dark suit, ominous and brooding at her father-in-law’s funeral, many observers, including me, were surprised. The once-glamorous thin face with high cheekbones had filled out and the formerly svelte figure was nowhere to be seen. “Sister Gu looked like she just came back from a vacation,” one netizen teased. “The food must be really good in jail.”

Gu Kailai’s weight gain triggered widespread speculation that it was not her in the court but a double. One Chinese blogger carefully compared Gu Kailai’s image on TV with previous pictures and listed twenty physical differences, including her eyes, cheekbones, ears, teeth, and even her accent to illustrate that the woman in the courtroom was a fake. Another blogger posted an “exclusive,” saying Gu Kailai’s double was actually a forty-six-year-old worker named Zhao, who lived outside Beijing. The double was said to have been discovered by the wife of Premier Wen Jiabao, who had paid the woman a large sum of money. The real Gu Kailai, said the blogger, was still in police custody in Beijing.

Those who actually knew Gu Kailai ignored such fabrications, and a Chinese-American psychiatrist told me her weight gain was probably due to the medication she was taking for her depression.

A few hours after the trial ended, Zhao Xiangcha, one of the observers, e-mailed several overseas media organizations his account of the trial after his initial posting on the Internet in China was deleted by government censors. Zhao said his notes were compiled from memory because his pencil was confiscated before he entered the courtroom. Details in his account were corroborated by two other observers and have been incorporated in the previous chapter. The next day, Xinhua news agency issued an official version of the court proceedings, omitting many details laid out in Zhao Xiangcha’s version.

“The government faces a dilemma in Gu Kailai’s trial,” said a legal scholar in Beijing. “If senior officials allow the court to give out too many investigation details relating to the Heywood murder and Bo family corruption, they run the risk of implicating more people in power and generating more public outcry. However, when the court details are too sketchy, people don’t believe in the verdict.”

Even so, Zhao Xiangcha, who attended the trial, remarked at the end of his observation:

       
I feel that the entire courtroom adjudication process was fairly objective and just. There was a slight feeling that things had been rehearsed beforehand. But that didn’t affect the ultimate defining of the case. The facts were really clear and the evidence was copious. The prosecutor didn’t bully people and the defense lawyers did everything they could. The written testimonies were just and unbiased. To convict these two is absolutely just. In the final statements of the accused, they both admitted guilt and showed relatively sincere repentance. I felt this genuinely came from the heart; there was no trace of acting or of their having been compelled.