Hong Kong prosecutors say Abby Choi’s former in-laws killed her to stop the sale of a luxury apartment she had let them live in rent-free. The case is less about violence than about what happens when generosity becomes leverage.
A $7.6 million apartment is the reason prosecutors say Hong Kong influencer Abby Choi, 28, was killed and dismembered by her ex-husband’s family. Not jealousy. Not a custody fight. A property transaction.
Choi was reported missing on February 21, 2023. Three days later, investigators found her remains in a rental home in the city’s Tai Po district: two legs in a refrigerator, a skull, ribs and hair in a cooking pot. Her former father-in-law, Kwong Kau, her ex-husband, Alex Kwong, and his brother, Anthony Kwong, were arrested and are now standing trial in Hong Kong’s High Court. All three have pleaded not guilty to murder. Alex and Kwong Kau have pleaded guilty to preventing Choi’s lawful burial.
A gesture of goodwill turned into the murder weapon’s motive
What makes the case land differently than a typical domestic violence story is the asset at its center. After Choi and Alex divorced, prosecutor Charlotte Draycott told the court, Choi kept a cordial relationship with his family. She let Kwong Kau live in a luxury apartment worth $7.6 million and put the property in his name for tax purposes.
That generosity is what prosecutors say got her killed. In 2022, Choi decided to sell the apartment and move her family closer to a school for her children. Kwong Kau refused to sign the paperwork. He eventually agreed, but only after Choi threatened legal action.
Prosecutors allege that refusal, and the pressure that forced it, is where the plan to kill her began. “We say the three of them decided they would do it together,” Draycott said.
The wealth gap inside the family is the actual plot
Choi came from a family with ties to the construction industry and built a public following of more than 140,000 Instagram followers as a model and socialite. After splitting from Alex, she married restaurant entrepreneur Chris Tam Fong-chun, whom prosecutors described as “extremely wealthy.”
The Kwongs, by contrast, were not. Draycott told the court plainly that money sits underneath the whole case: “I mention the money because it was, as we understand it, the root of what happened.”
That line reframes everything that came before it. The apartment was never a kindness with no strings. It was the one asset still linking Choi’s post-divorce wealth to a family that had none of its own. The moment she moved to reclaim it, the thing tying her fortune to theirs disappeared, and so, prosecutors argue, did any reason for them to keep her alive.
Why this case is being watched beyond Hong Kong
Dismemberment cases draw attention for the crime scene. This one is holding attention for the paperwork. A tax arrangement, a signature withheld, a legal threat, a sale that triggered a killing: the sequence reads less like a crime of passion and more like a hostile transaction that ended in violence instead of a lawsuit.
It is a pattern worth watching anywhere adult children remarry into money their original in-laws never had access to, and anywhere a shared asset outlives the relationship that created it. The apartment did not cause the alleged murder. The moment someone tried to take it back did.
The trial resumed and is expected to run roughly 40 days, with prosecutors continuing to build their case around the apartment sale as the motive at the center of the killing.
