[Amanda] On Tuesday, May 13, 1997, 11-year-old Quin-Rong Wu was walking to Public School No. 2 in Brooklyn, New York with her mother. They split ways about 100 yards from the doors to the building, and unfortunately, Quin-Rong would never make it to the school that day, disappearing in broad daylight never to be seen by her family again… I’m Amanda Morgan, and this is New York’s Dark Side…

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Hey Dark Siders, in case this is the first episode you're checking out today, I just want to plug that I did release 2 episodes today because they're short unfortunately due to not having a lot of information available when I researched them. So, just in case you missed it, there is a second episode available now on the disappearance of Tiffany Dixon, who also vanished on her way to school back in 1991. There's no connection that I could see in either of these cases, so I didn't want to create confusion by doing them in one episode. With that, I'm gonna dive right into it.

[Amanda] 11-year-old Quin-Rong Wu immigrated from her family to America in 1996 from the Guangdong province in southern China, settling on a second floor apartment at 199 Henry St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The apartment was small, with only two rooms, one of them being a bedroom, forcing the family of five to share the two available beds on the unit. Quin-Rong was the middle child, she had a 17 year old sister that she shared one bed with and her parents shared the other bed with her seven-year old brother. In China, Quin-Rong's father was an accountant at a hospital, however, when he came to Americam he took a job working 12 hour shifts at a Chinese noodle factory for meager pay. Quin-Rong's mother had been a farmer in China and began working as a seamstress in Chinatown after the move. Things were hard for the family as they struggled to get acclimated to their new life, new cultures, new language. But overall they felt the move was an improvement from where they had come. And Quin-Rong loved everything America, according to her family and friends. 

[Amanda] If you start to dig into this case, a factor of discussion was the Chinese policy at the time around having one child per household. The One Child program was started to try to address concerns in China regarding their rising population. The Chinese government had been promoting family planning and birth control well before that, starting as far back as 1949. But on September 25th, 1980, the Chinese government sent out an official letter for a nationwide adherence to their policy that each household could only have one child, something that they had been encouraging, but not enforcing starting a few years prior. The government enforced this policy by giving monetary incentives to families that complied, providing contraception, and even going as far as to force sterilization of the parents or forcing abortions. This nationwide policy was in effect in China until 2016. And it's said to have had some negative consequences as they now face an aging population and disproportionate ratio of males to females, as males were the preferred child in the home. Female children were either aborted in the womb, abandoned, or killed after birth, or placed in orphanages. 

[Amanda] Quin-Rong, however, prior to moving to America with her family did not live with them in China. She actually stayed with relatives about an hour from her family home and when they moved to America, this was the first time she was living with them when they moved to Manhattan. Quin-Rong enjoyed all things that kids like. She played hide and seek, enjoyed visiting the neighborhood park and playing games on the Gameboy that the family owned. She also loved pancakes and breakfast cereal. She would even go to school early so that she could have muffins or cereal before the classes started for the day. Quin-Rong was not doing the best in school, but this was likely due to not being fluent in English. She was struggling with that. 

[Amanda] On Tuesday, May 13th, 1997, the day started out like any other day Quin-Rong's mother walked her south on Henry Street the short distance toward the school. They parted ways about 100 yards from the school gate and her mother kissed her goodbye, leaving to go back to the house to prepare her son for school. Quin-Rong vanished in the short distance between where her mother said goodbye to her and the school building. The school would alert her parents later that day that she had not arrived for classes, and her parents would notify police. 

[Amanda] When reports went out about Quin-Rong's disappearance, a woman would come forward stating that she had seen a white man with a beard boarding the northbound subway on the Lower East Side and with him, he had a young Asian girl who was crying about 9:00 AM. She happened to see the pair again aboard the subway as they traveled from Manhattan to Brooklyn. This time, the girl was not crying, but appeared to be, quote- 'confused and not aware of her surroundings'. The woman would exit the subway train before the pair disembarked. Police would release a composite sketch of the man, which I posted on social media as well as the web page for this episode. The man was described as approximately 40 to 50 years old, around six foot one to six foot three, approximately 210 lbs with sandy colored hair and gray, blue, or green eyes. He was wearing a blue windbreaker, straight polo shirt, a pair of khakis, and light colored Converse sneakers.

[Amanda] Police took advantage of this lead to try to find him and followed other leads as well. However, they were not able to find Quin-Rong before the unthinkable happened. Two weeks after her disappearance, the body of a young girl was found floating in the East River on May 28th. The body had been in the river for several days, which meant that a lot of the available evidence was likely washed away. She was badly decomposed, but they were able to obtain dental records and confirm that this was Quin-Rong Wu. She had been manually strangled and I saw conflicting reports regarding the potential for sexual assault also being no factor. Police considered two angles for Quin-Rong's abduction and death. Either she was taken off the streets by a stranger or someone close to her had committed the crime. They would question a man named John Hayward, an unhoused man who fit the description of the composite sketch but turned up nothing on him. Other witnesses have come forward stating that there had been a strange man in the area staring at the school the days around Quin-Rong's diappearance, but it doesn't look like anything came of that potential lead. 

[Amanda] Police would also look at Quinn Wrong's family and they did this because... Well, one, it's normal in any abduction case, but two, because they had learned that the Wu's had an infant daughter in China that had unfortunately passed away. When police questioned Quin Rong's parents about the death of their infant daughter, they felt that they were getting differing stories about what happened to her. Investigators reached out to the Chinese embassy for help with the investigation and they were reportedly initially very helpful until the questioning turned to what happened to the Wu's infant daughter. I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole and speculate whether there is any connection between Quin-Rong's disappearance and the death of her infant sister before moving to America. For one thing, it's a different time and different culture. We just don't know and we have no right to judge or make assumptions on anything. But police thought that this was suspicious. They also would state that they found a suspicious that the Wu's weren't asking for updates on the murder case of Quin-Rong. But Quin-Rong's father would address this to the media when asked, stating through an interpreter that they didn't know that they could actually ask for case updates. And I feel like this could be an accurate statement. They likely didn't know that they could approach the police and ask for updates. There's also the language barrier to consider since they didn't speak much English at the time, and that's got to make an already heartbreaking situation even more difficult to navigate for Quin Rong's family. There's also cultural differences between the Chinese and Americans that may make it less likely for them to approach police asking for updates due to their respect for investigators authority.

[Amanda] Police at the time did attempt to look for a connection in Quin-Rongs case to a serial rapist in Chinatown but we're not able to find one. There are two aspects of the case that I want to mention that may come up if you look further into this on your own that I don't personally feel play a role in it. But they're out there. I'll bring them up here. First was some rumors at the time that Quin-Rong was working in the factory where her mother worked. Some coworkers reported seeing Quin-Rong at the factory and that Quin-Rong's mother appeared to be scolding her at times. There doesn't appear to be any evidence found that this was factual that I could personally find. I don't think it would be necessarily out of the ordinary for Quin-Rong to visit her mother at work, or potentially for Quin-Rong's mother to actually bring her to work with her given the time frame or for Quin-Rong' mother to scold Quin-Rong for one reason or another as part of parenting. There's also an article I found in the New York Times by Dan Berry published in 2005 regarding Quin Rong's murder. The article details a concern regarding the money that the community put together to help support the Wu's after the loss of Quin-Rong. The money was raised was to go towards her funeral, help them with living expenses, and more in previous articles from the time around when Quin-Rong was murdered. There have been mentions of portions of that money being placed into a trust for Quin-Rong's siblings to help pay for future college expenses. This 2005 article discusses a community member that was a spokesperson for the Wu's stating that the money was was to go towards a foundation named after Quin-Rong for the community that never opened. I didn't see that detailed in any of the articles from the 1990s around the time of Quin-Rong's murder. This is the first time I saw any mention of a foundation that was supposed to be opened in her name and actually the article goes on to interview one of the lawyers who represented the Wu's at the time and he said the money was used by the Wu's for them to move from their cramped apartment to another location and there was more money that was still in the trust for the Wu siblings education that had been established at the time that the Wu's received the money and that he was still helping the loose with that trust. So again. I don't know that there's necessarily anything out of the ordinary with this, or that this has anything to do with Quin-Rong's murder.

[Amanda] Unfortunately, Quin-Rong's abduction and murder remains unsolved almost 33 years later and this is about all the information that I have on her case. Again, it's just so frustrating to have so little information and for this to still be unsolved all this time later. I don't know if there was any DNA evidence that they were able to obtain from Quin-Rong. Unfortunately, like I said her her body was in the East River for several days making that a potentially unlikely situation, but with advances in DNA technology, if they have anything at all, they might be able to do some testing and maybe get something. I don't know. I'd like to hold out hope that this again could someday be solved. If you have any information about the disappearance and murder of Quin-Rong Wu, please contact the New York City Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-8477. I did a lot of plugging the Tiffany Dixon episode for things going on around the show, so I'm not going to do that again here, but I'll be back next week with another all new episode. I think it's gonna be an exciting one. I'm going back to the 1930s. I love the 1930s. Well, I didn't love everything about the 1930s, but it's just an era that I find very intriguing, so I have kind of like a case profile on someone that I had actually discovered when I was researching the Vivian Gordon piece. So I hope you will take a moment and check that out next week. I'm excited about it. And yeah, have a great week ahead. Ohh. I hope you'll check us out for our next Dark Side Cocktail Hour on March 15th at 7:00 PM. I hope you keep listening and I hope you stay curious.