On the morning of February 4th 1991, a taxi cab driver named Wang was chatting with the taxi dispatcher at headquarters when suddenly for no clear reason the dispatcher stopped talking to Wang and just began staring intently at something behind Wang and so Wang noticed this and right away he turned around to see what it was he was looking at but all when could see was just a window that looked out to this huge fencon parking lot that was full of taxi cabs and their drivers this is where they would go to wait for fairs and where the taxi headquarters were located was right near the airport in a very busy city called gaung City in Taiwan and so taxi cabs in this area were really in high demand and so as Wang looked out at the very busy parking lot full of drivers talking to potential customers you know to Wang nothing seemed out of the ordinary it was just a typical busy day but when Wang kind of looked at the dispatcher like I don’t really see what you see the dispatcher just raised his finger and kind of pointed in the direction that he was staring and so Wang turned around again and this time when he looked in the direction the dispatcher was pointing he could see immediately why the dispatcher was reacting the way he was because the dispatcher was pointing at one of their colleagues so another Taxi Driver whose name was Leo schwe Chung and as Wang looked out at him, he saw Lao was sprinting across this very busy part parking lot full of all these cabs and drivers and customers and Lao was clutching this big golden statue of Buddha in his arms as he ran and so Wang and the dispatcher watched Lao and what he did is he kept running all the way across the lot until he got to his taxi cab at which point he practically Dove inside of it he slammed the door locked every door and then began looking around frantically like he was expecting someone to show up who had been like chasing him or something but there was nobody around his car and Wang and the dispatcher kind of scanned in the parking lot and they didn’t see anybody who seemed remotely interested in Lao and so Wang and the dispatcher continued to watch Lao from the window and they saw eventually Lao stopped kind of scanning around for other people and at that point he took that golden statue of Buddha and he placed it up on the dash of his Cal and this was not the first Buddha statue that he had put up there from Wang and the dispatcher’s perspective it looked like he had at least two or three that were right up there alongside this new one and then after Lao placed this new golden statue. He sort of sat back in his chair and from Wang and the dispatcher’s perspective it sort of looked like he had closed his eyes and was praying or mumbling something but you know whatever he was doing it just seemed kind of odd and So eventually Wang and the dispatcher stopped watching Lao who still just continued to sit back in his chair and you know mumble or pray or something … and then Wang and the dispatcher looked at each other and they exchanged very concerned looks because they both knew you know Lao was kind of a weird guy but from his behavior today it just seemed like something must be wrong with Lao…. there has to be some issue…So for context Lao was this 35-year-old guy who lived alone and he had this reputation of being very antisocial and kind of just rude like he had terrible manners but recently Wang and the dispatcher and other taxi drivers who worked at this company had noticed that lao’s behavior had gone from being kind of awkward and antisocial to being kind of menacing like not even including the weird Behavior he was exhibiting now just like in his day-to-day interactions with people he was just really aggressive like he always would tell his colleagues at the taxi company how much he hated stray cats and dogs and you know a lot of people found these stray cats and dogs in their neighborhood in the city to be a bit of a nuisance you know they’d rumage through trash and make noise or whatever but nobody really paid them much attention they were just stray animals trying to survive like it wasn’t a big deal but for Lao he like obsessed over hating the stray cats and dogs and how much he wanted them to get out of his neighborhood and somewhat recently he had come to work and told his colleagues that he had gone out and gotten a crossbow and at night he’d begun shooting at the Stray Cats and Dogs which totally horrified his colleagues and now Lao had this weird thing going on with his Buddha statues that he was putting inside of his cab and also in addition to those statues he had begun putting on the windows inside of his cab these things called Foolus ( which are these little strips of yellow parchment paper that basically ward off evil spirits) and so Lao had basically transformed the interior of his cab into this sort of like weird Shrine or Temple and in fact Leo had put up so many of these foolus on the inside of the windows and again all those statues that sat on the dash that when he drove he could barely see because his view was totally obstructed but despite everybody at the company seeing this totally weird behavior playing out with Lao nobody went up to him and said hey what are you doing with these statues and pieces of paper like what’s going on on here because nobody wanted to interact with him he seemed like kind of a menace and so people just kind of let him do his thing but now as Wang and the dispatcher are watching Lao like run across the lot and act totally psychotic.They looked at each other and they were like maybe we should do something and so Wang volunteered to call the police and as Wang turned to go walk out and make the call he saw Lao peeling out of the parking lot nearly smashing into cars and people just driving like a total maniac and so Leo really felt like okay! yeah this really is the time to step in someone’s going to get hurt here.The following day Wang would contact his friend in the police department and he would explain what was going on with Lao and to Wang’s surprise his friend told him that actually the police were well aware of Lao and that was because not all that long ago Leo was actually a suspect in a murder case so about 10 months earlier in April of 1990 a 23-year-old woman from Japan named Mao aguchi had visited Taiwan on vacation and during this vacation she had gone missing.Now at the time, the Taiwanese economy really relied heavily on Japanese tourism and so Taiwan really aggressively marketed to Japan to you know come visit come on vacation here and so it was pretty common for Japanese college students to visit Taiwan on vacation to celebrate things like a graduation or a birthday party and so that’s what Mao was doing… she was here celebrating and she was traveling alone. Also one sort of quirky thing about Taiwanese culture at the time was it was pretty common for taxi cab drivers to open up their own personal homes to their fairs basically saying hey don’t stay at a hotel, I’ll give you a ride wherever you’re going to go but then at night you can stay at my house with my family and so it was just kind of a thing in Taiwan that people visited and stayed at the homes of their taxi cab drivers so when Mao came to Taiwan on this vacation this is what she did she stayed in the home of the taxi cab driver and it was during this period of time that she went missing and so naturally when the investigation began into her disappearance the first place police went were the taxi cap drivers and so first the police focused on a driver in the capital of Taiwan who said he had given Mao a few rides he had brought her sightseeing and then he had let her stay in his home but he said you know after that she left and he didn’t see her again . He had no idea what happened to her and the police would actually discover that after Mao left that particular driver’s house , she would send a postcard to her family that was dated after she had left and so basically this ruled out the first driver as a suspect and so for a little while this case went cold because the police couldn’t find any other taxi cab drivers that had given Mao a ride but then a few months later the police offered a reward for information about what happened to Mao and it was then that police got a tip that Mao had been seen speaking to Lao at the train station before she disappeared but when police spoke to Lao he immediately said yes I did give Mao a ride but that was it, she didn’t stay at my house, it was just this one ride from the train station into town and you know after she got out I have no idea what happened to her and so police would ask Lao dozens more questions and they would try to get more information from him but he just didn’t have any and then at the same time there was this flood of all these new tips that began coming into the police station about this case but it would turn out a lot of these leads like all of them were just terrible tips people were calling in totally random stuff just because now there was this monetary reward for information and it was kind of incentivizing people to just call in anything and it was actually making the investigation much harder because now the police had all these bad tips and so they really weren’t getting anywhere but despite the slow progress the police were making in this case, this case had really been elevated and become like a huge international news story and lots of people all over the world were following it. During this time when all these people are tuned in to this case… weird things began happening surrounding this case. People in the city began receiving all these strange phone calls from this kind of frantic woman speaking Japanese and in Taiwan people predominantly speakTaiwanese and Mandarin not Japanese, so this is a weird phone call to be getting in Taiwan and also at this time you need to remember that Mao’s disappearance was kind of all over the news and so to get these weird calls from a woman speaking Japanese who sounds totally frantic it made people in the city believe that it was Mao placing these strange phone calls but these calls they didn’t make any sense. It was just a woman kind of yelling in Japanese and then she would just abruptly hang up and also there were all these reports of people claiming to have seen Mao or heard Mao just in the city walking around. None of it was substantiated but there was just kind of this eerie quality to the case and so when Wang called his friend at the police department to report Lao for his totally weird behavior , this was at a time when the Mao Missing person case was still totally front of mind in Taiwan and around the world and also the police were still actively investigating this case and frankly Lao had not been ruled out as a suspect in this case. He was not considered a primary suspect by any means but he wasn’t ruled out yet and so the police are hearing that Lao is acting really funny and it made them think – hey !! maybe we should reinvestigate this guy and see if he really is connected to the Mao missing person case and so ultimately after Wang hung up, his friend in the Police Department got in touch with the lead detective on the Mao case and told him about what was going on with Lao. This lead detective whose name was Lynn xia G decided he would just put Leo under surveillance to see what he was doing last year. So starting sometime in the middle of February of 1991 detective Lynn and a few of his colleagues began taking turns trailing Lao basically 24/7 and so the police just kept their distance and they followed Lao all around the city as he picked up his fairs and you know the police never got out to talk to any of the fairs you know to get insights into whatever Lao might have been saying inside the cab they just kind of watched from a distance and just wanted to see if there was any obvious red flags. Detectives figured you know if Leo was somehow involved in whatever happened to Mao let’s say she was killed and let’s say Lao was responsible for killing her maybe if they followed him long enough he might drive to an area that was kind of connected to her murder maybe her grave site or the place where he killed her or something you know going to kind of strange random locations without affair would likely be an indication to police that that was a place of interest but as the police tailed Lao that’s not what he did. Lao basically never ever left his Car…. he just picked up a passenger drove them where they needed to go and then repeat it over and over and over again all day long and then at the end of the night instead of going home to his apartment that police knew he had he would just sleep inside of his cab just like in parking lots and stuff and the only times he would go into his apartment appeared to be just so he could go to the bathroom or maybe shower or something cuz they would see him through the window but whenever Lao went into his apartment he went through the same totally weird ritual every time, he would be in his cab, parked out front of his apartment and the police are you know parked far enough away that they can watch this and Lao at some point would begin kind of frantically looking all around him as if he was looking for somebody who was trying to hurt him or who was spying on him or something and then after kind of making sure the coast was clear Lao would open up his door and Sprint like absolutely as fast as he could into his apartment building and he’d only be in there for like a couple of minutes before he’d come bombing back out and practically dive into his cab and he would shut all the doors lock all the doors and then you know he’d clutch his golden statues and he’d rub his foolus that were taped all over the inside of his cab and he’d continue frantically looking around you know to make sure nobody was there to hurt him or something and then after a little while he’d kind of calm down he’d put a statue back on the dash he’d kind of make sure his foolus were all in place and then he would drive away.So of course Leia’s behavior from the police’s perspective was totally bizarre but in detective Lynn’s mind it didn’t really seem like the behavior of a murderer, but of someone who had lost their mind. Finally on March 4th 1991 detective Lynn decided that he just needed to speak to Lao which required basically ambushing him. So detective Lynn coordinated with his officers who were out surveilling Lao and he had them tell him when Lao was at his apartment you know going into to use the bathroom and when they called in to detective Lynn that hey he just got to his apartment he’s about to run inside detective Lynn and some other officers raced to the apartment and they were all ready outside for whenever Leo came running back out to dive back into his cap they were going to intercept him and now detective Lynn and his colleagues didn’t really know how Lao was going to react to having all these police standing there ready to grab him, I mean was this guy going to be hostile ? was he going to be aggressive? was he going to be scared? sad ?….they had no idea. Just seemed like Lao was totally unstable so they all kind of had to be ready for whatever reaction he was going to have. However, the way Lao ultimately reacted to this was not the way any of the officers suspected when Lao came bombing out of his apartment after a very short bathroom break he began charging down the stairs towards his cab and then seemed to kind of realize there were all these detectives and police officers all standing in front of him literally getting ready to grab him and Lao just collapsed to his knees and begin sobbing and thanking them over and over and over again. Now detective Lynn had no idea what this was he didn’t really understand what Lao was thanking them for but he didn’t waste any time trying to figure out what was going on, instead detective Lynn just went up to lao and said hey we need to speak to you at the station. Will you come with us? and Leia was like of course, I will of course ,I will and so detective Lynn drove Lao to the police station and when they got there Lao was saying things like oh I wish I could just stay at the police station with you all like this is where I’m safe I want to stay here now. Lynn didn’t really respond to this he just kind of said okay yeah yeah yeah and then they went inside together to head towards the interview room and as they’re walking there Leia was saying over and over again to detective Lynn and any of the officers who passes by you know thank you so much you’re my savior thank you. Now the police had no idea why Lao was treating them like his saviors because to them they’re like dude we just ambushed you and brought you to the police station to question you about potentially being involved in a murder so I don’t know how we saved you but it would turn out Lao had a really compelling reason to believe they really had just saved him because it would turn out Lao had this absolutely terrifying thing happening inside of his apartment just several minutes earlier when Lao had run into his apartment so right before he charged back outside and police grabbed him and took him to the station you know when he was still inside of his apartment he stepped inside and the apartment was totally dark all the lights are off all the shades are drawn and immediately Lao felt his heart starting to race and he looked around his apartment and it was totally silent but then he heard it he could hear on the far side of his apartment in a room that he couldn’t quite see into the sound of breathing but Lao lives alone there shouldn’t be anybody here he has no pets there’s nobody here but he hears breathing in another room but Lao knew there was nothing he could do the only thing he could do was just try to get in there go to the bathroom and get out as quickly as possible and so very slowly Lao began kind of tiptoeing across the living room floor kind of making sure to stay out of eyesight of the doorway that led into the room where the breathing was coming from and as soon as he kind of got past an area where he could be seen from the doorway he ran the rest of the way down the hallway he cut into the bathroom and shut the door and locked it and then as quickly as he could you know he did his business he used a washcloth to clean himself because he didn’t have time to take a shower because of what was going on inside of his apartment and then once he was all done you know he took a deep breath and then he opened up the door and this time the apartment was absolutely silent there was no more breathing and so Lao thinking he had this opportunity to get out of here without being caught by this thing inside of his apartment he turned and just started running towards the door and as soon as he did he began to hear a voice a horse female voice screaming at him from the other side of his apartment screeching why why why and as Lao is just about to get to the door he turns and he sees Mao, the missing woman running with her hair all nodded and matted hanging over her face sprinting towards him from that back room and Lao he only managed to barely get out of his apartment and shut it and lock it before she ran into the door and then it went silent again this is why Lao was acting totally crazy because he was terrified of what he believed was like this demonic entity inside of his apartment. He didn’t think that was a real person he thought it was like the spirit of Mao or something and she was haunting him and so he had no idea what to do he didn’t know who to tell and he just began living out of his cab instead of dealing with whatever was going on in his apartment and so when Leo charged outside after this latest encounter with Mao you know he sees the police and is just overwhelmed with relief hopefully he’s thinking they can get rid of her and his life can go back to normal but as overjoyed as Lao appeared to be and now having the police on his side you know finally being able to deal with whatever was going on when push came to shove. Lao actually did not feel comfortable immediately giving up details of whatever was going on with Mao inside of his apartment but as Lao was brought by detective Lynn to the police station to tell them what was going on with how Mao was in his apartment and she was haunting him you know it seemed like it was the Ghost of her or something you know as Lao was having that conversation other police officers were sent to Lao’s apartment to go see if maybe Mao really was in his apartment maybe that’s where she had been this whole time maybe she broke into this guy’s apartment and was just squatting there and harassing him and that was the mystery that’s where she’s been but when police went into Lao’s apartment there was no sign whatsoever that anybody else besides Lao was living in that apartment there was no sign of a breakin I mean there was nothing it was just Lao’s apartment and so this made police really suspicious of lao because his story was so outrageous and also he’s talking about a person who’s actively missing Mao and so the police really pressured Lao to you know come forward give us more information why did you say this is Maro in your apartment because there’s nobody in your apartment you know tell us what’s going on here and so finally after 4 days of intense questioning of Lao did finally admit to police that there was more to this story it would turn out Lao really did pick Mao up at the train station when she arrived in Taiwan for her vacation so he did give her a ride just like he said he had but Lao had lied about what happened after that it would turn out after giving her this ride Lao stayed with Mao and they went sightseeing together and then Lao invited Mao to stay with him at his apartment which again was customary in Taiwan and so Mao said yes and she went to his apartment in the evening and while they were there Lao did propose Mao and she rejected him and at first Lao just let it go but then after Mao fell asleep that night he got his crossbow that he used to shoot dogs and cats and he went into her room and he shot her four times with the crossbow and then cut her head off Lao would bury her body the following night but that same night was the first time Lao began hearing the breathing in his apartment , he couldn’t quite place it and then not long after that the head of Mao, the severed head would chase him all around his apartment screaming why why why at him and so basically mao’s severed head began haunting him incessantly to the point where he moved into his taxi cab and put up all those fulu papers to protect him from evil spirits and also put up all those statues of Buddha for the same reason I mean he was living in his cab to protect himself from what he believed was this evil spirit and so when people saw Lao in his cab kind of sitting back and muttering to himself that was him praying that he would live through whatever was going on with this head Lao would tell police where he buried mao’s body and he would tell police he buried her entire body in one location including her head but when police dug her up it was only her lower half her head was missing Lao was convicted of murder and to this day he is still in prison many people in Taiwan believe that you know this case was ultimately solved because of mao’s spirit that she played a big role you know her head haunting Lao is what drove him crazy to the point where he admitted to police what he did and then also people in Taiwan think all those strange phone calls they were getting from that woman who was speaking Japanese and acting frantic and then hanging up they say that was mao’s Spirit too that was maybe one of her attempts just to keep people engaged with the story so that it wouldn’t fade and become a cold case and in fact even some of the police including detective Lynn say they do believe mao’s Spirit played a role and in fact detective Lyn said at one point when he was inside of Lao’s apartment he was by himself and he felt someone push him on the back and when he turned around there was nobody there and so he was convinced that mao’s Spirit was inhabiting that …