Neighbors followed a smell to a locked house. Inside, five children were dead. Their parents were gone. It would take nine years, and a hunter on a remote mountainside, before anyone learned anything close to the rest of the story.
A Family, and a Business in Trouble
Liu Chih-chin was 48 in 2006, living in Ji'an Township in Hualien County, Taiwan, with his wife, Lin Chen-mi, 35. Liu ran a tourist photography business under the name "Magic Family," with multiple branches in the area. By most accounts, the business wasn't doing well — he had taken on substantial debt, reportedly close to NT$16 million, much of it credit card debt and money borrowed from relatives and friends, trying to expand a struggling operation.
The household included five children: Liu's two sons and a daughter from a previous marriage, ages 18, 17, and 12, and two younger children, a daughter and son, ages 9 and 8, from his marriage to Lin.
A Smell That Led to a Discovery
In early September 2006, neighbors began noticing an increasingly strong, unpleasant odor coming from the family's home. On September 8, after the smell became impossible to ignore, residents called police. The house was locked from the inside, with steel bars placed across the door to reinforce the lock, and all the windows secured with iron grates.
Inside the bathroom, police found the bodies of all five children. Their hands and feet had been bound with wire, their faces covered with adhesive tape, and plastic bags placed over their heads. The bathroom's door and windows had also been sealed shut with tape from the inside.
There was no sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle. Liu and Lin were nowhere in the house, and have never been confirmed to have been seen alive again.
A Crime Scene That Didn't Add Up
What followed was one of the most genuinely confounding investigations in recent Taiwanese criminal history.
Investigators initially theorized the children had been drugged or sedated before being bound, given the complete absence of any sign of struggle. An autopsy ruled this out — no drugs or poison were found in any of the children's systems. The same autopsy suggested the children may not all have died on the same day, and, troublingly, that the youngest child may still have been alive when the wire was tightened around his face.
No fingerprints were recovered anywhere in the house or on the children's bodies, suggesting whoever was responsible had worn gloves throughout. Two cigarette butts found at the scene carried DNA that matched none of the family — clear physical evidence that at least one other person had been present.
Investigators also found something that's stayed central to the case ever since: Liu and Lin's identification cards, phones, and personal belongings were all found sitting on a TV cabinet inside the house — items people would normally take with them if leaving voluntarily. Two handwritten notes were also recovered and confirmed, through handwriting analysis, to have been written by Liu — though their exact content and what they suggest about that night has never been fully made public.
A Theory the Evidence Didn't Fully Support
Investigators' early working theory centered on Liu's debts — that he and Lin had killed their children before fleeing, possibly tied to financial desperation or pressure from creditors. Liu's car was found abandoned near a train station in the county, suggesting the couple had left the area by train.
That theory ran into real problems. Police spent roughly a month investigating creditors, loan sharks, and anyone with a financial grievance against the family and came up with nothing connecting any of them to the scene. More tellingly, investigators noted that significant amounts of cash and gold jewelry were found undisturbed throughout the house — inconsistent with a robbery or a forced debt collection, where valuables left in plain view would typically be taken.
Some investigators came to believe a third party had been present at the scene, possibly forcing Liu and Lin to leave after the children were killed, rather than the couple acting entirely alone and then fleeing — though this theory, too, has never been conclusively proven.
A separate, troubling thread surfaced during the investigation: months before the murders, in December 2005, Liu and Lin had sold their home for an unusually inflated price to a man named Wu Chi-cheng — a serving police officer with the Hualien Police Bureau — through an arrangement that allowed Wu to obtain a larger-than-normal loan against the inflated value, with Liu and Lin then renting the house back and effectively covering Wu's mortgage payments. Three days after the children's bodies were discovered, Lin transferred a payment to Wu disguised as rent. Whether this arrangement had any connection to what happened to the family has never been publicly resolved.
Nine Years of Nothing
For nearly a decade, Liu and Lin's whereabouts remained completely unknown. Other remains discovered in the region over the years — a skeleton in a reservoir, a body recovered from the sea — were investigated and ultimately confirmed not to belong to either of them.
Then, on June 10, 2015, a local hunter came across skeletal remains on Tzuyun Mountain in Hualien County. DNA testing confirmed, five days later, that the remains belonged to Liu and Lin.
An Official Ruling, Still Not a Full Answer
Taiwan's Institute of Forensic Medicine concluded that traces of the pesticide methomyl were found in the couple's remains, with no evidence of opiates, sedatives, or other substances — leading investigators to officially classify their deaths as suicide by pesticide poisoning, consistent with the theory that they had fled to the mountain after killing their children and taken their own lives there.
That official conclusion hasn't fully settled the broader mystery for everyone who has studied the case. The Hualien Police Bureau's own lead investigator later noted that searches conducted in the months immediately after the murders had covered much of the same mountainous terrain, including the area where the remains were eventually found, and turned up nothing at the time — raising real questions about how the bodies went undiscovered for nine years in a location investigators had previously searched. The unexplained cigarette DNA, the untouched valuables, the unusual property transaction with a police officer, and the specific binding method used on the children have all remained, for many following the case closely, difficult to fully reconcile with a straightforward parent-kills-children-then-flees narrative.
A Case That's Never Been Fully Closed
What happened inside that bathroom, and what happened to Liu and Lin in the time between the murders and their deaths on that mountain, has never been explained with full certainty. The official record treats the case as resolved: a father in financial crisis, a mother caught in the same desperate circumstances, five children dead, and a murder-suicide that simply took nine years to be fully confirmed. The physical evidence left behind — evidence that pointed, at multiple points, toward someone else having been present — has never been folded into a final, complete explanation that accounts for all of it.
Sources
Investigators stumped by scene of Hualien murders — Taipei Times
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2006/09/12/2003327230
Five siblings slain in Hualien — Taipei Times
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2006/09/10/2003326950
Hualien remains might solve nine-year-old murders — Taipei Times
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2015/06/16/2003620834
Five Children Perish in a Sealed Room, Parents Found on a Desolate Mountain Nine Years After Disappearing — Vocal Media
https://vocal.media/criminal/five-children-perish-in-a-sealed-room-parents-found-on-a-desolate-mountain-nine-years-after-disappearing