A 24-year-old man who killed two women in their own homes within 24 hours has struck a deal to plead guilty to two charges of manslaughter, just one month before he was supposed to face a double-murder trial.
In December 2022, Yuqi Luo, 31, was inside her La Trobe Street apartment in Melbourne, working as a sex worker when she was strangled to death by Xiaozheng Lin. Lin told police after his arrest that he had committed the crime after Luo asked for more money during their encounter.
“I did bring her under my control and force,” he told police.
Luo was a Chinese national who was running a sex work business from her Melbourne apartment.
Less than a day later, another sex worker, Hyun Sook Jeon, 51, was killed by Lin in her Docklands apartment.
Lin stole money and valuables from both women, leaving the scene of the crime with $7000 in cash and a bag filled with items such as designer handbags. According to police investigation, Lin had been in financial debt due to a gambling habit.
This week, a pre-sentence hearing was held at the Supreme Court in Melbourne where horrifying details of the crime came to light.
On the evening of Boxing Day 2022, Lin visited a brothel in Melbourne before calling a friend to drive him to see Luo at her residence. Lin told his friend he had recently lost money gambling with TAB and that he was planning to rob Luo.
After Luo and Lin had sex, Lin asked Luo for an additional service without offering to pay for it. Luo refused. Lin become angry and lashed out, pressing Luo into the bed. When she retaliated by biting his hand, Lin strangled her to death.
Less than 24 hours later, Lin visited South Korean national Hyun Sook Jeon. After the pair had sex, Lin assaulted Jeon before stealing her laptop, bank cards, phone and building keys. When the sex worker’s body was discovered, it was so badly decomposed that a cause of death was unable to be determined.
On Monday, prosecutor, Kristie Churchill, said Lin’s actions were “subjectively serious”.
“He has caused the death of two vulnerable women in their own homes, a place that they were entitled to feel and be safe, within 24 hours of each other,” she told the court.
“He stole from them, he left them in positions with no regard for their safety and or dignity.”
On December 29, 2022, Lin was arrested. He has since been in custody and was due to face a murder trial in August. But in July, he successfully pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter.
In court on Monday, Churchill read out a victim impact statement written by Luo’s father, Luo Bo, who described the pain of losing his daughter.
“Having to see my daughter leave this world before us is a huge blow to my heart. Right in the prime of her life. A young life cut short in an extremely brutal way by a criminal,” he wrote.
“It’s extremely difficult to accept the cruel reality my daughter has been murdered.”
In Australia, the total number of sex workers has been estimated to be 20,000 in any one year, though the proportion of migrant workers remains largely unknown. In Victoria, between 5,000 and 10,000 sex workers are operating in any given year, with roughly half being migrant workers from non-English speaking backgrounds.
One study found that migrant sex workers made up a sizeable proportion of the sex worker population in Sydney, while another study found that the percentage of Asian migrant sex workers increased in the years between 1992 to 2009. Women make up roughly 80 percent of sex workers.
In Victoria, there are 89 licensed brothels and at least 500 unlicensed brothels according to Victoria Police. The state passed the Sex Work Decriminalisation Act in 2022 which decriminalised sex work. In the same year, a large-scale global study into the deaths of female sex workers found that 12.5 per cent of recorded deaths were caused by murder.
Another recent survey from the US identified homicide as a prevalent cause of death among sex workers. Among the female sex worker victims, more than half of the suspects were clients. In their introduction to their 2016 book, Invisible Women: Powerful and Disturbing Stories of Murdered Sex Workers Kylie Fox and Ruth Wykes explained how crimes against sex workers are rarely reported.
“The very nature of the work requires these women to get into cars with strangers, or go into dark alleys and to engage in some form of sex,” they wrote.
“Once they are alone with a customer they are at his mercy, and it is not uncommon for the customer to take more than he has paid for. Although it is difficult to find accurate figures, some studies have shown that 91 per cent of street-based sex workers have experienced some form of violence in the last six months of working.”
“This violence can take many forms: refusal to use a condom, slapping, beating, assaulting, raping, abducting, stealing money and refusing to pay. Sometimes the violence leaves a woman so badly injured she is unable to work for days or weeks. Women are abducted for days at a time and held as sex slaves before being released.”