Murder suspect arrested as victim’s corpse found after 13 years

Bui Trong Thanh stands accused of having killed the woman during a robbery when he was 17 years old.

The woman’s body was found accidentally on Dec. 6.

Local resident Nguyen Van Quy was looking for his dog when he checked the water tank in his backyard and discovered the rotted corpse.

The body exhibited evidence of having met a violent end, and police opened a criminal investigation into the death.

The woman, who was 22 and married with a two-year-old son when she died, went missing while riding her motorbike to deliver a gas cylinder on Dec. 3, 2010.

She did not come home that night.

Besides her motorbike, which was found 500 meters from her home, the family had no more clues.

But they still held on to the hope that she would show up one day. Until Quy found the body in the tank, 300 meters from the deceased’s house.

Local men stand at an abandoned water tank in Hai Phong City where the body of a woman was found on Dec. 6, 2023. Photo by VnExpress/Le Tan

Thanh is the son of Quy’s wife from another marriage.

According to authorities, at the time the woman went missing, Quy and his wife were in jail for illegal rock mining and production of explosives.

Neighbors said Thanh had lived in the neighborhood since he was a little boy. He now works as an excavator driver and no one around him had noticed evidence of anything unusual about his life over the past 13 years.