Police track down murder suspect after 13 years by hitting repentance

Bui Trong Thanh was detained last week, standing accused of having killed a woman during a robbery when he was 17 years old.

The police opened a criminal probe after Nguyen Van Quy in Lai Xuan Commune found a rotted corpse in the abandoned water tank in his backyard while looking for his dog on Dec. 6 this year.

DNA results confirmed the body belonged to Nguyen Thu Thanh, a local woman who went missing 13 years ago while delivering a gas cylinder from her shop.

The body exhibited evidence of having met a violent end, and the police determined that she was murdered.

“It’s a difficult case, so we planned a special investigation,” said Nguyen Van Hien, deputy head of Hai Phong’s Criminal Police Office.

At the time the woman went missing, Lai Xuan Commune was a rock excavation hotspot, drawing many people from other places to come to work.

The police made a list of people present in the commune at the time, and categorized them into four groups of suspects: miners, construction workers, drug addicts and people with criminal records.

Suspect Bui Trong Thanh points at the location where he killed a local woman in Hai Phong City 13 years ago. Photo by VnExpress/Le Tan

“The number of people to be looked into was huge. Some of them have died, some of them have moved to a different place,” Hien said. “We thus had to deploy 200 officers to travel to different places to collect necessary information over eight days.”

The list was then narrowed down to four suspects, who all denied being involved with the woman’s death when summoned by the police.

“We had no foundation to detain any of them, so we had to take several special measures to prevent them from leaving the locality,” Hien said.

The investigators found Bui Trong Thanh to be “most suspicious.”

“We invited him over for questioning many times. We repeatedly used tactics to hit his repentance. And he confessed,” Hien said.

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

He said that as his parents got divorced, he was left uncared for as a teenager. He adopted a dissipated lifestyle, fell into debt and also used drugs.

He, then 17, thought of committing a robbery to gain money, and his target was the woman Thu Thanh, living in the same village and often wearing gold jewelry. The woman was then 22, and married with a two-year-old son.

Trong Thanh came to Thu Thanh’s house on Dec. 9, 2010, asking her to deliver a gas cylinder to Quy’s house, around 300 meters away.

Quy and his wife were in jail for illegal rock mining and production of explosives at the time so there was no one home. Trong Thanh did not live there but stopped by once in a while.

When Thu Thanh was carrying the gas cylinder into the house’s kitchen, Trong Thanh grabbed her neck to seize her gold necklace, causing her to fall to the ground and hit her head and bleed, he told the police.

Bui Trong Thanh recreates a crime scene in which he murders a woman 13 years ago in Hai Phong City, Dec. 22, 2023. Photo by VnExpress/Le Tan

He then suffocated her to death, and put her body into the water tank.

He tried to clear all traces with wet cloth, and used cement and branches to make a lid to cover the tank.

He came back to the site once after seven years, making another lid after the old one was broken over time.

“Thanh said he has been living the past 13 years in torment, but he did not dare to hand himself in, fearing the death sentence,” Hien said.

“He has been a good citizen since, as a way to repay for his act. He had not told anyone about it,” the police officer said.

“Vietnam has had five cases in which the victims’ bodies were found a long time after they went missing, but this is the only one to have been solved successfully so far,” Hien said.