Taiwan News
Date: 2015-11-12
By Ko Lin, Taiwan News, Staff Writer
Date: 2015-11-12
By Ko Lin, Taiwan News, Staff Writer
Kaohsiung City’s Chien-mei Hotel, now the Metropolitan Hotel, is seen in this file photo. The hotel was where DPP politician Peng Wan-ru was last seen getting into a taxi before she was raped and murdered in November 1996. Investigators are verifying whether fingerprints from a convicted drunk driver serving a sentence in Chiayi match those taken from where her body was found.
An investigation that has taken 19 years to see new leads saw light at the end of
the tunnel as a convict who was incarcerated in early June for drunk driving blabbered to his cellmate claiming he was the murderer, reports said Thursday.
Peng Wan-ru, then-director of the Democratic Progressive Party’s department of women’s affairs, was raped and stabbed to death after attending a DPP provisional national party congress on November 30, 1996. Peng, reported missing after leaving Kaohsiung’s Jianmei Hotel by taxi, was consequently found dead outside an abandoned warehouse in Kaohsiung’s Wusong District several days later.
At the time, more than 130,000 taxi drivers in the five counties and cities in the south were fingerprinted, but to no avail. The case has remained unresolved since then.
According to the Chinese-language Apple Daily, police began questioning the convict in June after words quickly spread within the penitentiary rumoring he was Peng’s murderer. The convict surnamed Yang, who was apprehended by the police for driving under the influence of alcohol, however denied such allegations. [FULL STORY]
