8 minute read
Uncovering evil
Editorial and photography: Jesse Wray-McCann
Content warning: This article contains information about sexual assault and rape. Reader discretion is advised.
Detective Senior Constable Laurie Shanahan is about to finish work for the day at Melbourne Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Investigation Team (SOCIT) when the phone rings.
He doesn't know it at the time, but it's a phone call that will help expose one of the most heinous sexual offenders in Victoria's history.
On the other end of the phone is a young Chinese woman by the name of Chen Jin* who is studying in Melbourne and she is calling from St Vincent’s Hospital where she is recovering from a cardiac arrest that almost killed her.
She explains that four days earlier, on 23 July 2019, she had started her first day at a new job at an immigration agency in Melbourne’s CBD.
She had taken a carton of milk and a water bottle to the office but, after leaving them alone briefly with her new boss, Frank Hu, the milk later tasted bitter.
After leaving her to do some translating work, Hu came back in, picked up the carton and said to Ms Jin, “You didn’t finish it, there is still some more” but she said she didn’t want any more.
About 11.40am, Ms Jin began feeling tired so she drank more water to try to wake up and then messaged her boyfriend, saying, “I’m feeling dizzy and I don’t know why”.
The next thing she remembered was waking up in hospital, where she had been resuscitated after her heart had stopped.
She tells Det Sen Const Shanahan, who is now a detective acting sergeant, over the phone that she fears her boss of just one day had drugged and sexually assaulted her.
“When she told me her story and her boss’s name, Frank Hu, there was just something about it that really rang a bell to me,” Det A/ Sgt Shanahan said.
He told Ms Jin the detectives replacing him for the afternoon shift would soon visit her in the hospital.
“I remember walking back into the office the next morning and the night shift guys just said to me, ‘You’re never going to believe what we found’,” he said.
Ms Jin was one of four young Chinese women living in Melbourne as students who had made allegations to police in the previous eight months that Hu had drugged and possibly sexually assaulted them.
For three of them, it had happened on their first day working for Hu and they all recalled he had been insistent on them consuming drinks he had prepared.
Two of the women, at the time they reported the offending, were unwilling to make an official statement and progress their matters further.
In the case of one of the other victims, Hu was nominated as the offender but had been reported and recorded under a different name that he used.
Suddenly, Det A/Sgt Shanahan understood why Ms Jin’s story had seemed so familiar — one of the women who refused to take it further had reported the offending to him eight months earlier.
“With the benefit of hindsight, I regret I wasn’t more persistent back then with that victim for her to make an official statement,” he said.
“It’s easy for us cops to get gung-ho with these matters because we want to catch the bad guys and put them in jail.
“But in sex offences, that’s not always the best result.
You’ve got someone telling you the most horrific experience of their life and, as an investigator, the way you manage that interaction is crucial because it can impact the rest of their life.
“So you need to treat that person with respect and validation because, as it was with this victim, most of the time, they just want to tell their story, they want to be believed.”
The four victims’ stories would have to be thoroughly investigated, but the night shift detectives had more news for Det A/Sgt Shanahan that seemed to confirm their fears that vile crimes had been committed.
They discovered Hu had been stopped by Australian Border Force (ABF) in June 2018 at Melbourne Airport after coming back into the country.
ABF officers had discovered on Hu’s phone numerous videos and photos of women being raped and sexually assaulted while unconscious.
The ABF sent the material to Victoria Police at the time, but the investigation could not progress because none of the victims could be identified.
“They were really graphic photos and videos, and we began to realise, ‘Far out, I don’t think any of these women in the photos are our four victims’,” Det A/Sgt Shanahan said.
It was abundantly clear that this job was going to be a big one, maybe one of the biggest Melbourne SOCIT would ever do, so it was one of those moments where everyone in the office dropped what they were doing and took it on as a priority.
Det A/Sgt Shanahan and his colleagues knew it would take a lot of work to identify all the victims and build a case, but the most urgent priority was to get Hu into custody.
“It was all about the safety of the community, because there was nothing to suggest he was going to stop offending and one of his victims was very lucky to even be alive after what he did to her,” he said.
Detectives had identified an office suite and two apartments linked to Hu and, on 1 August 2019, four days after Ms Jin phoned from the hospital, Melbourne SOCIT police raided all three locations.
They arrested Hu at his office suite and seized phones, computers, medication, employment records, women’s clothing, condoms, unopened syringes and medical tubing.
“My immediate impression of Hu was that he was a very strange and reserved guy, and he was denying everything,” Det A/Sgt Shanahan said.
At one of the apartments, a woman called Ju Zedong* let police in and they immediately recognised her from some of the material the ABF discovered on Hu’s phone.
It was revealed that Ms Zedong was someone Hu had a personal relationship with.
Analysis of all Hu’s devices uncovered 1949 photos and 232 videos of him drugging, raping and sexually assaulting 15 different women.
But Det A/Sgt Shanahan said that was just the tip of the iceberg, with thousands more photos and videos of victims they were unable to identify.
Hu had been uploading the content to a website where other people did the same, and he also instructed others on the website on the techniques and drugs to use to keep someone unconscious.
After contacting everyone in the employee records, detectives discovered the majority of his victims were employees who had been offended against on their first day in the job.
Det A/Sgt Shanahan said it was clear Hu was hiring these young international students for the sole purpose of sexually assaulting them.
There were also a number of other victims Hu had known personally for a long time, with one of his earliest known victims having been raped while unconscious in 2013.
But almost three quarters of the photos and videos were of Ms Zedong.
Between April 2015 and July 2019, there were 68 separate times when Hu had drugged, raped and sexually assaulted her.
The scale of offending shocked the investigators.
It was so far beyond what a local SOCIT usually deals with that they reached out to the specialists in the Sexual Crimes Squad, which investigates the state’s most serious rapists.
Senior Sergeant Mark Farrugia, a sergeant at the Sexual Crimes Squad at the time, said that Det A/Sgt Shanahan’s efforts were “phenomenal” and they didn’t want to take the job away from him.
“Laurie is one of those detectives that leaves no stone unturned and follows every rabbit down every hole,” Sen Sgt Farrugia said.
“And this job, and those victims, sincerely needed that attention because it’s one of the most horrific this state has ever seen.”
The unique decision was made to keep Det A/Sgt Shanahan as the lead investigator but base him within the Sexual Crimes Squad to take advantage of its resources.
Det A/Sgt Shanahan and his colleagues then relentlessly shored up evidence and developed relationships with the victims, managing to get seven of them to give evidence in court at a committal hearing.
“At one of the hearings, Frank’s barrister was angling for a sentencing indication from the judge if they were to take it to trial, and his barrister was pretty blunt.
He said, ‘If a jury sees these videos and images, they’ll convict him of war crimes’,” Det A/Sgt Shanahan said.
Hu decided to plead guilty to his depraved crimes and was sentenced to the longest prison term for a sex offender in Victoria’s history — 29 years, with a minimum of 22 years.
“I personally believe that SOCIT work is the most important work a police officer can do outside of the Homicide Squad,” Det A/Sgt Shanahan said.
“I think it has the greatest impact because you’re protecting some of the most vulnerable people in the community.
“The appreciation the victims show you for how you’ve treated them, how you’ve dealt with the situation and how you’ve taken them seriously, it goes from being a situation where you’re investigating it because you want to catch crooks, and it becomes, ‘No, I’m doing this for her’.”
