A man killed a woman while her ex-boyfriend in the other country witnessed the incident via webcam.
On April 15, 2011, a 23-year-old Quian “Necole” Liu, a student from York University who had relocated to Toronto from her native Beijing, China, has been video chatting her former boyfriend, Xian Chao Meng, who was in China when Brian Dickson, a 29-year-old fellow York University student, knocked on the apartment door of Liu.
Initially, Dickson asked to use Liu’s phone, but, once inside, he came on to her sexually. In effect, Liu said, “thanks but no thanks,” Dickson attacked and brutally strangled the young woman.
From half a world away, Meng helplessly watched this deadly incident via webcam.
He watched Liu get up to answer the door, Meng said. He then saw Dickson enter and try to embrace Liu. She said “no” twice and tried to push Dickson away. Both figures went out of the frame.
From there, he heard a struggle that included two muffled bangs, Meng said. Finally, Dickson, now naked, returned into frame and shut off the webcam and stole Liu’s laptop and cellphone before taking off.
In a panic, Meng contacted anyone and everyone who could possibly help. This action led the police to Dickson, who was arrested for charges of first-degree murder.
When the case came to trial in 2014, Dickson’s lawyer’s conceded that their client did kill Liu, but they maintained it was an accident. They pushed the jury to convict Dickson of the lesser charge of manslaughter. The trial depends entirely on exactly how Dickson choked the life from Liu.
The issue was specifically determining whether Dickson consciously held his hands around Liu’s throat and squeezed with lethal purpose or perhaps whether death might have just been a tragic by-product of an attempted sexual assault.
Dickson was has previously registered complaints that he had been attacking women. He posts incest, underage sex, and his numerous volumes of Asian pornography online. These things were the jurors did not hear about.
After almost four hours of deliberation, the jury returned a guilty verdict for first-degree murder. In Canada, that conviction carries a mandatory life sentence with no possibility of parole for 25 years.
Necole Liu’s father, Jian Hui Liu; and mother, Ya Ru Zheng; had flown in from China for the trial. They cried tears of relief upon hearing the verdict, and her dad told the press:
“We believe the Canadian judicial system is very good and very fair. This is not simply a crime against my daughter, but also against the whole society.”
Dickson quickly filed an appeal against his first-degree murder verdict. He continues to maintain he should only be locked up for manslaughter. In 2016, Dickson filed for a taxpayer-funded lawyer to take up his case. The Ontario Court of Appeals shot him down.
19 years remain until he can possibly come up for parole. That ought to keep him off anybody’s webcams for a while.
Sources:
