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Crime Story Episode 54: Simon Lewsen

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Sending your kid off to university is probably one of the most stressful events in life. I know this firsthand, having already sent one and the other is going soon. They might be adults to the university administration, but to you, they will always be your kids. So I can't imagine what it would have been like for Wenbo Jin's parents to send their child all the way to Toronto from their home in China. While they must have thought a lot about what his life was going to be like in this new country, no one expects the call they got in January 2020: Their son had been kidnapped. Simon Lewsen investigated Wenbo Jin's story and he's here with me now. I'm Kathleen Goldhar, and this is Crime Story. Simon, welcome to Crime Story.

SIMON LEWSEN: Thanks so much for having me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So take me back to that night in January, 2020. What happens? Where is Jin and where, what time is all of this happening?

SIMON LEWSEN: So, Jin is fast asleep in his apartment on Grenville Avenue in Toronto. And it's three in the morning, and he wakes up to hear the sound of male voices inside his apartment. And he assumes that this is just a break in. He thinks to himself, They're probably just looking for cash or jewelry. I'll just stay quiet and this whole thing will end quickly. [KATHLEEN: Mm-hmm.] And then, seconds later, these two men burst into his room, and one of them is holding a gun. It's actually a starter pistol or a replica pistol, but it looks like a real gun. And both of them are wearing ski masks. He can't see their faces. One of them puts him in a chokehold. The other one holds the pistol to his face, and they instruct him to get out of bed and to stand up against the wall. They bind his arms behind him with zip ties. They put duct tape over his eyes and over his mouth and they put him back on the bed. And then minutes later, they remove the duct tape from his mouth and they force him to take a pill -- a five milligram tap of Seroquel, which is a sedative. And he's so terrified, that despite having taken a sedative, he can't actually get back to sleep. He's lying there on his bed in a kind of drugged, delirious, but very-much-awake state. And he can hear these two men ransacking his apartment, turning over furniture, rummaging through drawers. And they come back into his room again and again and again. And each time they come back in his room, they're surprised to see that he's still awake. And they administer another tap of the drug. They probably gave him about four or five pills over the course of the night. But he was so terrified that actually the drugs were no match for the adrenaline that was coursing through his body. And he remains awake the entire night. And this goes on hour after hour after hour. It gets to a point where the men have stopped ransacking. They're just sitting around and waiting. And he is lying in bed, wide-eyed and terrified, wondering what's going to happen. Until about ten to nine when his alarm goes off. That's his morning alarm. Keep in mind, the men broken at 3 a.m. So this is now five hours later.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Geez.

SIMON LEWSEN: It's actually-- Pardon me, it's six hours later. The sun is rising, he's due to get to school momentarily. And he has no idea what the men are there for. He thinks that they're looking for something. He thinks that they maybe thought there was some item of value in the apartment and they're trying to find it. He can't imagine what that item of value might possibly be. Then around 9 o'clock the men walk into his room again, and this time they're holding a really large hockey bag. And they tell him to curl up into a ball tight enough to get inside the bag. And this is when he realizes that the item of value they were looking for is him. They throw in a bunch of clothing to sort of pad the bag out. And then at 9 a.m. in broad daylight, they take him out of the apartment. He feels the kind of cold winter air as he's being hauled out of the apartment and then eventually placed in the trunk of a car. At that point, on the road, he finally falls asleep. When he wakes up, he has no idea where he is. He feels himself being hauled out of the car. He feels himself being taken into a building -- a house, as it would turn out. Carried up the stairs, laid out on a bed. He asks the man where he is, and this is when he finds out that he's been kidnapped for ransom. The men weren't looking for anything in his apartment, they were looking for him.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: If they were just looking for him, why were they, do you have any idea why they were ransacking the place and why, like, what that was all about?

SIMON LEWSEN: I think they were just passing the time.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Ohh.

SIMON LEWSEN: Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Because they were waiting for him to pass out.

SIMON LEWSEN: They were waiting for him to pass out. The plan originally for the kidnapping was for him to pass out quickly and for them to leave within minutes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Right.

SIMON LEWSEN: So they were just passing the time and they were hoping maybe to find some valuables.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Oh, interesting. Okay. So this was clearly planned. It might not have gone exactly as it was planned because it took a lot longer for him to pass out. But tell me what you know about the men who were behind this and what their plan was.

SIMON LEWSEN: So the ringleader is a guy named Zeyu Zang. And he's a man who's, who's got a kind of underworld life. He has a pretty sophisticated documents lab in his, in his Scarborough apartment where he can forge anything from passports to health cards. He's involved in a lot of credit card scams, he's orchestrating break in and enter robberies and, and they're, they're, um, on the more extreme end. I mean, the kind of breaking and entering where you come into someone's house in the middle of the night and tie them up with zip ties and threaten them with guns. And then he has his sort of sidekick, a guy by the name of Ian Chan. Ian Chan is young. He came to Canada as an international student at age 16. He doesn't have much by way of a social network or family in Canada. He's very lonely. And Zeyu Zang is 12 years older than him and sort of takes him under his wing. Zang always seemed to have ready cash, and he'd hire Ian Chan to do these various different odd jobs. And Chan is good-hearted, impulsive, greedy, impressionable. I'll tell you a story about him that I think really captures the kind of person he is. In 2020, Ian Chan was at the Pacific Mall in Markham, and he walked past a sports kiosk that was closed. And he figured that he could jump over the barrier of the sports kiosk, just a little kind of glass barricade thing. And so he jumps over into the sports kiosk and he, and he steals a bunch of cheap sports memorabilia and makes off with it. Then he feels bad about what he's done. And so he goes back to the mall, breaks into the sports kiosk a second time, and this time to return the memorabilia. And both of these break-ins are caught on camera. He is eventually arrested, and his lawyer is able to argue for a suspended sentence because he didn't actually steal anything. The second break-in was there basically just to return the things he'd stolen the first time around. Gives the kind of a sense of the person he is. The kind of person who gets into things a little bit too deep and then has to find a way out.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, and maybe has like a slightly better moral compass, because in the end he decides it wasn't so cool to steal something.

SIMON LEWSEN: Exactly. Exactly. [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] It always feels like his, his impulses and appetites are running a little bit ahead of his conscience. That's my line on Ian Chan.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: That's a good one. Yeah. So how did, does he get involved in this?

SIMON LEWSEN: So he gets a text in January of 2020 from Zeyu Zang, his former roommate, the sort of parental figure in his life. And Zang says, Are you looking to make some money? And Zang says, I want to kidnap somebody. And at first this freaks Chan out. But then he tells himself that maybe it's not as bad as it could be. The verb that Zang uses is bāng zhè, [ph] which means to kidnap somebody in Mandarin, or perhaps just to tie them up. And Chan tells himself, well, Zang's not an evil man. Probably what he's planning to do is nothing that extreme. Maybe somebody ripped him off in the past, and he's looking to tie that person up and scare them a little bit so they can get back whatever that person stole. It can't be that bad. Maybe he was just being colloquial when he said he was going to 'bāng zhè' [ph] somebody. So Chan tells himself that it isn't as bad as it looks, and he agrees to do what Zang asks of him. And the first thing Zang asks him to do is to go out and buy ski masks and an electronic camera. Chan does as he's told. A few days later, Zang hands him a tracking device and says, I want you to go and put this tracking device on the chassé of a car. He tells Chan to go to Wenbo Jin's building, get someone to let him in the building, and then go into the garage, find Jin's white BMW, and plant the tracking device on the chassé of the car. And Chan does as he's told. While this is going on, Zang is also figuring out how to get a copy of Jin's keys to his apartment. There's a lot that's unclear about how Zang first ever found out about Wenbo Jin. Clearly, it's through his network somehow.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, I was going to ask you that. Why did he choose him?

SIMON LEWSEN: That is, that is still somewhat unknown, actually. None of that information came out in court. But he's aware that there is this student, this mathematics and statistics major at University of Toronto who comes from what he believes is a wealthy family. And he's clearly plugged into Jin's social circle because he knows about this party that Jin is going to. And the irony is that Jin actually isn't the partying type. He's not conspicuously wealthy. Yes, he drives a white BMW, but he's not into party drugs. He's not into designer clothes. He doesn't party that much. But he does go to this one party in January. And somebody, we don't know who, who Zang has paid off is also at that party. And this person goes into Jin's jacket pocket, removes the keys from his pocket and puts the keys in the mailbox outside the house where the party is happening. Zang has them copied then returns them to the mailbox, and his person inside the party then puts them back in Wenbo Jin's jacket pocket. So Jin leaves the party with his keys, having no idea that his keys were borrowed and copied.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Wow.

SIMON LEWSEN: But at this point, Zang actually has access to Jin's apartment. And Zang and Chan go to Jin's apartment together a few days before the kidnapping. This is at a moment when the tracking device shows that the BMW is far away from the building, so they know he's not in the, in the apartment. And they're there, they're casing the joint, making sure there are no cameras. They're also rifling through Jin's drawers, and they find about $2,000 in cash, which Zang gives to Chan as payment for his services. And the experience for Chan is a mixture of sort of unnerving but also reassuring. It's unnerving because it's unnerving to be inside somebody's apartment when they're not there. It's also sort in this weird way reassuring because they've just robbed Jin, right? And Chan is thinking, well, you wouldn't rob somebody you were later going to kidnap, right? So maybe this isn't a kidnapping after all. Maybe this is just a robbery. And on the drive home from Jin's apartment, Chan asks Zang outright, What's going on here? He says, You're not actually going to kidnap this Wenbo Jin guy, are you? And this is when Zang lays out the plan to Chan. He explains that he has hired two men to conduct the kidnapping, but he doesn't trust the men that he's hired and he's worried that those men will rifle through Jin's drawers and steal his money. And so he wanted to get the money first before the men do it. And this is the moment where Chan realizes just how deeply implicated he is in a really terrible crime. But he doesn't know what to do. On the one hand, he doesn't want anything to do with this. This is a horrifying crime. On the other hand, he's scared of Zeyu Zang now. He's also still greedy and still looking for a paycheque. And so he makes a kind of deal with himself. He says to Zang, I'll do what you want me to do, but I will not participate in the kidnapping and I will not participate in anything violent. And he tells himself, Well, I can't be that bad, can I? I'm not actually doing the kidnapping.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Where is he then during the kidnapping? Do we know?

SIMON LEWSEN: On the night of the kidnapping -- that's, uh, the wee hours of the morning on January 21st, 2020 -- he shows up to a predetermined location near Wenbo Jin's apartment, and they're joined by two men, Kristopher Matthews and Jevaughn Myers. And these are the two men that Zang has hired for the kidnapping. Zang found them through another man, a man by the name of Jermaine Watson. And so these men are waiting for Zang and Chan outside the apartment.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And they're, they're known criminals? Like they...

SIMON LEWSEN: Khristopher Matthews absolutely is. His rap sheet includes arson, burglary, assault. Jermaine Watson, less so. I don't actually think he has a criminal record at this point in time. [KATHLEEN: Hm.] Chan's job is to hang out outside the apartment in his car. The plan is that Matthews and Myers are going to go into the apartment, they're going to quickly sedate Jin, and they're all going to drive off in the dead of night, in the Dodge. Chan's role is to follow the Dodge in his own car as a decoy. So if for whatever reason the cops approach the kidnapping car, the Dodge that is, Chan's job will be to start speeding immediately to sort of draw the cops away. [KATHLEEN: Hm.] But none of this really goes according to plan. And so the hours start ticking by, and by 6 a.m., the sun is starting to rise. Chan is panicking. He's texting Zeyu Zang, who's also holed up in another car near the apartment. He's saying, What's going on? We've got to go. At around 7 o'clock, Zang starts panicking as well. Zang starts thinking, maybe the kidnappers have a plot of their own. Maybe they're doing something else up there that I don't know of. At 9 a.m., it occurs to Zang that eventually Jin's absence is going to be noticed. Jin's not going to show up in class. Probably someone's going to come to his apartment to see what's going on, so they've got to clear out. So at 9 a.m. he makes the decision in broad daylight to carry Jin out of the apartment. You actually see it on security camera footage. There's actually footage of two men walking out of the apartment with this massive hockey bag and loading the hockey bag into the back of the Dodge.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Crazy. So how, how do they plan to get the ransom money?

SIMON LEWSEN: So, that same day, they make a phone call to Yumin Jin, who is Wenbo Jin's father in China. At this point in time, Yumin Jin is aware that something is up. Wenbo Jin has a cousin in Toronto, a student at York University, and Jin's cousin texts when Wenbo constantly, and none of his texts are being returned. And he thinks, this is weird. This, this isn't like my cousin to disappear like this. So, he actually shows up at the apartment, and he sits in the lobby for hours to see if Wenbo Jin will pass by, and Wenbo Jin doesn't pass by. So he calls Yumin Jin and tells him that his son has gone missing. And eventually he actually crosses the road from the apartment where there's a police cruiser idling, and he reports the disappearance to the cops. So, by the time Yumin Jin gets the ransom call, he actually knows that his son has disappeared. And as you can imagine, he's relieved to see his son's name suddenly pop up on WeChat. And so he picks up the call. And then he realized that his son is terrified, that something has gone horribly wrong. And Wenbo Jin explains to his father that he's been kidnapped. He tells his father that he cannot contact the police under any circumstances. That if the police find out about this crime, he could be killed, he could be injured, he could be beaten. He tells his father that the only thing to do is to pay the ransom as quickly as possible and as quietly as possible.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And so does the dad pay the ransom? What happens?

SIMON LEWSEN: So as I said before, this is quite a well-planned kidnapping, but they make a few key mistakes. I, in my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes they make is they overestimate the extent of Yumin Jin's wealth. They think he's an owner of a coal mine. In fact, he's a partial owner of a coal mine. He is, if you will, an investor. This investor is a bit like-- I would, I would imagine this investment is like a retirement fund. He's not a wealthy man. He describes himself as upper middle class, which is a very different thing from wealthy. The amount they ask is 500 bitcoins. In 2020, January 2020, 500 bitcoins is about five and a half million in Canadian dollars. It's a lot of money. I have often found myself wondering what might have happened if the kidnappers had asked for a smaller amount of money. If they'd asked for 50 or $100,000, I think Yumin Jin might have just paid. But because they asked for such an egregiously large sum, they force Yumin Jin to do the exact thing that he promised he wouldn't do, which is reporting the crime to the authorities.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And they actually come up with a pretty good plan of their own, right?

SIMON LEWSEN: You know, the real hero of the story is Yumin Jin, Wenbo Jin's father, [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] who is very concerned with his son's captivity, but is also remarkably cunning in the way he manages this whole affair. So he promises the kidnappers that he's going to stay in China and he's going to raise the funds immediately. He says, I will come up with the money you want within three days. And then he quietly boards a plane for Toronto with his wife. And on January 25th, he is at 52 Division telling the police everything he knows about the crime.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Oh, so the Toronto-- so just back up for a second. Had he spoken to the Toronto police while he was in China? Or--

SIMON LEWSEN: He had. Hed had.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Okay. And so was this plan approved by the Toronto police or was this really just something he decided to do on his own?

SIMON LEWSEN: Basically, what I can tell you is that the police tell him to come to Toronto, I'm pretty sure, but they don't really tell him what to do. Yumin is being told he has to pay up within three days, and the police don't think they're going be able to find Wenbo Jin within three days. So what they say to Yumin is that the best thing you can do is play for time: pretend to co-operate with the kidnappers, but find a way to get deadline extensions. Draw this thing out, give us the time we need to find Wenbo Jin. They don't tell him exactly what to say to the kidnappers. But he comes up with a really credible story, and to some degree, fate helps him out here as well. One of the things that the kidnappers did not factor in when they were planning this crime was the possibility of a once-in-a-century pandemic.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It was 2020. It was the winter of 2020.

SIMON LEWSEN: It's January of 2020. COVID hasn't come to-- it's not spreading in the community in Canada at this point, but it is raging across China where Yumin Jin is.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. And we're hearing about it here, yeah.

SIMON LEWSEN: We're hearing about it here, and it gives him a very, very credible story for why he can't come up with the money. So he's constantly telling them about the pandemic. He's telling them that things are so much worse in China than they think. Everything's shut down. Everyone's on lockdown. The banks aren't open. He can't meet with investors to get the money. There's no way for him to come up with the funds in three days. But don't worry, things are going to calm down soon. The moment he gets a chance, he's going to do it. He just needs a few days. So he keeps telling them about the pandemic and they have no choice but to believe him.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Okay, so he's on his way to Canada. He's figuring out how to stall these guys, which is pretty ingenious. What are the police doing during this time, even while he's traveling?

SIMON LEWSEN: So the police are conducting their own forensic investigation into the crime. So he is, he comes to Canada on the 25th. He holes up in a hotel. The police are holing up with him and they are following a bunch of digital forensic leads in the hopes of finding Jin while Yumin Jin plays for time.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Interestingly, which is something that I also learned in your story, is that a burner phone is not 100% untraceable. And this [SIMON: Yeah.] is kind of their downfall, right?

SIMON LEWSEN: This is kind of the downfall. I said earlier that they made a few key mistakes. One of those mistakes was overestimating the extent of Yumin Jin's wealth. Another key mistake is overestimating the amount of anonymity afforded by a burner phone. You know, heads up to all the would-be criminals listening to this podcast.

[Kathleen laughs]

SIMON LEWSEN: A burner phone, [laughs] it's, it's not as safe as you think. The IP address isn't registered in your name, so that gives you a degree of anonymity if you're using a burner phone. But it's still an internet-enabled device and it's still full of information that the police can seize and analyze. And that's what they do. So Ian Chan was responsible for setting up the ransom call, and he set up the ransom call through Jin's WeChat account.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

SIMON LEWSEN: Jin has two-factor identification enabled on his account. So when Chan logged on to Jin's WeChat account, he was immediately sent a code to Jin's Hotmail. And so he had to basically go and ask Jin for his Hotmail password. The police know that Jin has a Hotmail, so they ask Microsoft if anybody has accessed Jin's Hotmail since the kidnapping. And Microsoft says, Actually, yeah, somebody accessed his Hotmail on the 21st. So that's suspicious. The police contact-- [crosstalk]

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Bingo. Yeah. I mean, it's the day after.

SIMON LEWSEN: Yeah, bingo. Exactly. [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] That's the day after. And that kind of is the smoking gun. The police contact Bell Canada, and they get the IP address of the burner phone from which the email account was accessed. It's an Apple burner phone. So they were able to ask Apple, who logged on to this burner phone? And Apple says, well, somebody logged on with the email address ianchan98 at gmail.com. And that's actually an email address the police already have on file because they'd arrested Chan in accordance-- in connection with the sports kiosk robbery. So immediately Ian Chan becomes a person of interest in the case. And they seize all of his phone records. They now have information about all the Wi-Fi networks that Ian Chan is connecting to over the course of the kidnapping. And they see him connecting to his-- the Wi-Fi at his home, they see him connecting to the Wi-Fi at his girlfriend's place. And they see him connecting to the Wi-Fi at this other place -- 2 Marengo Drive in Richmond Hill -- which immediately becomes a source of interest for the police. They also notice that he is constantly in contact with another cell phone user. They don't know who this other cell phone user is, but they know that he's constantly going back and forth over text with Ian Chan. And so they immediately start pinging the phone of this other cell phone user. And every time they ping the phone, they get a sense as to where this user is in the city. So they're effectively following this other cell phone user as he moves through the city. One day, the cell phone user gets on the 407 Highway. And the 407 is a toll highway. It's administered by the 407 ETR concession company. And the way the company administers tolls is by photographing every car as it enters the highway and every vehicle as it leaves the highway as well. So you get on the highway, your license plate is photographed, you get off the highway, your license plate is photographed, and then they can use those two photographs to determine how long you're on the highway and to figure out what toll to charge you.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yes, I've had the bills.

SIMON LEWSEN: You've had the bills, you know what it's like. And so the police have these two timestamp moments when this cell phone user enters and exits the 407, and they're able to line those up with the photographs owned by the 407 ETR concession company. And there's actually only one car that entered the 407 at this exact time and left the 407 at this exact time, and it's a Jeep Wrangler belonging to Zeyu Zang. But of course, the cops don't know this. They just know the identity of the car at this point. They've got car, they've got Ian Chan, and they've got this address that's of interest at 2 Marengo Drive. So the next thing they do in the middle of the night is they set up a pole camera across the street from the house. It's basically just a electronic camera on a telephone pole and it's monitoring the house. They can see Ian Chan coming and going and they can see the Jeep Wrangler coming and going as well. And there's a sense that probably, not for sure, but probably Wenbo Jin is being held in the house.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Mm-hmm. So when do they go in? What do they do?

SIMON LEWSEN: Yeah, you would think that they'd go in right away, right? [KATHLEEN: Mm-hmm.] Wouldn't you just raid the house immediately?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

SIMON LEWSEN: But it's not that simple. Because there's risks either way. You have to remember that the kidnappers right now don't know that the cops are even on the case. And they've told Yumin Jin that if he notifies the cops, that Jin is going to be killed. So there's the problem that once the cops break into the house at 2 Marengo Drive, they were effectively announcing their presence. They know that the kidnappers are doing something in the house, but they don't know what. It could be a staging house. It could be a safe house. But as soon as they break into that house, the kidnappers are going to know that they're on the case. And if Jin isn't there, then things are going to become very, very dangerous for Jin in that moment. So, there's a sort of sense of you have to shoot, but don't miss. And the lead detective on the case, Michael Kerr, decides that he's not ready. And he's not totally sure that Jin is being held in the house and he doesn't want to risk raiding the house and announcing his presence.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So what makes him decide that they're ready to go in?

SIMON LEWSEN: So all this time, Yumin Jin is holed up in a hotel downtown and he's communicating with the kidnappers. He's telling the kidnappers that he's in China. He's playing for time. He's also asking them to put his son on the phone one more time. He's saying, I miss my son. I want reassurance that my son is okay. And the kidnappers are feeling a lot of pressure to arrange a second call between Yumin Jin and his son Wenbo. And eventually on January 31st, they agree. The cops are with Yumin Jin when the call is connected, and they are watching the house at 2 Marengo Drive.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Mm-hmm.

SIMON LEWSEN: And they see Ian Chan entering the house right before the call is connected, and they see him leaving the house right after the call is disconnected. That's pretty strong evidence that the call happened at 2 Marengo Drive. It doesn't prove anything. And there's a lot of debate within the investigative team as to whether this is evidence enough to justify going into the house and taking that risk. Michael Kerr, the lead investigator, decides it's as good as they're going to get. At this point, we're 11 days into the kidnapping. It's getting to the point where the kidnappers are likely to get desperate. Once a kidnapping has gone on for this long, it can get quite dangerous for the victim. Kerr has a sense that they are now running really tight on time. So on the morning of February 2nd -- this is 13 days after the kidnapping -- they finally raid the house.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And what state do they find him in?

SIMON LEWSEN: They send a emergency task force, which is sort of like a Canadian equivalent of a SWAT team, to the house. Sixteen cops descend on the house. They push through the door and they throw in a stun grenade, a device that creates a loud bang and emits smoke, and the goal is to just disorient whoever's in the house. So they rush inside the house, they throw in this stun grenade. And at that moment, two people hear the sound of the stun grenade and jump out of a second-floor window. Cops are waiting for them in the backyard. Both of them are arrested. One of them is actually injured, either in the fall or in the ensuing scuffle. They find a woman in the second-floor bedroom, and then in another bedroom, they find Wenbo Jin. He's there, he is tied up. He's got a blindfold over his eyes. They cut the chains on his arms. They take him and they sit him up on the bed. They say, Are you Martin? Martin, by the way, is his English language name. He says, Yes. They remove the blindfold from his eyes. And, you know, it's not very light in the room. He hasn't seen light at all in the last 13 days. So he is blinking furiously. He's also crying effusively. They get him into a car and they drive him downtown to where his parents are waiting to meet him at the police station. And he tells Michael Kerr, the lead investigator in the car, that he was convinced that he was going to die. He'd given up on any hopes of living. And when he is reunited with his parents in the police station, the chains are still dangling from his arms and he's still wearing the clothes that he'd been wearing for the last two weeks.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What a scene. [SIMON: Yeah.] And what does he tell them how he was treated? Like, what were those 13 days like for him? Why did he think he was going to die?

SIMON LEWSEN: Those 13 days were horrible, and also perhaps not as horrible as they could have been. There were kidnapping cases in which people are beaten, tortured, sexually assaulted, raped. None of that happens to Wenbo Jin. With that said, the conditions he's held in are absolutely appalling. There's a camera monitoring his actions. He has duct tape over his eyes and zip ties on his wrists. Eventually, they show him some small mercies. They take the duct tape off his eyes and replace it with a cloth blindfold. They replace the zip ties with a chain and padlock, which gives him a little bit more freedom to move around. For the first few days, he's relieving himself in a bucket in the corner of the room, but they eventually let him take trips to the bathroom. He can knock on the, on the floor and, and they escort him to the bathroom. They feed him McDonald's or Tim Hortons or pizza a couple of times a day. They tell him that if he takes off the blindfold, they'll hurt him or kill him, so he's terrified. And he listens to them. He never takes off the blindfold. He doesn't see any light at all for 13 days. [KATHLEEN: Wow.] He is genuinely afraid for his life. He has no idea how to tell time. He doesn't know when it's day, he doesn't know when it's night. He eventually just tries to tell time by the rap music downstairs. And when the music dies down, he assumes that it's probably night. But he doesn't know how long he's been in captivity, and he doesn't even know where he is. He thinks he's in Montreal.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Amazing. [SIMON: Yeah.] And so what, what's the result of this? Like, what are the charges? What happens to these guys when he's finally safe?

SIMON LEWSEN: So after the raid at the Marengo Drive house, things move pretty quickly. They find Ian Chan at his girlfriend's house and they bring him in. And they pull the, um, Jeep Wrangler belonging to Zeyu Zang aside near Zang's Scarborough apartment and they arrest him too. Some of the men plead guilty. The two kidnappers, Kristopher Matthews and Jevaughn Myers, both plead guilty. A few other, a few other people plead guilty as well. But there is a trial, and three men go to trial. One of them, of course, is Zeyu Zang. Another is Jermaine Watson, the guy who'd hired the two kidnappers. Another is this third guy, Martin Levy, the guy who jumped out of the second-storey window, whose role in this case is a little bit ambiguous. And the Crown presents an absolute barrage of forensic evidence. And all of that evidence is backed by their star witness, who is Ian Chan. Ian Chan eventually turns and co-operates with the prosecution and testifies against Zeyu Zang, presumably in the hopes of getting a reduced sentence. Although there is no deal between Ian Chan and the prosecutor. And the prosecution decides that, frankly, the case is strong enough. They have enough forensic evidence to tell a compelling story to a jury.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What happens then? What are the verdicts in these cases?

SIMON LEWSEN: Myers and Matthews, the two kidnappers, get five and ten years, respectively. They plead guilty. The jury convicts Zeyu Zang and Jermaine Watson for organizing and, and participating in the kidnapping and the forcible drugging of Wenbo Jin.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How did Zang react to the verdict?

SIMON LEWSEN: So I was at the sentencing hearing for Zeyu Zang, and it was an interesting experience. I was expecting to be scared. I was expecting to be in the presence of a very cold, hard, sort of, you know, evil man. And what I saw made me profoundly sad. I showed up in court. I was the only person there. There were no-- none of his family, no friends, nobody there to support him. There was one person in the visitor's gallery and that was me. And there he was, sitting in the box with his head in his hands, wearing an orange prison jacket. What I was looking at was just a picture of absolute abject despair. And his lawyer, Laura Villani, told a rather sympathetic story about him. And to be clear, this is her job, to tell a sympathetic story about him. So you can, you can decide for yourself what the story counts for. But she reveals that he actually was also an international student. He grew up in China. He had a physically abusive father and emotionally abusive mother. He moved to Canada to pursue a college degree and to get as far away from his family as possible. And like so many international students, he found himself in a low-end exhausting job. He was working at a photography lab, often working the night shifts. He was constantly exhausted. And one day, in a state of exhaustion, his car veered off the highway and he got in a car crash and he suffered a head injury. And because of that head injury, he was now underperforming at work, and eventually he gets fired. And now he's in a horrible situation: he's injured, he has no money coming in. He's got the same precarious status as so many international students, but without the money. And this is when he starts committing crimes. This is when he starts engaging in credit card fraud, and then eventually moving up to break and entering and then this kidnapping. And I think you can acknowledge the context without morally exonerating Zeyu Zang for his role in this crime. [KATHLEEN: Mm-hmm.] He was very much embedded in this exploitative system as much as Wenbo Jin and Ian Chan were.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It must be so lonely and hard. It's a new language. It's a new place. The culture is so, so different. It's a lot for anybody.

SIMON LEWSEN: The story of Zeyu Zang strikes me as a story of profound loneliness. [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] What I was struck with when I saw him in that courtroom was that I was looking at a deeply, deeply lonely man. Here he was in what was likely one of the worst moments of his life, and there was absolutely nobody there to support him.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Was he deported or is he in Canada?

SIMON LEWSEN: No. So he was-- the judge ultimately gave him quite a stiff sentence. The judge gave him a 20-year sentence. But once the prison time portion of that sentence is up, he will be driven to the airport and he will be deported. And he will be, at that point in time, he'll be a middle-aged man starting his life over again in China.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Are you confident saying that Wenbo's kidnapping happened because he was an international student?

SIMON LEWSEN: 100%. [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] This would not have happened had Wenbo Jin been a native-born student. It's very, very rare that kidnappings for ransom, that has happened among native-born Canadians.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

SIMON LEWSEN: Most native-born Canadians aren't rich. And, you know, it just doesn't make sense to take, take the risk of kidnapping somebody for a paltry ransom. There are, of course, rich Canadians, but rich Canadians are also very well-connected. And the risk of kidnapping a very well-connected Canadian is far too high for anybody to take. There was one story: in 2006, a guy by the name of Graham McMynn -- he's the son of a millionaire -- in Vancouver, was kidnapped. And the story was huge. It was all anybody in B.C. was talking about. There were 400 officers on the case. They found Graham McMynn so quickly. Um. And this is, this is what happens when Canadian-born rich people get, get kidnapped. I mean, it just, it's a huge story. The police spare no resources. Everybody talks about it. Criminals don't like that kind of, like, that kind of heat. So it really doesn't make sense to kidnap a native-born Canadian. If you're from, from this kind of cynical perspective of a would-be kidnapper, what you're looking for is somebody who is wealthy but not well-connected.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Right.

SIMON LEWSEN: Someone who is both wealthy and marginal. And there are not a lot of people who fit that description, but international students kind of do.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, it does sound like these international students kind of exist in this grey area.

SIMON LEWSEN: And I think these kidnappings are much more common than we think. I mean, there are certainly other documented cases of kidnappings. There was a Chinese student by the name of Kai, Kai Kong Jackie Lee, who was kidnapped in Vancouver in 2004. Another student named Si Nong Li, who was kidnapped in Richmond, B.C., in 2013. Very shortly before the Wenbo Jini kidnapping, a student by the name of Wanzhen Lu was kidnapped in his condo in March 2019. And he was taken out to an unheated barn in the Hamilton area and held in shackles there. Later released, eventually, when the kidnappers freaked out and let him go. And for every crime that's been reported, there have probably been many more that were not reported. The whole notion of these crimes is that you conduct them without the authorities finding out.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Right.

SIMON LEWSEN: I don't think Robert McMynn, the father of Graham McMynn, would have believed the kidnappers if they'd said, We've paid off the RCMP, don't report the crime. He knows enough about Canada. He knows enough about law enforcement to know that that wouldn't happen.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Right.

SIMON LEWSEN: But a parent in China might believe that. If a kidnapper calls you and says, I've kidnapped your son, and by the way, the cops in Canada are extremely corrupt and I'm connected with the RCMP, I've paid them off. Uh, if you report this crime, your son will die, but the cops won't do anything about it. Someone who lives far away from Canada and doesn't know a lot about Canadian law enforcement and doesn't have a lot of connections in Canada, may be inclined to believe that story.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And also places where police are bought off.

SIMON LEWSEN: Exactly. Exactly. That's right.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. Yeah. So, but, you know, a little twist to this story is that you actually are a professor at the same school that Wenbo went to. Do you have any sense of what universities could do to help keep the students a bit safer?

SIMON LEWSEN: I think we could be doing a lot more. First of all, I really think that schools should be housing international students. They should be making a much bigger effort to provide safe, secure housing, preferably on campus, instead of leaving students to the vagaries of the housing market. I think we should be doing a lot more to place international students in employment programs instead of forcing international students to rely on shady employers who are intent on exploiting them. We could be telling international students much more about their rights and where to go for legal representation, including potentially legal advice in their, in their home language. We could be telling students about what is likely to get them deported and what is not likely to get them deported. Because the threat of deportation is so often the thing that, that enables people to extort international students. And we're really not doing any of that.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How is Wenbo now?

SIMON LEWSEN: The kidnapping absolutely ruined his life in a lot of ways. He, afterwards, he tried to get back into his studies, but he couldn't. He had become kind of famous, particularly in China. The media stories sort of seem to follow him everywhere he goes, particularly back home. He was constantly waking up with nightmares. He was terrified of sleeping alone. He eventually decided that he couldn't complete his degree in Toronto, and he moved back to China. But he has been profoundly changed and profoundly traumatized by these events.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Wow. At least he knows his parents will always be there for him.

SIMON LEWSEN: Absolutely.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Okay. This was great, Simon. Thank you so much and thanks for all your work.

SIMON LEWSEN: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this.

[Music: Closing theme]

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. We release a new episode every Monday, so please remember to follow the show in your podcast app. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcasts' YouTube channel, or by subscribing to CBC Podcasts' True Crime channel on Apple Podcasts. In addition to early access, subscribers to our True Crime channel also listen ad-free. Crime Story is hosted by me, Kathleen Goldhar. Our producers are Nikky Manfredi and Mitchell Stuart. Sound design by Julian Uzielli and Mitchell Stuart. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Aagaard. And our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Executive Producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is the Senior Manager of CBC Podcasts, and Arif Noorani is the Director of CBC Podcasts.

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Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 54

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