On a warm May afternoon in 2010, residents of a new high-rise apartment building in Hanoi started to notice something strange.

At first, it was just a smell.
Something that didn’t belong in a clean, modern condominium block in Vietnam’s capital city.

Maintenance staff went searching for the source. They checked the rubbish chutes, the stairwells, the rooftop.

What they found… didn’t seem real.

Hidden away in a service area on one of the top floors was the body of a young woman.
No head.
No fingertips.

Just a torso, wrapped and left in a place where nobody was supposed to go.

Within days, the story of the “headless corpse in the apartment building” would grip the entire country. And investigators would uncover a killer whose crime was as calculated as it was brutal.

Sources

Báo Pháp Luật Việt Nam – “Toàn cảnh vụ Nguyễn Đức Nghĩa chặt đầu người yêu cũ” (June 9 2010)
 

Báo Pháp Luật TP. Hồ Chí Minh – “Bắt hung thủ vụ xác chết không đầu ở chung cư sau 30 giờ” (May 20 2010)
 

Báo Công An Nhân Dân – “Người giải mã tội ác của Nguyễn Đức Nghĩa” (May 2010)

Dân Trí Điện Tử – “Phát hiện thi thể không đầu tại chung cư Trung Yên” (May 17 2010)

Tuổi Trẻ Online – “Tìm thấy phần thi thể nghi của nạn nhân Phương Linh tại sông Cầm” (June 7 2010)
 

Vietnamnet.vn – “Man sentenced to death for beheading ex-girlfriend” (Nov 2010)