SAN FRANCISCO — A California appeals court upheld the conviction of a former Pinole resident found to have murdered his pregnant girlfriend and acted out a depraved fantasy by mutilating her body.
The victim, Alice Sin, 21, was shot and killed in 1999, her body discovered in a remote part of Nevada the following year. It would take more than 15 years before the defendant, Raymond Wong, was convicted.
Wong, 46, filed the appeal while serving a 50 years to life sentence at RJ Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego. Appellate judges rejected all of his claims, which alleged that jurors were made biased by various pieces of prosecution evidence, and that the court had erred in the way it handled jury selection.
Sin was four months pregnant with Wong’s child when she was killed.
“Depraved brutality ended Alice Sin’s life, a young woman who was poised on the brink of a bright and promising future. Alice’s story touched everyone who was part of this prosecution forever,” senior deputy district attorney Mary Knox said in a written statement, through a spokesman. “I am so grateful that the Court of Appeal affirmed Raymond Wong’s conviction, truly bringing an end to Alice’s parents’ and friends’ long and arduous journey to find justice for Alice.”
Wong’s dramatic 2015 trial included his own testimony, where he passionately denied killing Sin. Knox argued Wong was in a relationship with Sin and another woman, Jessica Tang, and that the two conspired to murder Sin to get her out of the way. Wong’s attorney, famed lawyer Tony Serra, argued Wong was being framed and rebutted Tang’s statements that implicated Wong by saying she was a “(expletive) liar.”
Sin went missing in November 1999, a month after she got a $2 million life insurance policy naming Wong as a beneficiary. Days after her disappearance, her car was found in Pinole and a police dog led authorities to Wong’s residence, where they found Tang had recently moved in.
Sin’s partially decomposed body was found in 2000, in a Churchill County, Nevada, desert east of Reno. Prosecutors presented medical experts who testified that her corpse had been mutilated by a human, and damaged by animals.
Wong also made attempts to throw authorities off the trail, according to prosecutors; he left Monopoly money at the scene indicating the murder had been committed to benefit the “Aryan Knights.” Later, during trial, Wong testified he had sent notes to multiple media outlets, including this newspaper, that suggested white supremacists were behind Sin’s killing.
In his appeal, Wong disputed expert testimony about Sin’s body and argued that jurors should not have been told of his 2001 child porn conviction, where he served two years in federal prison before fleeing to China in 2009. Wong was arrested after trying to re-enter the United States in 2011 under an assumed name.
Appellate judges, though, ruled that Wong had opened the door for his child porn conviction to come in when he testified in his own defense, and wrote Judge John Kennedy had been careful when screening jurors for potential bias in the highly publicized case.
Similarly, Wong argued that jurors should not have seen porn depicting sexual violence found on Wong’s computers, but appellate judges said the content was relevant because it was similar to the murder scene. Prosecutors argued the porn was a sign Wong had acted out a violent fantasy on Sin.
The appellate court also rejected Wong’s contention that witnesses who said he wanted to get Sin out of the way should not have been allowed to testify.