1 case tagged “Neil Heywood murder”
Convicted: Gu Kailai
On November 15, 2011, British businessman Neil Heywood was found dead in his room at a Chongqing hotel. Chinese authorities ruled it alcohol poisoning, cremated the body without an autopsy, and closed the file. It was, by every official measure, an unremarkable death. What the world did not yet know was this: November 15 is also the birthday of Gu Kailai, the wife of one of the most powerful politicians in China, a woman who had spent her life accumulating credentials, connections, and carefully constructed respectability. She had lured Heywood to that hotel. She had watched her aide carry his incapacitated body to the bed. And she had poured potassium cyanide into his mouth herself. The case that unraveled in the following months would expose a world of princeling privilege, illicit fortunes, cover-ups at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party, and a murder so brazen that it triggered the largest political crisis in China since Tiananmen Square. This is the story of Gu Kailai: lawyer, author, power broker, and killer.
