The 2023 Taiwanese series “Copycat Killer” shows us how an individual can appear perfectly normal on the outside but still possess extremely twisted sensibilities. Copycat Killer talks about trauma in general and shows us the far-reaching implications that an incident could have on a person’s life. It makes us realize that it is never wise to hide what is going on inside of you and live a pretentious life. It is important to let everything out of the system so that the buildup does not create any problems in the future. We are a generation of disgruntled people who constantly compare our lives to others and make things even more troublesome for us. We all have our own struggles in life, but there are some unfortunate people who go through something that no human being should have to go through. Once these people learn of the darkness that resides in our world, they can never be themselves again, no matter how hard they try.
spoilers ahead
Hu Jian-Ho becomes the prime suspect
Hsiao-Chi Kuo was called Fastidious Chi for a reason: he was a perfectionist of the highest order, and people knew he didn’t stop until he got to the root of the problem. Lin Shang-yong had found a severed hand in one of the parks, and as soon as prosecutor Kuo saw it, he knew it was a premeditated crime, and whoever did it wanted to play a game with the authorities. The killer had left his hand amputated on purpose as if to challenge law enforcement to catch him if they could. The hand was carefully placed in a gift box and the perpetrator had gone to great lengths to make it appear aesthetic.
He-ping Chin from the TNB media house was already in the park covering the news, and Hsiao-Chi Kuo was a little amused by how quickly these reporters caught wind of everything that happened in the city. When Hsiao-Chi Kuo asked the medical examiner if he had seen any similar cases in the past where the criminal had cut off his hand and amputated his thumb, surprisingly, he recalled a case that had taken place about a couple of years ago. years. The defendant’s name was Cun-Yi Tian, he had killed a girl named Jiang Yu-ping and then buried the body near her house. In the case files, it was mentioned that Cun-Yi Tian had tortured the victim for days before killing her. Mr. Kuo knew there was a connection between his current case and Cun-Yi’s, but he was unable to determine what it was. Cun-Yi was still serving his sentence, so committing the crime himself was out of the question, but prosecutor Kuo knew he might have had accomplices the police wouldn’t have known about. Mr. Kuo went to meet Cun-Yi in prison and immediately realized that he was not the real murderer and that he was simply taking the blame for someone else.
After the police found that severed hand in the park, many other girls disappeared, one of whom was Lin Shang-yong’s daughter. Shang-yong had suspicions about a guy named Hu Jian-Ho, who worked for TNB Media House, and he was the one who received the killer’s calls twice. When Shang-yong went to the club called Kink, where her daughter used to go frequently, he found out that Hu Jian-Ho had had a conversation with her daughter before the night she disappeared. Shang-yong also discovered that Hu Jian-Ho had a dubious past, where he was accused of assaulting a girl. He was a minor at the time, which is why he was released after serving a minor sentence. Mr. Kuo knew Hu Jian-Ho from before, as he was the brother of one of his close friends, Yun-Huei Hu, who was a clinical psychologist who sometimes worked together with the prosecutor’s office. Yun-Huei told Mr. Kuo that her brother could never commit such a horrible act, but as much as Kuo wanted to agree with her, he was bound by law, and even his own intuition told him that there was something wrong. dirty.
How did prosecutor Hsiao-Chi Kuo find the real killer in ‘Copycat Killer’?
Prosecutor Kuo decided that they would have to go meet the girl Hu Jian-ho had assaulted in the past. When they tried to contact her, they learned that she had recently committed suicide. Mr. Kuo and his team went to look for some evidence at the nursing home where he had been staying for quite some time. Although the suspect, Hu Jian-Ho, came to see her frequently, Hsiao-Chi Kuo found something that completely undid whatever progress he thought they had been making up to that point. The name of an unknown guy, Shen Jia-wun, was written by the victim under his mattress on the plywood. After investigating, Hsiao-Chi Kuo discovered that Jia-wun was also a batchmate of the victim and Jian-ho. Prosecutors went to Shen Jia-wun’s home and met her mother, Pei-fen Jhao, who told them that her “daughter” had moved to the city a long time ago and that she did not care for her. I have seen since. Mr. Kuo didn’t understand why Pei-Fen was referring to her son as her daughter, but a little prying made him realize that things weren’t as simple as he thought.
In “Copycat Killer,” Jia-wun was the man who had been cutting off girls’ hands and sending them in gift boxes for the authorities to notice. He was torturing and killing all the girls, although, at the time, Mr. Kuo did not know that he was not the mastermind behind the operation and that there was a mastermind above him. Hsiao-Chi Kuo had tried to question Jia-wun, but due to a lack of incriminating evidence that could be admissible in a court of law, he had to let him go. After days of hard work, prosecutors were finally able to find the body of a girl named Jhang Ming-mei, buried in the courtyard of Jia-wun’s mother’s house. Jia-wun had realized that he would not be able to evade the police authorities for long.
Why was Shen Jia-wun killing the girls?
Shen Jia-wun still held Yu-tong captive, and despite Hu Jian-Ho telling him over and over again to release the girl, he was in no mood to let her go. Jia-wun forced Hu Jian-Ho to accompany him in his car, knowing that the police could arrive at his door at any moment. All this time, he had Yu-tong in her trunk and it had reached a point where he didn’t know what to do with her anymore. He sped up his car as if he wanted to put all of her childhood traumas behind him, but obviously, his attempts were never going to succeed. The car went off a cliff and both Jia-wun and Hu Jian-Ho were killed instantly. Fortunately, Yu-tong was still alive, and Hsiao-Chi Kuo’s team saved her and got her admitted to a hospital.
As shown in the “Copycat Killer” series, Shen Jia-wun had a tragic life, and somewhere he realized that he could never start again. He could never erase the mark that his childhood trauma had left on his subconscious. Jia-wun’s mother had lost her husband and then her two-month-old daughter as well. The pain of a mother losing her son was insurmountable and she slowly began to lose her mind. When Jia-wun was born, his mother began to feel that she had got her daughter back. She started treating Jia-wun like a girl, making him wear women’s clothes and constantly telling him to accept the fact that she was a girl. Jia-wun, from a very young age, had felt the need to validate his own existence. His own mother denied it, and it had a very deep impact on the boy’s mind. Pei-fen even gave Jia-wun the same name as his daughter’s. That fear, that need to prove his own existence, that anger and frustration turned Jia-wun into a beast, and at times, he didn’t even recognize himself.
Jia-wun used to say that his sister’s ghost possessed him and forced him to do all kinds of dastardly acts. Jia-wun stopped living with his mother, but still, he couldn’t escape the ghost of his past. By the time he became an adult, Jia-wun was enveloped in hatred and began to view women as abominations that deserved to be tortured and abused. He was pleased to see the girls in such a miserable state, and he felt that his helpless cries quenched his soul. Hu Jian-Ho tried to lead him back to the right path, but Jia-wun knew that he had reached a point of no return. He had given in to the demons of him and knew that he had already sealed his fate a long time ago. In moments of vulnerability, Jia-wun felt guilty for what he had done, but he was in such a fragile state of mind that he was never able to recover and be in control.
Jia-wun probably would have been able to deal with his traumas if he had received help at the right time. His obsession and mental instability got the better of him and he ended up taking his own life, thus putting an end to his misery.
