Man acquitted of ex-wife's murder

Violet (Linjin) Ciu, the woman who was found chopped up in seven pieces after being strangled by her ex-husband.

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• Man 'provoked' into killing wife

A NOODLE chef who admitted to killing his ex-wife and trying to hide her dismembered body in a wall has been acquitted of her violent murder.

A Brisbane Supreme Court jury instead found Jiagen Pan, 45, guilty of manslaughter because he had been provoked.

Premier Anna Bligh on the weekend said the Attorney-General “would be seeking advice” on whether there was any further action the Crown could take against the court’s decision.

Pan told the jury he became furious and “felt like a volcano” when he strangled Linjin Cui, 32, at her home in Springfield Lakes in August 2009.

He said he was taunted with insults that he was “sexually incompetent” by his ex-wife moments before he killed her.

“I was really angry about it, I felt like all my blood went into my brain,” he said.

“She kept on saying I’m useless, I’m sexually incompetent.”

The judge described the attack as “sustained and gruesome” and sentenced Pan to 12 years for the manslaughter and 18 months for interfering with a corpse.

Pan, 45, who was divorced from Ms Cui in March 2009, admitted he chopped her body into seven pieces and tried to entomb the parts in a homemade cavity he built in a hallway cupboard at his townhouse in Woodridge, a Logan suburb.

He is considered a serious violent offender and will have to serve at least 80 per cent of his sentence.

The Queensland government recently amended legislation to make it harder to use provocation as a defence but it did not apply to Pan because he committed the offence before the changes.

Defence barrister Soraya Ryan said the killing occurred when her client went to Ms Cui’s home and the couple argued about a $700 tax bill.

Ms Cui called him a “loser” and words that translated from Mandarin to English as “you’re not a man, you never satisfied me as a man, you never brought me to orgasm”.

During the trial through a Mandarin interpreter, Pan said his ex-wife had called him a “eunuch” and “said things that made me feel not like a man”, so he put his hands around her throat and squeezed.

When he let go she fell to the floor and he realised she was dead.

He said he sat with her body for a while before moving it next to a sofa and going home.

Pan said he could not sleep that night and on his way back to Ms Cui’s home the next day he bought several saws from a Bunnings hardware store.

“It was probably easier for me to hide her body if I cut it into pieces,” he said.

Pan moved her into a spa bath where he had no success with handsaws so retrieved an electric saw from the garage.

But when Ms Cui’s underwear became stuck in the blade, he returned to Bunnings to buy another circular saw.

After cutting her body up, he put the parts in two garbage bags and left them in his car overnight parked at his home.

The next day he tried to dig a grave in his backyard but the soil was too hard, he said.

He then went back to Bunnings and bought bags of cement and a trowel and began building a cavity in a hallway cupboard.

The court heard police walked in on Pan entombing the body.