40-year-old Raymond Wong of Pinole was arrested Christmas Eve and charged yesterday in a 12-year-old murder case that had gone cold years ago. Wong is accused of murdering his one-time girlfriend, Alice Sin, who was killed in 1999 when she was 21 years old. Her body was found shot on a remote dirt road in Churchill County, Nevada, in what appeared to be a racially motivated attack.
Prosecutors now say that Wong murdered Sin for financial gain, having made her apply for a $2 million life insurance policy for which he was the beneficiary shortly before she was killed. He's accused of murdering Sin and then transporting her body across state lines, where he then covered her in Monopoly money that was marked to suggest a hate crime. Furthermore, they say, Wong emailed reporters from Calgary after the murder, where he was on a business trip, posing as a spelling-challenged white-supremacist group taking credit for the murder and writing that Sin was killed because "because our demans (sic) were not meet (sic) within the time frame." Wong quickly married another young woman, Jessica Tang, in Calgary.
New physical evidence in the case was recently uncovered, leading to Wong's arrest, however Wong's been in some trouble ever since the murder. When police searched his house in 1999, they found stores of child pornography on his computers, for which he ended up serving 27 months in jail. He moved back to Pinole after prison, under an assumed name, and later fled to China. Authorities had their eye on him and arrested him at SFO as he tried to return here on December 19, charging him with failing to register as a sex offender, after which he got out on bail. But then they found this physical evidence, leading to his Christmas Eve arrest.
Sin was a young mother and a college student when she was killed, and her father, Wah Sin of Oakland, has been raising his grandson, who is now 14. "We've been waiting for 12 years," said Sin's father, adding, "It doesn't end until the court proves it."
