SALEM, N.H. — A man found strangled and shot to death on a side road in Salem in 1995 is still without justice 30 years later as police continue to look for his killer.
Around 9 a.m. on the morning of March 30, 1995, a man out searching for his mother-in-law’s hubcap along Hampstead Road found the body of a young Asian man, later identified as Hai Bo (Paul) Lei, 25, of Boston’s Chinatown. He was found between Town Farm Road and Meadow Lane, the Eagle-Tribune reported.
At the time, the street only had a dozen or so houses and was considered one of Salem’s quieter neighborhoods, neighbors said at the time of the investigation. There were no homes across the street from where Lei’s body was found.
Though residents in the neighborhood would later report hearing gunshots around 4:45 a.m. that morning, at the time the rapid fire succession was assumed to be a car’s backfire, said Richard and Brenda Roy of 58 Hampstead Rd.
In the days after Lei’s body was found fingerprints on file with the Massachusetts State Police were used to identify him and tie him to the Boston area. His cause of death was determined by then-Deputy Chief Medical Examiner James Kaplan as multiple gunshot wounds and strangulation.
There were abrasions on his body when he was found but he did not appear to be beaten before he was killed and though he was severely choked before he was shot, police said the choking may have occurred before Lei was killed, the Eagle-Tribune reported.
He was quickly tied to a ring of Vietnamese and Chinese gang activity in Boston’s Chinatown, where Lei was known to have a criminal record. Police said at the time that his killing appeared to be professional in nature “by one or more people who knew what they were doing.”
In collaboration with the Massachusetts State Police, the Boston Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Salem police attempted to interview friends of Lei who may have know about his gang affiliations, but they kept quiet.
Questions at the time centered around Lei’s involvement with illegal gambling rings and gambling-related disputes. However, police said residents of Chinatown, well-known for its insularity and inclinations to kept police out of Chinese and Vietnamese affairs, did not provide much information, the Eagle-Tribune reported.
There were immediate concerns that the murder would go unsolved without their cooperation, as it has for the last 30 years.
New gangs emerging
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, it became apparent that new Asian gangs, primarily Chinese and Vietnamese, were emerging in Boston’s Chinatown and getting a foothold in prostitution, drug trafficking, extortion and gambling, according to the U.S Department of Justice’s website.
In 1985, Boston detectives learned that Vietnamese men in their late teens and early 20s were being recruited from Vietnam to join a notable Chinese gang, Ping On, which later fell into disarray when their leader fled to another country, the Boston Globe reported.
Vietnamese gangs started to pop up and attack their Chinese counterparts, prompting a war between the groups and leading to an upsurge in violent crime.
The violence came to a head on Jan. 12, 1991, when a Vietnamese nationalist of Chinese descent targeted a social club on Tyler street with two accomplices and allegedly shot six men at close range as they played card, according to the FBI’s website. Five of them died and the one that survived identified the shooters as Ping On gang members.
Leading up to the incident, Boston and other cities were seeing gangs of “war-hardened Vietnamese” targeting high-stakes card games run by Chinese immigrants to steal their money and shoot the gamblers, the Boston Globe reported in 1991.
Several shootings in these cities involving Asian gangs were perpetrated by “roving gangs of out-of-state hit men,” law enforcement specialists familiar with Chinese-American gangs told the Boston Globe in 1991.
Asian gang activity and violent crime fizzled out by the mid-1990s following several prosecutions of Chinatown gangsters, including the conviction of Ping On’s gang leader on murder charges in 1996. This drove out most of the gangs in the community, the Boston Globe reported in 2005.
In 1991 alone, there were nine homicides in Chinatown related to Asian gangs while in 2005, there was only one.
Boston detectives at the time speculated that Asian crime figures ordered the assassination of several players with ties to a rival gang, the Globe reported.
This very well might be what caused the violent murder of Lei, who had no known ties to Salem when he was shot and killed. If Lei’s murder was in fact a contracted kill, experts say the probability that the hitman has been caught or prosecuted for other murders-for-hire is low.
New Hampshire State Police are still looking for Lei’s killer and are asking anyone with information to please email coldecaseunit@dos.nh.gov