A Taiwanese woman has been jailed for 11 years and two months for repeatedly poisoning her much-younger Australian exchange student lover, who she met in the same month her husband died of a mysterious infection.
Chin-ping Yang, who is in her late 40s, was convicted in the Taipei District Court on Wednesday of the attempted murder of Queensland man Alex Shorey, who was 23 when he almost died in 2023 from ingesting food and drink Yang had laced with rat poison.
Yang, who denied the charges and showed no remorse, met Mr Shorey in December 2022 – the same month her British husband died of similar symptoms to the young Australian following repeated hospitalisations for a suspected urinary tract infection.
When the trial began in March the husband’s brother turned up at court and demanded authorities reopen an investigation into his sibling’s death, but prosecutors said Yang could not be charged as autopsy results and medical reports were inconclusive, and because the body had been cremated.
Yang claimed at trial that she intended to use the rat poison on herself as she was distraught over her husband’s death, but the court found she carried out the poisoning because she was unhappy that Mr Shorey planned to leave Taiwan, and that her repeated actions amounted to an intent to kill.
Mr Shorey’s lawyer said after the hearing that the sentence was “reasonable”, “fair”, and within the legal team’s expectations, and revealed that his client and his family have filed a civil lawsuit seeking damages, the Taipei Times reported.
Yang’s trial heard that she poisoned Mr Shorey with superwarfarin added to a drink of grape juice, and continued to lace his food with the rodenticide while he was in hospital and again after he was discharged.
The student was then flown back to Australia on a crowd-funded medevac flight in May 2023 with symptoms including black skin spots, diarrhoea, abdominal pain, nosebleeds, vomiting and bloody urine – eventually ending up in intensive care.
Mr Shorey, a University of Queensland student who was taking part in a Chinese literature program, told the court in March that he and Yang got along well in the beginning and that she wanted an open relationship, which he assumed was because of the recent death of her husband.
But Mr Shorey told the court Yang took his passport, making it impossible for him to access money sent to him by his family, and became jealous of his relationship with the female owner of a tutoring centre where he worked.
After he told Yang in March, 2023, that he was planning to return to Australia the following month, she gave him a strange tasting grape juice drink, Mr Shorey told the court.
He testified that while he was in hospital Yang prevented his doctors from speaking to him in English and insisted they give their explanations in Chinese so she could translate, and said he stayed with Yang after he was released due to being in poor health.
Mr Shorey told the court his doctor father flew to Taiwan to be with him as he recovered in early April of the same year, but Yang then gave him a grass jelly drink on April 16 that left him unable to get out of bed, and he was put in intensive care after being rushed back to hospital.
On May 1 Mr Shorey’s mother found an empty container of rat poison at Yang’s home while packing her son’s belongings, which was consistent with what a doctor had privately told him could have caused the illness when he was first hospitalised.
The court heard that after Yang was finally arrested, she then claimed to not know who Mr Shorey was.
Header image: Left, Yang, in black, leaving court in March (LTN). Right, Alex Shorey in hospital (supplied).
The post Taiwanese ‘black widow’ jailed for poisoning Aussie student lover first appeared on The Noticer.
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