‘No purpose for killing,’ Teng tells jury

Weaves tale of conspiracy in husband’s death

TORONTO • The accused killer Xiu Jin Teng ended her closing address to the jury Monday with a ringing cry of j’accuse at a mysterious suspect.

“There is second male person DNA test!”, she shouted, as Ontario Superior Court Judge Ian MacDonnell attempted to hush her.

“There is another male person DNA test! I am not a male!”, she yelled, as she triumphantly took her seat after more than two days on her feet.

The 41-year-old Teng, charged with first-degree murder in the strangulation death of her husband, Dong Huang, almost five years ago, kept shrieking as the judge quietly reminded the jurors that this was not part of the evidence.

Teng continued to rail until MacDonnell shooed the jurors out the door.

Until the very last minute, Teng had managed, albeit loosely, to stay within the rules as she spoke to the jurors directly, trying to convince them of her innocence.

“The mood has changed somewhat,” MacDonnell noted dryly as he sent the jurors on their way.

They return Tuesday for his closing instructions and are expected to have the case in their hands Wednesday.

In a rather astonishing feat for a layman with no legal training, Teng, who is representing herself, spoke virtually nonstop with apparent ease for hours.

Though her heavy accent and sharp manner of speaking made it difficult to always understand her (she is provided with interpreters but only rarely uses them), Teng appeared to be weaving a complex, wide-ranging conspiracy against her involving civilians and Toronto Police both.

She accused her former landlords, a neighbour in the Scarborough area where she and Huang rented a basement flat, and the first officer on the scene of “contaminating” the scene by “touching” the body.

She seemed to be alleging that the landlords and the neighbour concocted a story about her claiming that her husband had died from a heart attack because they all collectively had something to hide — their touching of her husband’s body.

The jury has heard that Huang’s body was spotted by the landlords and neighbour in a storage room of the basement.

Experts have testified that Huang was rendered disabled or unconscious by blunt force blows to the head or by the forced injection of a sedative, then bound at the wrists and ankles, before being strangled, likely with green twine that was found loosely around his neck.

“Four of them contaminated it,” she told the jurors at one point. “Touch body, contaminate it!”

At another point, she suggested that the police officer “move body…not easy for her {meaning herself }, is middle-age male body.”

She also suggested the male landlord may have moved the body, crying,

“They have secret to hide, reason to lie. (The male landlord) lied for touching the body! How this body in storeroom? How?”

On yet another occasion, Teng asked, “Is it possible to say somebody else move body there (to the storage closet)? Not me,” she said.

“Is it possible another person just drag the body to there?”

These somewhat circuitous suggestions of others colluding against her — at one point, with a great flourish, she said the story was like a big “highway, with many roads inside village” — firmed up with a direct statement of her innocence.

“Ms. Teng has no purpose for killing,” she said flatly. “She didn’t do; I didn’t do.”

She then told the jurors that just as other parts of the prosecution theory of the crime didn’t work in her view, neither did “the killing part” of the Crown theory.

“Crown theory,” she said, “is, first, two blows, then strangle, in the middle a drug injection.”

She acted out both the blows and the strangulation, then asked, “So how could I do the blow? What kind of tool? How? No! That’s a doubt.

“Binding wrists, and ankles, then neck strangling,” she said, adding, “First-degree murder of killing part does not work.”

Throughout, she jabbed the air with her pen, acted out various things, with extraordinary body English — now leaning in at the podium, then rocking back on her heels, arms flailing, ringlets tossing.

“Crown theory many gaps,” she concluded.

“And inconsistencies and many lies. L-I-E-S.”

She seemed oblivious to the nonchalant, if not downright crisp, manner in which she spoke about the dead body that was inarguably her late husband and was inarguably discovered in her apartment.

Even if she is as innocent as a lamb and the body fell from the sky and just landed in her storage locker, her bad luck, one might have hoped for a kind word for the deceased.

But, as Teng herself would put it, “No!”

THEY HAVE SECRET TO HIDE, REASON TO LIE. (THE MALE LANDLORD) LIED FOR TOUCHING THE BODY! HOW THIS BODY IN STOREROOM? HOW?