After the killings, Benjamin Ng returned to the home of Kennis Izumi, his girlfriend, who lived with her parents. Ng had been staying there for about two-and-a-half months. When Ng arrived, at 1:10 a.m., two of Izumi's girlfriends were at the house. Ng's hair was wet and Izumi suspected that Ng had been with another woman. Ng lit a fire in the fireplace. Izumi's friends left and Izumi went to bed. Ng stayed up until the early hours of the morning, watching the movie "The Heist" on television, before finally retiring to bed as well. Ng lay in bed with his girlfriend. He stared at the ceiling for a while before finally falling asleep. Later that morning, police came to Izumi's house searching for Benjamin Ng. Police had initially searched for Ng at the residence of his brother, Stephen Ng. Stephen informed the police that Benjamin was living with his girlfriend at her parents' home. Police rang the doorbell and Izumi's mother, Connie, answered. She told the officers that Ng was asleep with her daughter. Police Lt. Robert Holter entered the house, opened the bedroom door where the young couple was sleeping, and grabbed Izumi by the wrist. He threw her into the hallway and proceeded to pin Ng onto the bed. Ng gave no resistance and, in fact, was sound asleep when apprehended.

Benjamin Ng was taken into custody.

Willie Mak and Tony Ng left the Wah Mee Club and went to a bowling alley to establish an alibi. Both were spotted at the Imperial Lanes in the early hours of the same morning. Ironically, Tony Ng's father was also at the Imperial Lanes bowling with some friends. "A lot of people got killed in Chinatown," the senior Ng told his son. Though Mak was pleased with results at the Club and was confident his plan succeeded, he was still irate Benjamin Ng had arrived late to the Wah Mee. An unidentified source reported that Mak and his friends later left the bowling alley and returned to Chinatown to watch police remove bodies from the Club. That same morning, Mak accompanied a friend, Andy Wong, to the home of Moo and Jean Mar, the husband-wife couple killed at the Club.

"Do you know who did this?" Wong asked Mak, en route to the Mar residence.

"The Chinese-Vietnamese from Los Angeles," Mak replied.

Wong was a friend of the Mar family, and went to their residence to notify the family of the killings. Mak remained in the car while Wong went inside and gave them the bad news.

While Mak spent the early-morning hours at the Imperial Lanes and with Andy Wong, police spent their time at Mak's residence. Detective Dan Melton, along with several other police detectives, arrived at Mak's residence at 4:30 a.m. Mak's father and brother let the detectives into the house and Mak's room was looked over before it was decided a search warrant would be necessary.

Mak made a phone call to his house at 7:20 a.m. and learned that the police were looking for him. He then called Detective Melton. "I hear you are looking for me and my friend," Mak told the detective. He agreed to get a ride home and, when he arrived at his residence, he turned himself over to the police.

Something had gone horribly wrong for Mak: How could the police know to look for him? What could have possibly happened? Mak soon learned that even after the victims were hog-tied, shot, and left for dead, one person managed to survive.

One person who knew Mak well.

WAI YOK CHIN was a retired cook in his sixties. Chin shared a low-rent apartment several blocks from the Club with his female companion Rose. Rose, fifty-four years old, had recently divorced. She enjoyed living in Seattle's Chinatown. Her daughters, however, who did not live in Chinatown, wanted Rose to stay with them. "She's living there as a convenience," Chin's landlord, Sam Horishige, said at the time. "The daughters want her to live with them, but what can you do? She likes to hang around here."

Chin was an intensely private man who rarely ventured conversation with his neighbors. "[Chin was] very quiet," said Horishige, adding, "The Chinese people are very secretive." When Chin would see his landlord, he would offer a cordial hello and little else. Chin's neighbors knew very little about him. One neighbor described Chin as a small man who suffered from some sort of illness. He was extremely independent, never having joined any of Chinatown's four tongs.

Chin moved to the United States at the age of sixteen, to escape the fighting after Japan had invaded China. He joined his father in Seattle. He joined the United States Navy in 1942 and served as a steward's mate and officer's cook. He was discharged in 1946, and continued to work as a cook, a salesman, and a gaming dealer. After he left the service, he went to an English-language school near Seattle University. One of Chin's classmates, Jack Woo, reported that Chin worked for a while at a restaurant in Bremerton and may have possibly worked at the shipyards there. "Everybody [liked] him," said Woo. "Everybody saw him quite frequently in Chinatown." Whether Chin ever married or had any children is unclear.

Chin was an excellent Pai Kau dealer, leaving many Wah Mee patrons in awe over how quickly he was able to calculate the house's winnings. "That guy [was] the best," said one person who had seen Chin work as a dealer. "He [was] so fast. He [knew] how much to take out of the winner's pot for the house. That kind of math [came] out of his head instantly."

He went to work at the Wah Mee when the Club reopened in 1982. John Loui, who handled the money at the Club, knew that Chin was an excellent dealer and hadn't been working. He knew Chin could use the money and he offered the old man a job. Chin worked at the Wah Mee one or two hours a night, four nights a week.

Chin's interest in gambling also got him into some trouble. In 1976 Chin was charged in Federal court with illegal gambling. U.S. District Court documents indicate that Chin pleaded guilty to a charge of failing to keep records for a gaming establishment. Under a plea-bargaining arrangement, Chin was fined and given a suspended three-month prison sentence.

That Chin survived the worst mass murder in Seattle history is a miracle of no small measure. Chin was a weak, frail, aged man; the second eldest of all the victims left for dead at the Club. He was in poor health and moved at a slow pace along the streets of Chinatown. "The funny thing about the killings," commented one of Chin's friends, "was that [he] was the one who survived. He was the weakest of the bunch."

When Chin was ordered to the floor, it was Tony Ng who bent over to hog-tie the old man. "No need to tie so tight," he told Ng. Chin had never before that night met the young man. Earlier that evening, when Ng had entered the Club, Chin had offered him a bite of his food. Later, when he was being tied, Chin told the stranger, "I'm an old man." Apparently grateful for the food, Ng sympathized and complied. Chin wasn't frightened, nor did he plea for mercy. He had lived a full life, having served in World War II and earning commendations for his service. "If you die, you die," Chin would later comment, describing the situation. "That's all. They already tie you up. What else can you do?"

But the old man could do something else. He knew he would be shot and, when the three men opened fire, he wriggled beneath one of the gaming tables. When the bullets slammed into his neck, they came at such an oblique angle that they did not cause fatal wounds. Instead, he was knocked unconscious.

Chin regained consciousness after hearing someone pounding on one of Club's entrance doors and ringing the buzzer. Because Ng had not tied his victim tightly, Chin could free himself. It took him two or three minutes to stagger from the lower floor of the Club and manage the two steps that led toward the entrance. Near the entrance, he grew dizzy and rested on an adjacent stool. He looked at the victims scattered about the lower level. John Loui still lived, breathing heavily, lying face down in his own blood. Sitting on the stool, Chin leaned on one of the entrance doors and, much to his surprise, the heavy doors opened. He pushed past them and staggered outside the Club, the doors locking behind him. Chin lay in the alley, bleeding from bullet wounds in his neck and jaw, the bullets having exited through his throat. The night air was cold and damp. When he stepped from the Club and into the garbage-strewn alley, three men were waiting for him. One of the men, George Ong, a cook from Federal Way, had been pounding on the door and ringing the buzzer, trying to get inside and not knowing what had happened. Another man with Ong was an employee at the Tai Tung restaurant.

Seeing Chin bleeding profusely from the throat, one of the men asked, "Who did it? A black guy? A Vietnamese guy?"

"Ng and Mak," Chin replied, "That's all I can tell. The door locked already. Call ambulance."

Seattle Police Officers David Ziskin and John Wolph were the first to arrive at the scene. Ong met Officer Ziskin at the top of the alley. Ong was assisting the bleeding victim away from the Club. Chin was bleeding heavily from his mouth and throat and Ziskin helped to seat the old man in the passenger seat of his cruiser. A few moments later, medics arrived and Officer Carmen rode with Chin to Harborview Medical Center. In the rear of the ambulance, Officer Carmen tactfully interviewed the victim. But Chin's injuries were severe. He could only answer "yes" or "no," and even those answers were barely decipherable because of his thick accent. Furthermore, when the bullets had struck Chin, the old man's dentures were forced from his mouth and onto the floor of the Club.

"Have you ever seen any of these people before?" Carmen asked the old man, trying to get an ID on the suspects.

"Yes," Chin replied.

"Could you recognize them again?"

"Yes."

Chin arrived at Harborview and was listed in critical condition. The lone survivor of the worst mass murder in Seattle history, Chin was placed under heavy police guard and underwent surgery.

Chin had pointed to the entrance of the Club, and Officer Ziskin followed what he described as a "trail of blood" down the alley toward the Wah Mee. The officer noticed that a small trail of blood was leading out from beneath the entrance doors. The carpeted mat was freshly stained with Chin's blood and, when Ziskin tried the doors, he found they were tightly locked. He retreated to his car to get a Halligen Tool -- a sort of crowbar -- and returned to the entrance to try and break into the Club. Officer Ziskin pried open the first security door, then another, and followed Officers Wolph and Schlecht into the Club and its ensuing carnage.

The officers entered the Club with their shotguns drawn. To the right were bodies lying face down in an expansive puddle of blood. To the left and around the corner, in the office, a body slumped in an upholstered chair. At the Club's posh bar, the officers noticed that two of the stools had been overturned and the television blared. One officer checked the restrooms, the basement, closets -- the entire Club.

The suspects were gone.

Chinatown was abuzz with activity. The alley was cordoned off and a crowd of more than five dozen loitered around South King Street to watch the commotion. Police Chief Fitzsimons arrived, along with the Department's top detectives. Commenting on the scene, Fitzsimons, a veteran New York City cop, remarked, "[I've never] seen anything like this, even in New York." Sergeant Cameron supervised the investigation, with at least a half-dozen veteran detectives accompanying him.

Inside the Club, twelve of the victims were arranged in a semi-circle around the gaming tables. The guard, Gim Wong, was found dead in the office, slumped in a chair. The officers and detectives moved around the room's main gaming area, checking bodies for pulses. All the victims were lying face down, dead from gunshot wounds to the head. One victim was hog-tied so tightly that his hands had turned purple. The bodies of Moo Min Mar and his wife, Jean, were discovered with towels covering their heads. The towels were marked with stripling -- gun powder residue -- which indicated that the victims had been shot point-blank execution-style from a distance of less than three feet.

"There was so much blood," commented a Police Homicide Investigator. "We were all afraid of falling in it. It was that thick." A colleague confronted another officer, arriving at the scene moments later. Outside the Club's entrance, his colleague, without describing the carnage inside, simply said, "You don't want to go in there."

Checking for pulses, the authorities discovered that John Loui was still alive. He, too, was rushed to Harborview and underwent surgery in a room next to Chin. Attempts were futile and Loui later died during surgery.

Detectives, police officers, and medics worked around the room, sloshing through the thick blood that covered the cement floor. Some tied plastic bags around their ankles, to keep their shoes and pant-cuffs dry of blood. With each body they overturned, they found the spent slugs that had killed each of the victims.

The bodies were removed from the Club, with the ligatures still in place, and were driven to the Medical Examiners' office. With a positive ID on Benjamin Ng and Willie Mak, police officers arrested the two suspects. But the investigation was hardly finished. Chin had reported that there were three men who had opened fire on the Wah Mee. He had named Willie Mak and Benjamin Ng, but was unable to identify the third man. And a waiter, who spotted Benjamin Ng eating at a restaurant shortly before the murders at the Club, reported that someone other than Mak was dining with Ng.

A suspect was still at large, and police established a Chinese-language telephone-answering service. The recorded message stated simply: "Your friends were killed. Help us catch the persons responsible."

Chapter Six | A media frenzy, conspiracy theories, and stereotyping a community

This story originally appeared as a serialized feature in Asian Focus newspaper