Two sex workers killed in 24 hours in Melbourne, Xiaozheng Lin pleads guilty

He left two women — Yuki Luo, 31, and Hyun Suk Jeong, 51 — dead after he attacked them in December 2022 and stole cash and personal items, including designer handbags.

Lin, now 24, was due to stand trial for manslaughter in the two deaths in August.

However, a month before the trial, he offered to plead guilty to two counts of involuntary manslaughter, which prosecutors accepted.

Details of the case remained unreported as of early 2023 due to a court order that was later overturned.

Lin remained silent and bowed his head when he appeared in Melbourne’s Supreme Court on Monday for a pre-sentence hearing.

On Boxing Day 2022, he visited a brothel and then called a friend to take him to Luo, a Chinese national who operated a sex business from her apartment in Melbourne.

Lin told his friend that he planned to rob Luo because he had recently lost money in a gambling game with TAB.

He was dumped outside her apartment after midnight on December 26 while he was showering and having sex with Luo.

He then asked her to perform oral sex, but she refused to do so without additional costs.

Lin got mad at Luo and pinned her to the bed, but she fought back and bit Lin’s hand.

He punched Ms Luo and choked her, and later told police he became angry at her request for another A$100.

Lin left her for dead after stealing A$7,000 in cash, her phone and several designer handbags.

“She was gasping for air and I thought, OK, I had a robbery today and I didn’t kill her,” he later told police.

Luo’s friend called a locksmith and found her body before calling 911.

The 31-year-old woman’s father, Luo Bo, said her death was “a big blow to my heart”.

“It is extremely difficult to accept the brutal reality that my daughter has been killed,” he said in a statement read to the court.

Less than 24 hours after Luo was attacked, Lin went to see another sex worker, South Korean Jeon, who lived in an apartment in Docklands.

After sex, he beat her to death and stole her laptop, bank cards, phone and house keys.

By the time Jeon’s body was found, it was too badly decomposed to determine a cause of death.

Lin told her lawyer, Paul Smallwood, that Jeon “was assaulted in circumstances where she was seriously shaken”, the court was told.

Smallwood acknowledged that his client faces a lengthy prison sentence and deportation back to China.

Prosecutor Christy Churchill said Lin’s crime was “subjectively serious”.

“He caused the death of two vulnerable women in their own homes, a place where they had a right to feel safe and secure, within 24 hours of each other,” she told the court.

“He stole from them, he kept them in office with no respect for their safety and/or dignity.”

Lin, who has been in custody since his arrest on December 29, 2022, will be sentenced at a later date.