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The Opium Murders
What started as a routine day for a family - getting the girls off to school - quickly turned into the worst mass killing in Catawba County's history
Journal Photo Illustration by Nicholas Weir, AP Photo
The Tzeo family (clockwise, from top left): Brian Tzeo, 44; Lisa Phan, 40; Melanie Mouang Saephan, 20; Cody Briant Tzeo, 4; and Pauline Chao, 18.
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Published: May 17, 2009
CONOVER - There is blood on the porch. That's what sheriff's deputies see when they arrive at the house on Gristmill Drive.
Inside, it is more horrible than they could have imagined. Four victims, a mother, two daughters and a young son, are dead. It is the worst mass killing in Catawba County's history.
Investigators quickly find a hunting knife and gun that they believe were used on the victims. From there, the trail will lead investigators from the brick home in this quiet subdivision to Wisconsin and then, six days after the killings, to a deadly end in Utah.
There is empathy in the community and later anger, when people hear that opium dealing out of the house is most likely at the heart of the crime.
Soon after the killings, a young man stands outside the yellow crime tape, a bewildered look on his face as he mourns for his dead friends.
"I've just been asking what could have happened," he says. "Why would someone do this?"
What the young man doesn't know is that the killer was his father.
Mysterious man
It all begins on the morning of March 12, a Thursday, when a teenage girl pulls into the driveway at 1406 Gristmill Drive to pick up her friend Pauline Chao for school.
There is a man in a hooded sweatshirt on the porch. He is wearing a backpack. He walks across the driveway, past the garage and around toward the back of the house.
The girl uses her cell phone to let Pauline know that she's waiting. As they pull out for the 15-minute trip to Bunker Hill High School, the driver tells Pauline about the man she'd seen.
Concerned, Pauline uses her cell phone to call her sister Melanie, who has not yet left home for her community college classes.
Don't come home, Melanie tells her.
But Pauline asks her friend to return to the house. Pauline tells her friend she is so scared that she doesn't know if she should go to the door.
Together, they walk up onto the front porch, leaving the driver's brother in the car.
Standing on the front porch, Pauline and her friend hear crying inside. Pauline knocks.
The man opens the door. He hits Pauline. He stabs her repeatedly. He yanks her inside and slams the door.
The friend runs.
Jumping into the car and driving away, she tells her brother to call 911. It is about 7:15 a.m.
In a panicked voice, between wails and sobs, the girl tries to speak to the 911 operator. She gasps for breath. The girl does not know the address. She struggles to answer the operator's questions about what the man looked like, what he was wearing.
The girl musters her courage and drives back toward the house so she can tell the 911 operator where the attack happened.
From the time the 911 call is placed, it takes 18 minutes to get help to the house.
Scene inside
Inside, deputies find Lisa Phan, a 40-year-old mother, dead on the living-room floor. She had worked the night before on the chicken-processing line at the Tyson plant in Wilkesboro, getting off work shortly before 1 a.m.
Beside her on the floor is her 4-year-old son, Cody, who had been eating dry cereal. His fingers are still in the bowl.
Pauline, 18, is dead on the kitchen floor. Her sister, Melanie, 20, is dead on the floor of her bedroom, still in her nightgown.
Dozens of officers converge on the house. The back door shows no sign of forced entry. It's as if it had been left unlocked, the killer had a key or someone let him in. The victims have been shot or stabbed or both.
At 10:05 a.m., investigators find a knife and gun beneath a row of Leyland cypress trees in the neighborhood, not far from the home.
The husband and father of the family, Brian Tzeo, was at his job at International Paper in Statesville when his family was killed. He later said that he'd been uneasy when he left for work earlier that morning. His garage door remote was missing from the visor of his car. He asked Pauline to unplug the garage door opener. He had a bad feeling, worried that someone was going to steal money or break in, but he didn't see anything suspicious.
Tzeo, 44, is quickly ruled out as the killer.
But he and his wife are separated pending divorce. Investigators learn that he'd had an affair years earlier. The first suspect is the husband of the woman with whom Tzeo had the affair.
Investigators talk to more than 200 people. They initially have seven persons of interest in the case.
That Saturday night, a story about the case airs on America's Most Wanted, providing a significant lead. Investigators won't say what it was.
Gun had changed hands
Tracing the gun will point investigators to someone in Appleton, Wis., who had sold the gun. It had changed hands, but will eventually be traced to Chiew Chan Saevang.
Saevang, 37, is a close friend of the family. People in the local Asian community considered Brian Tzeo to be Saevang's uncle, perhaps a show of respect since the men were of a different ethnic mix. Tzeo and his family are Iu Mien. While Saevang had been adopted by a Mien family, he is of Thai and Chinese descent.
Saevang was trying to start a new life in Wisconsin, but had been a neighbor of the Tzeo family for years, and had lived with them off and on. In the last few months of their lives, Saevang and his girlfriend, Yer Yang, a Hmong, visited the Tzeo family.
The story that emerges is that Brian Tzeo was involved in a conspiracy to smuggle opium from Thailand to the family's home in the quiet subdivision on Gristmill Drive. The opium would be converted to heroin; then Yang would act as a courier to take the drugs to Saevang in Wisconsin, where he would sell it.
That story, as it turns out, is not accurate.
As more information emerges later, officers correct the picture, but the initial reports wind up in newspapers and on television stations across the nation, where they still remain largely uncorrected and say that a family involved in a heroin pipeline was murdered by the dealer.
There was no heroin. There is no French Connection operating out of Catawba County, authorities will later say, referencing the famous pipeline that was the source of most of the heroin in the United States in the 1970s. Instead, there was a mom-and-pop opium operation here, low-level, with bits of opium coming into the Tzeo house by mail.
Was it enough for someone to kill for? Or was there something else going on?
Travel to Wisconsin
On the Sunday after the killings, investigators interview Yang. Saevang has already left for the 16-hour drive home to Wisconsin. His family will later tell investigators that he arrived home on Sunday.
Later that night or early the next morning, Yang boards a flight from North Carolina to Madison, Wis. Saevang is in Wausau, Wis., where Yang has an apartment. Saevang is packing up his things when he tells friends that he has to go and pick up his girlfriend.
He drives about 2½ hours south from Wausau to pick up Yang at the Madison airport.
In Madison, investigators will later find a black or dark blue car they had been seeking since witnesses described seeing it in the Tzeos' neighborhood on the morning of the murders.
At some point, Saevang and Yang leave the state together. Saevang used to live in Central California, and authorities believe that is where they are heading. They worry that once he gets into the large Southeast Asian populations there he can disappear and they'll never find him.
From Madison, the most direct route takes the pair through Des Moines, Iowa, and Lincoln, Neb., and then into Denver, where they pick up Interstate 70, which crosses the Rocky Mountains before entering Utah. There I-70 merges into I-15, which cuts south on its way to Las Vegas and then into California.
So when an alert goes out that the suspects have entered Utah on I-70 and are headed to California in a green BMW, a deputy in Washington County, Utah, knows that the most direct route will take them right along I-15 in southwestern Utah.
Saevang and Yang have been on the road for more than 23 hours and have traveled nearly 1,600 miles from Madison.
Seven minutes after the alert goes out, a Washington County deputy spots the green BMW with the North Carolina tag.
The deputy settles in behind the car.
■ Monte Mitchell can be reached in Wilkesboro at 336-667-5691 or at mmitchell@wsjournal.com. Richard Gould can be reached in Hickory at 828-304-6916 or rgould@hickoryrecord.com.
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