True Crime Byline: The Case Lori Culbert Got Wrong (2024)

After a 21-year-old exchange student from China vanished without a trace in October 2002, the Vancouver Sun sent me and my Mandarin-speaking colleague Peg Fong to Coquitlam, where we interviewed Amanda Zhao’s grief-stricken best friend and her fellow students at the college she was attending to improve her English.

They all said the disappearance was out of character for Zhao, who they recalled as being hard-working, kind and trusting.

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We also interviewed Zhao’s distraught parents in Beijing, who said their only child “was our hope, she is our future.”

I tracked down Zhao’s 20-year-old boyfriend and interviewed him inside the basem*nt suite in Burnaby where he had lived with Zhao for about six months before she went missing. He wept about her disappearance, and said he was guilt-ridden that he let Zhao walk alone to the grocery store the night she disappeared.

He shared multiple photos of the young couple, holding hands and hugging.

I left that apartment feeling incredible sympathy for that young man, just as I had for Zhao’s friends and parents.

At the time, the Burnaby RCMP said it was stumped about the high-profile case, describing the missing young woman as “squeaky clean,” and a good student who didn’t party.

For weeks, police said they had no suspects, even after Zhao’s body was eventually found stuffed in a suitcase on a dirt road outside Mission.

I wrote story after story about this case. I couldn’t understand who had killed Zhao or why.

Reporters often become emotionally invested in crime stories, especially ones like this when everyone is mourning for the vulnerable victim and demanding answers from police.

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The case of who killed Amanda Zhao would eventually be solved. But I had made a major miscalculation while covering this story.

While I wasn’t the only one to make this mistake, the lesson has stayed with me for the last two decades. I think often about Amanda Zhao, and my own naiveté.

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True Crime Byline is a podcast by Postmedia and Antica Productions. In each episode, host Kathleen Goldhar talks to journalists about the cases that made their careers, changed the way they see the world and continue to haunt them. New episodes drop on Thursdays. Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts!

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