The lives of the killers and their victim couldn’t have been more different. According to the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, Dr. Victor Chang had personally saved hundreds of patients through his pioneering heart transplant surgery and as the head of the National Heart Transplant Program at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. He’d saved even more people through his work on two different heart devices.
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His killers, Phillip Choon Tee Lim and Chiew Seng Liew, were out of work and looking for a big score. Liew was a Malaysian national with a criminal record and was in Australia on a tourist visa, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. Lim was an out-of-work cook with large gambling debts. They also convinced a third man, Stanley Ng, to help, but he dropped out before the killing and would later turn the state’s evidence against the other two men. They picked Dr. Chang out of a magazine that had an article about prominent businessmen and laid out an ever-changing series of plans to get money from him. They considered holding Chang’s family hostage until he gave them $3 million but scuttled the plan at the last minute. After other botched attempts, they succeeded in cornering Dr. Chang on July 4. They killed him without getting any money.
