Hong Kong commuters walking through Central and along the harbour front earlier this month may have been handed a bag of candy worms, sweet enticement drawing attention to a gruesome litany of serial killers, mutilated body parts stored in lunch box containers, strangled accountants, missing children and undercover drug smugglers that are at the core of a new Hong Kong podcast, "Catching Worms: A Hong Kong True Crime Podcast".

Produced by the Hong Kong unit of U.K./European production house Create, the podcast series debuted this month with daily episodes and a fresh crime story every month. Each crime story in the series will be split into between two and four episodes of about 30 minutes. 

"Catching Worms" kicked off on 1 July with the story of taxi driver serial killer Lam Kor Wan, dubbed The Jars Murder, who was sentenced to death in 1983 after being found guilty of strangling and dismembering four women. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. 

Lam remains incarcerated at the maximum-security Shek Pik Prison on Lantau island, not far from where Create’s production director, Suzy Jamison, lives. 

Jamison says the series originally focused on Lam alone. 

“Then as we started to investigate, we spoke to more and more people with first-hand experience of investigating other infamous crimes in Hong Kong and so we couldn’t just stop at one. 

“Hong Kong is a safe city but the crimes in its history are some of the most shocking yet fascinating, uncovering a darker side of the city,” she says. 
"Catching Worms" is heavily researched, with scripted narration and real people involved in the case telling their stories.

“This was important because we wanted do the material justice in conveying the cases in a detailed way through the voices of people involved in the crimes,” Jamison says.

“We also wanted to make sure we were historically accurate and as truthful as possible out of respect for the victims and those affected,” she adds.

One of the challenges was constantly balancing this commitment with entertainment value. 

“I think whenever you deal with real people and real people’s stories you have to weigh up the importance of telling the story in an entertaining way with how it will make the families feel – this is continuous challenge,” Jamison says. 

The podcast’s name draws on the Cantonese term “juk chung” ( short for “juk chung yup si fat”), which translates as getting into trouble or causing unnecessary difficulties. 

Jamison says the team was looking for a title that was “connected to the stories we were telling but also to the roots of Hong Kong”. 

So they dug into Cantonese slang and phraseology around criminals, crime and policing, and came across an article in Time Out about Cantonese slang.

The article outlined the meaning of “juk chung” (putting worms up your rear end), with all the trouble that implies.

“What we liked about it is that it has humorous roots, but a truth to it. "Catching Worms" also conjures up the idea that this is what the police officers working on these crimes were tasked with doing, catching the worms of society,” Jamison says. 

And lastly, she adds, the phrase plays on the proverb, “the early bird gets the worm”, which Create hopes will encourage people to download the podcast asap. 

The rise in podcasts’ popularity mean the task of attracting new listeners is a whole lot easier than it used to be. 

“During the pandemic we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people in Hong Kong looking for new podcasts to listen to. True crime has captured our fascination and these crimes are the most intriguing we’ve come across,” Jamison says. 

Jamison was not concerned about tapping a story already so well told. 

“The story is only well known in such a small circle. This happened nearly 40 years ago and so many people who now live in Hong Kong have never heard this story,” she says, adding: “Podcasts also reach a global audience, so we are telling this story to a new audience, most of whom will have never even been to Hong Kong.