Inside the cult: The gruelling investigation to identify the body in the bag
Thursday, 2 July 2026
Shulai Wang’s body was found on March 12, 2024 by an unsuspecting fisherman.
After a months-long police investigation, four people were charged. They denied the charges.
Kaixiao Liu and Lanyue Xiao were found guilty of kidnapping, manslaughter, misconduct in relation to human remains, and attempting to pervert the course of justice.
On the afternoon of March 12, 2024, police were alerted to a body that had been pulled out of Gulf Harbour. 840 days later, the leader of a cult and his wife were found guilty of causing the death of one of his followers. Two of the detectives who headed up the investigation sat down with Catrin Owen to speak exclusively about Operation Parade, and details that didn’t make it to court.
The unknown body in the bag
Paul Middleton had parked up at Gulf Harbour marina on the afternoon of March 12, 2024, hoping to catch some fish. As he was standing on the rocks just off the grassy point, he noticed a floating object in the water. He cast his line out and started reeling it in.
It felt heavy.
As it came closer, he could see what appeared to be black plastic. When he bent down and opened it up he noticed some clothing and then he saw a hand.
The discovery led to a homicide investigation that spanned months, and went international.
And this week, more than two years on, two people were found guilty of the manslaughter of the woman whose body Thompson found.
It was a bizarre case, involving a cult leader and a woman who had travelled to New Zealand seeking his teachings.
After the verdict, the officers who led the inquiry, Detective Inspector Simon Harrison and Detective Sergeant Shane Page, sat down with Stuff exclusively to discuss the case, and how it unravelled.
The most challenging aspect of the inquiry was identifying the small Asian victim. No one had reported anyone fitting her description missing, nor was there anything on her body that pointed to who she was.
An autopsy didn’t provide any clues either.
“It's very rare to come away from a post mortem and not know who the victim was,” Page said.
With little to go on, police appealed to the public through the media for information.
Over the coming days and months, they released photos of the woman’s clothing, set up an 0800 number, and searched missing persons databases here and overseas.
As the painstaking search for clues continued, each morning Harrison reminded staff working on the inquiry - dubbed Operation Parade - that the woman was “someone’s mum, probably someone’s grandma, probably someone’s wife and we need to find out who she is and then what happened to her and then those responsible”.
While police’s inquiries located people who’d been reported missing, the victim’s identity remained unknown.
The key to solving the mystery lay within the contents of the black rubbish bag - the seemingly innocuous 10kg Sunrice Australian medium grain and jasmine rice bags filled with stones that were taped to her body to weigh it down in the water.
Detectives contacted Sunrice, and with the help of numbers on the bags they were able to trace when they were imported into New Zealand and stores where they may have been sold.
Using that information, they identified 193 sales of the rice at stores in and around the area where the body was found, and visited the homes of about 60 buyers.
Page said through those inquiries, one transaction stood out - an unusually large purchase of 18 bags of the rice at Pak ‘N Save Albany.
The bank card used in that transaction carried the name of Kaixiao Liu. Trawling through other transactions made using the card, detectives spotted a fuel purchase, and with the help of CCTV footage from the service station, they identified a white Mercedes van.
The “wahoo moment” for Page was when an automatic number plate recognition tool used by police captured the white van at Gulf Harbour on March 8 - days before the woman’s body was found.
“Here's the white van, and it just looks so suspicious … them doing the recce, waiting for it to be dark, and then coming back,” Page said.
Page and Detective Marc Renfree strained to see the grainy footage. They could make out what appeared to be children walking alongside adults with a push chair.
Police believed they were watching the dumping of the woman’s body into the harbour.
Kaixiao Liu and his wife Lanyue Xiao became “persons of interest” to the homicide investigation, and their Orewa home was identified as a “location of interest”.
A recruitment trip to China
However, police didn’t have enough evidence to arrest the couple and were powerless to stop them leaving the country for China three days later.
In China, Stuff can reveal, Liu and Xiao met with five women.
“There was communications with those five females which indicated that they were preparing themselves to come out to New Zealand,” Page said.
Photos later found on the couple’s devices showed Xiao seated at a table with the five young women around her looking at a whiteboard.
Police believe the women were living in China in a house owned by Liu.
The couple returned to New Zealand in early June.
Harrison said he’d had a discussion with another officer about what would happen if they tried to leave again. A border alert was issued.
Later that month, on June 30, it was triggered.
Page had just finished the dishes after cooking a roast when he got a phone call from a colleague saying “they’re trying to leave”.
By then, police believed their inquiries had established Liu and Xiao were involved in dumping the woman’s body in the harbour.
The couple were arrested at Auckland International Airport and charged with interfering with human remains - a holding charge.
“They gave us false details, they had one kid with them,” Page said.
Page and Renfree went out to the airport and attempted to interview the couple.
Xiao made out she couldn’t speak English and Liu claimed they had no one in New Zealand to look after the child.
The officers knew that was a lie, but played along.
They’d had the couple’s Orewa home under surveillance and knew other adults were living there.
Page and Renfree worked through the night while another detective secured a search warrant for the property.
Inside the Ark and uncovering a cult
On July 1, a team of officers, including multiple Mandarin speakers, arrived at the Harvest Ave home.
The case was about to take an unusual twist.
The Orewa property housed Liu’s parents, four children and five other Chinese women. (These were not the five women referred to earlier in this story who Liu and Xiao met with in China.)
Four of the women refused to speak to police, and stood with their hands clasped and smiling - something officers would later discover they’d been told to do.
The other spoke briefly to them, saying she’d travelled from China with a companion and that person was “no longer there”.
Inquiries soon revealed the woman she entered the country with was 70-year-old Shulai Wang.
While those who lived at the property remained tight-lipped, police found hours of recordings by Liu and notebook and diary entries by others. They revealed Liu was the leader of a religious sect, and how Wang, who had been one of his followers, ended up in Gulf Harbour.
At the property, described in the recordings as the “Ark”, detectives learned Liu slept in his own bedroom. There was no clothing in the room but a gun was found in a side table.
Xiao, referred to in the recordings as “Queen”, also had her own bedroom, while Liu’s mother slept in a room with the children, and his father slept on a stretcher in another room known as the children’s classroom.
Two of the older ladies slept on roll out camp beds in the lounge while the younger women shared one room.
When police looked around the house they didn’t see “a great deal of religion”.
But from the recordings, it was clear Liu wielded a lot of power over the women who lived there. For example, he told them how to chew their food, how long it should stay in their system and how to go to the toilet.
“I don’t know how his control manifests itself with those overseas,” Page said in regards to Liu’s followers in China.
“I don’t know how he recruits, I think it’s just word of mouth. But we’ve got plenty of examples of his control over some of the most minor, basic day-to-day activities at the household.
“It goes without saying he also controls and dictates the bigger things as well,” Page said.
One document that was found by police at the home was titled “Covenant of the Body”.
“I am willing to enter a mutual love relationship with Mr KL, build a family and have children with him. I will also love the other women and be loved by them…I am doing these out of my own free will … I will keep my body healthy and be in good physical condition.”
That document was found in various forms and had been signed by the women.
“He wanted a big family. He wanted to fill his ark with women and children,” Page said.
Harrison said the investigation team made a decision not to focus on the religious side of things, unless it was the motivation for Wang’s death.
“I don't care who people pray to or whatever … but the way she was treated, when we literally and figuratively unpacked the body, you realised that it's no reputable religion thing,” Page said.
How exactly Kaixiao Liu came to be leading a cult remains a mystery to police.
Liu went to a military-based university and then it appears took an interest in music.
He auditioned for China’s Got Talent and lied about a girlfriend who he claimed went missing in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.
After coming to New Zealand, he set up the Universe Choir, a project he hoped would change the world by 2026 through “kids singing”, and produced several albums.
“I travel to different destinations to visit various races, to do what I can to help anyone who needs help. My music has no boundaries of languages or spaces,” the choir’s website states.
“He likes being the centre of attention, he likes having his followers,” Page said of Liu.
Police also uncovered about $2m worth of gold bars in shoe boxes at the Orewa home.
“We found a number of bank accounts with unexplained deposits,” Page said.
They also discovered one of the Chinese women who had travelled to New Zealand had given Liu $1.2m.
“You could argue that the group is not set up for religious enlightenment … the group is set up for financial gain,” Page said.
Shulai Wang
After police identified Shulai Wang as the woman who had been dumped in the harbour, they went about trying to find her family in Hainan, China.
They still don’t know too much about her or her family, other than they were known as “family 12” in Liu’s “group” and she had been an accomplished market gardener.
Late last year, Wang’s husband, one of her sons and a grandson began posting online claiming New Zealand Police were corrupt and echoing Liu’s sentiments.
Wang’s husband claimed authorities had refused to return her body to China and described an “ongoing justice being deliberately prolonged by the New Zealand police”.
At a hearing before the trial, Liu claimed in the days leading up to Wang’s death she “had the best life”.
However, that is a stark contrast to what was heard in the recordings.
“These guys were just slaves and they were wasting away,” Page said.
On March 6, 2024, Wang tried to escape the Ark to a neighbouring property, the recordings revealed. She didn’t succeed and was instead captured, bound and likely put in a box or suitcase.
At some point her mouth was taped to stop her screaming.
“No movement,” Liu’s mother noted in a diary entry on March 7.
Wang was dead.
By March 8, her body was taped in the fetal position, with the rice bags filled with stones, and put inside the black plastic bin bags.
Police believe the pushchair and the children were used to disguise the dumping of her body in the harbour.
On Monday, Liu and Xiao were found guilty of kidnapping, manslaughter, misconduct with human remains and attempting to pervert the course of justice.
Liu’s mother was found guilty of kidnapping while his father was found guilty of misconduct with human remains.
For Harrison, it was “without a doubt the most unique” case he’s ever worked on with a myriad of challenges.
“It’s probably one of those once in a career files that you have, and I hope [we] don’t get another one like this.”