The Murders of Jimmy and Anne Choy (Massachusetts)

After a fire in a Brockton, Massachusetts neighborhood killed a man and woman in their own home, the investigation zeroed in on two people – two children – who had escaped the blaze unharmed.

The Fire

It was 4:56 a.m. on Thursday, April 17, 2003 when a 9-1-1 call came into the Brockton Fire Department. The caller, 17-year old Frances Choy, tells the dispatcher that her home is on fire. She’s in her bedroom and she could hear her mother screaming, but now the house is silent except for the raging flames. The emergency dispatcher stayed on the line with Frances and kept her talking as she waited for first responders to arrive with her head out the window of her bedroom.

Frances’s voice stays steady but moments of shock and fear are evident as the dispatcher continues to ask her questions. “This is like a dream,” Frances says. She tells the dispatcher that her mother, father, and nephew are also in the home as sirens got louder and louder.

Firefighters had arrived at 102 Belair Street in Brockton. According to a Massachusetts State Police incident report, there were no signs of smoke or fire from the street, but walking up the driveway along the side of the house they could begin to see smoke coming from a second floor window and a person sticking his head out, though he was not calling for help. In another second floor window, they spotted Frances Choy.

After hanging up the 9-1-1 call, she hollered down to the firefighters that her parents, 53-year old Anne Choy and 64-year old Jimmy Choy, were inside the house, too. Firefighters entered the house and found it filled with thick black smoke, but the smoke detectors weren’t blaring their telltale sound. Making their way through the kitchen, up a half flight of stairs into a living room and then to a bedroom, fire personnel found Anne laying on the bed and Jimmy on the floor. Both were unconscious as they were removed from the house.

Firefighters knocked down the blaze as all four residents, Frances and her parents as well as the other person seen in a second floor window, Frances’s nephew Kenneth Choy, were transported to the hospital for treatment. As the remnants smoldered, investigators noticed a distinctive odor in the air. It was a strong almost menthol scent described by one official as similar to Vicks Vaporub. As the Fire Marshal’s office began their assessment of the cause and origin of the fire, they realized that the odor was not from a topical medicine used for coughs and stuffy noses, but something else.

Trooper Jeannie Stewart of the Massachusetts State Police Fire Marshal’s Office realized what it was when she stepped inside Jimmy and Anne’s bedroom. Gasoline. It seemed the fire had been intentionally set. An accelerant detection canine alerted at several areas inside the house, including the melted remnants of a plastic container in Anne and Jimmy’s bedroom.

Investigators found no sign of forced entry to the house and all windows and doors were secured when they first arrived at the scene. So, what happened here?

At the hospital, Anne Choy was pronounced dead at 5:53 a.m. She had suffered burns on 60 percent of her body⁽⁴⁾. Jimmy was still hanging on, but was in critical condition and transported to a second hospital for additional treatment. By 6:35 a.m. the Choy’s home was secured as a crime scene.

About the Choy Family

Jimmy Choy, originally from Hong Kong, and his wife Anne had lived in Vietnam before immigrating to the United States. They lived in Boston’s Chinatown for a time before eventually moving to the Brockton neighborhood where their daughter Frances Choy grew up. According to reporting by Dave Wedge for the Boston Herald, both Jimmy and Anne worked at a medical equipment manufacturer in Braintree for years, but Anne left for personal reasons and then in September of 2002, Jimmy went on medical leave as he battled cancer.

Jimmy had been married before Anne, and had at least one son from that marriage who lived in Hong Kong with his family, including a son, Kenneth. When Jimmy’s son passed away, Jimmy petitioned to have his grandson Kenneth come live with him and his family in the United States. He arrived on March 27, 2000 and his grandfather was granted primary guardianship a little over a year later.

Kenneth lived with his grandfather and step-grandmother, along with his aunt Frances, who was almost the same age as him. In April of 2003, Frances Choy was a senior at Brockton High School. She was an honor student and a member of the student senate and she played on the tennis team. The superintendent of schools told Megan Tench and Anand Vaishnav of the Boston Globe that Frances was a hardworking, dedicated and high achieving student, but also quiet and reserved. She was the kind of kid who did all the work in the group assignment, but then let someone else present the final project. However, her academics had begun to slip in the last few months of senior year.

Frances had already been accepted into four colleges, including Suffolk University, but getting into college was one thing…While the reality and logistics of attending was another. According to statements made by Frances contained in case file documents, she held a lot of responsibility at home. Her parents struggled with health problems and so it was Frances taking care of them and the house. She cleaned, cooked, and managed the bills for her mother and father all on top of keeping up schoolwork and her job at an office supply store.

Frances had hoped that getting into college would give her some independence from her parents. She thought she might even be able to move in with her boyfriend, who her father had forbidden her from seeing. But that just wouldn’t be the case. Because of their strict rules and all of her responsibilities, Frances had to live at home and continue caring for her parents even after starting at university. This left her frustrated and unhappy. And that would fuel growing suspicion as the investigation into the fire at the Choy home unfolded.

Kenneth’s Story vs. Frances’s Story

Three Massachusetts State Police officials first spoke with Kenneth Choy as he lay in a bed at the hospital on the morning of the fire, still in recovery. Kenneth told investigators that he heard Frances get home from work around 9:45 p.m. the night before. He stayed up playing video games in his room until around 10 and then he went to bed shortly after. He said he was sleeping soundly until his grandmother’s screams woke him up. She was shouting for Frances.

Kenneth said he didn’t know what time it was, but it was still dark outside, so he reached for the lightswitch only to find that the electricity wasn’t working. When he opened his bedroom door, he was immediately overwhelmed by thick black smoke in the hallway. He slammed the door shut again and ran to one of the windows in his room. It was stuck, but he eventually wrenched it open and gulped in the fresh air from outside.

Kenneth told police that he could hear Frances on the phone in her bedroom, and though he wasn’t sure what she was saying, he assumed she was calling for help. Firefighters arrived and rescued him soon after.

Police asked Kenneth if he knew anything about the heating system at the house or if any maintenance or construction work had been done recently at the residence. He said he believed the house was heated with natural gas, but there hadn’t been any work done. They also asked if anyone smoked at the house, if they ever had issues with any of the neighbors, and if he heard the smoke detectors going off that morning. Kenneth answered no to all. No smoking, no issues, and no smoke detectors.

Finally, the officers asked Kenneth if he knew of any flammable materials that were kept inside the house. Kenneth could think of a few. There were cans of paint stored in the basement near the heating system and a red gas can used to fill up the lawnmower and snow blower, but he wasn’t sure if the gas can had anything in it. He didn’t have much else to offer detectives, he said.

The investigators asked Kenneth if they could collect the clothing he was wearing at the time the fire started,  saying that testing the items might help to determine the cause of the fire. Kenneth was eager to help and changed into hospital garments as he handed over his clothes to police.

The same officials interviewed Frances Choy at the hospital that morning, too. Frances told pretty much the same story as her nephew. She said that she got home from work around 9:45 and went to check in with her parents before going to bed herself. Her mom and dad were in their bedroom, and they chatted for about 15 minutes, mostly about Frances’s acceptance to Suffolk University.

Frances woke up sometime early in the morning to the sound of her mother screaming. She could just make out the words, “Frances, there’s a fire, there’s a fire.” Frances said she could hear a sizzling sound coming from outside the bedroom door and bright flames around the edge of her door frame. In the dark, Frances picked up the landline phone, but her mother was already on the line screaming unintelligibly. It wasn’t clear if anyone was on the other end, so Frances found her cell phone and called 9-1-1. The first call dropped, but the dispatcher called back and connected Frances to the Brockton Fire Department. That was the call audio you heard at the top of this episode.

Police asked Frances if she could think of anyone who might have a problem with her family, someone who might want to burn down their house. Frances said that their cars had been vandalized in their driveway about two months earlier and the investigation found that it was because of issues Kenneth had with two other people at school, but it had since been resolved and there weren’t any other incidents since. That was all that came to mind.

Like Kenneth, Frances also agreed to hand over her clothes for testing, wanting to do anything she could to help the ongoing investigation. Both teenagers’ articles were packaged separately and then presented to an accelerant detection dog who was trained in detecting the presence of flammable substances, along with the clothing Anne was wearing when she was found unconscious in her bed.

After a good sniff, the dog alerted to the presence of a possible accelerant on two articles of clothing: One being Anne Choy’s pajamas. The other was Frances Choy’s sweatpants, worn at the time the fire broke out. These were passed onto the state crime lab for further analysis to confirm the canine’s findings.

Life Insurance

Frances and Kenneth were released from the hospital at 10 a.m. the same morning as the fire. Kenneth went with a family member to visit his grandfather Jimmy, who was still fighting for his life in critical condition at a different hospital⁽²⁾, but Frances returned home first. She was greeted by officials still in the process of assessing the scene and they told her she wasn’t allowed to go inside. So instead, Frances sat with detectives in an unmarked cruiser for a second interview.

The detectives asked Frances why she returned to the house and she said she was worried about her belongings getting stolen. The detectives assured her that the house was secure, and even said that anything damaged by the fire would likely be covered by insurance, so she didn’t need to worry about her things. At the mention of insurance, Frances told detectives that she was the sole beneficiary of her mother and father’s life insurance policies, totalling an estimated $100,000. She knew this because she was the one who paid the bill every month.

The detectives then went on to ask Frances about the smell of gasoline in her parents’ bedroom…And on the  sweatpants she was wearing when the fire began. She had no explanation for why gasoline would be anywhere near her pants or her mother and father’s bedroom. She said she hadn’t handled gasoline recently, she didn’t fill up the lawnmower or snowblower (those were Kenneth’s chores), and she hadn’t worn them while getting gas in any of the family cars. When asked if she hugged her mother or had contact with her after the fire, Frances said no.

During this questioning, a family member arrived to pick up Frances and bring her to the hospital to visit her father, but the detectives gave her a ride instead and so they could continue talking on the drive. They asked her how she was going to pay for her college education, and Frances told them nothing was finalized yet, but her father was going to pay for her tuition and she was going to live at home, even though she didn’t want to. Frances described all the responsibilities she had at home and to her parents. According to the incident report, Frances described her parents as a quote-unquote “burden”.

After the detectives dropped Frances off at the hospital, they spoke with Kenneth who was also at the hospital where Jimmy was being treated. They asked him several questions before confronting him with this one: Would he or his aunt Frances have done anything to hurt Anne and Jimmy? Kenneth said no and then told the detectives that he wanted to go see his grandfather, but they could call him anytime.

Jimmy Choy passed away later that day succumbing to the burns on over 80% of his body and smoke inhalation from the blaze. As doctors removed Jimmy’s life support, Frances hugged him. According to Maureen Boyle’s reporting for The Enterprise, a family member tried to pull Frances away, explaining that hugging the dead causes bad luck to rub off on you. Frances didn’t care. She asked her dad to wake up. You can’t leave me, she said.

Back at 102 Belair Street in Brockton, with a warrant in hand, state police began to fully search the Choy’s home. Around 5:30 p.m. as detectives scoured Kenneth’s bedroom, they uncovered a piece of paper with a handwritten note. It was personalized stationery. The top read “A note from: Kenneth Choy” and below was what appeared to be a detailed plan to burn down the Choy’s home.

PHOTOS

Note: After extensive research, no photos have been located of Jimmy or Anne Choy. If you have photos, please reach out to hello@darkdowneast.com.