AI Summary
5 min readA cat feeder's camera in the kitchen-living room area of a Bay Area home captured footage that exposed a murder. Tony Hu, a Google software engineer, appeared blood-soaked in the early morning hours of January 15, 2020, holding a circular saw to his neck but not activating it. His arm was swollen, yet he had no visible injuries. His wife, Ivy Xu, last seen tidying up around midnight, was later found dead upstairs, her face unrecognizable from blunt force trauma. Police discovered Tony catatonic on his knees during a wellness check, staring at a wall beside her body. As officers led him out, he bit and smashed a framed photo of Ivy.
The Couple's Elite Backgrounds
Tony and Ivy, both 27-year-old Chinese immigrants, seemed like a model tech couple. They graduated from Tsinghua University (China's top school, akin to Harvard-Yale), earned PhDs in computer science at UC San Diego, and worked as software engineers—Tony at Google on YouTube Shorts algorithms, Ivy initially at Amazon before switching to Google. They married in 2022, bought a $2 million four-bedroom house (address 714, sounding like "wife will die" in Chinese numerology), and doted on cats Cooper and Kiwi, with a dedicated Instagram featuring cat parties and lap-sitting during work-from-home sessions. Tony, 6'2" with a guarded, nerdy demeanor, enjoyed photography, skiing, and volleyball. Ivy appeared softer and more
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:58) **Hidden Cameras in Smart Devices** - Explains unexpected cameras in ovens, vacuums, and pet feeders.
- 2 (01:52) **Reddit Cat Feeder Incident** - Girlfriend's colleague sees boyfriend via app camera at work.
- 3 (03:45) **Tony and Ivy's Cat Feeder Captures Alarm** - Couple installs pet feeder; camera logs disturbing events overnight.
- 4 (04:48) **Blood Evidence on Tony** - Tony's arm swollen, covered in blood but uninjured himself.
- 5 (10:36) **Police Wellness Check at House 714** - Officers enter blood-scented home on Jan 15, 2020; find catatonic Tony kneeling by Ivy's unrecognizable body.
- 6 (12:44) **Tony and Ivy's Perfect Tech Couple Facade** - 27-year-old Google engineers from China; married 1 year, buy $2M Bay Area home with $500K down, obsessed with cats Cooper and Kiwi.
- 7 (15:44) **Obsession with First Loves in Chinese Culture** - Explains "white moonlight" (pure first love) vs. "red rose" (passionate affair) concepts from literature.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
A cat feeder in California, meant to monitor Ivy and Tony’s two pet cats unintentionally captures the following events on camera.
12:21 am, Ivy walks into the kitchen and starts cleaning up. By 1:04 am, Ivy turns off the lights and heads to bed.
4:43 am and suddenly movement is detected. Tony, her husband, comes into frame with his shirt splattered in a deep red substance. He wanders out of frame only to return wielding a circular hand saw - the electric ones with a rotating blade and serrated edges made to cut two by fours.
He’s tense. Rigid. The electric saw isn’t on but he has it pressed against his throat. The serrated blade is frozen. His finger hovers over the power button. All he needs to do is just. press. down.
He pulls the saw away from his neck and walks out of frame again.
The next time he’s caught on the pet feeder, one of his arms is completely swollen, drenched in blood.
But Tony isn’t injured. So where is all this blood coming from? What has he been doing all night?
And what is he going to do when he realizes the pet feeder is recording his every move?
Full show notes available at RottenMangoPodcast.com
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