Ruihong Nie has been sentenced to life in prison for killing Nongyu Peng in a Perth hotel room, after her daughter broke down while describing the lasting impact of her mother’s death in the Supreme Court of Western Australia.
Nie, 27, will serve at least 17 years, backdated to March 2024 when he was first remanded in custody. He was also sentenced to five, seven and two years for drugging, raping and stealing from another woman three weeks later, with those terms to run concurrently.
The court heard Nie lured Peng to the hotel by pretending she was meeting a client. He then gave her GHB without her knowledge, intending to search her phone and transfer money to his mother, who believed Peng owed her money.
The amount of the drug Peng ingested was described as “significant” and proved fatal.
Nie had not been a stranger to Peng. He had signed a statutory declaration supporting her immigration to Australia, and Peng had lived with his mother at her massage shop.
Peng, 42, had moved to Perth from China with her daughter Eva after the teenager was bullied at school. She was studying English and law and hoped to become a lawyer, while working in sex work to help fund a new life for her family.
Her younger daughter, aged three, had remained in China with her grandparents while Peng established herself in Australia. The family had planned for her to join them later.
In the hours before her death, Peng sent a text message to Eva, who was at home. The teenager did not reply because she feared being reprimanded for using her phone late at night.
Speaking in court after travelling from China for the sentencing, Eva said that decision would haunt her forever. She recalled being collected from school and told by Stephen that her mother had died.
“I could not believe it. I could not breathe, and I thought I was going to die as well,” she said. “I was 14 years old, in a foreign country where we only had each other. No words can express how I felt then or how I feel now. Now I had no one but myself.”
Eva said she had been forced to see her mother’s body and was overcome by “pain, despair and utter devastation”. She also told the court: “I now fear for my own safety. I fear that one day another person will come out and kill me too.”
Before Peng’s death, she and Eva had travelled through Western Australia during the Christmas school holidays of 2024, visiting tourist spots, going to the beach and collecting seashells.
“I told her I would one day buy her a big house by the ocean,” Eva recalled.
