When 17-year-old Hang Lee vanished on Jan. 12, 1993, Whitney Houston’s sweet rendition of the Dolly Parton elegy “I Will Always Love You” was at the top of the charts. Lee, a refugee of Hmong descent who emigrated with her family from Laos to the U.S. as a little girl, was into the harder stuff.
“She liked heavy metal, she liked that look,” Hang’s brother Koua told The Daily Beast, describing his sister’s big, teased hairdo and red-dyed bangs. “She liked Metallica, Skid Row, tight ’80s fashion. At that time, for Asians, they frowned on having hair like that.”
Hang, who lived in a St. Paul, Minnesota, housing project with her parents and 13 siblings, was “one of the few Asian girls who smoked,” Koua said. For this reason, he explained, people mistakenly thought she was a “bad girl,” when in fact she held down an afterschool job at a local cafe and hoped to attend the University of Minnesota upon graduation. Hang, who made $7 an hour, gave almost all of her earnings to their father to stock the family’s fridge, leaving her unable to save much for college, according to Koua.
ADVERTISEMENT
On the snowy evening she disappeared, Hang told Koua, who was 15 at the time, that she was waiting for a call from a friend who worked as a secretary for a local carpentry business and said she could get Hang a job to augment her modest income from the cafe. A short time later, 18-year-old Kia “Nikki” Lee, who was not related to Hang, phoned and the two made plans for Hang to meet Nikki’s boss that night.
Hang was a very trusting person, a trait which could at times be taken as naïveté. Still, she also talked about “protecting herself,” and always carried a small pocket knife with her, Koua said. However, at just 5 feet tall and 90 pounds, she “was more of a talker” than a fighter.
“She went and got her stuff, I was watching TV,” Koua recalled, putting the time at around 6 or 7 p.m. “And I heard her come down, and she said, ‘If I don’t come back, look for me.’ And that’s the last time I saw her.”
A few days later, Koua took his mom, who didn’t speak English, to report Hang missing, but he believes police “didn’t really care at that time, like, ‘Oh, it’s just another Asian runaway,’ or whatever,”—a suspicion corroborated to The Daily Beast by a law enforcement source close to the investigation.
Six months passed without a word. Then, one day, detectives showed up at the Lee family home.
“They came to talk to my mom,” said Koua. “Nikki saw all the fliers and felt bad and called [police].”
Investigators now had a name: “Wallace” was Nikki’s boss, 30-year-old Mark Steven Wallace—the last person Hang was with the night she disappeared.
Police checked his criminal history, and found it was extensive and violent. When Hang fell off the face of the Earth, Wallace had only been out of prison for about 18 months after convictions for a pair of rapes—one of which involved a 16-year-old girl.
Nikki, who was unable to be reached by The Daily Beast, told cops that Wallace picked her and Hang up in a white pickup truck the night of the job interview and may have taken them to a casino, one of the detectives on the case told the Twin Cities Pioneer Press in 2014. Later, Nikki said Wallace switched cars for some reason, and that the three then rode off in a tan or silver Chevy Cavalier. Nikki asked Wallace to drop them back at home because it was snowing hard and they had school the next morning. Wallace dropped Nikki off first, and said he’d bring Hang home next because she lived not far from his place. When Nikki got out and began walking away, she said she looked back and saw Hang getting into the front seat.
Mark Steven Wallace.
Minnesota Department of CorrectionsAs the detective told the newspaper, according to Nikki, Wallace had asked her if she knew anyone looking for work. She thought of Hang right away, but thought the request was strange since she said Wallace didn’t even have enough work to keep her busy. She also seemed somewhat suspicious of Wallace, according to a 2020 court filing in which Nikki told police that Wallace once served her a drink that immediately made her “violently ill.” He dismissed her concerns, blaming the strange reaction on chemical fumes in his workshop, she said.
Investigators got nowhere with Wallace. He lawyered up, and refused to talk. Wallace’s public defender, Laurel O’Rourke, told The Daily Beast she couldn’t discuss the case or her client at all due to confidentiality laws.
“The cops were like, ‘Sorry, we can’t just arrest him,’” said Koua. “They said it would be trouble solving it... At that time, DNA was still very new and they were trying to do it with DNA, but they told us they got nothing. And that was it.”
During Det. Sgt. Kevin Navara’s 24 years with the Ramsey County, Minnesota Sheriff's Office, he never thought a case could haunt him the way Hang Lee’s has.
“You look at cop shows, and you always see these old-time cops: ‘You know, there’s that one case I could never solve,’” Navara, who retired in 2017, told The Daily Beast. “This is that one case.”
He said he used to think the idea of a battle-hardened police officer being so deeply affected by an old crime was “silly and stupid,” but not anymore.
“I saved a ton of [the case files],” Navara said. “It’s probably the only case that I hung onto when I retired.”
In the mid-to-late 2000s, Navara was part of a Hmong gang task force when he injured his ankle. He was put on desk duty while he recuperated, and when his supervisor asked if he wanted to have a look at an unsolved cold case, he jumped at the chance.
A look at the Wallace files quickly pushed things into the surreal for Navara.
“My dad was a cop in St. Paul, he started in ’67 and retired in the mid-’90s, late-’80s,” he said. “And his name’s all over Wallace’s reports. So here I am working on this piece of crap, and my dad worked on the same [case].”
Wallace has been named publicly numerous times by authorities over the years, in both interviews and court filings, as the prime suspect in Hang Lee’s disappearance. St. Paul police publicly zeroed in on him as a person of interest almost immediately after Lee went missing, having been recently released from prison for two sexual assaults, including the rape of a 16-year-old girl who thought she was meeting up with him for a job interview. And although he has never been charged, he has been a regular fixture in ongoing news coverage of the Lee case. Years after her disappearance, officers in the St. Paul missing persons unit say they still consider Wallace a prime suspect.
A document from the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office identifies Wallace as the prime suspect in Lee’s disappearance and maps his relationships with the missing woman as well as dozens of other people in Wallace’s orbit. It includes an alias that Wallace allegedly used, Mark Henning, and connects him with various women with whom he had children, as well as people he worked with in the illegal drug trade. Other people pictured include family members, like a stepbrother, Tom, who Navara said lived in Wallace’s squalid basement, and victims of past crimes Wallace was convicted of perpetrating, such as a $1,500 swindle around 2008. The document states that Wallace was the last person to see Hang Lee alive, according to Nikki Lee, who Navara told The Daily Beast he found to be a credible witness.
A relationship map showing Wallace’s extended circle and used by law enforcement during the Hang Lee investigation.
Ramsey County Sheriff’s DepartmentAs part of his investigation, Det. Sgt. Navara interviewed Wallace’s ex-girlfriends who said they had been tied up and violently raped in the past, but hadn’t reported those attacks to police. Navara says one of them said that after she ended her relationship with Wallace, he broke into her apartment and slashed all of her pillows, shredded the upholstery on her furniture, and otherwise destroyed the apartment in a fit of unbridled rage.
Others from Wallace’s past relayed tales to Navara, during his official investigation of Hang’s murder, of him offering them something to drink, then waking up without any clothes on and realizing that an entire day had passed without them knowing it.
These allegations are backed up by a 2020 court order remanding Wallace indefinitely to a state facility for sex offenders. In it, various women are cited as telling investigators about being sexually assaulted by Wallace, who they said, variously, drugged them, bound them with duct tape, rope, and belts, tied them to trees before raping them, and offering them to other men for sex. In one instance, Wallace became furious at an ex who said he tried to run her car off the road after she ended their relationship.
“Later on, he slashed her tires and poured molasses in her gas tank,” the filing states. “[Wallace] broke into her home and stole her TV. She didn’t report this theft to police, but did obtain a restraining order.”
Wallace, the court order states, demonstrated a clear pattern of victimizing young women.
“He either used the lure of a job interview as a guise to gain access to young women, or victims were brought into [Wallace’s] household offering a place to live...” it explains. “[Wallace] binds his victims, and either blindfolds or gags them. [Wallace] uses drugs to incapacitate his victims and uses threats to gain compliance.”
In 2009, roughly a year after he started working the case, Navara got permission to search Wallace’s garage. He called in three sets of sniffer dogs trained to find human remains, which entered the cinder block structure and “immediately hit on” an area at the garage’s back wall, he said.
Navara and his team then drilled a series of holes into the concrete garage floor.
They “had some success, but not enough” to go further without tearing up the entire garage. Investigators then used ground-penetrating radar to see what was down there.
A large object that turned up on the screen was identified as a possible tree trunk, according to Navara.
Navara sought permission to tear down the entire garage but said he was denied because higher-ups didn’t think he had sufficient evidence to take things further.
Wallace has long been the prime suspect in Hang’s disappearance, but has never been arrested or charged.
The case is considered a missing persons investigation, not a homicide, because Hang’s body has never been found—which Navara called a “huge issue” in getting the DA to initiate a prosecution.
“You want to find the body first of all, that’s the first thing,” former NYPD Bronx Cold Case Squad commander Joe Giacalone told The Daily Beast. “No-body cases are extremely rare to prosecute. It’s not unheard of, but they’re very rare.”
Giacalone, who now teaches at New York City’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, pointed out that the types of evidence that exist today weren’t around in 1993, when Hang went missing: residential surveillance cameras, automated license plate readers, cellphone-tower data.
Without a body or an actual confession, Giacalone, who was not personally involved with the Hang Lee case, said, “The chances of closing a case like this are close to zero.”
Former federal prosecutor Thomas DiBiase is an expert in no-body homicides, and trains detectives and district attorneys all over the U.S. on how to handle them. Echoing Giacalone, DiBiase said the biggest challenge in a no-body case is getting it to trial in the first place.
“The reason for that, of course, is when you don’t have the body, you don’t have the most significant piece of evidence in a murder case,” DiBiase told The Daily Beast.
Absent any physical proof that a murder occurred, it’s very hard to get a conviction. However, DiBiase said, “Once they are at trial, they tend to be convictions, because prosecutors will only take the strongest no-body case to trial.”
There have been 542 no-body prosecutions in the United States through November 2020, by DiBiase’s count, including at least two convictions in Minnesota. In California, a 1977 appeal by Charles Manson was denied in a murder case involving a body that was never found.
“The fact that a murderer may successfully dispose of the body of the victim does not entitle him to an acquittal,” the decision stated. “That is one form of success for which society has no reward.”
In the spring of 2017, Hang Lee's family held what they called a “spiritual release” ceremony.
WCCODiBiase tells detectives that no-body cases require an incredible amount of persistence.
“Anyone who’s handled a no-body murder case, be it a police officer, a police detective, or prosecutor, inevitably said it was the hardest case they ever had… To bring a cold case murder to trial requires a lot of effort, and no-body murder cases are sort of the peak of that effort,” he said.
In August 2016, cops entered the Key Inn Motel in Woodbury, Minnesota to perform a wellness check on one of the guests after running a license plate in the parking lot that triggered an alert. When they got to the room in question, they found Wallace holed up inside with a 20-year-old friend of his daughter from high school.
The young woman, identified in court filings as “A.S.,” said she had been staying at the Key Inn with Wallace since February because she didn’t have a place of her own. A.S. appeared malnourished and was “frozen in fear” when officers arrived, according to a probable cause statement signed by Woodbury, Minnesota police commander Stephen Wills. She claimed Wallace had raped her and had forced her to have sex with other men, stated a subsequent appeals court decision remanding Wallace to custody.
Wallace forced A.S. to smoke meth with him and was often physically violent towards her, the probable cause filing says, which adds that Wallace’s alleged abuses also included “punching her in the eye, choking her, sitting on her, slamming her head against the floor, and threatening her with a shotgun… A.S. said she had been hospitalized multiple times due to her injuries. A.S. said she had suffered concussions, lacerations that required stiches [sic], broken bones, and internal bruising from being hit.”
At one point, A.S. “became aware of a murder of a woman in St. Paul,” and asked Wallace about it, states the filing, which says Wallace responded, “She entered my business and never came out.”
“Wallace threatened A.S., stating he would do to A.S. what he did to the female in St. Paul,” the filing states, appearing to describe the Hang Lee case. “Wallace has told A.S. how one can get rid of blood and what can cut through bone.”
The responding officer, Dan Wenshau, “learned from the Anoka County deputy that Wallace is the primary suspect in an unsolved homicide in Maplewood,” the filing says, referring to the location of Wallace’s home. The 2020 civil commitment filing for Wallace refers to the victim as “H.L.,” presumably Hang Lee.
Hang’s family, still without any answers, told police they were willing to drop any potential charges against Wallace if he would just tell them where Hang’s body was. But prosecutors didn’t go for it, said Navara.
In the spring of 2017, the Lees tried to find a modicum of peace by giving Hang a Hmong spiritual release ceremony.
“To all who know or know of our sister Hang Lee,” her cousin wrote on Facebook. “Our dearest sister Hang Lee has been missing for 24 years now. The case remains unsolved and as much as it breaks our hearts that we can’t find the closure and answers we seek, we as a family, have decided to finally release her spirit on April 7-8 2017. The spiritual release acknowledges that Hang may no longer be alive in this world, but she will live in our hearts forever. We as her family, would like to honor her by releasing her spirit to the other world.”
That November, Wallace was sentenced to 54 months in prison on felony kidnapping charges in the A.S. case. Charges for misdemeanor drug possession and felony stalking were dropped by prosecutors. While awaiting sentencing, Wallace was brought up on jailhouse charges for throwing a cup of scalding-hot water in a fellow inmate’s face.
“The Victim’s injuries were described as left sided facial, neck and ear pain secondary to 2nd Degree burns,” states a Mar. 27, 2017 criminal complaint charging Wallace with felony assault. “Further the victim was noted to have sloughing skin on the left cheek and left side of his forehead extending down his left temple area and the top of his left ear. When speaking with the victim, your Complainant noted the victim had open raw skin from where the water [struck] his face.”
In 2019, with credit for time served pending trial and other similar factors, Wallace became eligible for release.
That’s when Navara said he got “a weird phone call out of the blue” from the Anoka County, Minnesota, Attorney’s Office. They told Navara that Wallace was getting out of prison and that he had applied as a registered sex offender to reside in Anoka upon being paroled.
“And the attorney basically says, ‘The fuck you are,’” recalled Navara, who is still amazed that Wallace has managed to avoid significant jail time throughout his criminal career.
The state then began strategizing to have Wallace civilly committed as a “sexually dangerous person” and a “sexual psychopathic personality” who was “highly likely to reoffend” if set free, according to court filings reviewed by The Daily Beast.
Wallace fought it, but an appeals court decision said Wallace had demonstrated “an utter lack of power to control his sexual impulses.”
“Wallace argues that the record is insufficient to support the district court’s finding that he evidenced an utter lack of power to control his sexual impulses,” states an appeal court decision that put Wallace away in September 2020, for an indeterminate amount of time. “We disagree.”
Sex offenders who are civilly committed in Minnesota are housed in two facilities. One, in the town of Moose Lake, about 50 miles south of Duluth, is where “clients begin to build their readiness for change,” according to the state’s Department of Human Services, which manages the Minnesota Sex Offenders Program (MSOP). The second, in St. Peter, which is about 80 miles south of Minneapolis, is where “clients who show positive change through treatment are moved... to complete primary treatment and begin the reintegration process.”
Wallace was sent to Moose Lake when he was eligible to be released from prison, according to the 2020 civil commitment filing. Christopher Sprung, an MSOP spokesman, told The Daily Beast that he could not provide any information about Wallace’s precise whereabouts.
“Because it is a treatment facility for civilly committed sex offenders, not a correctional facility, MSOP is subject to state and federal data privacy laws and cannot release or confirm the names of current or past clients in the program or provide any other information, even if names or other details appear in court proceeding or other public records,” Sprung wrote in an email.
To this day, Wallace, who could not be reached by The Daily Beast, has refused to provide investigators with any useful information about Hang, according to news reports. His legal team declined to answer The Daily Beast’s detailed list of questions about the multiple allegations made against him.
Unless somebody comes forward with a piece of rock-solid evidence, Navara doesn’t expect Hang’s remains will ever be discovered or that an arrest will ever be made. He wishes he could have provided the “happy ending” everyone was hoping for, and continues to mull over the details of the case in his mind.
“You just think, ‘How could we have not gotten the conclusion we wanted?’” he said.
Hang Lee shown age-progressed to 45 years. She has been missing since Jan. 15, 1993.
National Center for Missing & Exploited ChildrenNow that he’s back in civilian life, Navara has considered trying to visit Wallace where he’s being held and interviewing him one more time about Hang’s case. But he said he has heard from prosecutors that Wallace blames him for all of his troubles, and isn’t sure Wallace would agree to meet with him.
Koua Lee, Hang’s brother, said he’s willing to pay Wallace to lead investigators to her body.
“My only goal, if I made enough money, would be to say, ‘Here’s $50,000, now take us to her body,” Koua told The Daily Beast. “Just pay Wallace, give him some money. A lot of people suggested it... but he’s not really talking.”
Hang Lee’s case remains open as one of the oldest unsolved missing persons cases in St. Paul. Hang would be 45-years-old today. The investigation “remains open and active,” St. Paul PD spokesman Steve Linders told The Daily Beast. Investigators continue to check to see if her Social Security number has been used, indicating some form of employment. There has been no activity on it since she disappeared.
