BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
A man who is accused of killing his wife in Taiwan will testify that he couldn’t perform sexually, leading his wife to run off with their tour guide and lose contact with her family and the students she tutored in Mountain View.
“That creates a motive for her to find male companionship elsewhere,” attorney Chuck Smith said at a hearing on Monday (July 7) with Judge Beth McGowen.
Smith is representing Harald Herchen in a civil lawsuit filed by the family of Alice Ku, who disappeared after sightseeing at Taroko Gorge in Taiwan on Nov. 29, 2019.
Their tour guide was young, good-looking and spoke the same Hakka language as Ku, Smith said at the hearing.
In response, attorney Todd Davis said Herchen and Smith haven’t shown that the tour guide actually exists.
“They don’t have a name, they don’t have a telephone number, they don’t have an employer. The description we were given now three times under oath, is 5’9”, mid 30s, dark hair, speaks Hakka. To me that’s a phantom,” Davis said at the hearing.
McGowen decided that Herchen and Smith will be allowed to bring up the tour guide during the trial.
“That’s what the jury is for,” McGowen said at the Old County Courthouse in San Jose.
McGowen made several rulings on July 7 about what both sides could bring up during a trial. She said Herchen can’t bring up Ku’s history as a sex worker or her statements about her childhood. Ku’s family can’t suggest that Herchen also killed his second wife, Mellisa Yu, but they can bring up her death.
Yu, 54, died from sleep apnea in Palo Alto on June 3, 2017, with unexplained bruises on her body, the autopsy report said.
Herchen married Ku four months later on Oct. 6, 2017, and they lived together in a Mountain View apartment without telling her family.
One of the families that Ku tutored for reported her missing in December 2019. Ku was 37 when she disappeared and would be 42 today.
Ku’s parents and brother George Ku sued Herchen in Santa Clara County Superior Court in January 2021 for wrongful death, negligence and impersonation.
Herchen allegedly sent an email from Ku’s account after she disappeared to make it look like she was alive and visiting her parents.
Herchen and George Ku were both at Monday’s hearing but didn’t address McGowen.
Li Tsong Su, a detective for Taiwan’s National Police Agency, said he is investigating Ku’s disappearance as a homicide and has issued a warrant for Herchen’s arrest.
“Herchen is the primary suspect due to his suspicious behavior, failure to cooperate and the conflicting information he conveyed to the Ku family,” Su said in a court declaration.
