The Reptile Queen: The Murder of Girly Chew Hossencofft
Girly Chew was a bank teller in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a woman who had come to the United States from Penang, Malaysia, in search of an ordinary American life. What she got instead was a marriage to one of the more elaborate con artists ever documented in New Mexico criminal history, a man who eventually convinced his own girlfriend that Girly was a shapeshifting alien threat who needed to be eliminated before she could destroy them both. On September 9, 1999, Girly Chew Hossencofft left work and was never seen again. The case that followed involved a fake surgeon, a UFO conspiracy theorist convinced she was destined to become a reptile queen, a ninja sword purchased on the morning of the murder, and an allegation, made in open court, that Girly's remains had been eaten to make sure they would never be found.
An Ordinary Life Interrupted
Girly Chew was born August 27, 1963, in Penang, Malaysia, to Malaysian Chinese parents, and immigrated to the United States sometime in the early 1990s, eventually settling into work as a bank teller in Albuquerque. It was during a trip to SeaWorld that she met a man calling himself Diazien Hossencofft, and the two of them married in 1993, beginning a relationship that would eventually reveal itself to be built almost entirely on fabrication.
The Con Man Who Called Himself a Surgeon
Diazien Hossencofft had actually been born Armand Chavez, in Houston, Texas, in 1965. He had, at various points, presented himself as a thoracic surgeon with degrees from prestigious universities, when in reality he had been expelled from medical school after doctoring his own academic transcripts. Undeterred, he reinvented himself under the name Diazien Hossencofft and built an entire secondary identity as a geneticist claiming to suffer from leukemia himself, using that fabricated diagnosis to sell fake cancer treatments and anti-aging injections to vulnerable people, reportedly collecting thousands of dollars from victims who believed they were purchasing legitimate medical care from a credentialed specialist.
Behind the scenes of this elaborate fraud, his personal life was similarly built on deception layered upon deception. While still married to Girly, he fathered a child with a woman in Canada and had, by 1999, become simultaneously engaged to three different women, one of whom was a fashion designer named Linda Henning. By January of that year, Girly had discovered the truth about her husband's fabricated medical credentials, and following a domestic violence incident in which he threatened to kill her, she moved out of their home and filed for divorce, confiding to coworkers at the bank about how afraid of him she had become.
The Reptile Queen
Linda Henning, the woman Diazien had also become engaged to, had her own complicated history. Born in Hollywood, California, in 1953, she had worked successfully as a fashion model and designer before meeting Diazien in 1999 at a seminar hosted by David Icke, a conspiracy theorist well known for promoting the belief that shapeshifting reptilian beings secretly control world governments. Henning ended her existing engagement within two weeks of meeting Diazien, a decision so abrupt that her ex-fiancé later told investigators he had noticed her stop bathing and changing her clothes around that same time, suspecting some kind of chemical imbalance had taken hold of her. Her own mother would later describe her as someone who would believe the moon was made of cheese if a man simply told her it was true.
What Diazien apparently told her went considerably further than that. According to accounts that emerged during the investigation, he convinced Henning that he was in fact a 1,000-year-old alien, and that reptilian beings were preparing to arrive on Earth, with certain chosen individuals destined to serve as their local emissaries. Henning, in this narrative, was going to become the reptile queen. Girly Chew, his own legal wife, was recast in this fantasy as a dangerous impostor, someone who needed to be dealt with before she could interfere with the plan.
September 9, 1999
Girly disappeared on September 9, 1999, last seen leaving her shift at the bank. When she failed to arrive for her 8:00 a.m. shift the following morning, a coworker reported her missing. Investigators searching her apartment used luminol testing to uncover the smell of bleach along with wet spots in the carpet and seven distinct spots of blood, evidence of an attempt to clean up a violent scene that had not been entirely successful. Diazien fled to Charleston, South Carolina, that same day, where he was eventually located and apprehended.
A search connected to the investigation turned up a Japanese ninja sword hidden in the ceiling of Linda Henning's garage, along with a shotgun and a .22 caliber Beretta handgun. Receipts showed that Diazien had purchased the sword on the very morning Girly disappeared, a detail that, combined with the blood evidence from the apartment, painted an unmistakable picture of premeditation rather than a spontaneous act.
Evidence Down the Highway
Investigators eventually recovered items belonging to Girly roughly 120 miles south of Albuquerque, along Highway 60 near Belen, New Mexico: a tarpaulin, a blouse, shorts, and underwear, all bloodstained, wrapped together with duct tape that carried a strand of Linda Henning's hair. DNA testing on the recovered items and elsewhere connected to the case placed Henning's own biological material at multiple locations tied to the crime.
Lies, Perjury, and an Indictment
When investigators first approached Linda Henning, she claimed she had no knowledge of Girly Chew at all. That claim collapsed once police established that Henning had, in fact, banked at the same branch where Girly worked and had personally been one of her customers, directly contradicting her sworn denial. Henning was initially charged with perjury connected to her grand jury testimony, and as the investigation deepened, both she and Diazien were formally indicted for murder.
Two Trials
Diazien Hossencofft pleaded guilty in January 2002, avoiding a potential death penalty in the process, and was sentenced to life in prison plus an additional sixty-one years, eventually serving his sentence at the Wyoming State Penitentiary.
Linda Henning's trial began in September 2002 and was televised on Court TV, drawing significant national attention. She became the first woman in New Mexico history to face the possibility of capital punishment. In a striking turn during the proceedings, Diazien himself testified on her behalf, claiming that he alone had masterminded the entire murder and that Henning was innocent of any real involvement, a claim prosecutors and Henning's own defense suggested was in fact an attempt to help frame her more deeply rather than exonerate her. On October 25, 2002, Henning was convicted of first-degree murder, kidnapping, conspiracy, tampering with evidence, and four separate counts of perjury. Prosecutor Paul Spiers told the court that Henning had made statements suggesting she had actually consumed portions of Girly's remains, a detail he argued explained why no trace of her body had ever been recovered despite extensive searching. Henning was sentenced on April 18, 2003, to seventy-three years in prison. A third individual connected to the case, Bill Miller, was charged only with tampering with evidence and received one year of probation.
Aftermath
In 2010, the New Mexico Supreme Court reviewed Henning's case and overturned her four perjury convictions specifically, while affirming every other conviction and leaving her overall sentence intact. In January 2020, Diazien Hossencofft sought to have his own sentence vacated, alleging prosecutorial misconduct and requesting additional time to gather what he described as evidence involving global connections to the case, a request that, like the fantastical belief system he had built his final crime around, offered more spectacle than substance. The case has since been the subject of a book, journalist Mark Horner's September Sacrifice, published in 2004, and has been featured across numerous true crime television programs in the years since, including Court TV, American Justice, Snapped, and Sins and Secrets.
Still Missing
More than two decades after Girly Chew Hossencofft disappeared from Albuquerque, her remains have never been found, and no search connected to the case has ever recovered so much as a trace of her body. What is known with certainty is that she came to the United States hoping for an ordinary life, married a man whose entire identity was constructed from fabricated credentials and elaborate lies, and was ultimately killed by that same man and the girlfriend he had convinced, through a fantastical story about aliens and reptile queens, that murdering his wife was not a crime but a kind of cosmic necessity.
Sources
- The Charley Project: Girly Chew Hossencofft
- Wikipedia: Murder of Girly Chew Hossencofft
- Oxygen: The Disappearance of Girly Chew Hossencofft, A Con Man, A Fashion Designer, UFOs, and a Ninja
- Oxygen: Girly Chew Murdered By Diazien Hossencofft, Linda Henning
- KRQE: Convicted wife killer calls to 'vacate sentence'
- Alchetron: Murder of Girly Chew Hossencofft
