A skeleton was found in a black plastic bag dumped at the foot of a hill a few miles from the village on Tuesday. A villager reported the incident to police the following day.

Cheng Kuo-yi, 63, of Tungkang, was arrested Saturday on suspicion of murdering his own son.

He collapsed under heavy questioning and admitted Saturday night to having strangled his son Chang-hai, 36, with a nylon rope.

Police investigators quoted Cheng, a vegetable retailer in Tungkang, as saying he asked his wife, Yang Shih, 59, to help bury the body of their own son.

Both were arraigned before a Pingtung district prosecutor yesterday morning. The vegetable retailer was charged with murder and his wife as an accomplice.

The murder suspect told investigators his son was a alchoholic and became berserk while drunk and denied pocket money to purchase more alcohol.

On Dec. 27, police said, Cheng Chang-hai threatened to kill his father if the latter did not give him the money he had asked for.

The son tried to kill his father with a kitchen knife, and in the struggle the old retailer was able to get hold a nylon rope to strangle to death his drunken offspring.

With the help of his wife, the old man carried the body aboard a truck to Shihtzu and buried it in a bush on Dec. 28. He made a note of the time of when he buried the body and its location and put it in an envelope, investigators said.

When arrested, the father was found carring a homemade pistol, which he said he planned to use commit suicide with his wife.

The note was kept so that the old retailer might be able to come back to Shihtzu to pick up the skeleton and inter it, police investigators said.

Police were able to track Cheng Kuo-yi down by following one clue, a cellphone. Without it, no identification of the skeleton could have been made.

There was also an earring in the bag that contained the skeleton. It belonged to the victim.

The district prosecutor questioned the parents of the victim on Thursday after they had identified the body as their son’s at a funeral parlor.

They were not placed under detention.

With the evidence, police summoned the retailer and his wife for questioning Friday but they did not present themselves, claiming they had to go to Hualien.

Thereupon, police were able to stop the couple at Kuanshan near Taitung and took them under custody Saturday morning.

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