Teen murderess Connie Leung – who helped her boyfriend strangle both her parents when they objected to their relationship – was sentenced yesterday to 30 years to life in prison.
Leung was only 17 at the time of the grotesque East Harlem double murder. She’d been an honor student, but she’d begun playing hooky and her grades had plummeted after she started dating a homeless, jobless 20-year-old named Eric Louissant.
Leung’s parents became angered at finding Louissant hiding one day in the girl’s bedroom closet, investigators say. Then, later that day, on Nov. 2, 2000, the pair pounced on Chilin and Stephen Leung as each of the hardworking Chinese immigrants arrived home from work.
Louissant, serving his own 30-years-to-life sentence, did the strangling – using the mother and father’s own belts – as Leung held them down. The twisted pair then lived with the parents’ bodies for four days before picking the corpses for cash and jewelry and dumping them in laundry bags into the East River.
Leung’s sentencing yesterday brings to a quiet close a case that caused a sensation when the floating corpses were discovered two winters ago.
Now a statuesque 20-year-old, Leung showed no expression as Supreme Court Justice Charles Tejada rejected her last-ditch attempt to back out of her January guilty plea, then ordered her sent to prison.