NEW YORK (AP) -- Police on Thursday were investigating whether a woman found beaten to death in her SUV was killed in a botched extortion plot from her native China.
Chao Ru Xie was found Monday slumped between the seats of her family's vehicle in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, miles from its home. Her husband reported an unauthorized use of the SUV on July 1. It's unclear when the wife last was seen.
The husband told police the family received a call from China demanding money. Investigators have been unable to verify the information.
No one answered after repeated knocks on the door of Xie's home in the Flatlands neighborhood of Brooklyn on Thursday, though it appeared there were people inside.
The crime scene, more than 3 miles from Xie's house, is a residential road with private homes on one side of the street and a tree-lined park on the other. The area was quiet and deserted on Thursday, vastly different from earlier in the week, when police tape and cruisers surrounded the spot where Xie's body was found.
Detectives were pulling phone records and interviewing business associates.
The victim moved from China about a decade ago, and police said she ran a type of homegrown lottery in Manhattan's Chinatown.
A report in the World Journal, a Chinese-language newspaper serving overseas Chinese in North America, said Xie and her family ran a kitchen supply company in Chinatown. Her husband, You Song Zhu, was a councilman at the American Fujanese Chamber of Commerce, a society that helps develop Fujanese-owned businesses in New York.
News of Xie's murder was reported by the local Chinese-language press in New York and has since been making headlines on numerous Chinese-language Web sites and in newspapers across mainland China.
The medical examiner ruled Xie's death a homicide, saying she had been killed by blunt force trauma to the head and skull.
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