Scott Herhold writes for the San Jose Mercury News:
In a first-floor room at the Economy Inn in Morgan Hill, the clothed body of porn director Inkyo Volt Hwang, 38, lay face down, half off and half on the bed, an empty box of Milk Duds near his head.
Hwang’s body was found Sept. 29 a few feet from a shrine he constructed to his recently deceased wife, porn starlet Haley Paige, 25. Near two glass candles, he taped three computer-generated photos of Paige smiling and another of her casket. In a spiral notebook, he described how hard it was for him to deal with her death, a death in which police said he was implicated.
Early this month, the verdict on Hwang’s demise became public. It was no big surprise. The Santa Clara County coroner’s office said the Canoga Park man had committed suicide by an overdose of methadone pills.
Another sordid death in a sordid world? Maybe. As I pulled back the strands of this story, however, I encountered things I did not expect: a father’s grief, a daughter’s yearning, an unpopular man’s penance and even male chauvinists’ compassion.
This much seems clear: Hwang and Paige were hellbent for destruction in a life that mixed porn, drugs and violence in a lethal cocktail.
Hwang, sometimes known as "Chico Wanker Wang," was a UCLA honors graduate, an erratic ex-con who swore he never could tell his Korean-born parents what he did. "This was a very dark, dangerous fellow," said Luke Ford, a freelance writer who knew him. "He would talk about killing himself or other people with a disturbing ease that wasn’t just humor."
