The mother of a baby boy found dead beneath blankets in an Adelaide motel room had shared a series of disturbing posts online before her arrest.
Benjamin Nicholas Houghton, 40, and Yue Ning Lieu, 42, will remain behind bars for at least seven months after police discovered the infant’s body during a welfare check at the Tollgate Motel in Glen Osmond, in Adelaide’s south, on Saturday.
Police said a post-mortem examination found the boy was between six and seven months old and had been dead for “a period of time”.
Authorities said the pair had been living at the motel since arriving in Adelaide earlier this year. They had not been in contact with South Australian authorities before their arrests on Saturday.
Houghton and Lieu were charged with criminal neglect and destroying human remains to pervert the course of justice.
Houghton also faces one charge of hindering police.
The couple appeared before Adelaide Magistrates Court on Monday via a bedside hearing.
Neither applied for bail, and both were remanded in custody until May 3, 2027.
Benjamin Nicholas Houghton and Yue Ning Lieu (above) were arrested on Saturday after a baby boy’s body was found in an Adelaide motel room
Police found the deceased infant during a welfare check at the Tollgate Motel in Adelaide’s south on Saturday
Lieu shared several disturbing posts (one above) in the days leading up to her arrest
Lieu began posting disturbing material on Facebook and Instagram earlier this year.
Three days before her arrest, she shared several posts claiming that unidentified people were trying to spy on her.
“Stop teleporting flies into my room,” she wrote.
Later that day, Lieu wrote about the “advantages” of time travel and expressed concern about “gauss equipped” trucks passing by and striking her with “magnetic weapons”.
She posted several times a day on Facebook until the account fell silent on Saturday morning, when police found her son’s body beneath blankets in the motel room.
An Instagram account linked to Lieu’s blog, Health in Lieu, had been inactive in the weeks before her arrest. Earlier posts included photographs of people she believed were “spies”, along with AI-generated horror videos.
One video posted in March appeared to compare Houghton, her co-accused, to a monster and described him as the “spirit of hatred”.
The Daily Mail does not suggest that Lieu’s social media posts indicate wrongdoing by either her or Houghton.
Houghton and Lieu (above) were charged with criminal neglect and destroying human remains to pervert the course of justice
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Lieu wrote on Facebook of unidentified people trying to spy on her and ‘guass (sic) equipped’ trucks (above) driving nearby
‘I was a healer wanting to share my gifts with this world but today I am a TI living in a tent, sharing truth before it becomes illegal,’ her Instagram profile states.
In her blog Health in Lieu, she claimed she was a Chinese Traditional Medicine practitioner.
‘I am not here to be politically correct. I’m unapologetically Australian,’ Lieu wrote.
‘I’m blunt, and I’m direct. I also hold very strong opinions, I didn’t give up my life in the corporate world to hide behind another ‘professional’ façade. So if you can handle that, please read on.’
Her last post in April 2025 titled ‘Help Me in My Fight Against Tyranny’ accused governments of using ‘mind control’ to ‘enslave us’.
‘I fight every day in ways that you cannot comprehend (unless you have been in my shoes),’ she wrote.
‘Our government is using our money for research and development in scientific endeavours not to make our lives better, but to better enslave us.
‘Their current focus is mind control, hence their interest in quantum science, and the popping up of private DNA labs is not to ‘solve crime’.
Benjamin Nicholas Houghton, 40, and Yue Ning Lieu, 42, were arrested at the Tollgate Motel on Saturday
‘Guess who the guinea pigs are? People like me. I resist and if you help me resist the tyranny of the communist government, you help yourselves resist too.’
Police confirmed that Houghton and Lieu previously lived in Victoria and NSW.
Lieu and her then two-year-old daughter were reported missing in Sydney in May 2021, sparking serious concerns for their wellbeing.
Lieu attended a police station in Canberra eight days later and informed police that her daughter was staying at a relative’s home in Victoria.
SA Police declined to comment when contacted by the Daily Mail on Tuesday night about Lieu’s daughter.
Specialist crime detectives have taken over the investigation into the baby boy’s death due to the ‘nature and complexity of the incident’.
Police are seeking assistance from anyone who has stayed at the Tollgate Motel, and specifically anyone who has information about the occupants of room four to contact Crime Stoppers.
‘No further comment will be made at this stage in the investigation,’ the statement added.
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