VANCOUVER, British Columbia — After he had chopped up the body into 108 pieces and taken a long nap, Zhao Li cooked himself some noodles for breakfast.

He never ate them.

Instead, Mr. Zhao, a soft-spoken Chinese immigrant, found himself surrounded by a SWAT team that had been surveilling the imposing $8 million hillside mansion owned by the victim, Mr. Zhao’s cousin by marriage.

The police had been discreetly watching Mr. Zhao through the large floor-to-ceiling windows as he calmly washed blood from a hunting knife, according to investigators.

These were some of the details that emerged during lurid testimony offered recently in Mr. Zhao’s trial for murder at the Supreme Court of British Columbia.