Changping Shen was the younger of the two brothers from Huojia county in rural Henan, several years behind Changyin. He was born on March 8, 1983, by the most detailed account; another gives 1984. He used the alias Li Xiaojun. Both brothers finished middle school and left home around 2000. After the Spring Festival of 2003 they went into the auto parts business in Lanzhou and lost money; Changping tried Baotou, in Inner Mongolia, which he knew, and did no better. He was about twenty when the killings began, and his former girlfriend, Du Surong, would later be forced into them.
The killings ran from June 2003 to August 2004 and moved with the brothers across China: Lanzhou in Gansu, then Baotou in Inner Mongolia, Taiyuan in Shanxi, Hefei in Anhui, and Shijiazhuang in Hebei. The victims were women working as prostitutes, taken from beauty salons, bathhouses and spas. The pattern was robbery first: each woman was lured to a rented room, tied up and made to give up her bank card PIN before she was killed. The first, Yao Fang, in Lanzhou in June 2003, was stabbed in the neck and held upside down over a squat toilet so the blood would run into the drain. The bodies were dismembered and dissolved with sulfuric acid or otherwise destroyed. "The first time I killed, I was afraid," Changping later told police. "After that, killing a person was no different from killing a chicken."
Accounts differ on what was eaten. English-language and some Chinese sources say the brothers ate the livers of their victims; the court's findings, as reported in China, say the kidneys of some victims were fried and eaten.
They did not work alone, and the way they recruited is the disturbing part of the case. In late November 2003 in Baotou, Changyin picked up a bathhouse worker named Li Chunling and took her back to kill her, found she had no money, and decided to keep her as a helper instead, making her kill a woman as her initiation. She brought them women over the following months and killed some of them herself. In Taiyuan they took a woman named Zhao Meiying and forced her to procure others, making her help kill one of the women she had delivered, Yang Zhiling. When police came to their rented room in Taiyuan, the brothers kicked out the window bars and escaped; only Li was caught. In Hefei they drew in a young woman surnamed Guan and killed three more women. Back in Lanzhou they forced Changping's former girlfriend, Du Surong, to help them kill a girl they had met on a train.
From Lanzhou they went to Shijiazhuang with Du, who lured another woman, Zhao Hongxia, to their apartment. They were destroying her body when, on the afternoon of August 31, 2004, more than thirty officers, acting on a tip from residents who recognized them from wanted notices, came to the door. A policewoman knocked, claiming to be from the building management to check the water meter, and the door was opened; accounts differ on which brother opened it. The officers found a dismembered body, tools and a quantity of stolen bank cards. Guan was arrested later in Fujian. The brothers confessed to killing and dismembering eleven women, and Changyin also confessed to killing a man surnamed Wu in their home county years before.
Six defendants went on trial before the Lanzhou Intermediate People's Court on May 19, 2005. The court found that the brothers had taken part in ten murders and thirteen robberies, one of which caused a death, and had taken property worth 134,302 yuan besides phones, gold necklaces and rings. On September 2, 2005, it sentenced both brothers and Li Chunling to death for intentional homicide and robbery. Du Surong and Guan Xin received twenty years. Zhao Meiying, whose report to police had speeded the case, received three.
On the morning of April 27, 2006, on the order of the president of the Gansu High People's Court, the Lanzhou court put both brothers and Li Chunling to death by lethal injection, along with other prisoners executed that day; one report gives the date as April 28.
He was twenty-three. The eleven is the case total, one series shared with his brother, not twenty-two deaths.