Two auxiliary police officers, Jin Yunguo and Xu Junzhuo, were on motorcycle patrol through a lane in the Lucheng district of Wenzhou on the afternoon of May 24, 2003, when an old bicycle blocked their way. Neighbors complained that the scrap collector who lived there was always leaving it across the lane, and the officers went to tell him to move it. Loud music was coming from the room. When they got the door open, Chen Yongfeng was covered in blood, and a second scrap collector lay dead on the floor beside a hammer. Chen said the man had owed him money.
It was the tenth killing, and it was still in progress.
Chen was twenty. He had been born in 1983 at Huangdakeng, a village in Jizhai township in Qingtian county, and had left school after elementary. He drifted between jobs, fluffing cotton for the best part of five years, and by nineteen he was collecting waste. In early 2003 he came to Wenzhou to make a living buying and reselling scrap.
The business went badly and he ran short of money. He noticed that the people who did the same work carried cash on them, and that they could be persuaded to come to his room.
The first killing, in late February, was so that he could buy a disinfection cabinet he could not otherwise afford.
He rented two places in Lucheng, one on Putao Peng Road and one on Dong’an Road, and he equipped them. The list the court recorded is an axe, a fruit knife, a kitchen knife, a hammer, homemade electric shock tools, a table to dismember bodies on, an artificial leather mat to do it over, and a bucket to collect blood in.
He found the ten at the places where the trade gathered: the entrance to the Lucheng second-hand market, and the vegetable markets. He invited them back on the pretext of selling them something. He killed all ten, robbed them, and dismembered nine.
The parts went into the river and into bins around the city. By the week of his arrest police had recovered nineteen bags of remains; the final count was two hundred and twenty-nine parts, filling twenty-nine bags.
The total he took from ten people was 10,032 yuan.
The killings emptied the city of trust before anyone knew who was doing them. From April 2003 Wenzhou police had been receiving missing-person reports, all of them for people in the scrap trade, and residents stopped selling their waste paper and stayed away from the collection points. The Beijing Evening News wrote that Wenzhou was in the grip of terror, with residents looking into the eyes of outsiders and filled with doubt and fear. When he was led away, bound, he was smiling, and he told investigators that killing was a fast way to make money.
The Wenzhou Intermediate People’s Court tried him later that year. He half admitted it. A civil case ran alongside the criminal one, and he was ordered to pay the funeral costs of the people he had killed.
He was convicted on December 5, 2003, and the charge is worth stating exactly, because it is not the one a reader would expect. He was sentenced to death for robbery, which is the provision Chinese law uses where a robbery causes death, together with deprivation of political rights for life and confiscation of everything he owned.
He was executed on April 7, 2004, one of eleven prisoners put to death in Wenzhou that day, four months after sentence and less than a year after the last killing. He was twenty or twenty-one. His name appears in Chinese as 陈勇锋.
None of the ten has been named in the published reporting. They were scrap dealers, which is how the reporting identifies them, and which is also why he chose them: the work is done in cash by people who have moved to the city for it, and nobody notices quickly when one of them stops coming to the market.