Chen Zhaofeng was born in 1980 in Mudanjiang, a city in Heilongjiang province in the north-east of China. His father was a Shanghai native who had been sent north as an educated youth during the Cultural Revolution and had married a local woman there. Chen was their only child.
The family returned to Shanghai in 1995, when he was fifteen. They were poor in a way the city made conspicuous: his lawyer put the household's income at around three hundred yuan a month, about thirty-six dollars, and his mother was in poor health. He left school that year without finishing junior middle school and took whatever work he could find. One of the things he did for money was steal cats at night and sell them to dealers. In 1999 he was held for ten days for theft.
He was asked in court why, and said that he had been unemployed a long time and the pressure had pushed him into a corner. He had taken to drinking.
The first attack was on the night of June 2, 2001, on a thirty-two-year-old woman in Putuo District, and he used an empty beer bottle. She collapsed and he took her mobile phone and a ring, worth about seven hundred yuan. He explained the change that followed in plain terms: bottles broke easily and did not reliably knock the victim out, so he bought hammers, three of them.
The second woman he attacked was the first to die. On July 11, 2001 he struck Cai Yafei three times with a hammer in a neighbourhood in Jing'an District. Her body was found near her home early the next morning, and her money, her mobile phone and her jewellery, some seven thousand four hundred yuan in all, were gone. Her husband Wu Chaofu, who was forty-seven, told the court he had last seen her leaving home at about ten that morning. He gave his evidence without taking his eyes off the defendant.
About a fortnight later he attacked a third woman in Xuhui District and took her gold necklace. Then he stopped until November, when he committed four more assaults in Putuo District.
On the night of January 11, 2002 he hit twenty-two-year-old Meng Weiping three times on the head. She was found dead in a flower terrace the following morning. He had taken a hundred and fifty yuan from her, some books, a bag and clothes. An hour later he seriously injured another woman and took belongings worth about four thousand one hundred yuan. That was the last attack.
The whole series brought him goods worth about thirteen thousand yuan, a little over fifteen hundred dollars. He said he had sold what he took or given it to friends.
Police questioned him ten days after the last attack and detained him on January 23, 2002. He was charged with attacking seven women across three districts of Shanghai; two had died and five had been left with brain damage.
At the trial his lawyer, Wang Qian'en, argued that poverty was the explanation, that Chen could have finished school and had some sort of future had the family not been destitute, and that this made him different from other criminals. He asked for help for families like Chen's, returned to the city and unable to keep their children in school. The prosecutor, Zeng Mian, said Chen's cruelty showed no sympathy and made him no different from any other violent robber, and pressed for the maximum penalty.
Chen asked the judges for a lighter sentence. He said he knew what he had done was disgusting and had caused irretrievable damage, that he did not dare hope to be forgiven, and that he apologised.
He was sentenced to death sixteen working days after the first hearing and was executed. He was twenty-two.