On Friday, August 26, 2016, police walked into a small grocery shop in Baiyin, an industrial city in Gansu province in China's northwest, and arrested the man who ran it with his wife. He was Gao Chengyong, 52, a married father of two. Within days police announced that he had confessed to the rape and murder of 11 women and girls between 1988 and 2002, a series that Baiyin had lived with, and that investigators had failed to solve, for 28 years.
Gao was born in 1964 in Chenghe, a poor rural area of Gansu; China Daily described him as a villager from the area of Lanzhou, the provincial capital. According to Robert Foyle Hunwick's account in The New Republic, he left farm life in his late teens and joined the waves of migrant laborers who moved to the cities as China's household registration rules loosened. He worked as a low-skilled laborer and later ran a shop on a college campus with his wife. His first son was born in 1988, the year of the first killing. Neighbors in his home village remembered a quiet young man, and later a dutiful son who nursed his sick father and paid for his sons' education. His sons, The New Republic reported, saw him about once a year, at Spring Festival.
The killings began in May 1988 and ended in February 2002. Nine took place in Baiyin, a city of about 1.7 million, and the rest in Baotou, in the neighboring Inner Mongolia region. The court found that he followed women home, usually in daylight, and raped and killed them there, sometimes in the course of a robbery. Most were in their twenties. The youngest was eight. Many of the bodies were mutilated. Reports at the time said many of the women had been wearing red, and the idea that the killer chose women in red spread through the city; The New Republic reported that Gao's confession did not support it.
The authorities did not make the victims' names public, and the trial was closed. A few are known from press accounts.
The first was a 23-year-old woman surnamed Bai, killed at her family's home in Baiyin in 1988. Gao later said he had gone there to steal and that she woke up.
In July 1998, an eight-year-old girl, called Miao Miao in The New Republic's account, was killed in Baiyin.
Cui Jinping, a factory worker, was killed in her home in Baiyin in late 1998. Her mother found her. After the arrest her brother, Cui Xiangping, told China Daily that he had come to believe the case would never be solved, that his mother could not stop crying when she heard the news, and that the family still thought about his sister.
The last killing for which Gao was convicted was of a 25-year-old woman surnamed Zhu, in February 2002. Her body was found ten days after she died.
Through the 1990s, reporting on the killings was restricted, and many were not connected at the time. In December 2004 the Baiyin police publicly linked the crimes for the first time and offered a reward of 200,000 yuan, about $30,000, for information. Their profile described a man aged 33 to 40 with "a sexual perversion" who "hates women," and who was "reclusive and unsociable, but patient." Parents in Baiyin kept their children inside after dark, and many women would not walk alone.
Investigators had his DNA and fingerprints from crime scenes, but no match. Police collected prints from more than 100,000 men, and by The New Republic's account the lead investigator's team later reviewed more than 230,000 sets. Baiyin did not have a proper forensic laboratory until 2010.
In March 2016 the Ministry of Public Security's criminal investigation bureau began a fresh review of the DNA and other biological evidence using newer technology. The break came through a relative of Gao's who had been detained over a minor offense; China Daily and CNN describe him as an uncle placed under house arrest, the South China Morning Post as a distant relative held in a bribery case. His DNA, collected as a matter of routine, came close enough to the killer's profile that investigators concluded the killer belonged to his family. Detectives screened the men of the family, covertly collected Gao's DNA and matched it and his fingerprints to the crime scenes.
His family appeared not to have known. According to CNN, his wife wailed and cried when she learned of the arrest.
Police said Gao confessed in his first interrogations but gave no motive. According to The New Republic, he later told police he "just felt the need to kill." He went on trial at the Baiyin Intermediate People's Court on July 18, 2017, charged with intentional homicide, rape, robbery and insulting corpses. The court closed the hearing to the public. The court had announced the prosecution on May 2. At a news conference the day before the trial, the judicial official Teng Wenxiang explained the closed doors. "This case involves several female victims, and the way they were killed was cruel," he said. Gao pleaded guilty.
In March 2018 the court sentenced him to death. It found that he had killed 11 women and girls, gave him death sentences for robbery and intentional homicide and lesser terms for rape and insulting corpses, and called his motives "despicable."
China's Supreme People's Court reviewed and approved the sentence, as it must for every death sentence. Gao was executed in Baiyin on the morning of Thursday, January 3, 2019, and the Baiyin court announced it on its Weibo account. He was 54. No report described any apology to the families.
Gao was convicted of 11 killings, by a court that heard the case in private and did not publish the victims' names. The figure of 11 is what he confessed to and what the court found; The New Republic noted that it may not be complete, but no other killing has been charged or attributed to him by any authority. The case was one of the first in China to be solved by familial DNA searching, through a relative who had nothing to do with the crimes.