On Friday, August 26, 2016, police walked into a small grocery shop on the campus of a vocational school 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 grown sons. Within days the Ministry of Public Security 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.
The people who knew him were stunned. He had worked as a migrant laborer, put two sons through college, nursed his ailing father and, according to the New York Times, liked to go ballroom dancing with his wife. Nothing in that life had pointed police toward him. What did, in the end, was a cheek swab taken from one of his relatives in an unrelated and minor case.
Baiyin grew up around copper. In the Mao era its mines and smelters made it one of the more prosperous places in a poor province, and the employees of Baiyin Metals, as one local account quoted in The New Republic put it, were the city's trendsetters. By the late 1980s the ore was running out. State industries were restructured, jobs disappeared, young men drifted into gangs and families moved away. The city of about 1.7 million that Gao preyed on was in decline, and its police force had few of the tools a modern investigation needs. Baiyin would not have a proper forensic laboratory until 2010.
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. Neighbors in Chenghe, interviewed by The New Republic's Robert Foyle Hunwick after the arrest, could remember little about him as a boy beyond that he was quiet. In his late teens he left farm work and joined the waves of migrant laborers moving to the cities as China's household registration rules loosened.
One of his sons told local reporters after the arrest that his father had suffered "bitter" disappointment in his youth when he failed, for what the son called political reasons, to become a pilot. Fox News and other outlets carried the remark; no further detail about it has been published.
Gao married a woman surnamed Zhang. Their first son was born in 1988, the year the killings began. In later years the couple ran a shop on a school campus in Baiyin (The New Republic says a university, China Daily a vocational school). By The New Republic's account Gao kept out of sight there, and his wife did most of the work, so much so that a teacher on the campus said people assumed she was single. His sons saw him about once a year, at Spring Festival. In his home village he had a reputation for filial piety, a man who looked after his sick father and paid for his children's education.
The court later found that the killings ran from May 1988 to February 2002. Most took place in Baiyin; reports differ on whether the Baiyin total was nine or ten, with the remainder in Baotou, in the neighboring Inner Mongolia region. The pattern the court described was consistent across the years. He followed women home, usually in daylight, and raped and killed them there, sometimes in the course of a robbery, usually by strangling them or cutting their throats. Most were in their twenties and many lived alone. The youngest was eight. Many of the bodies were mutilated after death.
The authorities never published the victims' names, and the trial was closed. What is known about individual women comes from press reports, chiefly The New Republic, China Daily and the Beijing News as relayed by other outlets.
The first was a 23-year-old woman surnamed Bai, who lived in a factory bungalow in Baiyin with her family. Gao later told police he had gone there to steal and that she woke up. He stabbed her to death. The New Republic reported that friends called her "Little White Shoes." Accounts disagree on the date: the court's charges begin in May 1988, The New Republic placed the killing at Chinese New Year, and the Beijing News, cited by the New York Times, said she was found on August 25, 1988.
Six years passed without a killing that police later attributed to him. In July 1994 a 19-year-old woman who worked as a cleaner was killed in the dormitories of the Baiyin Power-Supply Bureau.
In 1998 the killings came close together. A 29-year-old woman was found dead in her home, and within days another woman was killed. On July 5, 1998, he attacked an eight-year-old girl, called Miao Miao in The New Republic's account, who was waiting at home for her parents to come back. He raped and strangled her. Years later an interrogating officer asked him how old his own son had been at the time. Gao said ten. The officer told The New Republic that he nearly hit him.
At about 11 a.m. on November 30, 1998, Cui Jinping, a factory worker, was killed in her home in Baiyin. Her mother came home and found her. China Daily reported that parts of her body taken by the killer were never recovered. Her brother, Cui Xiangping, became one of the few relatives of a victim to speak publicly after the arrest.
In May 2001 a 28-year-old nurse was killed at her home, near the address of one of the earlier victims. Around Spring Festival that year, by The New Republic's account, a young woman whom Gao followed fought back, locked her door and called her husband. She later said she saw the man again outside her window, grinning. She survived, and her description gave police their best witness account of the killer.
The last killing for which Gao was convicted was of a 25-year-old woman surnamed Zhu, on February 9, 2002. She had been staying at a hostel. Her body was found ten days later.
Little has been published about the killings in Baotou, beyond their place in the court's list. The reports do not name those women or give their dates.
Through the 1990s, reporting on the killings was tightly controlled by propaganda departments, and the public learned of them mostly by word of mouth. Rumor filled the gap. People said the killer chose pretty young women with long hair and high heels, and above all women wearing red. Parents kept children inside after dark. A man who grew up in the city told The New Republic that his mother had never let him wear anything red. After the 2001 attack, a teacher recalled, schoolgirls who would normally have stayed at school to study went home instead. Many women in Baiyin would not walk alone without a male friend or relative.
The red-clothing theory spread far beyond Baiyin, and state media repeated it as fact at the time of the arrest. The New Republic reported that Gao told police he had no such preference.
The early investigation was hampered from the start. Hunwick's reporting described crime scenes trampled by inexperienced officers and visiting officials, and fingerprints compared by hand, under a magnifying glass. "There was very little physical evidence," said Zhang Enwei, who later led the investigation.
Sixth Tone reported that several teams of investigators were assigned from 2001 onward. After the failed attack that year, the Ministry of Public Security sent eight specialists to Baiyin, among them Zhang Xin, a facial composite expert, who drew a set of three portraits from the survivor's description. Police kept the portraits internal; Zhang said publishing them could have hurt the investigation. Using the drawings as a reference, police ran a citywide dragnet and took fingerprints from more than 100,000 men. It produced nothing. Zhang Enwei's team, by his account, eventually compared more than 230,000 sets of prints.
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, built from DNA, fingerprints and footprints, described a man aged 33 to 40. "The suspect has a sexual perversion and hates women," the police said, and called him "reclusive and unsociable, but patient." Gao fit almost none of it. He was a family man who ran a shop with his wife.
The searches missed him for reasons that were reported after the arrest. According to the South China Morning Post, investigators had assumed the killer was an educated, clever city resident, so the rural areas around Baiyin were not tested. The New York Times reported that Gao had lived in a small village and had avoided the fingerprinting that went with the national identity card. Investigators held his DNA and his prints from the crime scenes; they had nothing to compare them with.
The science that would solve the case already existed. Yin Guoxing, who studied the Y chromosome at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences from 1999 to 2003, told Sixth Tone that his team approached the Ministry of Public Security about the technique in 2003 and found little interest. The Y chromosome passes almost unchanged from father to son, so a man's Y profile is shared by his male relatives on his father's side. A close match to a crime scene sample does not identify a killer, but it can identify his family.
In March 2016 the Ministry of Public Security's criminal investigation bureau began a fresh review of the Baiyin evidence as part of a national drive to clear old, hard cases, re-examining DNA and other biological material with newer technology.
The break came through one of Gao's relatives, who had been detained over a minor offense; Xinhua, as relayed by CGTN, said the offense was committed in 2015. Reports describe the relative differently. China Daily and CNN call him an uncle placed under house arrest in Baiyin; the South China Morning Post a distant relative arrested in a bribery case; The New Republic a cousin held on minor corruption charges. His DNA, collected as a matter of routine, came close enough to the killer's Y profile that investigators concluded the killer belonged to his family.
The South China Morning Post reported that police took biological samples, under escort, to a laboratory at Fudan University in Shanghai run by Professor Li Hui, which had analyzed more than 1,000 samples for police. Li's team traced the Y profile to the Gao clan, and the only Gao clan in the Baiyin area lived in Chenghe village, outside the city. Police then ran a new round of DNA testing in the area. Detectives screened the men of the family, covertly collected Gao's DNA and matched it and his fingerprints to the crime scenes. Gansu police told the state broadcaster CCTV that Y-chromosome testing had led them to him. Yin Guoxing called it the first official application of Y-chromosome testing in a criminal case in China, a claim that has not been independently confirmed.
Police arrested Gao at the shop on August 26. His family appeared not to have known. According to the Beijing News, his wife wailed and cried when she learned of the arrest. One son told a Chinese outlet that he was appalled and did not know what to say or how to deal with it.
Police said Gao confessed in his first interrogations. Officers and prosecutors described him as calm throughout. He could give the time and place of each killing, how he did it and how he got away, but no motive. According to The New Republic he said he "just felt the need to kill," that he chose victims for their appearance and because they suited his purpose, and that he wore dark clothing to hide blood. Asked why he had stopped for years at a time, he said he did not know. No account explains why the killings ended after 2002.
Wang Humin, deputy director of Baiyin's prosecuting authority, told China Daily in June 2017 that more than ten prosecutors had been assigned to the case. "He never showed any regret or sorrow for the victims or their families when discussing the details," Wang said. Through his lawyer, Gao said his crimes had nothing to do with his own family, and that he hoped his relatives would not suffer for them.
The Baiyin Intermediate People's Court announced the prosecution on May 2, 2017, and on Friday, July 14, posted the time and place of the hearing on Sina Weibo. On Monday, July 17, the court held a news conference. The judicial official Teng Wenxiang said the hearing would be closed. "This case involves several female victims, and the way they were killed was cruel," he said. He explained the year-long wait since the arrest by the complexity of a case that ran from the 1980s into the 2000s, and said the judgment would come later.
The trial opened at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, July 18, 2017, in the court's No. 1 courtroom, and ended at about 5:30 p.m. the next day. Gao was charged with intentional homicide, rape, robbery and insulting corpses. Under Chinese law the first three can carry the death penalty. He pleaded guilty.
His lawyer, named in China Daily as Zhu Aimin, said afterward that Gao had confessed to all 11 killings, but that in his view the evidence was insufficient for one of them, while the facts of the other ten were clear. He said Gao spoke no more in court than he had under interrogation. At the end of the hearing, the lawyer said, Gao apologized, said the fault was his and bowed three times toward the victims' families. CGTN, citing the Beijing News, reported that Gao told the court he could not afford to pay compensation but was willing to donate his organs, and that a relative of one victim confirmed the account. No statement from any of the families in court was published.
On the morning of Friday, March 30, 2018, the court sentenced Gao, then 53 by China Daily's count and 54 by Reuters', to death. It found that he had killed 11 women and girls, ten women and one eight-year-old girl. He received death sentences for robbery and intentional homicide, and lesser terms for rape and insulting corpses. In its statement on Weibo the court called his motives "despicable" and his methods "extremely cruel," and said he had acted "to satisfy his perverted desire to dishonour and sully corpses." Relatives of the victims gathered outside the court that day. There is no report that Gao appealed.
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. Reports gave neither the method nor any further statement from him, and none described contact with the families before his death.
For the families, the arrest came after most had given up. Cui Xiangping told the Beijing News that he had come to believe his sister's case would never be solved. When his mother heard the news, he said, she could not stop crying, and in nearly two decades the family had never stopped thinking about Cui Jinping. Prosecutors said they had contacted relatives of the victims to gather information and offer support, but no family's later life has been reported.
Gao's own family was left with the knowledge that the husband and father they knew had been someone else. His wife and sons, CGTN reported, had been unaware of his crimes and were shocked when told.
The case became an argument for genetic investigation in China. Li Hui told the South China Morning Post that he hoped DNA might one day be coded into identity cards. Yin Guoxing's account of his team's unanswered approach in 2003 suggested how much earlier the case might have been solved.
It also illustrated how little outsiders can learn about serial murder in China. The New Republic described a near-impenetrable wall of silence: the lead investigator and eight other experts declined interviews, and a lawyer withdrew after being told that "leaders" had forbidden contact with foreign media. The American criminologist Mike Aamodt, whose database then listed 62 known Chinese serial killers against 3,376 in the United States, said China suppressed information about crime and that the real rate might be similar.
Agence France-Presse, reporting the arrest, pointed to another question: miscarriages of justice and forced confessions were not rare in China, and no report said whether anyone had earlier been convicted of any of the Baiyin killings. None has been reported since.
The red clothing. State media said at the time of the arrest that the killer targeted women in red. The New Republic reported that Gao said he had no such preference. The idea is best treated as a local belief, not an established fact.
The count. Gao was convicted of 11 killings, the number he confessed to and the court accepted. His own lawyer said the evidence for one was insufficient. The New Republic noted that the figure may not be complete, but no other killing has been charged or attributed to him by any authority.
The first date. The charges begin in May 1988; The New Republic dated the first killing to Chinese New Year; the Beijing News said the first victim was found on August 25, 1988.
The relative. Uncle, cousin and distant relative are all reported, with the offense described as minor, bribery or corruption.
The pauses. Why Gao stopped between 1988 and 1994, why he stopped after 1998 or 2001, and why the killings ended in 2002 have never been explained. Reports have speculated about the failed 2001 attack and family pressures; there is no evidence either way.
1964: Gao Chengyong is born in Chenghe, Gansu.
1988: His first son is born. The first killing, of a 23-year-old woman surnamed Bai, takes place in Baiyin (the court's series begins in May 1988).
July 1994: A 19-year-old cleaner is killed in the Baiyin Power-Supply Bureau dormitories.
1998: Several killings, including a 29-year-old woman, the eight-year-old girl on July 5, and Cui Jinping on November 30.
2001: A nurse, 28, is killed in May; a woman fights off an attacker and gives police a description; eight Ministry specialists join the case and more than 100,000 men are fingerprinted.
February 9, 2002: The last killing, of a 25-year-old woman surnamed Zhu.
December 2004: Baiyin police link the crimes publicly and offer a 200,000-yuan reward.
2010: Baiyin gets a proper forensic laboratory.
March 2016: The Ministry of Public Security reopens the case.
August 26, 2016: Gao is arrested at his shop in Baiyin and confesses.
May 2, 2017: The court announces the prosecution.
July 18-19, 2017: Closed trial in Baiyin; Gao pleads guilty.
March 30, 2018: Sentenced to death.
January 3, 2019: Executed in Baiyin.