Dong Wenyu was born in 1978. His parents divorced and he left home at eleven. He had previous convictions for wilful and malicious injury and for theft, and had served prison terms of eighteen months and of two and a half years. He was unemployed.
Between March and May 2006 he committed five burglaries across the eastern provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangxi and Fujian. Six people were killed and two others injured, and he raped several women. What he took from those five houses came to sixteen hundred yuan, about two hundred and thirteen American dollars at the time.
The court set out how he worked. He broke into houses in the middle of the night while the owners were asleep, looking for money or anything worth taking. If the noise woke them he killed them, in most cases by cutting their throats. He raped several women, and in some cases had sex with the bodies of women he had killed.
Separately, between November 2004 and November 2006, he was found to have broken into houses in Jiangxi, Zhejiang and Sichuan and stolen money and goods worth eight thousand six hundred yuan.
China's Ministry of Public Security issued an arrest order for him on July 19, 2006, about two months after the last of the killings.
He was caught doing the same thing that had produced them. In the early hours of November 16, 2006 he was trying to steal a mobile telephone from a second-floor flat in Xiangbi township, in south-western Sichuan, when the owner woke and cried out. He jumped from a window, broke his right leg, and was recognised by local police.
The intermediate people's court at Jinhua, in Zhejiang, sentenced him to death in June 2007 for murder, rape and burglary. He did not appeal. The Supreme People's Court approved the sentence, as Chinese law requires, and he was executed on November 29, 2007, at twenty-nine.
The accessible record is the Xinhua report of the execution and the findings it summarises. No judgment is published and the victims are not named. Two people survived the burglaries in which the six died; nothing further about them is recorded.