At forty minutes past midnight on May 7, 2001, a man with a large fruit knife got into a university dormitory at No. 47 Huazhong Village in the Wuchang district of Wuhan and stabbed a twenty-four-year-old student to death. She came from Gong'an County and was wearing denim. He took her bag, which held an internet card and keys, and sexually assaulted her body. It was the first killing of its kind in Wuhan, and over the next month he attacked five more women the same way; three died and two were badly wounded. On June 2, near Hansan Palace in Wuchang, a twenty-one-year-old woman surnamed Chen was stabbed thirty-eight times. The last Wuhan victim, a woman in her twenties from outside the city, was killed at 2:15 on the morning of June 3 on Qiyi Street.
A rumor spread through the city's three boroughs that a madman was hunting women who wore red and had long hair. Families kept their daughters in after dark, some young women stopped wearing red, and some cut off their hair. Wuchang police set up a forty-member task force under the bureau chief, Xia Jianzhong, went door to door through every permanent and temporary resident in the district, and at night sent policewomen out in red clothing as decoys.
The killer had come from Hunan. Duan Guocheng was born in 1973 or 1974; his family came from Jianli in Hubei, and his father settled in Yueyang, across the provincial line. Chinese accounts describe parents who quarreled for long stretches, once not eating at the same table for a year, and a father who was upright but violent; one says he crushed the boy's finger with pliers when he was seven or eight to stop him stealing. At thirteen Duan was sent to a juvenile institution for three years for theft, with two more added for breaking the rules inside, and at eighteen he got five years for robbery. The accounts describe a solitary man with no interests who had never had a girlfriend and who drank, gambled and used prostitutes.
In Yueyang, from 1999, he robbed women walking alone at night, and the robberies turned into killings. By one account he committed more than fifty crimes in Hunan, nine of them confirmed killings. At about five in the morning on April 4, 1999, a young woman was stabbed to death on her way home outside the municipal trade union building on Yunxiang Lane. On February 23, 2000, a forty-seven-year-old woman out for morning exercise was stabbed twenty-five times. In the small hours of February 16, 2001, a woman in her thirties coming home from a mahjong game was killed at her door and robbed of more than 4,000 yuan and a mobile phone. Local toughs took to calling him Duan Ye, Master Duan, and Yueyang police officers greeted each other with the question, "Have you caught Master Duan yet?" The stolen phone gave police his name, and he knew it. In March 2001 he went to relatives in Jianli, took 300 yuan from them, and at the end of the month reached Wuhan, where he moved between small guesthouses near Wuchang railway station.
In Wuhan, a woman who survived his attack gave police the description that turned the case: a man of about one meter seventy, fair-skinned, with an out-of-town accent. Searching the area where the attacks had happened, police found a suspicious outsider registered as Hu Cheng. On August 10, 2001, Yu Min, a cashier at the 719 Guesthouse, was going through the register when she saw that the guest in Room 311 was named Hu Cheng and matched the police notice, and she called. The Wuchang station chief and eight plainclothes officers went to the guesthouse and arrested Duan. On August 13 the Ministry of Public Security sent its congratulations; some accounts give that as the arrest date.
On January 29, 2003, the Wuhan Intermediate People's Court sentenced him to death for robbery. The official summary of the case describes thirteen robberies across Hunan and Hubei between April 1999 and June 2001 in which eleven women were killed; popular accounts put the number of dead at thirteen. Later retellings say he was executed soon afterward, and no execution date has been published.