Duan Guocheng was born in 1973 or 1974. His family came from Jianli in Hubei and he was brought as a child to Yueyang, in Hunan, where his father settled. Chinese accounts describe a household in which the parents quarrelled for long stretches, at the worst not eating at the same table for a year, and a father who was upright but violent and who punished him severely; one account says that when he was seven or eight his father crushed one of his fingers with a pair of pliers to stop him stealing.
It did not stop him. At thirteen he was sentenced to three years in a juvenile institution for theft, and had two more years added for breaches of the rules inside. At eighteen, shortly after release, he was sentenced to five years for robbery. The accounts describe him afterwards as solitary, without interests, never having had a girlfriend, and drinking, gambling and using prostitutes. Chinese reporting called him the Red Dress Killer, after what the women he followed were wearing.
From about 1998 he began attacking women walking home alone at night in Yueyang, taking whatever money they had. The attacks became killings, and by early 2001 a rumor had gone round the city, and later round Wuhan, that a madman was hunting women who wore red and had long hair. Women stopped going out after dark, some stopped wearing red, and some cut their hair. The press called him the Red Clothes Killer.
The Yueyang series ended on February 16, 2001, when a woman in her thirties was robbed of four thousand yuan and a mobile telephone at her own front door and then killed. Police traced the stolen telephone, and it gave them his name.
He knew it. In March he went to relatives at Jianli in Hubei, took three hundred yuan from them, and left for Wuhan.
He began again there. At forty minutes past midnight on May 7, 2001 he forced his way into a student hostel in Wuchang and stabbed a twenty-four-year-old woman to death with a large fruit knife, took her bag, and assaulted her body. In the following month he attacked five more women in the same way: three died and two were badly hurt.
The police had no case until one of the women who survived came forward. She described a man of about one meter seventy, fair-skinned, speaking with an out-of-town accent, and that description narrowed a search that had until then covered the whole district.
He was arrested at a small hotel near Wuchang railway station in August 2001 and confessed to the murders and robberies. Footprints from four of the Wuhan scenes were part of the case against him. Thirteen women had been killed.
Two points on the record. The date of arrest is given as August 10 in one Chinese account, as August 13 in the contemporary wire reports this archive drew on, and as January 6, 2001 in a third; the January date cannot be right, since the Wuhan killings ran into the summer. And Chinese retellings of the case describe him as having been executed, which is what the earlier version of this entry called undocumented, but no court, sentence or date has been found, so the entry records the claim without asserting the outcome.