At about six on the morning of Thursday, October 21, 2004, staff at the Beixin Kindergarten in Beijing's Dongcheng District, a boarding kindergarten where seven teachers and four children had spent the night, found two of their own dead. He Yufen, forty-four, the nursery attendant on night duty, had been raped and smothered with a quilt. A five-year-old boy had been beaten to death with a fire extinguisher. One account compiled from Chinese press reports says his body had been pushed into a washing machine. The police statement put the discovery at dawn that Thursday; Xinhua's later report dated the break-in to the night of October 21, and the two accounts are easiest to reconcile if it happened in the small hours of that morning.
Investigators treated it as murder from the start and a manhunt began the same day. At about two in the morning on Saturday, October 23, officers of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau arrested a thirty-one-year-old man in a hotel. His name was Fu Hegong, written 付贺功, and the bureau said he had confessed to the robbery and the killings. He had come in to steal, he said. She had caught him at it, and the noise had woken the boy.
On Monday, October 25, the No. 2 branch of the Beijing Municipal People's Procuratorate approved his formal arrest for robbery and the murders of the teacher and the child. Its statement gave his age as thirty and described him as jobless, a year younger than the police had said.
He was a peasant's son from Miyun, a rural county on the northern edge of the capital, born in 1973. In 1996 a court in Hebei province had given him seven years for theft, and he was let out in 2001, three years early.
What he did after his release came out in custody. According to Xinhua, he confessed to sixteen other crimes, three of them murders; some reports place the confession in custody, others at his trial. The details that reached the press were thin: in 2002 he had killed two people with bricks and knives after a quarrel, and earlier in 2004 he had stabbed a security guard to death during a robbery. None of those victims was named in the reports. Taken with the two deaths at Beixin, they make five.
The kindergarten killings landed on a city already afraid for its children. On August 4 a temporary worker had stabbed fifteen children and three teachers at a kindergarten attached to Peking University, and one child died. In September a man armed with a knife and homemade bombs attacked twenty-eight children at a kindergarten in Suzhou, and earlier in October a primary school teacher in Hunan stabbed four children to death. After Beixin the government ordered schools to hire guards and tighten their security.
The Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court tried him in September 2005 and convicted him of murder, rape, molestation and theft. He was sentenced to death and lodged no appeal. He was executed in Beijing on Tuesday, December 20, 2005, at thirty-one. Before he died he said he was sorry for his mother. He expressed no regret to the families of the people he had killed, and the name of the five-year-old boy was never published.