On March 16, 2005, at about three in the afternoon, a nine-year-old girl named Wang Shengli, a third-grader at Jiamusi's No. 2 Primary School, was asked by a man who said he was ill to help him open his door. When she went missing her family called the police, and a police dog, given her shoe to smell, followed her scent to the gate of a courtyard in a back alley. The landlady cursed the detectives and they left without searching. Inside, in the room Gong Runbo rented, the child's body was still there. Over the next month he cut it up, burned it and left the remains in the toilets of two internet cafes, a public lavatory and the washroom of the city's art center. The police identified her only a year later, from the padded trousers she had worn, which he had kept.
She was the first of six. After her he turned entirely to boys of ten to fifteen who lived within about two kilometers of his room, most of them met in the internet cafes of Xiangyang district, above all the Tianqi. Parents reported them missing. The local police stations, Chinese accounts say, did not believe boys that old could be abducted and assumed they had run away, gone off to cafes or traveled to meet friends from the internet, and none of the cases was opened as a criminal investigation.
On the night of February 26, 2006, a fourteen-year-old boy met a man in his thirties at the Tianqi cafe and went home with him. He was held there, found bodies, got away, and on the afternoon of February 28 went with his mother to the Xiangyang police. Detectives staked out the man's mother's home, the places he went and the cafes, and at about four that afternoon arrested him inside the Tianqi. In his room they found the bodies of four boys and bones sealed in cement. The boys were Wu Shutian, ten; Ma Qianli, ten; Jiang Fuyuan, twelve; and Bai Jinlong, fifteen, whose mother was Chen Yufang. DNA testing confirmed the others. Chinese sources give the fourteen-year-old's name differently, as Zhao Long and as Sun Hai.
Gong was born in Jiamusi on July 6, 1973. His father died young and he lived with his mother, Yuan Guixiang. He left school early and in 1990 went to work at the city tractor factory. One Chinese account says he went for training at the Harbin Institute of Technology in 1994; other accounts say he later admitted inventing it. In 1996 he moved in with a young girl, and in June that year the Dongfeng district court sentenced him to eight years for sex with a minor. Sohu gives her age as thirteen; English-language sources say fifteen. While he was inside, his mother remarried. Chinese accounts say he was raped by cellmates in prison and later took part in the same abuse. He was released at the end of October 2004 with nine months off his sentence and went to live with his mother and stepfather, spending most of his time in internet cafes.
On February 20, 2005, before the first killing, he lured a twelve-year-old boy from the Tianqi cafe to his home, molested him and let him go. Between then and his arrest he molested five children he let live.
On July 13, 2006 the Jiamusi Intermediate People's Court sentenced him to death for intentional homicide and to five years for child molestation, combined as a sentence of death with deprivation of political rights for life, and ordered him to pay the families 661,840 yuan in compensation. The Heilongjiang Higher People's Court upheld the sentence in December, and he was shot on December 31, 2006.
How many died is still disputed. At the time of his arrest police told state media they suspected more than twenty, and forensic work was reported as pointing to about twenty-eight. Wu Heping, spokesman for the Ministry of Public Security, publicly dismissed any figure above six, which is the number the court accepted. No published source reconciles the two.