Hua Ruizhuo came from Shuangcheng in Heilongjiang. In the autumn of 1993 he took over his retiring father's job at the fifth construction company of a Beijing building group, and with it a Beijing residence registration. He drove a cement mixer. Chinese accounts describe a man of twenty-eight with regular features and a medium build, a capable wife and a son of just over two, thought well of by his colleagues and considered a dutiful son by his parents.
In 1994 he was introduced to a young woman named Qiuyan and fell in love with her, spending on her, in the words of one account, all his feeling and several years of savings. After about six months he discovered she was working as a prostitute. He tried to persuade her to stop, failed, and she left him. From that point he carried the intention of revenge.
In July 1998 he killed a prostitute after paying her. The accounts say the feeling it gave him turned him into a man who went on killing.
Between then and June 2001 he took fourteen women from the area around the Yansha bridge in Chaoyang district and drove them out to Dongba, Maizidian, Pingfang and similar places on the edge of the city. He strangled them with his hands, with rope or with iron wire, or struck their heads with stones or an iron hammer.
What he did with the bodies is part of the reason the series ran for three years. Some he buried. Some he threw into cesspits. Some he put down wells, and four bodies were recovered from a single well. Several of the dead had steel rebar or corn stalks driven into the lower body as far as the chest cavity. Many were badly decomposed by the time they were found.
The women were mostly migrants from other provinces, working in a trade that kept them at the edges of the city and out of its ordinary protections. Their disappearances produced few reports and most of the bodies were never identified.
He was arrested on July 10, 2001. Asked why he had killed them, he said that they were too dirty and that killing them was ridding the people of a scourge.
The second branch of the Beijing People's Procuratorate laid the indictment on November 7, 2001, and the Beijing Number Two Intermediate People's Court opened the trial on November 20. The court sat in closed session, on the ground that the case involved the victims' privacy. It held that he had used particularly cruel means, that the nature of the crime was extremely vile and its consequences especially grave, and sentenced him to death. The sentence went to the Supreme People's Court for review and was carried out.
When sentence was passed there were two relatives of victims in the public gallery: the sister and brother-in-law of the one woman who had been identified. A Chinese account of the case observes that the families of the rest may still have been waiting for them to come home.
Two points on the record. The earlier version of this entry said the victims had no Beijing residence registration and that this was why nobody reported them missing. The sources say they were migrants from other provinces and that few reports were made; the specific point about registration is not stated and has been removed. And the execution date of January 31, 2002 comes from the contemporary wire reports rather than from the Chinese accounts of the judgment, which record the review and the execution without a date.