Huang Yong was born in 1974 in Pingyu county in Henan province in central China and had worked as a security guard.
Between September 2001 and November 2003 he approached teenage boys in internet cafes and video game arcades in Henan and Beijing, told them he was recruiting for a military academy or offering work, and took them back to a room at his family's house. He had built a wooden frame in it. He tied them to it and strangled them with a rope, and buried the bodies in the yard.
Seventeen boys aged between sixteen and twenty died. One escaped in November 2003 and went to the police, which is the only reason the case was ever opened.
The disappearances had not been investigated. Rural Henan in that period had very large numbers of adolescents moving between towns for work and for internet cafes, and a boy who stopped coming home was assumed to have gone to the city.
He was arrested on November 12, 2003, tried within weeks, and executed by a gunshot to the head on December 26, 2003, five weeks after his arrest.