At 9:34 on the morning of Friday, August 10, 2012, a gunman opened fire on bank customers outside a Bank of China savings office at Fengmingshan in Shapingba District, Chongqing. One woman died and two other people were wounded, and the gunman took a woman's handbag holding more than 70,000 yuan in cash. About ten minutes later, a plainclothes railway police officer named Zhu Yanchao, who was out on a patrol, stopped to question a man walking toward him. He was shot three times and died.
Within hours Chongqing police announced a name. Shell casings from the two scenes matched guns used in a series of shootings that had run for eight years across three provinces, and DNA on the casings matched a local man, Zhou Kehua. Four days later he was dead, shot by two plainclothes officers in an alley a few miles from the bank. Because he was killed before he could be arrested, none of the cases attributed to him was ever heard in a court. Everything below that concerns his guilt is the police account, as the police and the Chinese press reported it, and it should be read that way.
According to the Chongqing police, Zhou Kehua was born on February 6, 1970, in Ertang village, Jingkou town, in Shapingba District on the northern edge of Chongqing. The Chongqing Shangbao (Chongqing Commercial Daily) reported that his mother, Chen Shizhen, already had two children when she married his father, Zhou Zhengxi, and that Kehua was born a year after the marriage. He did poorly in primary school and read martial arts and detective novels. TIME, citing Chinese reports, wrote that the family was poor, that he left middle school, and that he worked with his father hauling sand from the Jialing River before loading freight and driving trucks. A compilation of 2012 press reports later republished by the Tianjin news portal Jinyun says he had a junior middle school education, worked away from home from 1985 to 1993, and worked as a porter at a railway station from 1995 to 2000.
His record, as Deputy Police Chief Huang Wei of the Chongqing Public Security Bureau read it out on August 14, 2012, began in March 1986, when he was held for fourteen days for harassing a woman. In September 1991 he stole a hunting rifle in Shapingba. In March 1993 he took the rifle to Wuhan, where police in Qiaokou District caught him, and he was sent to two years of re-education through labor. In the summer of 1997 he bought a Type 54 pistol on the Yunnan border. In October 2005 he was caught at the railway station in Xuanwei, Qujing, Yunnan, with an illegal Type 54 pistol and six bullets. A court in Kunming sentenced him to three years, and he was released in April 2008. Other accounts differ from the police record on his first gun case: The Telegraph reported a year of reform through labor in 1997, and TIME put a labor camp term around 2000.
The Chongqing Shangbao reported that he married at twenty-six, divorced, and had a son, who was thirteen in 2012. According to the paper, he stayed in touch with his former wife, a woman surnamed Xu, and helped her after an operation in August 2011. Reports after his death said he sent money to his mother and his son. CCTV's reporter told the program News 1+1 that police put the total taken in the robberies at 555,000 yuan, that Zhou spent little on himself and mostly on his family, and that 60,000 yuan had been recovered.
The police said the series began in Chongqing in 2004. Two press summaries of police information, the Jinyun compilation and the list CCTV broadcast on August 14, 2012, set out the cases, and they differ on some figures. Most victims are named only by surname in the Chinese reports.
On April 22, 2004, at about 11:52 a.m., two finance employees of a Chongqing hotel, surnamed Zhao and Zhou, came out of an Industrial and Commercial Bank of China branch on Hongwu Road in Jiangbei District with 70,000 yuan. About fifteen meters from the door a gunman shot them. Zhao was hit in the head and died; Zhou was wounded. The gunman took the cash.
On May 16, 2005, at about 9:35 a.m., Zheng, a finance worker at a property management company, and Deng, the company's driver, had withdrawn 170,000 yuan in wages at a Bank of China outlet near Sanxia Square. Deng was carrying the money along Hanyu Road in Shapingba when a gunman shot him from behind. Deng and Zheng both died, and the money was taken. CCTV's list gives this case as two dead and one wounded.
On March 19, 2009, a sentry at an army post in Shiqiaopu, in Chongqing's high-tech zone, was shot dead and his Type 81-1 automatic rifle was taken. TIME named the soldier as Han Junliang. At the 2012 news conference Huang Wei said DNA from shell casings at that scene matched Zhou, and that the 9 mm pistol used against the railway officer in 2012 had also been used against the sentry. The rifle was not found after Zhou's death. The China Story project at the Australian National University reported that he was wanted on a charge of committing a terrorist act over this case.
Changsha police said Zhou carried out four shootings in their city between October 2009 and June 2011, while living for about two years in a hillside graveyard at Tianma Mountain, in Yuelu District.
On October 14, 2009, Li Chengshou, from Guandu in Liuyang, was shot dead at a secluded spot called Heisongkou in Nanjiao Park, in Tianxin District. His daughter, reached by phone in 2012, said: "He's gone. What is there to say?" Changsha's chief of criminal police, Shi Shangchi, said this was the only case in the series whose motive was never fully established. Police thought it more likely that Li had seen the gunman preparing a crime and was shot to silence him, but said that could no longer be proved.
On December 4, 2009, a man surnamed Guo withdrew money at an Agricultural Bank of China branch on Furong South Road, near the west gate of the Railway College, and was shot in the head. CCTV reported that 45,000 yuan was taken. Surveillance video showed a man waiting near the scene from 9:46 a.m., sitting on a lawn when the victim's car pulled up at 11:23, and the shooting at 11:30.
On October 25, 2010, a company manager surnamed Xiao was shot dead outside a steel shop at No. 220, Section 1 of the East Second Ring Road, in Yuhua District. The gunman took a laptop computer. In 2012 employees of the shop told a reporter they did not believe Zhou was the man who shot their boss, because he did not look like the man in the videos. Deputy Changsha police chief Li Xinmin said police had checked by several means, and that the video they released showed only the gunman's profile.
On June 28, 2011, a 48-year-old man surnamed Zhang was shot and wounded as he got out of a vehicle on Heili Road in Tianxin District. A neighbor named him as Zhang Dingguo, a local landlord, and said one bullet went through his waist. Workers nearby saw the gun and did not intervene.
On January 6, 2012, outside an Agricultural Bank of China branch at No. 2 Dongmen Street in Xiaguan District, Nanjing, a construction company employee surnamed Cheng had just withdrawn about 200,000 yuan. CCTV, citing witnesses, said he and a colleague withdrew the money together and that he carried it out alone to a car. About thirty meters from the bank door, a man walked up to him and shot him in the head. Cheng came from Hushu, in Jiangning. His mother, in her sixties, told the Modern Express in August 2012 that she had dreamed every day of the gunman being caught, and that she bought paper money to burn for her son "to bring him the news, so he can rest in peace."
On August 10, 2012, came the Fengmingshan shooting and the death of Zhu Yanchao. The Chongqing Morning Post reported that the woman who died was Wang Hong (the paper gave the name by sound only), the sister-in-law of Liao Deying, who was wounded. Liao's wife, Wang Min, from Bijie in Guizhou, was at his hospital bed when she heard four days later that Zhou had been shot. ABC News, citing Xinhua, gave Zhu Yanchao's age as twenty-nine. He belonged to the criminal police detachment of the Chongqing Railway Public Security Division.
At the August 14 news conference Huang Wei gave the total as ten shootings, ten people dead and six wounded, plus "a huge amount of property" and one Type 81-1 rifle. The figures do not all agree. CNN on August 13 called Zhu Yanchao Zhou's tenth victim, and its report a few hours later called him the ninth. Xinhua, as reported by Al Jazeera and NBC, said nine deaths. A later Paper article based on an interview with Liu Zhongyi, the Ministry of Public Security investigator who led the national task force, gives eleven dead, ten cases and twenty-four shots fired, and The Paper and the China Story both describe the August 10 shooting as two dead and one wounded at the bank, where the police said one dead and two wounded.
For most of those eight years the police did not know who they were looking for. Liu Zhongyi told The Paper that the investigators had only a few blurred video clips and witness sketches. He set his team a rule: look for features that do not change, go back over the video, strip away the disguise, and find a face. Nearly a hundred officers worked in shifts through about 3,500 terabytes of video. Changsha's video investigation chief, Kuang Zhengwen, put it another way: at 500 megabytes a film, his officers had watched the equivalent of 830,000 films. At the peak, Changsha's deputy police chief Ou Yike said, more than a thousand officers a day were reviewing video.
Changsha police also worked undercover. Long Wenjin, deputy head of the city's criminal police, confirmed a story that had circulated online: five officers sold steamed buns from a street stall for a month, and others waited tables and worked as shop assistants, near places the suspect had been seen. He never came. Changsha received more than 2,000 tips from 2009 on. Each needed a clear video or photo before it could be ruled out. One, in August 2011, led police to a man on a bus who turned out to be a music teacher from Jiangxi recruiting students.
On March 25, 2011, Changsha officers found what they had been looking for: footage from 6:15 a.m. on October 18, 2010, of the suspect without a disguise, buying breakfast from a stall outside a Bank of China self-service branch on Fubuhe Road. They followed his route to an internet cafe and recovered two clear photographs of his face from its system. The cafe owner told reporters that the man had used sixteen cafes in the area, sat in the open like a regular customer, and said little. The manager of a second cafe said he had used an identity card in the name of Zhou Keqiang. Police said he watched crime films and often read websites from Sichuan and Chongqing. On November 28, 2011, a panel of investigators from several provinces concluded from his accent, his choice of cities and his browsing that he came from the Sichuan dialect area. Ballistics experts concluded that the gun used in Changsha was an M20-type pistol that had entered China from Myanmar.
In January 2012, after the Nanjing shooting, the police briefly put a different name before the public. CNN, quoting Xinhua and Nanjing police, reported that the suspect was a man in his early forties from Sichuan named Zeng Kaigui. Shi Shangchi said in August that Zeng was a real fugitive wanted for a separate homicide, whose methods were similar, and that he had been an important suspect before Zhou was identified.
The Nanjing shooting brought the series national attention. CCTV reported that the Jiangsu provincial police chief and the Nanjing police chief went to the scene the same day. The reward rose from 100,000 yuan to 150,000 and then to 200,000. Nanjing police mobilized 13,000 officers, according to CCTV; the Xuanwu district police office told CNN that more than 80,000 took part. Police set checkpoints on the roads out of the province and at railway stations, bus stations and docks, put two helicopters in the air, and played video of the suspect hourly on big screens downtown. On January 9 the Ministry of Public Security held a meeting in Nanjing and made the Jiangsu-Hunan-Chongqing series its "No. 1 case". CNN reported that at least nine provinces joined the search and that rewards passed three million yuan. By August, CNN and ABC reported, they had reached 5.4 million yuan in total.
The suspect left Nanjing on foot. The Chongqing Shangbao reported that he wore out three pairs of shoes doing it. On January 14 or 15, 2012 (the reports differ), a resident found a sleeping bag and camping gear in a graveyard on a hill in Qixia District. Police recovered biological traces from it. According to The Paper, on January 19, 2012, the task force took samples from Zhou Kehua's family in Chongqing and matched them. Huang Wei's account of the match is that the Jingkou police station in Shapingba, screening its area, found Zhou as an important suspect, and that the DNA of his immediate relatives matched the sample from Nanjing and the casings from the 2009 sentry case. The Jinyun compilation adds that Chongqing police noticed him among residents who had never replaced their old identity cards, and that he had been away from home a long time. Residents in Chongqing had also reported that the photo released by Changsha police looked like him.
The police did not publish his name for seven more months. Shi Shangchi explained why in August: "the suspect had a home in Chongqing," so the three police forces decided not to make his identity public and "left an opening" for an arrest. The Telegraph reported that police had kept his mother under surveillance since mid-January. In July 2012 Liu Zhongyi took a team of criminal investigators back over every place Zhou was known to have been, from internet cafes to caves and graveyards, interviewed people who knew him, and found a diary at his home. On August 9 the task force completed a plan for catching him. The next morning the Fengmingshan shooting took place.
Chongqing police published Zhou's name and photograph on August 10. The Ministry of Public Security issued a Class A wanted notice, the highest level. Party Secretary Zhang Dejiang, a member of the Politburo, issued instructions the same day, as did Public Security Minister Meng Jianzhu, who sent his deputy, Zhang Xinfeng, to Chongqing to direct the search. The Chongqing police chief, He Ting, took personal command. Police canceled leave.
Huang Wei described the search in numbers. Police printed more than 1.86 million wanted notices and ran the notice on television. They briefed more than 40,000 bus, coach and motorcycle-taxi drivers and held meetings of village and neighborhood officials. They received more than 700 tips. They set three rings: the core was Gele Mountain, the wooded ridge above Shapingba, where nearly 10,000 armed police and police officers searched with 117 dogs and 419 patrol vehicles in heat above 40 degrees Celsius; the middle ring was Shapingba and nearby districts, where police made 79,000 checks of culverts, air-raid shelters, cemeteries, small hotels, empty houses and waiting rooms; the outer ring was 289 armed checkpoints on the roads out of the city and province. Hunan, Sichuan and Guizhou set their own checkpoints. CNN and China Daily reported that searchers found a cave on Gele Mountain with two cigarette packs, a T-shirt and human waste. A police dog named Leiming, from the Fuling district kennel, died of heatstroke after twenty hours on the mountain.
According to CCTV, the mountain search was partly a cover. On Saturday, August 11, a young woman recognized Zhou in a shopping mall at Guanyinqiao, a busy commercial district in Jiangbei, and police confirmed from security video that it was him; one report said he watched two films there. The Chongqing Morning Post reported that he had bought a mobile phone, although police had believed he did not use one, and that camera footage showed him making a call. Police asked the phone companies to locate the more than 3,000 people in the area on calls at that moment and narrowed them down to his number. While the search went on in the hills, police put plainclothes teams of four, armed, outside every bank branch in the areas he knew.
The Jinyun compilation reports that police were listening to the phone of his girlfriend, Zhang Guiying, and heard Zhou tell her: "On the 10th I didn't get much money. I'm getting ready to do a big one on the 14th." A report compiled by the portal ifeng said police intercepted a message on August 13 in which Zhou said he planned "a bigger case" soon. The two officers who shot him later said they had been told he meant to strike a bank in Shapingba on August 14.
Wang Xiaoyu and Zhou Jin were veteran officers at the Microelectronics Park police station in Shapingba. They told reporters they went on duty at about 6 a.m. on August 14, in plainclothes, near a postal savings office at Tongjiaqiao. Wang wore a T-shirt, shorts and sandals and carried a Type 54 pistol in a shoulder bag; Zhou Jin had a Type 64 pistol in his pocket. At about 6 a.m. their station called to say Zhou Kehua might strike nearby.
At about 6:45 a thin man in plain glasses, a checked shirt and muddy leather shoes, with a black bag over his shoulder, walked toward them from the direction of the Martyrs' Cemetery. "From far away he looked a bit like Zhou Kehua on the wanted notice," Wang said. "When he came past me I saw some differences. We weren't sure. We let him pass and kept following." After about a hundred meters he crossed the road into an alley called Wosungou. The officers judged from the way he walked that it was probably Zhou, and followed about two meters apart. Inside the alley he looked back, saw Zhou Jin, and walked faster. About thirty meters in, he turned around and came back toward them, talking to himself. TIME, citing the officers, reported his words as "Did I go the wrong way?"
"He stopped for only a few seconds after he turned, and then he pulled out a gun," Zhou Jin said. "Then I was sure it was him. I shouted 'Gun!' to warn Wang behind me, and I got behind a utility pole." Wang had no cover. According to the officers, the man fired first, from less than three meters. His first shot hit the ground about a centimeter from Wang's leg, and the ricochet struck Wang's right calf. Each officer fired twice. The police said Zhou fired three shots, missed with all of them, and died at the scene. In a CCTV interview quoted by ABC News, one officer put the distance at about ten meters when Zhou turned. The officers said: "Our first idea was to take him alive, but he drew a gun and fired at us, and in an emergency we were forced to fire back."
Police recovered an imitation Type 54 pistol and a 9 mm pistol, three magazines and 62 rounds. The officers said his bag held about 20,000 yuan in cash and an identity card in a name other than Zhou Kehua. Reporters found two bus or train tickets among his belongings. At 9 a.m. his body was taken to the Shiqiaopu funeral home for examination, and Huang Wei said fingerprint and DNA tests confirmed that it was Zhou. Police said test firing showed the two pistols were the guns of the series and of the 2009 sentry case.
A vegetable seller named Fan, who lived beside the alley, told the Chongqing press he had noticed the man looked like the wanted notice and was comparing him with a poster on the wall when the man turned around, less than a meter away. He saw a gun at the man's waist, ran, and heard the shots behind him. Another resident said she saw the man's lips still moving on the ground. A resident told reporters that cameras at both ends of the alley had covered the spot, and that police had taken the footage.
More than ten kilometers away in Ertang village, a reporter found Zhou's mother sitting in a bare room with a fan, chatting with a policewoman who had been assigned to stay with her. She did not yet know that her son was dead.
Meng Jianzhu signed a citation for the Chongqing police within hours, and the force received a collective first-class merit award. Zhou Yongkang, the Politburo Standing Committee member in charge of law and order, issued a written instruction praising the result as proof that police must "rely on the people." The Ministry of Public Security paid 100,000 yuan, and Chongqing 500,000 yuan, to a resident who gave the key tip; the person was not named. The Chongqing Party committee and government named Wang Xiaoyu and Zhou Jin "Chongqing People's Guardians" and gave the same title to Zhu Yanchao after his death.
Several outlets read the operation in the light of Chongqing politics. TIME, NBC (with Reuters) and the China Story noted that it came months after the fall of Bo Xilai, the city's former Party chief, whose crime crackdown had been led by his police chief Wang Lijun. TIME reported that Wang Lijun had been promoted on March 26, 2009, partly to investigate the sentry killing. The China Story wrote that the scale of the hunt prompted speculation that it was meant in part to show residents that security would not weaken after Bo's removal.
Within hours of his death, photos of a body face down in blood were on Chinese news portals and social media. The reports did not agree on how he died. The Telegraph noted that the Chongqing Times reported that Zhou had shot himself, and that the Changsha Evening News reported that he was shot twice and then turned the gun on himself. A commentary later collected by ifeng said that three versions appeared that morning in established media: shot by police, suicide, and shot and then suicide. At the 4:30 p.m. news conference the police said he was shot by the two officers. The same commentary argued that Zhou was facing the officers but was hit in the temple, and asked how that was possible. A week later, Global Times reporter Yang Jinghao wrote that many local people he spoke to still insisted Zhou had killed himself, and that police denied it "but did not show any proof."
A second rumor held that the dead man was not Zhou at all. On August 16 a blogger writing as "Chen Zihe" posted an article titled "The dead 'Zhou Kehua' is actually a plainclothes officer," arguing that the dead man's clothes looked like a plainclothes officer's, that a train ticket from Chongqing to Changsha had been shown among his belongings, and that his face and build did not match the wanted photos. The sites deleted the posts. By August 17 the rumor had changed, through copying, into a claim that the dead man was a Changsha officer named Chen Zihe. Then the name became "Fang Bin." A photo of a Changsha officer, circled, spread widely as the man supposedly shot by mistake. Some posters said a police badge could be seen on the dead man's wallet; reporters who enlarged the photo said it was probably a brand logo.
On August 18 Chongqing closed the forests of six districts, including Gele Mountain, to everyone but local residents with identity papers. Officials said it was routine fire prevention. A post about the closure by the writer Zhang Hongjie was shared more than ten thousand times, and many readers took it as a sign the police were still looking for Zhou. On the morning of August 19, Wang Xuming, a former spokesman for the Ministry of Education, shared the doubts and wrote: "The Ministry of Public Security should speak."
The police answered on Weibo. At 10:55 a.m. on August 19 the Chongqing police internet security unit wrote that officers were searching Zhou's former hiding places and that "online information doubting that Zhou Kehua was shot dead is pure misunderstanding and rumor. There is no doubt that the bandit Zhou Kehua has been shot dead." At 2:25 p.m. the Shapingba police account added that his DNA and fingerprints had been matched, and that "still doubting it now is somewhat ridiculous and laughable." On August 20 the Changsha police said all their officers sent to Chongqing had come home, that the force had no officer named Fang Bin, and that the circled photo showed an ordinary officer surnamed Duan at the Yuhuating police station, taken at a staff event. Officer Duan met reporters. "I'm fine," he said. "I'm standing here talking to you." He said he reserved the right to sue. Changsha police said people who spread rumors that caused serious harm would be held legally responsible.
Some critics wanted more than statements. The historian Zhang Lifan wrote that the police should publish the autopsy report, photos of the body and the DNA results. Zhang Zhi'an, a communications scholar at Sun Yat-sen University, said the police had been slow, and that in the microblog era officials should answer within an hour; "the public's doubts are never laughable," he said. The Sina report noted that the police had not released the surveillance video of the shooting or a DNA report. A forensic examiner, Qin Ming, published an analysis comparing the ears and other features in the death photo with Zhou's wanted photos and concluded that the dead man was Zhou.
On August 20, according to the Changsha Evening News, Chongqing police released three photos of the dead man's head, one from the front and two in profile, with a wound near the temple clearly visible. The next day a reporter for a paper quoted by ifeng asked the Chongqing police about the photos, and was told that the bureau had not released autopsy photos and would not comment on whether the man in them was Zhou. The two reports cannot both be right, and no later official account was found. Some readers said the head wound, an entry wound with no exit, was consistent with a shot from several meters away; others said the face in the photos differed from the wanted photos.
The police account of the shooting has not been tested in any court or published inquiry. No independent review of the shooting was found.
Zhang Guiying was described in the Chinese press as Zhou's girlfriend. A notice posted by the gatekeepers of a residential compound in Yibin, Sichuan, said that Zhou and Zhang had rented a room there on the sixth floor from March to June 2012. Neighbors said they saw them come and go with fruit, and the gatekeeper said Zhou often came home after midnight with takeaway food. CCTV reported that Zhou told her about his plans before his crimes, and that police had already detained and questioned her before he was shot.
On March 22, 2013, the Shapingba District court convicted her of harboring a criminal and of concealing criminal proceeds, and sentenced her to five years in prison and a fine of 10,000 yuan. Her defense lawyer had challenged the legality of her first statement to police and of the text-message records used against her. The court ruled that both were lawful, that there was no evidence of a coerced confession, and that the messages had been obtained lawfully by the police technical investigation unit after the crime. Hers is the only trial connected with the case.
Guilt. Zhou was never charged, tried or convicted. The link between him and each shooting rests on what police said at news conferences: ballistic matches between casings and the two pistols, DNA from casings at the 2012 scene and the 2009 sentry case, DNA from the Nanjing camping gear matched through his relatives, and video comparisons of build and gait. CCTV's reporter said that ballistics joined eight cases to the two pistols, a third gun was used in another case, and DNA tied him to nine. The evidence was never tested by a defense lawyer.
The count. Police said ten cases and ten dead. Other reports say nine or eleven dead. The 2005 case is given as two dead in one list and two dead and one wounded in another. The August 10 shooting at the bank is given as one dead and two wounded by the police and two dead and one wounded by The Paper. The amount taken on August 10 is "more than 70,000 yuan" in police statements and 200,000 yuan in CCTV's list.
The death. The police say the officers shot him after he fired first. Early press reports said suicide, or suicide after being shot. The surveillance video was taken by police and not released.
The Nanjiao Park case. Changsha police said the motive in the October 2009 shooting of Li Chengshou was never established. Staff at the business of the October 2010 victim, Xiao, said they did not believe Zhou was the gunman; police said he was.
Burma. ABC News cited The Irrawaddy as reporting that Zhou may have worked as a mercenary in Myanmar, and the China Story repeated that media reports said so. Neither attributed the claim to the police, and it is unproven.
Accomplices. Some commentators argued that Zhou must have had a go-between who passed messages and money. Police did not say so, and no one other than Zhang Guiying was reported convicted.
Zhou Kehua died on August 14, 2012, and no court ruled on the cases attributed to him. The only related court case reported is Zhang Guiying's 2013 conviction. As of the March 22, 2013 report on her sentencing, nothing further had been reported on the case, and no later inquiry into the shooting, review of the evidence or compensation award for the victims' families is known.
Banks and police in the affected cities gave new advice. After the Nanjing shooting, banks there urged customers to bring a companion when withdrawing large sums and to use transfers instead of cash; Jiangsu police had since 2009 offered free escorts to people carrying large sums, though Liu Zhongyi said few people used it. In Changsha, guards at the bank where Guo was shot told reporters in 2012 that they reminded customers to carry bags in front and would escort large withdrawals. Reporters in Chongqing found wedding hosts telling newlyweds to carry gift money to the bank in an old bag and dress down.
The criminal psychologist Li Meijin of the People's Public Security University described the man police identified as calm, solitary and focused on money, and said she did not see him as driven by hatred of society. Shi Shangchi said that apart from the Nanjiao Park case the shootings were mainly for money, though they also showed hostility to society and a wish to provoke the police. These are opinions, offered after his death, about a man no court examined.
February 6, 1970: Zhou Kehua born in Ertang village, Jingkou town, Shapingba, Chongqing (police).
March 1986: Held 14 days for harassing a woman.
September 1991: Steals a hunting rifle in Shapingba.
March 1993: Arrested in Wuhan with the rifle; two years of re-education through labor.
Summer 1997: Buys a Type 54 pistol on the Yunnan border (police).
April 22, 2004: Hotel finance worker Zhao shot dead and a colleague wounded outside a bank in Jiangbei, Chongqing; 70,000 yuan taken (attributed).
May 16, 2005: Deng and Zheng shot dead on Hanyu Road, Shapingba; 170,000 yuan taken (attributed).
October 2005: Caught with a pistol at Xuanwei railway station, Yunnan; three years; released April 2008.
March 19, 2009: Army sentry shot dead at Shiqiaopu, Chongqing; rifle taken (attributed).
October 14, 2009: Li Chengshou shot dead in Nanjiao Park, Changsha (attributed).
December 4, 2009: Guo shot dead after a bank withdrawal on Furong South Road, Changsha (attributed).
October 25, 2010: Company manager Xiao shot dead in Yuhua District, Changsha (attributed).
March 25, 2011: Changsha police find undisguised video of the suspect and then clear photos from an internet cafe.
June 28, 2011: Zhang Dingguo, 48, wounded on Heili Road, Changsha (attributed).
January 6, 2012: Cheng shot dead outside a bank on Dongmen Street, Nanjing; about 200,000 yuan taken (attributed). Manhunt in Nanjing.
January 9, 2012: Ministry of Public Security makes the series its "No. 1 case."
January 14-15, 2012: Camping gear found in a Nanjing graveyard yields DNA.
January 19, 2012: DNA from Zhou's relatives matched to the series (The Paper).
August 10, 2012: Fengmingshan bank shooting in Shapingba, one woman dead and two wounded (police count); railway officer Zhu Yanchao shot dead. Zhou named publicly; Class A notice issued.
August 11, 2012: Zhou seen in a Guanyinqiao shopping mall.
August 14, 2012: Zhou shot dead by officers Wang Xiaoyu and Zhou Jin at Tongjiaqiao, about 6:50 a.m. Police news conference that afternoon.
August 16-20, 2012: Rumors that the dead man was a plainclothes officer; Chongqing and Changsha police deny them.
March 22, 2013: Zhang Guiying sentenced to five years.