When the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court passed sentence on March 2, 2004, it tied together two cases that had sat eight years apart. One was the murder of a family and the burning of their house in 1995, which no one had ever solved. The other was the killing and dismemberment of four young women in a small house on the western edge of the city between November 2002 and April 2003. The man who had done both was a taxi driver in his early forties, Li Pingping.
He had once worked as a boiler man at a health food company in Beijing and was dismissed for indiscipline and slack work. He blamed the manager, Song Shutian. On the night of May 27, 1995 he went to Song's house with a pointed knife and killed Song, his wife and their twelve-year-old daughter. Then he set the house on fire to destroy the evidence, and seven rooms and everything in them burned.
Seven weeks earlier, on April 1, he had gone to a house near Fragrant Hills in Haidian district, waited until it was empty and set fire to it with a cigarette lighter. Nine rooms were destroyed. Prosecutors said he did it out of envy of the owner, a man named Wan, for his wealth; the court put it down to resentment of society. He already had a record, including a year of supervised control for hooliganism.
By 2002 he was driving for the Wanquansi taxi company and living in a small courtyard house on the city's outskirts with a large, fierce dog. He supported the household alone, and he resented people with money. Chinese accounts describe him working the nightspots where the rich spent their evenings and brooding on the unfairness of it.
Between November 2002 and April 2003 he picked up four young women who worked in karaoke halls as prostitutes, took them to his home, and killed them there. Three of them he cut apart with a knife, and the remains were buried and hidden. He took what they had on them, which is why the prosecution added a charge of theft. His explanation to the police was plain: the women made money from prostitution more easily than he made it driving a taxi. None of the four has been named in the published record.
His wife, Dong Meirong, a woman from the countryside, came home from work in January 2003 and saw him kill and dismember a woman. Shortly before the Spring Festival that year she found him attacking another, and this time she handed him a hammer and held the woman down while she struggled. Chinese accounts say she feared that if she left he would kill her too, and that if she called the police the family would be finished.
He was arrested in 2003 and confessed, including to the 1995 killings. The case, known as the June 15 case, was sent to prosecutors, who indicted him in January 2004 on three counts: intentional homicide, arson and theft. The court convicted him on all three and sentenced him to death with deprivation of political rights for life and a fine of a thousand yuan. Dong Meirong was convicted of intentional homicide and of harboring stolen goods and sentenced to fifteen years. Police and press described him as unrepentant to the end.
On June 15, 2004, on an execution order signed by the president of the Beijing High People's Court, he was taken to the execution ground and shot, along with three other condemned men. He was forty-four.
His given name is written with the character 苹 in most Chinese reporting and 平 in the indictment coverage; both are romanized Pingping.