Li Wenxian came from Meizhou in eastern Guangdong and went to Guangzhou in 1991, in the first great wave of internal migration into the Pearl River delta, because men from his village had come home with money. He had no education and no trade, could not get taken on even at an electronics factory, and ended up carrying bricks on a building site for board and lodging.
What he did afterwards began, by his own account and that of the Chinese reporting, with a honey-trap scam. He was lured, robbed and humiliated by a woman working as a prostitute and the men working with her, and afterwards he set out to take revenge on such women indiscriminately. Chinese reporting called him the Guangzhou Ripper.
He took them to Jinbaogang, a low hill in the Baiyun district that had so bad a reputation for robbery and killing that people called it the Baiyun slaughterhouse. He raped them there, stabbed them, beat them, and strangled them with a military belt.
The scale is larger than the death toll. Chinese accounts put the number of attacks at about twenty, of which thirteen women were killed, four were left badly injured and three got away unhurt.
The bodies began to be found in August 1993, when a farm worker cutting bamboo on the hill came across one and police dogs found two more nearby. All three had been stripped. The pathologist put the deaths months apart, the earliest more than three months before and the most recent about forty days. There were no witnesses and nothing usable at the scene.
The survivors are what eventually gave the police a case. Residents had found a naked woman on one of the hills with severe head injuries and got her to hospital, and a woman surnamed Chen had already reported to a local station that she had encountered the man. Chen later travelled with Guangzhou police to identify him.
He was arrested in November 1996, admitted everything, and said he did not regret it and that he hated them.
He was sentenced to death by the Guangzhou Intermediate People's Court on December 18, 1996 and executed the same day. The speed was not unusual for the period; what it removed was any possibility of examining the other cases attributed to him.
Two corrections to the record. This entry previously listed dismemberment among his characteristics. Guangzhou had two separate series of killings of women running at the same time, the one on Jinbaogang in Baiyun and another in Haizhu district, and the police examined whether they were connected and concluded they were not: the Haizhu bodies were dismembered and scattered and showed the tyre marks of a small truck, while the Jinbaogang victims were strangled and left close together on one hill. Dismemberment belongs to the other series.
And his name is given in Chinese sources as Li Wenxiang, written with the character xiang. The form Li Wenxian, which this archive and the English wire reports of 1996 use, appears to be a transliteration slip. The entry keeps the familiar spelling for the sake of the address it lives at, and records the Chinese form here.
The span is also given as 1991 to 1996 in English reporting and as 1992 to 1996 in Chinese accounts.