Late in August 1993 a farmer on Jinbaogang, a low hill in the Baiyun district of Guangzhou, came upon the bodies of three women near a drainage ditch. In other accounts it was a worker cutting bamboo who found one body and police dogs who found the other two. All three had been stripped. The pathologist put the deaths months apart, the earliest more than three months before and the latest about forty days. From their clothes the victims looked to be women in their twenties, very likely women who sold sex on the street, which would explain why no one had reported them missing. There were no witnesses and nothing usable at the scene. The hill already had a name for robbery and murder; people called it the Baiyun slaughterhouse.
Li Wenxiang had come to Guangzhou in 1991 from Meizhou, in eastern Guangdong, in the first great wave of migration into the Pearl River delta, because men from his home district had come back with money and spent it freely. He had little schooling 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. By the account that emerged after his arrest, the turning point came in 1992. Approached on the street by a young woman, he followed her into a room and was undressing when several men burst in, one shouting that Li had assaulted his wife; they beat him and took every coin he had. Weeks later, on a visit to a massage parlor with workmates, he caught a venereal disease that took the rest of his savings to cure. He resolved, the Chinese reporting says, to take revenge on such women without distinction.
He lured them to Jinbaogang, raped them, and killed them by strangling with a military belt, stabbing or beating. Chinese accounts put the total at about twenty attacks between 1992 and 1996, in which thirteen women died, four were badly injured and three escaped unhurt. He had counted, he later said, on the women's trade keeping the survivors from going to the police, and for the most part it did.
The first real lead came from a woman surnamed Chen, who worked at a foot-massage parlor and had reported to a local police station that she had met the man. About two weeks before the 1993 discovery, she said, a stranger had taken her and a coworker to Jinbaogang at night and pulled out a fruit knife. Chen ran; her coworker did not get away. She had said little at first, afraid of being looked down on, and with police encouragement she told the whole story and agreed to help find him. Early in 1994 detectives arrested a man surnamed Gui whose build Chen thought matched, but his footprints did not match those from the scenes, and when another body was found on the hill while he was under watch, he was cleared. More bodies turned up around Jinbaogang through 1995.
The end came through an ordinary robbery. In 1996 a woman passing near Jinbaogang was stopped by a man who took her bankbook and demanded the PIN. She broke away, ran shouting for help, and went straight to the police, who reasoned that the robber would try to withdraw the money and staked out the banks. The man they caught was Li. His build reminded detectives of the suspect in the killings, and his footprints matched those left at several of the murder scenes. Arrested in November 1996, he admitted everything. "I don't regret it," he told police. "I hate them."
The Guangzhou Intermediate People's Court sentenced him to death on December 18, 1996, and he was executed the same day. Speed of that kind was not unusual in the period; what it foreclosed was any examination of cases attributed to him beyond those he confessed.
Two things have become attached to him that belong elsewhere or need qualifying. Guangzhou had a second series of killings of women running at the same time, in Haizhu district, and police examined whether the two were linked and concluded they were not: the Haizhu bodies were dismembered and scattered and bore the tire marks of a small truck, while the Jinbaogang victims were strangled and left close together on one hill. And although English wire reports of 1996 spelled his name Li Wenxian, Chinese sources write it Li Wenxiang, 李文香. English reporting also dates the series from 1991; Chinese accounts give 1992 to 1996.