Liu Mingwu was forty-two when he was arrested in 2002. He came from Dapo Laozu, in Tuanlong village, Wuluo town, in the Songtao Miao Autonomous County of Guizhou province.
The first killing was not part of the series. He had a quarrel with a village cadre at home in Guizhou and killed the cadre's son, then fled. From that point he lived as a vagrant and a beggar, moving through Jiangsu, Anhui, Shanghai and Henan.
While living that way he began killing other beggars. He stabbed or beat them, in some cases with bricks, while they slept rough, and then set the bodies alight. Asked afterwards why, he gave as one of his reasons that they were filthy. He said he did not himself know clearly how many he had killed.
The pattern accumulated across two provinces before anyone connected it. Between February and October 2001 at least fifteen beggars were killed by the same method in Xuzhou and Suqian in Jiangsu and in Si County in Anhui. Between November 2001 and March 21, 2002, at least six more were killed in Lu'an alone. Because the victims had nothing worth stealing and no common enemy, investigators reasoned that the killer was himself a beggar, and began working through the begging population; some officers went out dressed as beggars.
He was picked up on March 23, 2002, by patrolling officers on Meishan Middle Road in Lu'an, who noticed a middle-aged beggar in a leather coat squatting at a bus stop and looking around him. They searched him and found a bloodstained knife wrapped inside a newspaper. He first gave his name as Tan Renhong and said he was from Hunan.
Twenty-two counts of murder and wounding were treated as established on clear facts and conclusive evidence. The Jin'an public security sub-bureau closed its investigation on June 18, 2002 and sent the case to the district procuratorate, which forwarded it to the Lu'an municipal procuratorate on July 15. The Lu'an Intermediate People's Court heard the case in open court on August 28, 2002.
A judicial psychiatric report of June 25, 2002 by the Anhui provincial appraisal committee diagnosed a habit and impulse control disorder and assessed him as bearing full criminal responsibility.
The figures should be kept apart. He confessed to twenty-nine beggars killed, and one account puts it at thirty offences with twenty-nine dead and one gravely injured. The number the prosecution treated as evidentially secure was twenty-two. The outcome of the August 2002 trial is not in the sources this entry can reach.