Between the morning of March 17 and the early hours of March 21, 2002, two dead beggars were found in the streets of Lu'an, in Anhui province, one on Jiefang Road and one on Renmin Road. Each had been killed with a knife or a brick and then set on fire. Police in Lu'an contacted their counterparts in Hefei, the provincial capital, where two similar killings of beggars had already been linked, and the scale of the thing began to show. At least six beggars had been killed in Lu'an alone between November 2001 and March 21, 2002. Between February and October 2001 at least fifteen more had died the same way in Xuzhou and Suqian in Jiangsu and in Si County in Anhui.
The victims had nothing worth stealing and no enemy in common, so investigators reasoned that the killer was himself a beggar and began working through the population of people who lived on the streets. Some officers went out disguised as beggars, dressed in rags and eating from garbage cans to make the disguise convincing. On March 23, 2002, a patrol on Meishan Middle Road in Lu'an 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 in a newspaper. He said his name was Tan Renhong and that he came from Hunan.
He was Liu Mingwu, forty-two, from Dapo Laozu, in Tuanlong village, Wuluo town, in the Songtao Miao Autonomous County of Guizhou. In 1992 he had quarreled with a village official over some small matter and killed the official's son, then run. For the next decade he lived as a vagrant and beggar under the name Tan Renhong, moving through Jiangsu, Anhui, Shanghai and Henan.
He admitted killing the beggars and could remember, roughly, where and how. "I can't remember the details," he told investigators. "I killed a few in Hefei, a few in Lu'an, and I think I went to Jiangsu and Shanghai. Mainly Anhui." Asked why, he gave various reasons, one of them that the beggars were "very dirty." He did not himself know how many he had killed; in one account he confessed to twenty-nine. Investigators established twenty-three offenses as proved on clear facts and conclusive evidence: twenty-two people killed and one who survived.
The Jin'an public security sub-bureau closed its investigation on June 18, 2002, and passed the case to the district procuratorate, which forwarded it to the Lu'an municipal procuratorate on July 15. On June 25 a forensic psychiatric panel of the Anhui provincial appraisal committee diagnosed a habit and impulse control disorder and found him fully criminally responsible. Although he had confessed after his arrest, the court held that this did not amount to voluntary surrender, and it found no sign of remorse.
The Lu'an Intermediate People's Court heard the case in open court on August 28, 2002, with the city procuratorate prosecuting him for intentional homicide, and sentenced him to death with deprivation of political rights for life. Chinese accounts of the case describe the sentence as carried out, but none gives the date of an execution. None of the beggars he killed has been named in any published account.