Ma Yong was from Hunan and had a college diploma. He was forty-three. He met Duan Zhiqun, a woman from Sichuan in her early twenties with a primary school education, in Shenzhen at the end of 2001. On March 25, 2003 he rented a room on Daping Road in Buji, in the Longgang district of Shenzhen, and in April she moved in and lived there with him.
Between May 26 and October 2003 the two of them went repeatedly to the Senxinyuan employment agency in Buji and presented themselves as representatives of companies that were hiring. They picked out young women who had come alone, who were good-looking and who had little experience of the world, and invited them back to the rented room to look at the paperwork. When a woman bent over the papers on the table, Ma strangled her from behind. Duan told the court that Ma did most of the killing and the dismembering himself and that her part was helping to dispose of the bodies; she said that when a victim struggled hard she would step in to help hold her.
They then dragged the body into the bathroom and dismembered it with a fruit knife, a cleaver and an axe. To prevent the dead being identified they burned the hair and cut away or entirely removed the face with scissors or a blade. The parts were put into five or six black plastic bags and left in the waste ground around the Buji agricultural wholesale market and along the Buji river.
The court found that Ma had committed twelve such offenses and that Duan had taken part in five. What the two of them took from twelve women was ten mobile telephones. In the eleventh case, at the end of September, they lured a woman surnamed Tan from the agency to the room and killed her, and the only thing taken was an umbrella.
Before the trial it was widely said in Shenzhen that the pair were sexual sadists killing without motive. Asked in court what their motive had been, both said that it was money and nothing else. There is no sexual offense in the judgment.
The first was a nineteen-year-old from Hubei who went to the agency at about nine in the morning of May 26, 2003, for a second-round interview with five or six other young women, accompanied by her father. Within forty minutes he had lost contact with her. That afternoon he went to the company that was supposed to be hiring and was told it had never taken on any girl from Hubei; that evening he reported her missing at the Buji police station, and the agency could tell police only that fifty-six employers had been recruiting there that day. Her name is given in Chinese reporting as Zhang Ting and as Zhang Yun. Over the following months the Longgang district police received more than ten further reports of young women who had disappeared in the same way, and families began putting up missing-person notices around the agency. One of the dead was named as Jiang Hongmei.
Ma was arrested on October 12, 2003 and Duan on October 23. At their room police recovered most of the victims' SIM cards, along with clothing, handbags, wallets and shoes, and the axe and cleaver they had used.
Duan told police at first that fourteen women had been killed. Two bodies were never found, and the court's findings were confined to twelve for Ma and participation in five for Duan.
They were tried together on November 27, 2003 at the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court and both were convicted of robbery, sentenced to death and deprived of their political rights for life. Duan wept in court and said she had been coerced into taking part. Both appealed, the Guangdong High People's Court upheld the sentences, and both were executed on the morning of December 18, 2003, seven weeks after the arrests.
The employment agency was closed by the labor and commerce authorities and its legal representative and general manager were detained.