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 an 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.
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 offences and that Duan had taken part in five. What the two of them took from twelve women was ten mobile telephones. In one case, at the end of September, 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 offence in the judgment.
The first was Zhang Ting, nineteen, from Hubei, who went to the agency on May 26, 2003 accompanied by her father, was taken away on the pretext of visiting a factory, and never came back. 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 the case was treated as a matter of serious concern. 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 labour and commerce authorities and its legal representative and general manager were detained.
Two corrections to this entry as it stood. It said that the case was documented nowhere accessible, with no victim list, no account of method and no trial record; the Chinese record contains all three. And it explained the length of the series by saying that Shenzhen was built of internal migrants without local household registration, so that the disappearance of a young woman from another province produced no report and no search. The sources say the opposite: reports were made, more than ten of them, and they are what drew the attention of the district police.