Ma Yong was 43 and came from Hengdong County in Hunan province. Duan Zhiqun was 20, from Pengxi County in Sichuan. Both were among the millions of people who had moved to Shenzhen, the boom city on the border with Hong Kong, and they met there at the end of 2001, according to China Youth Daily. On November 27, 2003, the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court convicted them both of robbery for a series of killings of young women who had come to a job agency in Buji, a town in the city's Longgang district, looking for work. Ma was found to have carried out all twelve; Duan took part in five. Both were sentenced to death.
The case drew attention far beyond Shenzhen. Ming Pao in Hong Kong called it the cruelest series of killings in the city's history, and the Taiwanese Central News Agency reported that it had alarmed the central government in Beijing. Time magazine reported on it from Shenzhen as part of a wider look at how China's police were coping with crime among a vast and mobile migrant population.
Shenzhen was declared one of China's first special economic zones in 1980. By 2003, Time reported, almost all of its roughly five million residents had arrived from other parts of the country within the previous ten years. Neighbors seldom knew one another, and fewer cared to. Across China about 120 million rural migrants were living in cities, and only a decade earlier internal travel had required official permission.
For a newcomer looking for work, the usual first stop was a labor market: a hall where job seekers paid about a dollar to get in and then moved among the booths of brokers and company recruiters. The young women in this case went to one such agency in Buji. The women who were killed had come to that agency looking for work, and most of them, the Central News Agency reported, had come to apply on their own.
Little is known of Ma's earlier life. The Central News Agency, citing the Guangdong Provincial Public Security Department, described Duan as his girlfriend. China Youth Daily reported that Ma rented a unit in Buji on March 25, 2003, and that Duan moved in around April, after which the two lived there together.
Time described Ma as an unregistered broker who had bribed his way into running a booth at the labor market. A neighbor from Sichuan, speaking to Time after the arrests, said he had thought Ma odd but had paid him little attention, because so many people came and went.
Between May 26 and October 2003, according to the court's findings as reported by China Youth Daily, Ma and Duan posed as employers at the Buji agency and killed young women who had come there looking for work. The court found that the women were strangled and that their mobile phones and handbags were taken.
China Youth Daily's summary of the judgment put the number of crimes at twelve for Ma and five in which Duan took part, and gave the property taken as ten mobile phones. Ma and Duan told investigators that they had sold the phones to pay their rent and living costs, and said that the money they had obtained from the twelve women was small, according to the Central News Agency report.
The first of the women, named by Time as Zhang Ping, was 19 and came from Hubei province. On May 26, 2003, she left the labor market with a broker. Her father had come to the market with her, and as she went he called out to her to keep her phone switched on. She did not answer it again.
By late September, Time reported, eleven more young women had disappeared from Buji. Their families reported them missing. The Central News Agency, relaying Ming Pao, said that the police did not take the reports seriously at first. The names of the other women were not published with the verdict.
The police drew up a list of missing women and circulated it to the labor markets, Time reported, but made little headway for months. The break came when a manager at the market told police that Ma, the unregistered broker, had bribed his way into a booth. In his briefcase was a resume belonging to one of the missing young women.
Local reporters said that police recovered the victims' shoes and other belongings and that Ma confessed, according to Time. The Guangdong Provincial Public Security Department said that police had found the missing women's identity documents and clothing and that both suspects had admitted the killings and robberies, the Central News Agency reported. Time added that one of the country's four main police forensic laboratories, which ran DNA tests for the big cities, was reported to have carried out the identifications of the Shenzhen victims.
Both Ma and Duan were arrested by the public security authorities in October 2003, China Youth Daily reported. Police seized the victims' SIM cards, clothing, handbags, wallets and shoes. Faced with the evidence, the paper said, both admitted the killings and robberies.
While the case was open, the police ordered Shenzhen's newspapers to stop reporting on the murders, according to Time. The magazine said the authorities were happy to announce solved cases but tried to keep unsolved ones out of the news, and it reported a similar restriction in Henan, where coverage of a series of missing boys had been limited until a suspect was caught.
Ma and Duan were tried together in Shenzhen on November 25, 2003, in a hearing that lasted six hours, according to the Central News Agency's report the next day. A working group from the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing attended the hearing, and the agency reported that the group was also examining whether the local police had been negligent in their handling of the missing-person reports.
In the afternoon of November 27, 2003, the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court gave its judgment. It convicted Ma Yong and Duan Zhiqun of robbery (抢劫罪) and sentenced each of them to death, with deprivation of political rights for life. It also ordered them to compensate the plaintiffs in the attached civil suit for their economic losses, China Youth Daily reported. The court found that the purpose of the crimes had been robbery.
The reports of the verdict did not say whether either defendant intended to appeal. As of the end of November 2003, both were under sentence of death.
Time placed the Shenzhen case alongside others that had come to light in China in the same autumn: a man held in Hebei on suspicion of killing 65 people in four provinces, and Huang Yong in Henan, accused of murdering 17 boys he was said to have met at internet cafes. Police had a name for killers who moved from region to region: "predatory transients." Such cases had been rare a decade earlier.
Violent crime had risen by 73 percent over five years, Time reported, as a police force used to close watch over fixed neighborhoods struggled with a population that was free to move. The Ministry of Public Security had built a national computer network to flag suspects, urban police had gained access to the registers of better hotels, and the ministry was introducing "community policing," moving officers out of large precinct stations into smaller neighborhood posts.
Ren Jiantao, head of the School of Government at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, told the magazine that society now had blind spots that had become "a heaven for killers," and that Shenzhen was only a few years ahead of the rest of the mainland.
The number of victims. The court's findings, as reported, covered twelve killings: all twelve by Ma, five of them with Duan's participation. Time, writing before the verdict, said police put the number at about a dozen.
The victims' names. Time named the first woman as Zhang Ping. The reports of the verdict did not list the victims by name.
Motive. Both defendants told investigators that the aim was money, and the court found that the crimes were committed for robbery. No sexual offense was part of the judgment as reported.
Police conduct. The families said their reports were not taken seriously at first, and a Ministry of Public Security working group was examining in November 2003 whether local police had been negligent. The outcome of that examination was not reported at the time of the trial.
1980: Shenzhen is made one of China's first special economic zones.
End of 2001: Ma Yong and Duan Zhiqun meet in Shenzhen.
March 25, 2003: Ma rents a unit in Buji, Shenzhen.
About April 2003: Duan moves in with him.
May 26, 2003: The first victim, a 19-year-old woman from Hubei named by Time as Zhang Ping, disappears after leaving the Buji labor market with a broker.
May to late September 2003: Eleven more young women disappear from Buji.
October 2003: Ma and Duan are arrested; both admit the killings and robberies.
November 25, 2003: Ma and Duan are tried together in Shenzhen in a six-hour hearing attended by a Ministry of Public Security working group.
November 27, 2003: The Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court convicts both of robbery and sentences both to death with deprivation of political rights for life.
December 1, 2003: Time publishes its report on the case and on the rise in killings among China's migrant population.