Police in Wuhan Arrest Duan Guocheng, Suspected "Red Dress" Killer of at Least 13 Women
Women in the city had stopped wearing red out of fear. The 28-year-old was found in a cheap guesthouse and was reported to have confessed within hours.
Published
For months, women in Wuhan had stopped wearing red, afraid of a knifeman said to choose victims by their clothes. On August 13, 2001, police arrested the man they blamed for at least 13 murders.
Chinese state media named the suspect as Duan Guocheng, 28, and said he was wanted for killing at least 13 women in central China between April 1999 and June 2001. Most of the women were in their twenties and were attacked at night on dark streets and in alleys. Nine of the killings were in his home area of Yueyang, in Hunan province, and the rest in Wuhan, the capital of neighboring Hubei. He was also suspected in as many as 70 armed robberies.
Police in Yueyang had come close to catching him months earlier. In February 2001, officers waited at his family's apartment, but Duan saw them from a window, fled through a vegetable market and escaped. Yueyang police told the family they suspected him of murdering nine women, and they sent a nationwide bulletin. In Wuhan he lived under an alias in cheap hotels, and the rumor spread that the killer picked out women dressed in red.
Wuhan police finally traced him to a military-run guesthouse, the 719 Aerospace Institute Inn, close to the station of Inspector Zhang Dehua. Zhang and two other officers found him in his room, and it took all three to hold him down. In a drawer they found bloodstained shorts and a pair of shoes that matched a footprint from the last murder. Duan was reported to have confessed to the killings, and to a series of robberies, within hours.
Police quoted by state media described him as a loner, a heavy drinker and a gambler. He had been sent to a juvenile corrections center at 13 and had served a prison term for robbery in the mid-1990s. His trial opened in Wuhan in December 2002.
Reports at the time of the arrest gave Duan's age as 28, while a 2003 Time profile described him as 29 when police first came for him in February 2001.