Chinese Court Sentences Gao Chengyong to Death for Killing 11 Women and Girls
A Baiyin court found the 53-year-old killed 11 female victims in Gansu and Inner Mongolia between 1988 and 2002. He said he would not appeal.
Published
Gao Chengyong said he would not appeal. On Friday, March 30, 2018, the Intermediate People's Court of Baiyin City, in China's northwestern Gansu province, sentenced the 53-year-old to death for murder, robbery, rape and the mutilation of corpses, after finding that he had killed 11 women and girls between May 1988 and February 2002. Gao confessed in court.
The court found that he had killed his victims to cover up robberies or rapes in Baiyin, in Gansu, and in Baotou, in the neighboring Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
Police hunted him for 28 years. What finally led them to Gao was not his own record but a relative's: in 2015 a member of his family committed a crime and underwent DNA testing, and that test led to Gao's arrest in August 2016.
What this story covers. It draws on the report of the sentence issued by China's state news agency, Xinhua, on March 30, 2018, which credits its photograph to the Baiyin court; the court's own announcement was not opened. The victims are not named in any source opened for this story. This was the first-instance sentence; Gao was executed in January 2019.