On the morning of July 18, 2003, the Shenyang Public Security Bureau told reporters that a case it had worked on for years was solved. The city police had filed it as "Serial Case No. 54" and the Liaoning provincial police as "Public Case No. 3." For three years couples had been found stabbed to death on the banks of Shenyang's canals and in its parks, the women raped and the bicycles they had ridden there gone. In a village near Kaiyuan, in the north of the province, a family of three had been killed in their beds. Four days earlier, detectives had arrested a twenty-eight-year-old man at the entrance to his mother's village. His name was Wang Qiang, and by the time he went to trial twenty months later, prosecutors had charged him with killing forty-five people.
The record of this case is thinner than its size. Chinese courts did not publish the judgment, the trial was closed to the public, and the police released one account after the arrest and said little afterward. What can be told comes from that police account, as printed by two Liaoning newspapers in July 2003; from a 2005 report in Sanlian Lifeweek built on interviews with Wang's court-appointed defense lawyer; and from wire and newspaper reports of the trial. The victims are known by surname only, as the Chinese police and press named them.
Wang Qiang's household registration was in Budayuan village, Budayuan town, Kuandian County, in the east of Liaoning, according to the police. He grew up in Kaiyuan, a county-level city in Tieling, in Xinghua village in Mazhai township, the Shenyang Evening News reported. His parents divorced when he was eight. His father gambled, often stayed out all night, and could not pull himself away from the card tables. The court gave custody of the boy to his father, and not long afterward the father was imprisoned for a crime of his own. After that, the paper said, no one looked after Wang Qiang. At nine he ran away.
He was small. His lawyer later put his height at 1.58 meters, about five feet two, and described him as thin. By the account police gave in 2003, he had twice been sent to labor reeducation, a form of detention imposed by the police without trial, once for pickpocketing and once for extortion. From 1992, they said, he had moved between Shenyang, Tieling and Shanghai.
He married and later divorced. In 2003 his mother and his four-year-old son were living in Yaobao village in Kaiyuan. People there told the Shenyang Evening News that he came rarely, and only in recent years, to see his mother. When he did, he helped with the farm work if there was any. They called him honest and steady, on good terms with everyone. "He was always such an honest, simple person," one villager said after the arrest. "How could he do something like this?"
The indictment that Zhang Shuhong of the Shenyang People's Procuratorate signed began with a killing on January 22, 1995, Sanlian Lifeweek reported. Wang told investigators that he had robbed and killed before 1995, but none of those earlier crimes could be confirmed, and none was charged.
According to the prosecution's materials, as Sanlian described them, Wang worked mostly in three places in Shenyang: Youth Park, Nanhu Park and the parks that line the city's South and North canals. Between 1995 and early 1996 he carried out three attacks in Youth Park, killing four people and wounding one, and in Nanhu Park he killed one person and seriously injured three. The names of those victims were not published.
In 1996 a girlfriend reported him to the police, and he was sent to labor reeducation for two years. Sanlian said that because of failures in information sharing within the police, his record was never thoroughly compared with the open killings. He was released on December 4, 1998, half a year early. That same night, by the indictment's account, he killed and raped again on the South Canal.
On September 17, 1999, he broke into a home and took 20,000 yuan, the one robbery in the case that brought him real money. For almost everything else, his lawyer said, the take was a few hundred yuan, sometimes a few dozen.
In 2000 the killings along the canals came close together.
On May 9, 2000, a young man and a young woman were found dead on the east bank of the South Canal, on Xiannongtan Road in Shenhe District. Police identified them as a man surnamed Wang, 20, and a woman surnamed Liu, 20, both workers who had come to Shenyang from elsewhere for jobs. Each had been stabbed once in the left side of the chest, through the heart. The woman had been raped. According to the Beijing News, as reported by AFP, it was after this attack that police first came to suspect the man who would later be identified as Wang Qiang.
In July he went north to Kaiyuan. On July 6 he got into a home in Kaiyuan town, the police said, killed a woman surnamed Yin and her son, robbed the house, and raped her. The police account gave no ages and nothing more about them.
Eighteen days later, on the night of July 24, he entered a house in Xutai village, in the Chengjiao township just outside Kaiyuan. It belonged to a bricklayer surnamed Zhao, 29, who lived there with his wife, surnamed Yang, 26. His wife's younger sister, also surnamed Yang, 19, was staying with them. All three were asleep on the kang, the heated brick platform used as a bed in northeast Chinese homes. They were found the next morning. Each had been struck on the head with a pickaxe. The house had been searched, and the nineteen-year-old had been raped. In a single month, the police said, Wang had killed five people in two attacks in Kaiyuan.
After his arrest, Wang described the Xutai killings to investigators in an offhand way, his lawyer, Li Changren, told Sanlian Lifeweek. He said he saw a family of three asleep on the kang and broke their skulls one by one with the pickaxe. When he found no money, he raped the girl, who was already dead. He threw the pickaxe down at the scene and stayed in Kaiyuan to see how the police would solve it. Li said Wang told this in a mocking tone: "In the end, for years, nobody came looking for me."
Two months later he was back on the canals in Shenyang. Early on September 19, 2000, a man and a woman were found dead on the west bank of the North Canal, on Linqing Lane off Desheng Road in Dadong District, outside the south wall of the boiler room of the Shenyang Institute of Instruments and Meters. The man, surnamed Li, was 57, out of work, and lived in Qinlao Lane No. 1 off Desheng Road. The woman, surnamed Liu, was 41 and lived on Gongnong Road in Dadong District. Both had been stabbed once in the left side of the chest and once in the left side of the neck, and both blows to the chest had reached the heart. Their pockets had been turned out. Liu had been raped. Her red 24-inch bicycle, a women's model with a slanted bar, was gone, and police believed the killer had ridden it away.
Investigators linked the canal attacks through the evidence left at the scenes and concluded that one man was responsible. In the police account, the description they built was specific. He was short, with a northern accent and deep vertical frown lines between the eyebrows, the kind Chinese descriptions call "chuan" lines after the character 川. He had little money. He was probably a drifter or a migrant worker who had come to Shenyang, and he probably moved around on a bicycle. He used a single-edged knife with a blade longer than ten centimeters. He went after couples courting along the canals, and in many of the cases he raped the woman after killing her.
The police mounted large patrols and stakeouts along the canals and in the parks, around the clock. The case did not move.
Early on October 17, 2002, a man and a woman were found dead in the botanical garden at the field training base of the forestry college of Shenyang Agricultural University, in Dongling District. Police identified them as a man surnamed Li, 52, who lived at Maguanqiao in Dongling District, and a woman surnamed Chen, 52, who lived in the Tianzhushan residential area. The Shenyang Evening News had reported the killings at the time. Li had been stabbed in the neck and the left side of the chest, Chen in the neck; the police account printed by the Northeast News Network also described wounds to her back. Both bled to death from cut arteries. Their pockets had been searched. Chen had been raped, and the bicycle she had ridden there, a purple-patterned 26-inch model with a slanted bar, was gone.
The Shenyang police designated the series "Serial Case No. 54" in 2002 and made it a priority.
In the first half of 2003, three more attacks involving rape, robbery and murder took place in Shenyang and Tieling. The crime science institute of the Liaoning Provincial Public Security Department compared DNA from semen recovered in those cases and found that one man had committed all three, the Shenyang Evening News reported. Investigators then joined those three cases to the series of the previous years and concluded it was the same person.
Because the attacker moved between cities and the harm was so serious, the provincial department listed the series as Liaoning's "Public Case No. 3." The designation came during the "Hundred-Day Battle," a provincial police campaign that year. Li Wenxi, the head of the provincial department, said the case had to be broken during the campaign. Liu He, Party secretary of the Shenyang Public Security Bureau, called repeated meetings on it, and the bureau put its executive deputy director, Zhang Qingming, and its deputy director for criminal investigation, Zhang Jianming, in charge.
The city police fought on what they called two fronts. On the first, they stepped up patrols and stakeouts in the city's ribbon parks and other places where attacks had happened, used plainclothes officers and surveillance, and searched systematically through neighborhoods where the man in the description might be living, starting with community police officers, "not missing a household in any area, not missing a person in any household."
The second front ran through the jails. The Shenyang public security bureau, procuratorate, courts and justice bureau had jointly issued a notice urging all offenders to surrender and to report other crimes. Officials from the city and district political-legal committees went into the detention centers to explain the policy to inmates and press them to confess and inform, a drive the police called the "confess and report" offensive.
The break came at the Dadong District detention center. A guard there, Liu Changkai, noticed that a newly admitted prisoner surnamed Zhao, held for robbing motorcycles, was restless and unsettled, and thought he was struggling with whether to talk. Liu reported this to the center's director, Li Yuefan, and began working with Zhao, explaining the policy and talking with him patiently over several sessions. On July 1, according to the police account printed by the Northeast News Network, Zhao said he wanted to report a man named Wang Qiang. The Shenyang Evening News gave the date as June 25.
Zhao described a man about thirty who had lived in Kaiyuan. He was not tall, Zhao said, but he was ruthless, and he had robbed people in parks many times. He usually carried a knife when he went out, rode a bicycle, and liked to wear a pair of yellow rubber-soled shoes. Zhao said he had once seen Wang holding a necklace with blood on it and an expensive watch, which Wang said he had taken in a robbery. On a rainy day in the summer of 2001, Wang had asked Zhao to go robbing with him around the city's second ring road, but the moment was not right and they did nothing. Afterward Wang gave him a lesson. When it rains, he said, go to the pavilions in the parks; it is easy there. The Shenyang Evening News gave his advice in fuller form: on rainy days, choose the parks or the canals, show the knife, and the couples will not dare resist.
The center's officers passed the information up to the Dadong public security branch. Its leaders concluded that the man Zhao described matched the suspect in Serial Case No. 54, and the branch's criminal investigation brigade was given the arrest.
On July 3, detectives from the Dadong brigade went to Kaiyuan and searched for Wang without finding him. On July 7 they went back with a more detailed plan and checked every place he might be staying. Again they found nothing. Back in Shenyang, they decided that because his mother lived in Kaiyuan, and Kaiyuan was his home, they would keep after it.
On July 14 they went a third time. Around midday, with help from the local police, they learned that Wang had turned up in Yaobao village, in Majiazhai township, where his mother lived. The Shenyang Evening News reported that a driver at the township police station had known Wang since childhood. The detectives judged that Wang had come to see his mother and was not expecting them, and that one Shenyang detective and two local auxiliary officers would be enough.
At about three in the afternoon the car reached the village entrance, where Wang was walking near the bridge. The driver recognized him at once. As the car drew level with him, the detective and the two auxiliaries jumped out and pinned him to the ground, and the detective held a pistol to his head. That is the police account. Sanlian Lifeweek, writing in 2005, said he was caught while fishing by the river at Yaobao village and named the town as Zhonggu. He was taken back to Shenyang that night.
Under questioning, the police said, Wang admitted to killings, rapes and robberies dating back to 1992. On July 15 a technical examination confirmed that he was the suspect in Serial Case No. 54. The police did not say what the examination was; the earlier cases had been linked by DNA. In the account they gave the Shenyang Evening News, Wang said he had at first committed crimes only now and then, and that after his divorce he came to hate society and all women.
His questioning went on for about a year and a half, Sanlian Lifeweek reported, and in that time he gradually told investigators about the major cases. Like Yang Xinhai, who killed sixty-five people in Henan, he remembered the details of attacks from years before, and after his arrest he led police to the scenes without a mistake. When he described a killing, his lawyer said, he took about twenty minutes to go from the attack to leaving the scene, and he was never in a hurry. "I have never run after killing someone," Wang told him.
In July 2003 the police said the investigation was continuing and the cases he had described were still being checked. They gave no total.
By the time the case reached court, prosecutors had settled on forty-five killings and ten rapes. AFP, citing the Beijing News, reported that he was charged with murdering forty-five people in thirty-four cases, raping ten of his victims and taking about 30,000 yuan in cash and goods. Sanlian, citing the indictment signed by Zhang Shuhong, said thirty-six crimes were confirmed, starting on January 22, 1995, and ending with his arrest on July 14, 2003, a span of eight years and six months.
Four other men were tried with him. The South China Morning Post said their names and charges were not made public. Wang said they had had nothing to do with the rapes or the killings and had only taken part in the robberies.
Li Changren, a lawyer, was appointed by the Shenyang Intermediate People's Court to defend Wang. He read thirty-seven thick volumes of case files before he went to the detention center to see his client. "I loathe him to the bone," Li told Sanlian, "but lawyers have a duty to provide legal aid." He tried, he said, to understand what was in Wang's mind. Wang answered him absently: "Once I've killed someone, the work is done and I'm off shift. I go home, eat what there is to eat, sleep when it's time to sleep."
What Li could not explain was the motive. The money was too small for robbery to account for it, he said. Wang's method, by the prosecution's description, was to attack the man first, suddenly, so that he could not resist, then rob the couple and rape the woman, even when she was already dead or badly hurt. Li connected that order of attack to Wang's size.
The trial opened at nine in the morning on March 23, 2005, before the Shenyang Intermediate People's Court. To protect the privacy of the victims, the court closed it to the public. Li was one of the few outsiders present.
Wang raised no objection to most of the indictment. He disputed two of the rapes. Li built his defense on what Wang had voluntarily confessed and contested those two charges, but the police produced DNA results to prove both. A psychiatric evaluation by the Shenyang Mental Health Center had found tendencies toward psychological abnormality, Li said, but it also found that Wang had been capable of controlling his conduct when he committed the crimes and was legally responsible. It would not, Li said, change the outcome on the death penalty.
At one point a relative of one of the victims, furious, jumped on Wang and hit him with his fists until court police pulled him away, the South China Morning Post reported, citing the Shenyang Evening News. The relative shouted that Wang deserved to be cut into pieces. The paper did not name the relative or the victim.
The trial had been set to last four days, according to Sanlian; the Post said it was due to run to the end of the week. Because Wang admitted almost all of the charges, it ended at about four in the afternoon of the same day, after roughly nine hours. The court said it would announce its verdict on a later date. Wang was thirty.
No court judgment, court announcement or press report of the verdict has been made public. The last press report of the trial, in the South China Morning Post, said a verdict was expected within days. Sanlian Lifeweek, published on April 7, 2005, two weeks after the trial, did not report a verdict. Its account of the psychiatric finding, in Li Changren's words, assumed that the court would impose death.
Accounts on Chinese content platforms published years later say he was sentenced to death in 2005 and executed by shooting the same year. They do not agree on the dates, and none cites a court record.
When the South China Morning Post reported the trial in March 2005, Wang Qiang had been tried for forty-five killings and ten rapes, had admitted the killings in court, and was waiting for a verdict. Whether he was sentenced to death, whether the Supreme People's Court approved a sentence, and whether and when he was executed have not been confirmed by any court record or press report.
The total. Forty-five is the number in the indictment, and it is the number Wang admitted at trial. Sanlian Lifeweek wrote that, according to the evidence, there were more tragedies behind that figure that would remain unsolved. Wang told investigators he had robbed and killed before 1995, and those claims were never verified or charged.
The number of cases. The Beijing News, as reported by AFP, said thirty-four cases; Sanlian, citing the indictment, said thirty-six. The difference may be in how attacks with several victims were counted, but no report explains it.
The span. The police in 2003 said he had been committing crimes since 1992, across eleven years. The indictment began in January 1995. Sanlian's lead paragraph says nine years, and its body says eight years and six months; AFP said eight years.
The tip date. The informant came forward on July 1, 2003, in the Northeast News Network's version of the police account, and on June 25 in the Shenyang Evening News version.
The arrest. The police said he was caught walking at the village entrance; Sanlian said he was fishing by the river.
The co-defendants. Four men were tried with him for the robberies. Their names, what each did and what happened to them were not reported.
The motive. The police said he told them he came to hate society and women after his divorce. His lawyer said the money explained nothing and that, in his words, Wang had become addicted to killing. Wang himself, by his lawyer's account, explained little.
The sentence and the execution. Popular online retellings say he was sentenced to death and shot in 2005, and they give different dates for both. Those accounts also add details of his childhood, his marriage and his last days that appear in none of the press or police reports and cannot be checked against them.
Of the forty-five people named in the indictment, eleven appear in the published police account: the two young migrant workers on the South Canal; the woman surnamed Yin and her son in Kaiyuan; the bricklayer Zhao, his wife and her nineteen-year-old sister in Xutai; Li and Liu on the North Canal; and Li and Chen, both fifty-two, in the university botanical garden. Most were people of modest means, riding bicycles to the canal banks and parks in the evening, or asleep at home. Nothing more about them was published. At least one of their families came to the trial. The others are known only through the counts in the indictment.
1975 (approximately): Wang Qiang born; he was 28 at his arrest in July 2003 and 30 at his trial in March 2005.
About age 8: parents divorce; custody to his father, who is later imprisoned. At 9 he runs away from Xinghua village, Kaiyuan.
1992: by his own account to police, begins committing crimes; moves between Shenyang, Tieling and Shanghai.
January 22, 1995: first killing in the indictment.
1995 to early 1996: three attacks in Youth Park, Shenyang (four killed, one wounded); one killed and three seriously injured in Nanhu Park.
1996: reported by his girlfriend; two years of labor reeducation.
December 4, 1998: released half a year early; kills and rapes on the South Canal that night, per the indictment.
September 17, 1999: home-invasion robbery, 20,000 yuan.
May 9, 2000: Wang, 20, and Liu, 20, killed on the South Canal, Shenhe District.
July 6, 2000: Yin and her son killed in Kaiyuan town.
Night of July 24, 2000: Zhao, 29, Yang, 26, and Yang, 19, killed in Xutai village, Kaiyuan; found July 25.
September 19, 2000: Li, 57, and Liu, 41, found killed on the North Canal, Dadong District.
2002: Shenyang police designate the series Serial Case No. 54.
October 17, 2002: Li, 52, and Chen, 52, found killed in the Shenyang Agricultural University botanical garden.
First half of 2003: three more attacks in Shenyang and Tieling linked by DNA; the province lists the series as Public Case No. 3 in the Hundred-Day Battle campaign.
June 25 or July 1, 2003: an inmate surnamed Zhao, held for motorcycle robbery, names Wang Qiang at the Dadong detention center.
July 3 and July 7, 2003: detectives search Kaiyuan without finding him.
July 14, 2003: arrested at Yaobao village, Kaiyuan; taken to Shenyang that night.
July 15, 2003: technical examination confirms him as the Case No. 54 suspect.
July 18-19, 2003: Shenyang police announce the arrest.
March 23, 2005: closed one-day trial at the Shenyang Intermediate People's Court on 45 killings and 10 rapes, with four co-defendants charged in the robberies; Wang admits all but two rapes; verdict deferred.
April 7, 2005: Sanlian Lifeweek report; no verdict reported.
Sentence and execution: not confirmed by any court record or press report.