On November 28, 2019, police in Xiamen, a coastal city in Fujian province, walked up to a watch counter in a shopping plaza and detained the woman minding it. She told them she was Hong Yejiao, from Nanjing, an orphan who had never known her parents or her hometown. A DNA test said otherwise. The next evening she admitted her real name: Lao Rongzhi. She was 44, and for 20 years she had been wanted for her part in a run of robberies, kidnappings and killings that left seven people dead in the late 1990s. Her partner in those crimes, Fa Ziying, had been executed two decades earlier.
Lao Rongzhi was born on December 25, 1974, in Jiujiang, a city on the Yangtze in northern Jiangxi province. According to her second-oldest brother, Lao Shengqiao, her middle-school exam scores were good enough for Jiujiang's best high school, but on his advice she chose a teacher-training school instead, because at the time it guaranteed a job. He took her there on the first day on his bicycle, with her bedding, a washbasin and a plastic bucket on the back. She entered in 1989, finished in 1992 and was assigned to teach Chinese at a primary school run for the children of employees of the Jiujiang petrochemical company. The pay, two or three hundred yuan a month, was considered good.
At 19, by her brother's account, she went to the wedding of the vice principal's son and met Fa Ziying there. He was 29 and married, and he had served about eight years in prison for armed robbery; her brother later claimed his record went back to his teens. After the banquet Fa offered to walk her home, and she let him go only as far as the corner. Little else is known about how the relationship developed. In 1996 Fa was wanted by local police after stabbing a man with a fish spear in a brawl, and Lao, then about 22, applied for unpaid leave from her school, telling her family she was going into business. They could not stop her. She left Jiujiang with Fa. Once their savings ran out, according to her brother, Fa would not let her look for proper work with her qualifications and insisted she work as a hostess in nightclubs.
The couple went first to Nanchang, the provincial capital. Lao used a stolen identity card in the name of Chen Jia to get work as a hostess. According to the prosecution, they had agreed that she would use the job to find a target with money, and in a karaoke venue she found a businessman surnamed Xiong, who was 35 according to Fa's 1999 judgment and 37 according to hers. Fa followed Xiong home to learn where he lived.
On July 28, 1996, Lao telephoned Xiong and lured him to the room she rented. Fa held a knife to his throat. In a statement read out at her trial, Lao described how she then tied his ankles and wrists. They took his gold necklace and his house keys and forced him to tell them his address. Fa strangled him and dismembered his body. That night the two went to Xiong's home. The Supreme People's Court later found that Lao first tried the stolen key in the door to check the house. Fa held Xiong's wife, surnamed Zhang, at knifepoint and tied her while Lao searched the rooms and took gold and silver jewelry, cash and bonds. In the early hours of July 29, Fa strangled Zhang and the couple's young daughter. The South China Morning Post reported that the two took more than 200,000 yuan from the house. The court's own figure for the robbery was more than 30,000 yuan.
Prosecutors told the court that during the investigation Lao had said four times that she proposed burning the house down, to destroy fingerprints, regardless of whether the mother and child were alive; Fa stopped her, by her account. In 1999 the Hefei court found that Fa had carried parts of Xiong's body to the house to mislead investigators. Nanchang police opened a case on July 29, 1996, and on August 18 issued wanted notices for Fa Ziying and Lao Rongzhi. From that moment they were known suspects.
For the next three years they kept moving. Reports compiled from the court records list Wenzhou, Huangyan (now part of Taizhou), Nanjing, Guangzhou, Macao, Beijing, Hangzhou and Hefei, with stays of about ten days in each. Before every crime, Lao later told investigators, they studied their escape route and chose meeting points from which they could leave town at once.
In the autumn of 1997 they were in Wenzhou, in Zhejiang province, where Lao again worked as a hostess at a karaoke venue. A 22-year-old woman surnamed Liang, whom she knew from work, mentioned that she wanted to sublet her apartment. Fa decided to rob her. On October 10, Lao and Fa went to the apartment on the pretext of renting it. Fa threatened Liang with a knife, and Lao, by her own statement, tied her with belts, wire and rope found in the room. They then forced Liang to call a friend, a 27-year-old woman surnamed Liu, and Lao let her in and helped tie her as well. Lao took Liang's bankbook to a bank and withdrew money. A teller asked why the account holder had not come in person, and Lao replied calmly that she was busy and signed Liang's name. She then called Fa to tell him the money was in hand, the agreed signal. Fa strangled both women. Prosecutors argued that the call was one of the causes of their deaths. The South China Morning Post's early account said the pair took the women's watches, phones and money.
In the summer of 1998, in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, Lao met a man surnamed Liu at a karaoke hall and drew him to her rented room. Fa was waiting behind the door with a knife and cut Liu's chest. Lao tied him to an armchair with wire she had brought; the two worked, he said later, in silence and in perfect coordination. While Fa was out, Lao stood behind him with a knife at his neck and threatened to kill him if he moved. They found no money on him, so the next morning they made him call his wife and ask her to bring cash. Lao went out to meet her and brought her back to the room, where she handed over 70,000 yuan and was tied up in turn.
According to the court that tried Lao, the two had agreed that if Lao did not return within an hour, Fa would kill Liu. After the money was taken, Fa wanted to kill him anyway. Lao pleaded with him, and Fa, pointing at Liu, said three times that he owed his life to his wife. Then they left. Liu and his wife escaped. Liu is the only known survivor of the couple's crimes, and more than 20 years later, he told the court, he still carried scars from the wire. Fa had described the Changzhou crime after his arrest, but there was not enough evidence to charge it in 1999. It was charged for the first time against Lao.
In June 1999 they moved to Hefei, the capital of Anhui province, and rented an apartment. They prepared more carefully than before. Fa had a steel cage made, telling the workshop it was for a dog. Lao bought a used freezer at a secondhand market. Working at a dance hall under the name Shen Lingqiu, she picked out a 35-year-old man surnamed Yin who seemed to spend freely. On July 22 she called him and invited him to the apartment. Fa forced him at knifepoint into the cage.
To convince Yin that they would kill him, Fa then lured a 35-year-old carpenter, Lu Zhongming, to the apartment with the promise of a job, killed him and dismembered his body. The carpenter's body was put in the freezer. Yin was made to write notes to his wife asking her to bring money, and the court found that Lao added a line threatening that he would die faster than "that other man." Fa tried to collect the ransom that evening without success. On the morning of July 23, Yin was strangled. Fa told investigators he had instructed Lao more than once to kill Yin with wire if he resisted or if Fa did not return on time; Fa's lawyer later said Fa had not known how many people died in the apartment. The courts held Lao responsible for Yin's death.
That morning Fa went to Yin's home with a homemade pistol and a note. Yin's wife told him she needed time to gather the money and asked him to wait; meanwhile a colleague alerted the police. Officers surrounded the building and arrested Fa on the spot. The South China Morning Post reported that he was shot in the thigh in an exchange of fire. According to the Post, the demand was 300,000 yuan; the 1999 judgment, as reported in China, recorded a demand of 10,000 yuan that morning. Five days after Fa's arrest, police found the two bodies in the rented apartment. Lao was gone.
Lu Zhongming left three young children. His daughter, who was three at the time, later recalled in a video that her father told the family he was going away to work for half a month, and that her brother ran to the door to ask him to bring back something good to eat. His wife, Zhu Dahong, did not learn he was dead until about a month later. Caixin reported that he had been supporting a family of six. After his death, his daughter said, their mud-brick house collapsed and the family lived like beggars, staying with relatives, until around 2003, when her mother borrowed money to rebuild in brick. Zhu raised the three children alone and later worked as a cleaner.
Fa went on trial at the Hefei Intermediate People's Court on November 18, 1999, and was sentenced to death. His judgment covered three crimes and seven deaths: three in Nanchang, two in Wenzhou and two in Hefei. According to the South China Morning Post, he at first refused to tell police anything about Lao and later gave them false information. Chinese reports say that during his trial he spoke up for her seven times. His lawyer, Yu Xi, said his refusal to cooperate "provided time for Lao to escape." The Post reported that Fa said the only time he felt he was "committing a sin" was when he killed the little girl in Nanchang. He was executed on December 28, 1999, at the age of 35.
Lao went from Hefei to Wuhan, then to Henan province, then to Chongqing, and reached Xiamen around 2000, she later said. She told investigators that she had plastic surgery to change her appearance. Xiamen police said she lived on part-time and casual work in bars, karaoke clubs and similar venues. Witnesses cited in her judgment said she lived largely on money from men who supported her.
In mid-2016 she worked at a bar in Xiamen's Siming District, keeping customers company and earning a commission of about 10,000 yuan a month. She was the only member of staff to use an English name, Sherry. Former colleagues remembered her as gentle, hardworking and careful about her appearance. She left in early 2017, worked for a time at a car dealership, and later began helping her boyfriend at his watch counter in a Xiamen shopping center. She dressed well, played piano, painted, took violin lessons and kept two dogs. In court she said she had often gone to church while she was on the run.
In June 2019 the Ministry of Public Security launched Operation Cloud Sword, a national campaign that used technology and data analysis to track down fugitives. Security cameras in a Xiamen mall photographed a woman. On November 27, data analysis by the Siming District police found that one image matched the wanted fugitive Lao Rongzhi with a similarity of 97.33 percent. Two police teams set to work. The next day, November 28, officers detained her at the watch counter in a shopping plaza in Huli District, where her boyfriend had asked her to mind the stall for a few days. Shown a photo on an officer's phone, she agreed to go with them. She gave a false name and story until the evening of November 29.
On December 5, 2019, Xiamen police handed her to their colleagues in Nanchang, who set up a special team to interrogate her. Prosecutors in Nanchang approved her formal arrest on December 17. Over seven months, investigators questioned her 48 times. On August 31, 2020, the Nanchang People's Procuratorate indicted her for intentional homicide, kidnapping and robbery.
The trial, delayed by the pandemic, took place at the Nanchang Intermediate People's Court on December 21 and 22, 2020, over more than 15 hours. Prosecutors said she and Fa had planned every crime together with a clear division of labor, and that she was a principal offender who should answer for all the deaths. They relied on her own statements, Fa's 1999 statements, witness testimony and physical evidence from the original investigations. Her defense lawyers, both assigned by legal aid, did not contest the robbery and kidnapping facts but argued that the evidence did not prove she had killed anyone. No biological evidence pointed directly to her as a killer, and some original exhibits had been lost over the years; the court explained that the original files had been kept at the Hefei court and copied.
Lao told the court she did not accept the charges. "I was coerced by Fa and couldn't break up for fear that he would retaliate against my family," she said, according to the South China Morning Post, citing Procuratorial Daily. She admitted the robbery and kidnapping in Changzhou and Hefei but said she had only gone along because she could not escape him. She said she had never in her life killed so much as a chicken or a duck. She told the court, according to Beijing Youth Daily as reported by CNN, that Fa's methods were very cruel and that during their relationship she suffered physical and mental abuse and two miscarriages. She said she had lived in fear for 20 years and could finally sleep peacefully. She wept and apologized to the victims' families. "You can say I am not outstanding, but you cannot say I am not kind," she said.
Zhu Dahong, the carpenter's widow, attended. She said it was hard to accept such an apology: "The pain we suffered in the past two decades cannot be brushed away by an apology." She sought about 1.34 million yuan in damages for funeral and living costs.
On September 9, 2021, the Nanchang court found Lao guilty of intentional homicide, robbery and kidnapping and sentenced her to death, stripped her of political rights for life and ordered all her personal property confiscated. It found that she had been a principal offender who played a major role and should be punished for all the crimes she took part in. It held her responsible for five deaths by intentional homicide, one death in the course of robbery and one in the course of kidnapping, with more than 70,000 yuan extorted. It rejected her claim of coercion. Her truthful account of the Changzhou kidnapping counted as a confession, but the court said it was not enough to justify leniency, given methods it called particularly cruel and crimes extremely serious.
In the Nanchang case, the court accepted her own account that she had entered the house, not Fa's 1999 claim that she had stayed outside, and found that she knew or should have known that the wife and child might be killed. In Hefei it found that she bought the freezer knowing Fa meant to kill, helped move it with the carpenter's body inside, and wrote threats on the ransom note.
When the death sentence was read, Lao, dressed in white, began to cry. She said she would appeal, that what she had done was not her true intention and did not fit her character as a former teacher, and that her mind was too confused to say more. The court awarded Zhu Dahong about 48,000 yuan, much less than she had asked for; she said she was satisfied with the death sentence and would not appeal, and that she planned to take her children to visit her husband's grave.
Lao's family hired new lawyers for the appeal, which the Jiangxi High People's Court heard from August 18 to 20, 2022. Her brother, Lao Shengqiao, who said he had written her more than 20 letters that were all returned, was allowed to follow the hearing only by video. He told reporters that she was "pitiable," that Fa had been violent since boyhood, and that her sentence did not square with Fa's. He pointed to discrepancies between the two judgments: different months for their arrival in Nanchang, different ages for Xiong, and a different account of who first decided Liang in Wenzhou was worth robbing. He also questioned how the Changzhou crime, never charged against Fa, could be charged against her.
In court Lao challenged the court's jurisdiction, which was rejected, and withdrew most of her earlier statements. She admitted robbery and theft in Nanchang but denied planning a kidnapping or a killing. She said that in Wenzhou she had only discussed the apartment. She said she first learned that Fa killed people when she saw the carpenter's body in Hefei, and she denied buying the freezer. She admitted tying Liu in Changzhou and hitting his chest with pliers. Her answers to prosecutors were combative. Asked whether she and Fa had lived together in Chongqing, she replied, "If we didn't live together, would we rent two apartments?" She described herself as naive and a person with a conscience. The Changzhou survivor declined to testify, citing his privacy.
On November 30, 2022, the court rejected the appeal and upheld the convictions and death sentence, sending the case to the Supreme People's Court for review.
Under Chinese law, a death sentence cannot be carried out until the Supreme People's Court approves it. On March 22, 2023, judges of the top court heard her review lawyers in person, and the lawyers submitted 282 pages of arguments against approval. The court questioned Lao herself. It approved the sentence, finding that she and Fa had planned their crimes carefully, divided the work and cooperated, and that she had been active throughout. It said her crimes showed "extreme brutality and malice" and had caused severe consequences, and that the verdicts at both levels rested on sufficient evidence and lawful procedure.
Lao Rongzhi was executed in Nanchang on the morning of Monday, December 18, 2023, under the supervision of the Nanchang procuratorate. She was 48. The court said she had been allowed to meet her close relatives beforehand and had expressed her apologies to the victims' families. Told the news by a reporter, Zhu Dahong said it was a long-awaited answer for the dead. Her lawyer said the civil damages had still not been paid; Lao's brother said they had been. One of Lao's lawyers, Liu Changsong, said he respected the court's decision.
Lao's central claim, that she acted under Fa's coercion and never meant anyone to die, was rejected at trial, on appeal and in the Supreme People's Court review. The courts relied heavily on statements she made after her arrest, which she later retracted, and on Fa's 1999 statements, which in places differ from hers; the Nanchang court chose her version where it found her account more consistent. Her family argued that a woman who had been controlled by a violent man did not deserve to die, and that the evidence was thin after 20 years, with exhibits lost. None of that changed the outcome.
Several details differ from source to source. The Nanchang child was two according to the Supreme People's Court and three according to other court accounts and the South China Morning Post. The sum taken from the Xiong house is given as more than 200,000 yuan by the Post and about 30,000 yuan by the courts. The Post's account of Fa being shot in the thigh is not repeated in the Chinese court summaries, which say only that he was caught on the spot. Her arrest is dated November 28, 2019, by the court and November 27 by some reports, the day the camera match was made.
December 25, 1974: Lao Rongzhi born in Jiujiang, Jiangxi.
1989 to 1992: Teacher-training school; assigned to a primary school in Jiujiang.
Around 1993 to 1994: Meets Fa Ziying, a married man with a robbery record.
1996: Leaves her job and Jiujiang with Fa.
July 28 to 29, 1996: Xiong, his wife and their daughter killed in Nanchang.
August 18, 1996: Nanchang police issue wanted notices for Fa and Lao.
October 10, 1997: Two women, Liang and Liu, killed in Wenzhou.
Summer 1998: Liu kidnapped for ransom in Changzhou; he survives.
July 22 to 23, 1999: Yin and carpenter Lu Zhongming killed in Hefei; Fa arrested at Yin's home; Lao escapes.
November 18, 1999: Fa sentenced to death in Hefei.
December 28, 1999: Fa Ziying executed.
Around 2000: Lao settles in Xiamen under false names.
November 28, 2019: Lao arrested in Xiamen.
August 31, 2020: Indicted in Nanchang.
December 21 to 22, 2020: Trial at the Nanchang Intermediate People's Court.
September 9, 2021: Sentenced to death.
August 18 to 20, 2022: Appeal hearing; rejected November 30, 2022.
December 18, 2023: Executed in Nanchang.