In November 2019, police in Xiamen, a coastal city in Fujian province, arrested a 45-year-old woman who sold watches in a shopping center. She had been living under another identity for two decades. Her real name was Lao Rongzhi, and she was 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 20 years earlier.
Lao was born in 1974 and worked as a primary school teacher. According to the South China Morning Post, she was 19 and teaching when she met Fa Ziying, and she soon quit her job. Fa had served eight years in prison for armed robbery.
Over about three years, from 1996 to 1999, the two committed a series of crimes in four provinces: Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui. According to the reports of her sentencing, Lao took jobs as a hostess in entertainment venues and picked out people who appeared to have money. Fa used the violence.
The best-documented case is the first. In 1996 in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi, Lao lured a man surnamed Xiong to an address. According to the Supreme People's Court, the two robbed and killed him and dismembered his body, then burgled his home and killed his wife and their young daughter. The South China Morning Post reported that they forced him to give them his address and took more than 200,000 yuan from the house. The court's account, as reported by the Malaysian news agency Bernama from Xinhua, gives the girl's age as two; the South China Morning Post gave it as three.
According to the South China Morning Post's 2019 account, the pair kidnapped and killed two women in 1997 and took their watches, phones and money.
The last case was in Hefei, the capital of Anhui, in 1999. The two held a man surnamed Yin captive in an apartment and demanded a ransom of 300,000 yuan. A carpenter who came to the apartment was killed there. When Fa went to collect the money, Yin's wife had already alerted the police, and Fa was wounded in the thigh in a shootout and arrested. Yin had been killed. Lao got away. The carpenter, his wife later told Caixin, had been supporting a family of six.
Another victim, named in reports of Lao's sentencing, was Lu Zhongming. His widow, Zhu Dahong, attended the court in 2021.
In all, seven people died, among them a small child.
Fa confessed to the kidnappings and the seven killings. According to the South China Morning Post, he refused at first to tell police anything about Lao and later gave them false information. 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. He was sentenced to death and executed in December 1999, aged 35.
Lao disappeared. For two decades she lived under assumed names and false identities. The arrest in Xiamen in November 2019 was part of Operation Cloud Sword, a national police campaign against fugitives and fraudsters; police did not say how they found her. She was taken to Nanchang and charged in August 2020 with intentional homicide, robbery and kidnapping.
Lao went on trial at the Nanchang Intermediate People's Court in December 2020, in a two-day hearing. Prosecutors said she was a major perpetrator and should be held responsible for the deaths.
She pleaded not guilty to murder. She said her part had stopped at kidnapping and robbery and that she had not known Fa would kill. "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 denied there had been any conspiracy, said Fa had used her when she was 21, and said he had beaten her and that she had thought about suicide. She wept and apologized to the victims' families and offered compensation. At trial, according to Caixin, she admitted the kidnapping and robbery charges but denied conspiring with Fa to kill. One victim's family sought more than 1.3 million yuan in damages.
On Thursday, September 9, 2021, the Nanchang court found her guilty of intentional homicide, robbery and kidnapping and sentenced her to death. It found that she had been involved in killing five of the seven people who died. It stripped her of political rights for life and ordered all her personal property confiscated. The court said her methods were particularly cruel and her offenses extremely serious, and that although she had confessed, she could not be shown leniency. She cried in court and said she would appeal. Zhu Dahong, Lu Zhongming's widow, said she felt relieved and planned to take her children to visit his grave.
The Jiangxi High People's Court heard the appeal in August 2022 and on November 30, 2022, upheld the convictions and the death sentence.
Under Chinese law, a death sentence cannot be carried out until the Supreme People's Court approves it. The top court did so, saying 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 Monday, December 18, 2023. She was 49.
Lao was convicted as a principal in all four crimes and held responsible for the deaths in them; the court found she was involved in five of the seven killings. Her claim that she was coerced was rejected at trial, on appeal and in the Supreme People's Court review. Fa Ziying's confession and conviction in 1999 covered all seven deaths. Most of the victims have not been named in English-language reports.