Reuters, reporting on one Beijing case in 2004, wrote that the Communist state had long seen itself as largely free of the mass violence of the West, and that the country’s media, "sensationalist but still self-censoring," tended not to play up serial cases. The record is thin, mostly official, and often in pieces: a court notice here, a wire story there, a retrospective written twenty years later by a newspaper in another city.
Ten cases can be set out from outlets that printed names, dates and verdicts. They run from a taxi driver’s trial in Hong Kong in 1983 to an execution in Inner Mongolia in 2019. Nine come from the mainland, most of them reported in 2003 and 2004, and one comes from Hong Kong, which tried its case under its own legal system and its own rules. For each one, what a court held is kept apart from what a newspaper, a police statement or a defendant said, because the two are not always the same thing.
In January 2003 Time magazine’s correspondent Matthew Forney wrote about a kind of crime Chinese police were meeting more and more often at the turn of the century. He used cases from Beijing, Wuhan, Jilin and Henan. Under Mao, he wrote, neighborhood committees and work units watched people so closely that there was little room for serious crime. By the early 2000s those controls had loosened, and tens of millions of people were moving from the countryside to the cities in search of work. For the first time, many people could live as strangers among strangers.
Wang Dazhong, a criminal investigator who trained police at the Chinese People’s Public Security University in Beijing, put it more bluntly: "We’ve reached the age of serial killing in China."
Forney added that Chinese police, who solved most ordinary murders, were less prepared for serial cases. Local forces did not always share information with one another, and news of killings was often kept out of the press, so the public was not warned. A second Time piece, published in December 2003, gave a number to the change. Violent crime had risen by 73 percent over five years, the magazine reported, as a police force used to close watch over fixed neighborhoods struggled with a population free to move. Police had a name for killers who traveled from region to region: "predatory transients." Such cases had been rare a decade earlier.
The cases that follow are arranged by region, not by date, beginning in the capital.
Hua Ruizhuo, aged 28 in November 2001, came from Shuangcheng in Heilongjiang Province and drove a cement-mixer truck for a Beijing construction company. In July 2001 he confessed to prosecutors that he had killed 14 women in Beijing’s Chaoyang district, on the city’s east side, between July 1998 and June 2001. He told them he had acted alone.
The fullest account of the case appeared in the newspaper Life Times as his trial opened, and China News Service reprinted it on November 22, 2001. Except for Hua and the officials who handled the case, the report gave every person a pseudonym.
By his own account, the first killing came in July 1998, months before his marriage. He said that when he looked at the woman’s face he saw the face of a former girlfriend, the relationship of 1994 and 1995 that he gave investigators as the root of what he did. When the first death went unnoticed, he said, the urge came back, and each time he returned to the same part of Chaoyang to look for another woman. Asked by a prosecutor why he had killed so many, he spoke of the girlfriend, of the quarrel and of losing her.
Over the three years that followed, deaths of women came to light in Chaoyang at intervals of months. Life Times listed the cases that police later connected to him:
• September 21, 1998: a woman’s death came to light at Dongba, in Chaoyang district. She was not identified.
• July 31, 1999: a 22-year-old woman from Heilongjiang. She was one of only two victims who were identified.
• September 4, 2000: an unidentified woman.
• December 19, 2000: another unidentified woman.
• April 12, 2001: an unidentified woman, again at Dongba.
• May 14, 2001: another unidentified woman.
The second identified victim was a woman of 33 from Hebei, whose death in June 2001 led directly to the arrest. Only two of the 14 women had names by the time of the trial. Officials quoted by Life Times gave three reasons. Most of the women had come to Beijing from other provinces, and their families could not be traced. The way they earned a living meant that the people around them often did not know their real names. And many of the deaths had come to light long after they occurred, which made identification hard. Because the women had no names, their families could not be told.
Detectives from the Chaoyang branch of the Beijing Public Security Bureau arrested Hua at about 4 p.m. on July 16, 2001, in Beijing. Life Times reported that after a short exchange he began to describe the killings, starting with the woman in July 1998. The arrest, according to Time, followed the death of the woman from Hebei, the recollection of a night guard who remembered a white cement truck, and what Hua’s workmates told police.
The prosecutor in charge of the case was the head of the prosecution division of the Second Branch of the Beijing People’s Procuratorate. He told Life Times that in more than 20 years as a prosecutor he had not handled an intentional homicide case with so many victims, and he called for severe and swift punishment, with no leniency.
The Second Branch brought the case before the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court, and the trial opened on the morning of November 20, 2001. Life Times, writing as the hearing began, said Hua would face the full force of the law. It did not report a verdict, and none has been reported since. What Time reported, in its issue of January 27, 2003, was the end: Hua had been executed the previous year for killing 14 women. The exact date was not given. The date of the verdict, what he or his defense said in court, and whether any of the other twelve women were ever identified are all unreported.
Time and Life Times differ on where Hua met the women and on where they were located, and Time described other conduct toward the women that the Life Times report does not mention. Life Times was the report closest to the trial.
Li Pingping (李平苹) drove a taxi for a company in Beijing. He was 44 when the Beijing Municipal No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court sentenced him to death, and the state news agency Xinhua reported the sentence on Tuesday, March 2, 2004, saying the court had passed it that day. The charge, as Xinhua summarized the judgment, was the killing of seven people. Four of them were young women whose deaths came to light in Beijing between November 2002 and April 2003. The other three were a former employer, Song Shutian, and Song’s wife and daughter, killed in 1995. The girl was 12, according to Reuters. Radio Free Asia’s Mandarin service said the series, known in Chinese as the "六一五" (6-15) case, had caused a stir in Beijing.
Li had a record. In May 1980 he was placed under one year of surveillance, and in December 1985 he was jailed for six months for theft, Xinhua said. He had worked for a food company run by Song, who dismissed him; Reuters, relaying Xinhua, wrote that he had been sacked. Xinhua’s report of the sentence also said that in the same year, 1995, he was accused of setting fire to the house of a wealthy person. It did not name the owner or say how the court ruled on the accusation. How investigators came to connect Li with the 1995 killings was not reported.
Beijing police arrested him in June 2003, Xinhua said. His explanation for the four deaths of 2002 and 2003 was financial. Radio Free Asia reported that he said the women earned money more easily than he did driving a taxi; Reuters, citing Xinhua, put it as a belief that the women "made money more easily than taxi drivers." Summing up all his crimes, Li attributed them, according to Xinhua, to "discontent against society."
His wife, Dong Meirong, was tried with him. The same court sentenced her to 15 years in prison. Xinhua said she was convicted of helping her husband and of harboring stolen money. Radio Free Asia named the offense as intentional homicide. Reuters wrote that she was jailed for helping in the murders and keeping stolen money. Her age, her background and which killings she was held to have taken part in were not reported.
On Wednesday, June 16, 2004, Reuters, citing Xinhua, and Radio Free Asia both reported that Li had been executed on the Tuesday. Neither the date in figures nor the place was given.
Accounts differ on one point. Xinhua and Radio Free Asia place the killing of the Song family in 1995 and the four women in 2002 and 2003. The Reuters report of the execution says all seven deaths came between November 2002 and April 2003, while also describing the killing of the former employer and his family as a separate matter. Xinhua and Radio Free Asia agree with each other.
Reuters set the case beside two others: a man executed in February 2004 who had killed 67 people over four years, and a migrant worker put to death in December 2003 who had killed at least 17 teenage boys. Radio Free Asia quoted an unnamed worker at a psychological counseling center in Shandong province, who said Li clearly had serious psychological problems and attributed the recurrence of such cases to rapid change in Chinese society. A former reporter for Xi’an television, 马晓明, told the station that more and more people in China had psychological disorders but often had nowhere to turn for help.
In December 2003 the Wenzhou Intermediate People’s Court, in Zhejiang Province, sentenced Chen Yongfeng to death for killing ten people in the city between February and May of that year. He was 20. The people he killed worked in the same trade he did, making a living from rubbish and scrap, and the court held that he had robbed them. Chinese state media reported the sentence, and it was carried abroad by Agence France-Presse and the Taipei Times.
The Taipei Times, summarizing Chinese reports, described Chen as a rubbish recycler who made his living picking through waste and selling whatever could be recovered. It called his victims his competitors. The AFP report, carried by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, called them co-workers in garbage collection. How the ten died was not reported, and none was named. The motive was money: AFP, citing the Beijing Star Daily, reported that Chen took a total of 10,032 yuan from the ten.
He was caught by chance. According to the Beijing Evening News, as summarized by the Taipei Times, police called at his door in May 2003 to ask him to move an old bicycle, and the visit ended in his arrest.
The China News Service report summarized by the Taipei Times on December 10, 2003, said he had been sentenced "on Monday." ABC News, on December 15, also said state media had reported the sentence "on Monday." The exact date of judgment is unclear. A civil claim was heard alongside the criminal case, and AFP, citing the Beijing Star Daily, reported that Chen was ordered to pay the victims' relatives funeral expenses of about nine times the money he had taken. The Taipei Times paired his case with the death sentence passed the same week in Henan Province on Huang Yong. It reported on December 10 that Chen planned to appeal. The outcome was not reported that month, and what became of him afterward has not been reported. His name is spelled Chen Yong-feng in the Taipei Times and Chen Yongfeng by ABC.
Ma Yong was 43 and came from Hengdong County in Hunan Province. Duan Zhiqun was 20, from Pengxi County in Sichuan. Both were among the millions who had moved to Shenzhen, the boom city on the border with Hong Kong, and they met there at the end of 2001, according to China Youth Daily. On November 27, 2003, the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court convicted them both of robbery for a series of killings of young women who had come to Buji, a town in the city’s Longgang district, looking for work. Ma was held responsible for all twelve; Duan took part in five. Both were sentenced to death.
The case drew attention far beyond Shenzhen. Ming Pao in Hong Kong called it the cruelest series of killings in the city’s history, and the Central News Agency of Taiwan, relaying Ming Pao and the Guangdong Provincial Public Security Department, reported that it had alarmed the central government in Beijing.
Time described Ma as an unregistered broker who had bribed his way into running a booth at the labor market. A neighbor from Sichuan, speaking to Time after the arrests, said he had thought Ma odd but had paid him little attention, because so many people came and went.
Between May 26 and October 2003, according to the judgment as reported by China Youth Daily, the two men killed young women who had come to Buji for work. The court’s summary put the number of crimes at twelve for Ma and five in which Duan took part, and gave the property taken as ten mobile phones along with handbags. The two told investigators they had sold the phones to pay their rent and living costs, and said the money they had obtained from the twelve women was small.
Time named the first of the women as Zhang Ping, 19, from Hubei Province. By late September, Time reported, eleven more young women from Buji had been reported missing by their families, and the Central News Agency, relaying Ming Pao, said police did not take the reports seriously at first. Time wrote that police drew up a list of the missing and circulated it to the labor markets but made little headway for months. The break came when a manager at the market told police about the unregistered broker. Both men were arrested by the public security authorities in October 2003, China Youth Daily reported. Faced with the evidence, the paper said, both admitted the killings and robberies.
While the case was open, Time said, police ordered Shenzhen’s newspapers to stop reporting on it. The magazine wrote that the authorities were happy to announce solved cases but tried to keep unsolved ones out of the news, and it reported a similar restriction in Henan, where coverage of a series of missing boys was limited until a suspect was caught.
Ma and Duan were tried together on November 25, 2003, in a hearing that lasted six hours, according to the Central News Agency. A working group from the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing attended and was also examining whether local police had been negligent. On the afternoon of November 27 the court gave its judgment: robbery, death, and deprivation of political rights for life for each man, with an order to compensate the plaintiffs in the attached civil suit. The court held that the purpose of the crimes had been robbery, and no sexual offense was part of the judgment as reported. Whether either intended to appeal was not reported, and the outcome of the working group’s examination was not reported. Time, writing before the verdict, had said police put the number at about a dozen.
Ren Jiantao, head of the School of Government at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, told Time that society now had blind spots that had become "a heaven for killers," and that Shenzhen was only a few years ahead of the rest of the mainland. The Ministry of Public Security, the magazine reported, had built a national computer network to flag suspects, given urban police access to the registers of better hotels and begun "community policing," moving officers from large precinct stations into smaller neighborhood posts. Time listed the Shenzhen case beside another that autumn, a man held in Hebei on suspicion of killing 65 people in four provinces.
Huang Yong was a farmer from Pingyu County, in the Zhumadian area of Henan Province in central China. Between September 2001 and November 2003 he killed 17 young people, most of them students, and seriously injured one more. A court sitting in Pingyu, which People’s Daily Online described as sitting in his native county, convicted him of intentional homicide on December 9, 2003, and sentenced him to death with deprivation of political rights for life. He was 29 and did not appeal. After the Henan Higher People’s Court reviewed the sentence, he was executed on December 26, 2003.
Little else about his life before the killings was published, and his date of birth was not printed. People’s Daily Online, reporting on the day of the verdict, described the dead as high school students; its later review of the case said most were students. The court’s findings, as that outlet summarized them, were that Huang had been influenced by violent films since childhood and wanted to become a professional killer. The court called the crimes extremely vicious and cruel and said they had a very bad effect on society. Only two of the dead were ever named in reporting, in April 2004. The others were not.
The killings went undetected until November 2003, when an 18th youth, seriously hurt, survived and reported what had happened to police. People’s Daily Online gave November 21 as the date of Huang’s arrest; the date he was first detained has not been reported separately from the date of formal arrest.
The number of dead was disputed from the start. The official figure was 17 dead and one injured, which the Beijing Youth Daily traced to a Henan newspaper report of November 17, 2003. A day earlier, on November 16, relatives of victims had told reporters that county police had given them a figure of 23 dead, 18 of them students. A police record from Pingyu drawn up that month, quoted by the Beijing Youth Daily the following spring, has Huang telling the youth who survived that he had already killed more than 20 people. The charge and the conviction covered 17 deaths and the one injury.
China News Service reported on December 25 that the Henan Higher People’s Court was conducting the death penalty review, and on December 26 that Huang had been taken that morning to the execution ground. In his last days he spoke with reporters; China News Service headlines of December 26 and 27 said he talked about how he had chosen the young people and, shortly before his execution, that he wanted to see his parents.
The case did not end there. In March and April 2004 relatives of victims raised the question of whether there had been more victims than the official 17, and further material connected to the case surfaced in Pingyu. DNA tests by the Ministry of Public Security linked it to two of the young people already on the list, Han Peng and Zhai Pengchao, and not to anyone new. Police acknowledged failings in the earlier investigation, and the head of the police technical unit responsible was removed from his post, the Beijing Youth Daily reported on April 23, 2004. No killing beyond the 17 was charged, and any further deaths stay unproven.
Gong Runbo (宫润伯) was executed on December 31, 2006. He was 33. Five months earlier, on July 13, 2006, the Jiamusi Intermediate People’s Court, in Heilongjiang Province in northeast China, had sentenced him to death for the murder of six children and teenagers in Jiamusi between March 2005 and February 2006, with other charges, according to Sing Tao Headline, the Hong Kong newspaper that retraced the case in a 2025 retrospective.
Sing Tao wrote that Gong was born in 1973 in Jiamusi, and that his family of three lost their jobs in the 1990s and got by selling popsicles and collecting scrap. The paper gave 2003 as the year he was released from an earlier prison term. It wrote that a boy who escaped from him became the key to solving the case in February 2006. The South China Morning Post reported the week after the arrest that police described Gong, then 32, as a suspect in the deaths of five teenagers, and that the families of five children planned to sue the local police for dereliction of duty, saying officers had failed to investigate thoroughly much sooner.
The case became a story about police failure. Sing Tao wrote that from the second half of 2005 the Xiangyang district public security bureau received repeated reports from families whose children had gone missing, and that the cases made no progress for lack of evidence. A grandfather told the South China Morning Post that he had reported his granddaughter, aged 10, to the local police station and that officers did nothing until local media took up the story; police did not confirm his account in that report.
Gong was tried on July 13, 2006, in a closed hearing that lasted more than three hours, Sing Tao reported. He did not dispute the prosecution’s account. The court convicted him of intentional homicide, with other charges, and sentenced him to death with lifelong deprivation of political rights. Sing Tao put the total awarded to the civil plaintiffs at more than 660,000 yuan. He was executed on December 31, 2006, at the age of 33.
The number of victims was contested. The court’s judgment, as Sing Tao gave it, covered six. Sing Tao wrote in 2025 that 32 pairs of children’s shoes had been recorded and that an unconfirmed rumor held that 28 missing children from Jiamusi had been killed; no official confirmed either figure. No killing beyond the six was charged.
In 2003 six women in Anshan, an industrial city in Liaoning Province in northeastern China, were killed after riding alone in a taxi late at night. In late November the city’s police detained the driver, Zhou Wen. He was 38 and, according to Xinhua, had a previous criminal conviction; the agency did not say what it was for. He confessed, and the Anshan Public Security Bureau said he had kept a written record of the dates and places. "I jotted down the dates and places in case I couldn’t remember them," he said, according to the bureau.
The local press had given the unknown killer a name, the "taxi devil" (出租车恶魔). When the detention was announced, Xinhua reported, many residents set off fireworks, and several hundred taxi drivers marched carrying national flags and logos, saying they were glad someone had been caught. Reuters carried Xinhua’s report from Beijing a few days after the November 28 detention.
In his confession, as Xinhua quoted it, Zhou linked the killings to his former wife: "I began to hate women when my ex-wife aborted without my permission." The women themselves were described by Xinhua only as young women who had hailed his taxi late at night. Their names, ages and places of origin were not published.
The Anshan Intermediate People’s Court (鞍山市中级人民法院) convicted him at first instance on December 1, 2003, of robbery (抢劫罪), according to China News Service, and sentenced him to death. Robbery is the offense named; no separate conviction for intentional homicide was reported, and nothing was published about the evidence heard, the length of the hearing or the judges and prosecutors. Zhou appealed, and on January 12, 2004, the Liaoning High People’s Court rejected the appeal.
That afternoon reporters from Qianhua Web (千华网), the news site of the Anshan Daily, interviewed him at the Anshan No. 1 Detention Center. China News Service relayed their report two days later. They saw him shackled and fairly calm, but he kept asking for cigarettes and would not answer unless given one. Asked whether he regretted the deaths of the six women, he said he did not: "不后悔." He explained that he had appealed so that he would die sooner. As he understood it, an appeal meant the provincial court would review the case the next day and could only confirm the sentence, while without one the process would take about 15 days longer. "速死是对我最好的解脱," he said: a quick death was the best release for him. He also said that after each killing he kept driving at night, and that when he heard passengers talking about how seriously police were treating the case, he felt relief at having escaped once more.
Zhou Wen was executed on January 13, 2004, the day after the appeal was rejected. China News Service carried the news on January 14 under a headline saying he had remained unrepentant to the end; it did not say how the sentence was carried out.
A good deal remains open. China News Service dated the killings from May to October 2003 and Xinhua said they began in July. Neither says how long Zhou had driven a taxi, how police identified him, what the court held about each death, or why the conviction was recorded as robbery. He gave more than one account of his reasons: anger at his former wife in the confession, and in the final interview resentment of women he saw out late at night.
Zhou Youping (周友平) earned his living as a singer who moved from one song hall to the next in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province in central China. Between October 11 and November 26, 2009, six men died in the city on separate dates. Investigators came to see the deaths as one series, linked to a dangerous practice the men had agreed to take part in, and to see one man as the partner the six had in common. That man was Zhou.
According to the Changsha daily 潇湘晨报, he was born in June 1972 in Xiangxiang (湘乡), a county-level city in Hunan, and had a secondary vocational education. A 2010 report by the Hunan news site 红网, summarized in 2014, described him as a bar singer who performed under the stage name 戴君. His record was already marked: in October 2006 he was sentenced to three years in prison for robbery, which under Chinese criminal law made him a recidivist, a factor that would weigh against him.
From September 2009, the 2014 reports said, Zhou posted repeatedly on a website seeking men from northern China, and he told police later that he had never meant to pay anyone who answered. 潇湘晨报 reported that most people involved in the case had met through the same online chat room, which had a large following and had been running for a long time. Zhou told police he knew how dangerous the practice was and that he never took part in it himself.
The first death was recorded on October 11, 2009, and the last two on November 26. Police described the six as men in their twenties to forties, tall and well built, several from northern China. The 2014 reports describe a few of them. One was a man from Gansu Province who first met Zhou on September 28; Zhou sent him away on October 4, the man returned to Changsha on October 9, and he died the next day. By Zhou’s account to investigators, he had wanted the man gone because he had become a nuisance, and when he saw the death reported on television he felt calm. Another was identified only by the surname 方, whom Zhou said he met on October 22; Zhou told investigators that the man’s demand for 5,000 yuan made him angry and that he then wanted him dead. The reports give the last two deaths through the eyes of one family: a man from Henan Province told his wife in late November that he had work in Changsha, and she later learned he had died there. On the same night a man from Heilongjiang Province died in another part of the city. The likeness of the two deaths helped police connect the cases.
The arrest came on another matter. On November 28, 2009, two days after the last two deaths, Zhou was detained in Changsha on suspicion of robbery. In custody he confessed to the deaths and gave a detailed account of each meeting; the paper reported that the results of the investigation shocked the police. Foreign press took it up in April 2010, when PinkNews, citing Shanghai Daily, said a bar singer in Hunan named Zhou Youping had been arrested over the deaths of six men he had met through online sites and was being held on murder charges.
His own account turned on money and on being cheated. He said men he met had deceived him and pressed him for money, and that he came to resent them. His defense at trial was that the men had acted voluntarily and that he had never intended that anyone should die.
The Changsha Intermediate People’s Court tried him on October 28, 2010, on charges of intentional homicide covering all six deaths. The 2010 report by 红网 called it the largest number of deaths tied to such a practice in China up to that time. The court rejected his defense. It held that Zhou knew the risk of death, used the men’s own willingness to draw them into a dangerous practice, misled them and did not save them, and that he was criminally responsible for six deaths. Because of the 2006 robbery conviction it treated him as a recidivist. On March 29, 2011, it sentenced him to death for intentional homicide and deprived him of his political rights for life.
The legal question at the center was intent. 黎四奇, deputy dean of the law school at Hunan University, explained to 潇湘晨报 in 2014 that a person who takes part in a deadly game, helps set it up and then does nothing when the other person is in mortal danger commits intentional homicide, because he acts with what Chinese law calls indirect intent: he knows that death may follow and allows it to happen.
Zhou appealed to the Hunan Higher People’s Court on the same ground he argued at trial. The appeal court upheld the judgment, including the death sentence, but held the facts established in only two of the six cases; for the other four it ruled the evidence insufficient. Why the evidence failed on those four, and which two deaths formed the upheld counts, has not been reported. The case then went to the Supreme People’s Court, which approves death sentences. Zhou Youping was executed in Changsha on August 29, 2014, aged 42, as the 2014 reports gave it. This is the one case in the group in which the deaths were treated as a series by investigators but the appeal court confirmed only a third of them.
Zhao Zhihong was arrested in Inner Mongolia, in northern China, in October 2005, and he confessed to more than 20 crimes, among them robberies and killings, committed over almost a decade. One of them was a killing that, as far as the courts were concerned, had been solved long before. On April 9, 1996, a woman surnamed Yang died in Hohhot, the regional capital. An 18-year-old factory worker who had gone to the police to report it, was convicted of her murder and executed in June 1996, 61 days after her death.
Zhao’s confession did not lead quickly to a reckoning. Prosecutors left the 1996 killing out of his indictment, his trial was adjourned in 2006 and not resumed until 2015, and only in December 2014 did the Inner Mongolia Higher People’s Court declare the 18-year-old not guilty. Zhao was then tried, convicted and sentenced to death. When the Supreme People’s Court reviewed the sentence, it confirmed 17 crimes, including the killing of six people, but declined to confirm four others, one of them the killing of Yang. Zhao was executed at Hohhot on July 30, 2019. He had maintained throughout that he committed the crime that cost the young man his life, and the highest court held that claim unproved.
Zhao was born in 1972 in a rural county of Inner Mongolia. Xinhua, reporting the first-instance judgment in February 2015, gave his birth as May 1972 and described him as Han Chinese, with a junior-high education and no job. The Supreme People’s Court’s ruling, as the People’s Daily printed it in 2019, gives September 5, 1972 and describes him as a farmer. The court record shows one conviction before his arrest: six months in prison for theft, in October 2003, with release in December 2003. Because he went on to commit crimes within five years of finishing that sentence, the courts treated him as a recidivist.
The 18-year-old, an ethnic Mongolian who worked at a cigarette factory, was questioned for 48 hours before he confessed, Agence France-Presse reported in December 2014. On May 17, 1996, the Hohhot Intermediate People’s Court sentenced him to death for intentional homicide, with lifelong deprivation of political rights, and to five years for hooliganism. On June 5 the Inner Mongolia Higher People’s Court rejected his appeal, and he was executed on June 10, 1996. Reports differ by a day on the interval: Xinhua said 61 days after the killing and Radio Free Asia 62 days after the crime. An uncredited 2015 report gave the first-instance date as May 23 rather than May 17; the High Court’s own account, as the People’s Court Daily reported it, uses May 17. His parents spent years petitioning for the case to be reopened, nearly a decade by AFP’s count.
What Zhao did in the nine years after is known chiefly through the courts' findings. The Hohhot Intermediate People’s Court, in its 2015 judgment, held him responsible for 21 criminal incidents between April 1996 and July 2005, in Hohhot and another city in Inner Mongolia. According to The Paper, a Shanghai news site, those findings covered killings that left ten people dead, together with robberies totaling 31,400 yuan and thefts worth more than 3,500 yuan. China News Service reported that the youngest of the victims was 12.
The Supreme People’s Court narrowed that list. It confirmed 17 crimes committed between September 1996 and July 2005, in Hohhot and other places in Inner Mongolia, in which six people were killed. Two girls under 14 were among the victims of the other charges. There were also repeated robberies, including robberies of large sums, and repeated thefts. According to the court, he killed in order to silence witnesses. One confirmed killing, dated by the ruling to the morning of September 5, 1996, was tied to him by DNA evidence, and he confessed to it. The names of the victims of the confirmed crimes were not published, and the courts heard the homicide and related charges in closed session to protect the victims' privacy.
Some of the property cases were heard in public in 2015. Prosecutors alleged that on the evening of May 19, 1996, Zhao robbed a woman on her way back from work, and that between 1998 and 2000 he carried out several thefts of cash and gold rings worth more than 3,000 yuan in all. At the January 2015 trial he admitted the robbery and most of the thefts but denied stealing one gold ring in 1998. On appeal in April 2015, the public part of the hearing dealt with one robbery in 1996 and two thefts, in 1998 and 2003, worth 2,980 yuan in total; Beijing News reported that his appeal stressed meritorious conduct.
He was taken into custody on October 23, 2005, according to China News Service and Radio Free Asia, and the Supreme People’s Court’s ruling gives November 23, 2005 as the date of formal arrest on the charges later tried. Chinese media, China News Service said, came to call him "the smiling killer." After his arrest he confessed to more than 20 cases, the People’s Court Daily reported, and told investigators that the first killing of this kind he had committed was the one in Hohhot on April 9, 1996, known in Chinese reporting as the "4·9" case. The Supreme People’s Court noted in 2019 that he had confessed to the Yang killing on his own initiative and consistently maintained it.
On November 28, 2006, the Hohhot Intermediate People’s Court heard Zhao’s case behind closed doors. Prosecutors charged nine killings, and the 1996 killing was not among them. Zhao raised the omission in court, and the hearing was adjourned. According to China News Service, the case was not heard again until after the 18-year-old’s case had been retried. In detention, The Paper reported, Zhao wrote a document in 2006 that he called an application to pay with his life, repeating that he had committed the 1996 killing and asking prosecutors to look into it fully. A widely repeated story later said his execution had been stopped at the last minute in 2007 so that the 1996 case could be preserved; the Supreme People’s Court rejected it in 2019, saying no first-instance judgment against Zhao existed until 2015, so there had been no death sentence and no execution order to halt.
On November 19, 2014, the Inner Mongolia Higher People’s Court decided to retry the 1996 case, and the young man’s father received the decision the next day, the People’s Court Daily reported. On the morning of December 15, 2014, the court set aside the 1996 conviction and the appeal ruling and declared him not guilty, on the ground that the facts were unclear and the evidence insufficient. It gave three main reasons. The way of killing he had described in his confession did not match the medical findings. The blood-type evidence used against him identified only a type, not a person, and could not show he alone was responsible. And his statements were unstable and conflicted with other evidence; Xinhua reported that his description of the victim did not match her height or hairstyle. The hooliganism conviction, the court said, had rested on nothing but his own confession. AFP added that the court held the DNA evidence did not definitively link him to the crime. Xinhua reported on December 31, 2014, that his parents were awarded 2.05 million yuan, a sum covered in the discussion of state compensation to the families of wrongly executed men. In February 2016 the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Radio Free Asia reported that 27 officials had been punished over the 1996 case.
Zhao stood trial on the remaining charges at the Hohhot Intermediate People’s Court on January 5, 2015, with judgment dated January 26 and announced on February 9. The court sentenced him to death for intentional homicide and to death on a second count, each with lifelong deprivation of political rights, to 15 years and a 50,000 yuan fine for robbery, and to one year and a 3,000 yuan fine for theft, a combined sentence of death, lifelong deprivation of political rights and a 53,000 yuan fine, with 102,768 yuan owed to the civil plaintiffs. The Inner Mongolia Higher People’s Court heard the appeal from April 14 and rejected it in a ruling dated April 26, 2015. The Supreme People’s Court approved the sentence on July 2, 2019, and he was executed on the morning of July 30. The case also drew comment in March 2015, when, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported, China’s chief justice expressed regret over wrongful convictions.
Hong Kong tried this case under its own legal system. Between February and July 1982, four women who took a taxi in the small hours did not reach their destinations. The driver was Lam Kor-wan (林過雲), a quiet 27-year-old who had driven a cab since 1979 and preferred the night shift. The victims were Chan Fung-lan, 21 or 22; Chan Wan-kit, 31; Leung Sau-wan, 29; and a 17-year-old student who had just finished Form 5. Their killings are dated February 3, May 29, June 17 and the night of July 2, 1982. Police questioned hundreds of people for six months and searched for the right driver among tens of thousands; the case broke in August 1982, when staff at a photo shop in Tsim Sha Tsui reported what was on a roll of film a customer had left, and police arrested Lam there on August 17 when he came to collect the prints.
He was tried in the High Court in March 1983. The jury convicted him of four counts of murder, and on April 8, 1983, he was sentenced to death. In August 1984 the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, as every death sentence in Hong Kong had been since 1966, according to the South China Morning Post’s account. He has been in prison since, and a report in October 2023 still had him serving his life sentence at Shek Pik Prison on Lantau Island. In 2018 the Correctional Services Department declined to comment on reports that he had been granted parole, and Sing Tao later reported that the department denied them.
Lam was born on March 22, 1955, according to a 2023 Sing Tao series by Tsang Hoi-fan, the eldest of seven children. His father worked as a mechanical engineering consultant for an oil company in Brunei and, Sing Tao reported, took a second wife there; Lam went to primary school in Brunei and returned to Hong Kong in October 1962. The South China Morning Post placed his childhood in Malaysia and said the family moved to Hong Kong when he was a teenager; the two newspapers differ on both the country and his age at the move. Both describe a violent father. The Post says his father beat him and his mother, once knocking the boy unconscious, and that the beatings stopped after the move. Sing Tao, drawing on its archives, said his father was strict from the start: when Lam was about two, his father slapped him so hard for starting a meal without first greeting the family that half his face swelled. During the trial, according to the Post, the court heard that his father had beaten him severely as a child.
Lam had trouble making friends, the Post wrote, and his closest companion was an electronic chess set. In 1970 his father opened a shop selling motorcycles, and Lam had to work there in the afternoons after school; his grades fell, and Sing Tao reported that he was scolded and beaten for dozing and became withdrawn. At 19, his family noticed a change in his mental state. Sing Tao, describing him before February 1982, said he regularly gave money to his mother and that his life looked like anyone else’s. He lived in Kowloon with his father, his siblings and the family of a brother-in-law, and shared a small bedroom with his younger brother; the brothers, by informal agreement, never touched each other’s belongings.
The first of the four to die was Chan Fung-lan, and Sing Tao, summing up what Lam later told police, said the first killing was impulsive rather than planned. Her death came to light in Sha Tin on February 11, 1982, and the Post reported it on February 12. Detective Chan Tim-wo of the police homicide unit linked the discovery to a nightclub worker who had been reported missing. Police questioned regular customers of the nightclub. A man who had pursued the woman and been turned down was investigated, but there was no evidence against him. Officers checked shops that sold power tools without result. Chan Tim-wo told his foreign superior that they should concentrate on taxi drivers, and many officers questioned drivers in Tsim Sha Tsui, a task Sing Tao sized at about 16,000 cars and nearly 30,000 drivers in the 1980s. The taxi the woman had taken was never traced by its number, and the case stayed open through the spring.
On August 10, 1982, a customer left a roll of film at a photo shop in Tsim Sha Tsui. An equipment fault meant it was sent to the company’s branch in Mong Kok to be printed, and there a technician saw what the pictures showed and alerted his superiors, who called the police, Sing Tao reported. The forensic pathologist Dr. Ma Suen-lap, who worked on the case early in his career, later told HK01 that a fingerprint on one of the photographs matched one of the victims. On August 17 police watched both branches. Shortly before 5 p.m. a man came into the Tsim Sha Tsui shop and collected the prints, and officers arrested him. It was Lam. The Post reported on August 19 that a 27-year-old night-shift taxi driver was among those arrested.
Police first suspected Lam’s younger brother, who shared his bedroom. He was detained and then released for lack of evidence, according to Sing Tao and the retired officer Leung Ping, and Dr. Ma told HK01 there was no evidence the brother took part. Lam’s father would not believe it at first, Sing Tao reported, telling police that his quiet son could not have killed anyone.
For a long time Lam told police nothing. "He didn’t say a word, didn’t want to talk, never made a sound," Leung Ping, then a detective in the homicide unit, told Sing Tao. Leung worked to build a rapport, bringing Lam dim sum for breakfast; Lam believed in ghosts and liked strange stories, and Leung talked with him about the spirit world. He persuaded Lam that if the victims were recovered, the women could be identified. Lam then gave a full account, which Sing Tao placed on the eve of the trial. Before he did, he asked that someone write his story, a kind of autobiography, and keep it; Leung agreed that the investigation would be written up.
Hong Kong newspapers gave the case nicknames drawn from details of the investigation. The case has kept its hold on the city: Sing Tao, in December 2024, listed it among the real crimes adapted for Hong Kong films, and HK01 reported in September 2026 on a film project drawn from it. Rumors of further victims, and of a woman who escaped him, are unconfirmed, and no other killing was charged.
Several of these cases reach the outside world through little more than a wire or state-media notice of the verdict: Chen, Li, Ma and Duan, Zhou Wen. In most of the ten the victims have no published names, and in Hua’s case twelve of fourteen women had none by the time of trial. The cases also exposed police failures, from the Jiamusi reports of 2005 to the Shenzhen families whose reports were not taken seriously at first.
Courts did not always agree with the police or the press about what had happened. The Supreme People’s Court trimmed Zhao Zhihong’s 21 crimes to 17 and declined the one that had already cost a young man his life. The Hunan Higher People’s Court confirmed two of six deaths against Zhou Youping. Counts of the dead ran ahead of the charges in Pingyu and Jiamusi, and in neither case was the higher number ever charged. In Hong Kong, where a jury heard evidence and a detective spent months earning a confession, the published record is fuller than most of the mainland reports, and still the account of how the killings began rests on what Lam later told police.
• 1982, February 3 to July 2: four women killed in Hong Kong; Lam Kor-wan arrested August 17, 1982.
• 1983, April 8: Lam sentenced to death for four counts of murder after a jury trial in March; sentence commuted to life imprisonment in August 1984.
• 1995: Song Shutian, his wife and daughter killed in Beijing (Xinhua and Radio Free Asia).
• 1996, April 9: a woman surnamed Yang dies in Hohhot; an 18-year-old is executed on June 10, 1996.
• 1996, September to July 2005: crimes confirmed against Zhao Zhihong by the Supreme People’s Court.
• 1998, July to June 2001: Hua Ruizhuo’s confessed killings of 14 women in Beijing.
• 2001, July 16: Hua arrested; November 20, 2001: his trial opens; executed in 2002.
• 2001, September to November 2003: 17 young people killed in Pingyu County, Henan.
• 2002, November to April 2003: four women killed in Beijing in the case against Li Pingping.
• 2003, February to May: Chen Yongfeng’s ten killings in Wenzhou; sentenced to death in December 2003.
• 2003, May 26 to October: twelve young women killed in Buji, Shenzhen; Ma Yong and Duan Zhiqun sentenced to death November 27, 2003.
• 2003, November 28: Zhou Wen detained in Anshan; sentenced to death December 1; appeal rejected January 12, 2004; executed January 13, 2004.
• 2003, December 9: Huang Yong sentenced to death; executed December 26, 2003.
• 2004, March 2: Li Pingping’s death sentence reported; his execution reported June 16, 2004.
• 2005, March to February 2006: six children and teenagers killed in Jiamusi; the case is solved in February 2006; Gong Runbo is sentenced July 13 and executed December 31, 2006.
• 2005, October 23: Zhao Zhihong taken into custody.
• 2009, October 11 to November 26: six men die in Changsha; Zhou Youping detained November 28, 2009.
• 2011, March 29: Zhou Youping sentenced to death; executed August 29, 2014.
• 2014, December 15: the 1996 conviction in Hohhot set aside.
• 2019, July 2 and 30: Zhao Zhihong’s sentence approved, then carried out.