Shen Changyin was the elder of the two brothers. He is carried here as an individual because he was convicted and sentenced as one; his brother Shen Changping has his own entry, and the two files describe the same case.
The brothers came from Huojia county in rural Henan. In September 1999 Changyin stabbed a man there, and from 2000 the pair moved around the country, in some accounts to stay ahead of the police. What turned them to killing, on the accounts available, was money: a failed investment in an auto parts business.
The killings ran from June 2003 to August 2004 and moved with the brothers across China: Lanzhou in Gansu, then Taiyuan in Shanxi, then Hefei in Anhui, Baotou in Inner Mongolia, and Shijiazhuang in Hebei. The victims were eleven women working as prostitutes, taken from beauty salons and spas. The pattern was robbery first: the women were bound and made to give up their bank card numbers before they were killed, and the bodies were dismembered, burned with sulphuric acid or otherwise destroyed.
Accounts differ on what was eaten. English-language sources say the brothers ate the livers of their victims; others report that kidneys were removed and eaten. The organ is not agreed and the entry does not pick one.
They did not work alone, and the way they recruited is the disturbing part of the case. In late November 2003 they robbed a woman named Li Chunling in the same manner as the others and decided not to kill her when she offered to bring them more victims instead. She brought them women over the following months and in some accounts killed some of them herself. Later, in Taiyuan, they took a woman named Zhao Meiying and forced her to procure others, making her stab one of the women she had delivered. Zhao went to the police in mid-2004 and Li was picked up soon after.
In August 2004 police raided an apartment in Shijiazhuang and found the brothers with a newer accomplice, a dismembered body, tools and a quantity of stolen bank cards. They confessed to murdering and dismembering eleven women. Both were sentenced to death on September 2, 2005, as was Li Chunling. Three other women, aged between sixteen and twenty-six at the time, received sentences of between three and twenty years for procuring victims.
Reported birth years disagree. He is given as born in 1975, 1976 and 1979 in different sources; the roster follows 1976. He was thirty when he was executed on April 27, 2006.
The eleven is the case total, shared with his brother. It is one series counted once, not twenty-two deaths.