In January 2005 police at Xingyang, in Henan province, stopped a farmer from Guangping county in neighboring Hebei during a routine check. Under questioning Wang Shujin told them he had raped a number of women in Hebei and killed four. One of the four was a young woman raped and killed in a cornfield in the western suburbs of Shijiazhuang in 1994.
That case had been closed for a decade. The victim, a woman surnamed Kang, had been found in the cornfield in August 1994, and the Shijiazhuang police had arrested a young factory worker, Nie Shubin, for her murder. He was convicted of rape and intentional homicide and shot in April 1995. His family had never accepted it. The Chinese press called the situation one case, two killers.
Wang was born in 1967. At fourteen or fifteen, in 1982, he had been sentenced to three years for rape. In March 2005 the Hebei provincial political-legal committee promised a joint investigation of the Nie case with results within a month. None was published.
When the Handan prosecutors indicted Wang in 2006, they left the cornfield case out. On March 12, 2007 the Handan Intermediate People's Court convicted him of raping and killing two women surnamed Liu and Zhang and of raping and attempting to kill a third, surnamed Jia. A fourth killing he described was not found proved, because the remains could not be identified as the woman he named. He was sentenced to death for murder and to fourteen years for rape. He appealed on an unusual ground: that the prosecution had failed to charge him with the Shijiazhuang murder, and that his confession to it should count in his favor.
The Hebei High People's Court took six years. It heard the appeal again in June 2013 and on September 27, 2013 dismissed it, holding that his account of the cornfield killing did not match the evidence and could not establish that he had committed it. The case went to the Supreme People's Court for the mandatory review of the death sentence, and stayed there. Many people suspected he had taken the Nie case on himself to stay alive longer. He told The Paper that living longer only meant suffering longer.
On December 2, 2016 the Second Circuit Court of the Supreme People's Court quashed Nie Shubin's conviction and declared him innocent. The court found the original evidence gravely deficient. His family received compensation the following year. The court did not say who had killed the woman in the cornfield.
On November 9, 2020 the Supreme People's Court found the facts of Wang's three convictions clear and the evidence sufficient, but declined to approve the death sentence and sent the case back. On November 24 the Handan court again sentenced him to death, finding that he had surrendered voluntarily but that his confession did not count as meritorious service; the Hebei High Court dismissed his appeal in December; and the Supreme People's Court approved the sentence. He was executed at the beginning of 2021. No court ever decided whether he killed the woman Nie Shubin was shot for, and nobody stands convicted of her murder.