Wang Shujin was a farmer from Guangping County, in the southern part of Hebei province, who killed three women and attacked a fourth between November 1993 and 1995, according to the findings of the Chinese courts. He disappeared from his village in 1995 and lived for about ten years in neighboring Henan province before police in the city of Xingyang questioned him in January 2005. He confessed to six cases. One of them was a killing in the western suburbs of Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital, in 1994. For that killing a young man named Nie Shubin had been tried, sentenced and executed in 1995.
The Chinese press called it one case with two killers. Wang's confession pushed the Nie case back into public view and kept it there for more than a decade. The Hebei courts convicted Wang of his crimes in Guangping but refused to find that he had committed the Shijiazhuang killing. In December 2016 the Supreme People's Court cleared Nie Shubin, finding that the evidence against him had never been sufficient. Wang's own case was sent back for a retrial in 2020, on new evidence in one of the Guangping killings, and he was executed on February 2, 2021. To the end he said that he had killed the woman in Shijiazhuang. No court has found that he did, and no one stands convicted of her death.
Wang was born in 1967, according to The Paper, a Shanghai news outlet that reconstructed his life in 2020. He grew up in a village in Guangping County, in the prefecture of Handan. The Paper reported that he left school after the second grade of primary school and that he was a withdrawn boy. He had older and younger sisters and an older brother. His marriage came about through an arrangement made by his father, a practice in which families exchanged daughters so that neither side had to pay a bride price; one of his sisters was married off as part of the exchange, The Paper said. The union was never registered as a legal marriage, and the couple had a son.
As a teenager he was convicted by the Guangping County court in a case involving a young girl. The Supreme People's Court later dated that sentence to September 1982 and gave its length as three years. He served it in a juvenile facility and was released in 1985, The Paper reported. When the courts came to sentence him for the killings, they cited this earlier conviction as a reason why his culpability and the danger he posed were very high.
The Paper quoted the police officer who later led the hunt for him, then deputy head of the Guangping County Public Security Bureau, as saying that Wang showed almost no expression and that he collected women's clothing.
The courts' findings, as the Supreme People's Court set them out in February 2021, were that between November 1993 and the eighth month of the lunar calendar in 1995 Wang attacked women who were alone at several places in one township of Guangping County. He raped four women. He killed three of them to keep them silent, the court said, and he tried to kill the fourth, who survived. The court described his motive for the killings as base, his methods as cruel and the consequences as especially serious, and it called the circumstances of the rapes egregious. The cause of death in the killings was strangulation, according to the court's summary and the indictment as reported by the Chinese press.
The first of the three women was a 25-year-old surnamed Zhang, from Wang's own village, who was killed on November 29, 1993, according to the indictment as reported by Jiemian, a Shanghai news site. She was married and the mother of a son and a daughter. Her husband spent 12 years looking for her and then 15 more trying to have her death formally recognized. Both of her children left school early to work, Jiemian reported, and her mother lost much of her sight in the years of grief that followed.
The second woman was surnamed Liu. The Paper dated her killing to 1994. Little else about her was published.
The third woman, also surnamed Zhang, was killed in 1995, and her death led directly to Wang's flight. Guangping police placed him on an online wanted list in October 1995 in connection with her killing, the Supreme People's Court said later. By then he had left the village. Police checked the men of the village one production team at a time, The Paper reported, but Wang was gone, and he was not found for almost ten years.
The fourth woman survived the attack. The court found that she cried for help and that he fled.
Wang spent the next decade in Henan province, living under another name. The Guangzhou Daily, in a 2016 report published by The Paper, said he had been living under an assumed name when he was identified at Xingyang. Little was reported about how he lived in those years.
In January 2005 police in Xingyang, a city in Henan, questioned a man who had drawn their attention by behaving suspiciously. The Supreme People's Court's account says he gave a series of false names and addresses until each was exposed. He then gave his real identity and admitted the killing for which he was wanted. Over the following days he confessed to six cases of rape or rape and murder. The Supreme People's Court dated the questioning to January 17, 2005; Jiemian and the Guangzhou Daily gave January 18.
The deputy head of the Guangping police traveled overnight to Xingyang after learning who the man was, The Paper reported. In a later account Jiemian gave the six cases as including the 1993 killing of the woman surnamed Zhang and a killing in the western suburbs of Shijiazhuang in 1994. The Paper, citing the case record, gave four killings among the confessions: the two women surnamed Zhang, the woman surnamed Liu, and the woman in Shijiazhuang.
The Shijiazhuang case was already closed. A woman had been killed in the western suburbs of the city in August 1994. Nie Shubin, a young man who worked at a factory in the area, was detained on October 1, 1994, and confessed on the sixth day of questioning, according to a case study published by the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at New York University. The Shijiazhuang Intermediate People's Court convicted him of intentional homicide and rape on March 15, 1995, and sentenced him to death. The Hebei High People's Court upheld the sentence on April 25, 1995, and he was executed on April 27.
Nie's mother had petitioned on his behalf since his detention. The South China Morning Post reported in 2013 that no footprints had been found at the scene and that no DNA tests had been carried out on the victim, so that the conviction rested on Nie's own statements.
When Wang's confession reached the Guangping police, the deputy head of the bureau learned that someone had already been executed for the Shijiazhuang killing. He told reporters about the discrepancy, the Guangzhou Daily reported, and on March 15, 2005, a newspaper report under the headline "One case, two killers: who is the real killer?" started a national debate. The next day, March 16, 2005, the Hebei Provincial Political-Legal Committee promised to investigate and to reach a conclusion within one month. No conclusion was published before the Supreme People's Court ruled on the Nie case more than 11 years later.
Within weeks the case had become a test of the provincial authorities. The weekly Southern Weekend warned on April 28, 2005, that the investigation might end in a whitewash, according to a summary published that May by the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China. The paper reported that information about Wang had been removed from a police website, and it responded to suggestions that Wang was making up his story or that Nie might have had an accomplice. Nie's family, the paper said, was still being refused a copy of the original verdict, which they needed in order to seek a retrial.
The Wang case was transferred from the Guangping police to the Hebei Provincial Public Security Department, which took over the files and the prisoner, Jiemian reported. The Guangping officer had no further part in it. He told the Guangzhou Daily in 2016 that after 2005 he had been investigated again and again by the discipline authorities and had been the subject of rumors, and that in 2009, at 49, he had been removed from his post as deputy chief. He said he did not know whether that had anything to do with the Nie case.
Wang's lawyer, Zhu Aimin, said later that his client had not known when he first confessed that Nie had already been executed. After learning of it, Zhu told Xinhua in 2014, Wang still hoped to use his own appeal to prove Nie innocent.
On March 9, 2006, the Handan People's Procuratorate indicted Wang for intentional homicide and rape. The indictment covered four of the six cases he had confessed to, Jiemian reported: the killings of the two women surnamed Zhang and the woman surnamed Liu, and the attack on the woman who survived. It left out the Shijiazhuang killing and a 1994 rape in Guangping. One of the confessed rapes was not pursued because the woman involved denied it, The Paper reported.
The Handan Intermediate People's Court gave its verdict on March 12, 2007. It convicted Wang of killing the woman surnamed Liu and the woman surnamed Zhang who died in 1995, and of the attack on the fourth woman. It did not convict him of the 1993 killing, because the evidence could not establish the identity of that victim. He was sentenced to death for intentional homicide, with lifelong deprivation of political rights, and to 14 years for rape, and the court fixed the combined sentence at death.
Wang appealed. His ground was unusual. He argued that the prosecution had wrongly left out the Shijiazhuang killing and that his confession to it should be treated as a major meritorious act, which under Chinese law can reduce a sentence. Nie's mother was refused entry to the first trial, The Paper reported.
After the appeal was lodged, the case went quiet for six years. In early 2013 the Hebei High People's Court said only that the Nie case was still under review, citing its complexity, the volume of evidence and the difficulty of checking witness statements, according to Xinhua. Nie's mother went to the court every month and was given the same answer each time.
The appeal was heard at Handan, beginning on June 25, 2013. Wang and his lawyers maintained that he had committed the Shijiazhuang killing. The prosecutors argued that he had not, and that his account did not match the evidence. Nie's mother attended, and she told The Paper that she believed some of the prosecution's evidence about the victim's clothing was false.
In late September 2013 the Hebei High People's Court dismissed the appeal and upheld the death sentence. It found that Wang had not committed the Shijiazhuang killing. The South China Morning Post reported that the court found his confession contradicted the case evidence on several points, among them the victim's height, which he gave as 172 centimeters, his own height, while the record put it at 152 centimeters, and an item of clothing that the original verdict described and that he did not mention. The Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights group based in San Francisco, summarized the ruling as finding insufficient evidence to corroborate his confession. Xinhua dated the decision to September 27; Beijing News commentaries in 2020 and 2021 gave September 22.
Forty lawyers, among them Li Fangping, Teng Biao and Jiang Tianyong, published an open letter condemning the ruling, the South China Morning Post reported. They said the court had ignored Wang's confession and its many matches with the evidence, and they asked the Supreme People's Court to review the Nie case itself rather than leave it with the Hebei court. The case then went to the Supreme People's Court for the review that every death sentence in China must pass. It arrived there in October 2013, the Guangzhou Daily reported, and it stayed there for seven years.
On December 12, 2014, the Supreme People's Court announced that, at the request of the Hebei High People's Court, the case of Nie Shubin would be reviewed by the Shandong High People's Court, in another province. The Guangzhou Daily described it as the first such cross-provincial review. Nie's mother told Xinhua that for the first time she felt a little reassured.
Nie's lawyers were allowed to read the full case file for the first time in March 2015. On April 28, 2015, the Shandong court held a closed hearing before a panel of 15 people, the Dui Hua Foundation reported. Nie's lawyers argued that his execution record carried a false date, that signatures had been forged, that he had been tortured, and that the rape finding rested on his confession alone. Hebei officials rejected those claims. The Shandong court postponed its findings four times, the Guangzhou Daily reported, and The Paper found Nie's mother, in September 2015, still saying she would keep going until the case was overturned or she died.
The Shandong court concluded that there was no objective evidence tying Nie to the crime, that there were serious doubts about the time of death, the weapon and the cause of death, and that the involvement of others could not be ruled out, the Guangzhou Daily reported. It recommended a retrial. On June 6, 2016, the Supreme People's Court decided to retry the case.
On December 2, 2016, the Second Circuit Court of the Supreme People's Court, sitting in Shenyang, overturned Nie Shubin's conviction and declared him not guilty. The court said that the facts relied on at the original trial were unclear and the evidence insufficient, Agence France-Presse reported. The Christian Science Monitor, citing Xinhua, reported that the court also found Nie's confession might have been obtained through torture or other illegitimate means. In March 2017 his parents received 2.68 million yuan in state compensation, according to the U.S.-Asia Law Institute.
The day after the ruling, Nie's parents visited their son's grave on a hillside outside their village, with reporters following, Sixth Tone reported. It was his father's first visit in 21 years. Nie's mother told her son that the 21 years she had spent petitioning had not been wasted.
The Supreme People's Court did not say who had killed the woman in Shijiazhuang. A Beijing News commentary in 2021 noted that Wang had not been found to be the killer in that case and that Nie's acquittal had not depended on Wang's confession.
Wang's death sentence remained under review in Beijing while the Nie case moved forward, and his lawyers linked the two. In 2014 Zhu Aimin argued to Xinhua that if Nie had been wrongly convicted, then Wang had to be the real perpetrator of the 1994 killing, and his own case would have to be tried again. Many people, then and later, suspected that Wang had taken on the Shijiazhuang killing to delay his own execution. His lawyers denied it. In a Beijing News commentary in November 2020 Zhu was described as saying that Wang wanted the truth about the woman's death investigated, not a longer life.
In February 2015, the Guangzhou Daily reported, Wang said he was not afraid. A man who kills pays with his life, he said, and his own fate had already been decided. In January 2020, according to Beijing News, he said he hoped the Supreme People's Court would rule soon. He apologized to Nie Shubin and said he deeply regretted what he had done and was very sorry for his victims and their families. The Paper quoted him in 2020 as saying that his sentence could not change, but that the facts had to be made clear.
His relatives kept away. The Paper reported that his older brother had said the family was ashamed and would not take his remains.
For the family of the woman surnamed Zhang who was killed in November 1993, the 2007 verdict left her death unresolved. The first court had not found that charge proved because her identity as the victim could not be established, and for years her family could obtain no ruling on her death.
The Guangping officer who first handled Wang's case had tried in 2005 to have the question settled, Jiemian reported, but the case was taken out of his hands before he could finish. In 2019 he helped the woman's husband find a lawyer to press for new forensic work. In April 2020 a forensic center under the Ministry of Public Security issued a finding that settled the question of her identity, according to The Paper.
On November 9, 2020, the Supreme People's Court declined to approve Wang's death sentence and sent the case back to the Handan Intermediate People's Court for retrial. In its ruling the court found that the facts of the killings of the woman surnamed Liu and the woman surnamed Zhang, and of the attack on the fourth woman, were clear, the evidence reliable, the sentence appropriate and the procedure lawful. But new evidence bore on the 1993 killing, so the earlier judgment and ruling were set aside, Beijing News and China Daily reported.
Zhu Aimin told Beijing News that the retrial had nothing to do with the Nie case. Another defense lawyer said the new facts affected both the conviction and the sentence, but would not say whether the outcome would change.
The retrial opened at Handan on November 20, 2020. It was held behind closed doors because the case involved private matters, and the hearing lasted about two hours, Jiemian reported. The family of the woman killed in 1993 asked the court to convict Wang of her killing and claimed about 725,000 yuan in civil damages. Their lawyer said Wang pleaded guilty to her killing, expressed remorse and accepted the civil claim. Wang again said he had committed the Shijiazhuang killing. The prosecutors did not accept it. They said he had described the victim's clothing and height wrongly and that nothing apart from his confession supported his account; they also suggested that he had been working nearby and might have seen the crowd at the scene.
On November 24, 2020, the Handan court sentenced Wang to death again, now including the 1993 killing. He was sentenced to death for intentional homicide, with lifelong deprivation of political rights, and to 15 years for rape, with five years' deprivation of political rights, combined into a sentence of death. The court accepted the prosecutors' view that the Shijiazhuang killing was not his work, citing differences over the timing, the victim's height and the cause of death, Beijing News reported. On the civil claim the court awarded the family 37,887.5 yuan in funeral expenses and rejected the other items. The victim's son told Beijing News that the family would appeal, and that they wanted the amount recorded in a judgment more than they wanted the money.
Wang appealed once more, on the ground that the court had not found him to be the killer in the Shijiazhuang case. The appeal was heard on December 18, 2020, at the Handan Intermediate People's Court, which provided the courtroom for a panel of judges drawn entirely from the Hebei High People's Court. The hearing lasted more than two hours, Beijing News reported, and the main point in dispute was still whether he had killed the woman in Shijiazhuang. Zhu said Wang had told him the day before that he would keep petitioning if he lost.
On December 22, 2020, the Hebei High People's Court dismissed the appeal and upheld the death sentence, and again did not find that Wang had committed the Shijiazhuang killing. Wang appeared in full protective clothing, Beijing News reported. Zhu told China Daily that his client thought the judges should make the matter clear, and that was why he had appealed. Wang planned to petition the Hebei High People's Court after the new year and then the Supreme People's Court, his lawyer said.
On February 2, 2021, the Supreme People's Court approved the death sentence and issued the order for its execution. The Handan Intermediate People's Court carried out the sentence the same day, Xinhua and China Daily reported. Before the execution the court told his close relatives that they could visit him. They declined.
The Supreme People's Court answered questions about the case in a statement reported by CCTV and Beijing News. The court said that Wang had been convicted of four rapes, three killings and one attempted killing. It accepted that he had given himself up in 2005, but said that given his earlier conviction and the gravity of the crimes this did not justify a lighter sentence. Of the six cases he had confessed to, the court said, investigators and prosecutors had found that two could not be substantiated, so they were not charged or tried. The court applied the principles it called evidence-based adjudication and no conviction where guilt is in doubt.
The court also answered the argument that Wang's confession to the Shijiazhuang killing should count as meritorious service. Confessing one's own crimes was not meritorious service under the law, it said; at most it could count as surrender or confession. Credit for meritorious service, China Daily reported the court as saying, was available to those who exposed crimes committed by others, and a person would be held criminally liable only for the confessions that the courts recognized.
A member of the family of the woman killed in 1993 told Beijing News that the execution brought some comfort.
The convictions are final. The Handan and Hebei courts found, and the Supreme People's Court approved, that Wang killed three women in Guangping County between November 1993 and 1995, tried to kill a fourth, and raped four women.
Wang also confessed to the August 1994 killing of a woman in the western suburbs of Shijiazhuang, the case for which Nie Shubin was executed in 1995. That confession was never charged. The Hebei High People's Court ruled in 2013 that he had not committed that killing; the Handan court at the 2020 retrial accepted the prosecutors' view that it was not his doing; and the Hebei High People's Court did not find him to be the killer when it dismissed his last appeal in December 2020. The Supreme People's Court cleared Nie Shubin in 2016 on the ground that the evidence against him was insufficient, without naming anyone else. Wang's lawyers and dozens of other lawyers argued that his account matched the evidence in many respects; the prosecutors and the courts said it did not match on key points. The killing remains formally unsolved.
Two further cases that Wang confessed to were found unsubstantiated and were not charged. One reported confession, to a rape, was not pursued because the woman concerned denied it.
Reports differ on several points. The first-instance conviction in 2007 was described by China Daily as covering three rapes, two killings and one attempted murder, while the South China Morning Post wrote in 2013 that he had been sentenced to death for raping and killing three women. The date of his questioning at Xingyang is given as January 17 or January 18, 2005, and the date of the 2013 appeal ruling as September 22 or September 27. Nie Shubin's age at his death is given as 20 by Agence France-Presse and Sixth Tone and as 21 by the U.S.-Asia Law Institute.
1967: Wang Shujin is born; he grows up in a village in Guangping County, Handan, Hebei.
September 1982: sentenced by the Guangping County court to three years, in a case involving a young girl; released in 1985.
November 29, 1993: a 25-year-old woman surnamed Zhang, from his village, is killed (date from the indictment).
1994: a woman surnamed Liu is killed.
August 1994: a woman is killed in the western suburbs of Shijiazhuang; Nie Shubin is detained on October 1.
March 15, 1995: Nie Shubin is sentenced to death by the Shijiazhuang Intermediate People's Court; the Hebei High People's Court upholds the sentence on April 25, and he is executed on April 27.
1995: a second woman surnamed Zhang is killed; a fourth woman survives an attack.
October 1995: Guangping police place Wang on a wanted list; he has left the area.
January 2005: questioned by police in Xingyang, Henan; he confesses to six cases, including the 1994 Shijiazhuang killing.
March 15, 2005: a press report on "one case, two killers" starts a national debate; on March 16 the Hebei Provincial Political-Legal Committee promises a conclusion within a month.
March 9, 2006: indicted at Handan on four of the six cases.
March 12, 2007: sentenced to death by the Handan Intermediate People's Court; the 1993 killing is not found proved.
June 25, 2013: appeal hearing at Handan.
September 2013: the Hebei High People's Court dismisses the appeal and finds that he did not commit the Shijiazhuang killing; the case goes to the Supreme People's Court for review.
December 12, 2014: the Supreme People's Court assigns the Nie case to the Shandong High People's Court for review.
June 6, 2016: the Supreme People's Court decides to retry the Nie case.
December 2, 2016: Nie Shubin is declared not guilty.
March 2017: Nie's parents receive state compensation.
April 2020: a forensic finding settles the identity of the woman killed in 1993.
November 9, 2020: the Supreme People's Court declines to approve Wang's death sentence and orders a retrial.
November 24, 2020: resentenced to death at Handan, now including the 1993 killing.
December 22, 2020: the Hebei High People's Court dismisses his appeal.
February 2, 2021: the Supreme People's Court approves the sentence; he is executed at Handan.