Wang was born in 1967 in Hebei province. He was arrested in 2005 for a series of rapes and murders of women committed in the 1990s, and while in custody he confessed to four killings. Including the 1994 rape and murder of Kang Juhua in a maize field outside Shijiazhuang.
That case had already been closed. Nie Shubin, a twenty-year-old factory worker, had been convicted of it and executed by shooting in April 1995, ten months after his arrest. His parents had never accepted the verdict and had spent a decade petitioning.
Wang's confession contained details of the Kang Juhua killing. The courts nonetheless declined to attribute it to him: he was convicted of three murders and sentenced to death in 2007, with the Kang case excluded, and the Hebei High Court twice rejected his account of it, holding that his confession did not match the evidence. He was executed in February 2013.
In 2016 the Supreme People's Court, reviewing the Nie case at the direction of the leadership as part of a broader campaign on wrongful convictions, quashed Nie Shubin's conviction and declared him innocent. The judgment found the original evidence gravely deficient: no murder weapon properly established, a confession obtained in circumstances that could not be verified, and key case files missing. His family received compensation in 2017. Nobody stands convicted of Kang Juhua's murder.
The range of three to four is the whole case in two numbers. Three killings were attributed to Wang and one was not, and the one that was not is the one an innocent man was shot for. This entry is retained for the conviction; it should be read as a wrongful-execution case as much as a serial one.