"I could not stop after the first time," Wu Yandong told the Shenzhen Municipal Intermediate People's Court in March 2008. "I knew it (the trial) will come sooner or later." He was forty-two, and at the opening of his hearing he admitted every accusation against him: eleven killings between 1999 and 2003, committed, he said, either for money or to give vent to his anger.
According to the Xinhua News Agency, the dead included two of his lovers and the daughter and sister of those women, three truck owners and a motorcycle rider, and two people he had been paid to kill. The case had begun with one more: in June 2003 he killed the husband of another lover. A local court sentenced him to death for that killing in 2004, but further leads pointed to other victims and to more bodies, and the court withdrew its ruling and handed the case to the Shenzhen police. Wu had once worked for a company in Sichuan province, in the southwest.
Xinhua's dispatch of March 20, 2008, is the whole of the published record. It does not name a single victim, says nothing of how any of them died, and ended by noting that it was not yet known when the court would announce its ruling. No later report of a verdict, a sentence or an execution has been found. Chinese courts did not then publish judgments in cases of this kind, and the case does not appear in a Shenzhen court retrospective of its major cases.
What can be said, then, is narrow. A man admitted eleven killings in open court, one earlier death sentence was set aside so that the rest could be tried, and the outcome of that trial has never been reported.
1999 to 2003: the period of the eleven killings Wu Yandong later admits in court.
June 2003: he kills the husband of another lover.
2004: a local court sentences him to death for that killing, then withdraws its ruling and hands the case to the Shenzhen police.
March 2008: at the Shenzhen Municipal Intermediate People's Court he admits eleven killings; no verdict has been reported.