Yang Xinhai was convicted in February 2004 of crimes in which 67 people were killed. Chinese newspapers ranked him among the worst serial killers since the founding of the People's Republic. Between 2000 and August 2003 he moved on foot, by bicycle and by bus through the countryside of Henan, Anhui, Shandong and Hebei provinces, entering poor farmhouses at night and attacking the families inside. The Luohe Intermediate People's Court in Henan found him guilty of robbery, intentional homicide, rape and intentional injury in 26 cases, in which 67 people died and 10 were injured, Xinhua reported. He was sentenced to death on February 1, 2004, did not appeal, and was shot in Luohe on February 14, 2004.
For most of those years no one connected the killings. Each county police force treated its case as a local crime, and several innocent men were held on suspicion. Even after the Ministry of Public Security joined the cases into one investigation in August 2003, the suspect was found by chance: police in Cangzhou, in Hebei, followed up a tip about a man from Henan staying at a hotel without identification. A blood test and a DNA comparison tied him to the crime scenes, and on the evening of November 5, 2003, he began to talk.
Yang was born on July 17, 1968, according to the profile released by police and reported by the Beijing News, and to the account of his life that China News Service drew from the People's Court Daily. Some reports, including CCTV and the Beijing Times, gave his birth year as 1970. The Xinmin Evening News explained the difference: the only official record of him at the local police station listed the wrong year, because a younger brother had reported his age while he was away and understated it by two years. The Henan provincial prosecutors corrected the year during the prosecution, and the court's judgment gave 1968.
His home was a village in Zhengyang County, the southernmost county of Zhumadian prefecture in southern Henan. The county borders Xinyang, the Huai River runs along its southern edge, and it has long been known as a poor, flood-prone place, the Xinmin Evening News reported. China Newsweek wrote that his family was among the poorest in the village, which had no bus service and lay about three kilometers from the nearest town on a rough road. His parents lived in a low mud-brick house; the only piece of furniture of any value was an old pine bed. A reporter who visited after his arrest described a three-room house with a kitchen, a room that served as both living room and bedroom, and a pen for the cattle.
He was the fourth of six children, with two older brothers, an older sister, a younger sister and a younger brother, according to the Beijing News and China Newsweek. (One Beijing News report said seven children.) His relatives and neighbors remembered a quiet, withdrawn boy who did well at school and loved to draw. His sister told the Beijing News that he had been very clever as a child and could draw anything he looked at. His father said he had been near the top of his class in primary school. His mother told the Xinmin Evening News that he often brought home awards from school.
He was the only one of the children to go on to senior high school, China Newsweek reported, although the family could barely pay for it and he argued with his father about it. At the township high school he often lived on wild greens or cooked for himself because he could not afford meal tickets. In his final year, at about 16 or 17, he left without telling anyone. His father found that he had not been in class for days; his mother went looking for him and promised to take him to a film if he came home. He told police years later that he had wanted to go out into the world and make a good life with his own hands, the People's Court Daily reported.
He found work where he could. He worked in a coal mine in Jiaozuo, in Henan, and cooked for a construction crew in Taiyuan, in Shanxi, according to China Newsweek and the Beijing News. He also did building and mining work in Shanxi and Hebei, the Beijing Times reported. Once, he came home and worked for less than a month at a brick kiln near the village. He never sent money to his parents. Over more than ten years he came home no more than three times, his parents told reporters; at one point they believed he was dead.
Employers often failed to pay him. When a restaurant withheld his wages, he took an aluminum basin from it in anger. The People's Court Daily and China Newsweek both described this as his first theft, and China Newsweek said it taught him that money could come easily.
His record with the police began early. He said under questioning that he had been in trouble with the police since his teens and had often been detained, beyond the sentences that were later made public, the Beijing News reported. In 1988, according to the People's Court Daily and China Newsweek, he was sent to two years of reeducation through labor by a branch of the Xi'an police in Shaanxi. In 1991 the Shijiazhuang police in Hebei sent him to one more year of reeducation through labor for pickpocketing. A Xinhua account of his arrest dated these two terms to 1990 and 1993. The Xinmin Weekly reported that he had also been arrested more than once for soliciting prostitution and let go after paying fines.
While he was in a labor camp, a girlfriend from his home area told him she would wait for him. When he went to find her about a year later, she was preparing to marry someone else. Xinhua's account of his arrest said he regarded this as a humiliation and that it fed a lasting hatred of women.
In 1996, in his home county of Zhengyang, he tried to rape a woman. She fought him off and bit off a large part of his tongue. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, the People's Court Daily and China Newsweek reported; Xinhua described the conviction as one for theft and rape. To heal the wound, he kept raw egg white in his mouth for several days, China Newsweek wrote. Xinhua reported that Yang himself named the girlfriend who married someone else and the woman who resisted him as the two women behind his violence. Police told China Newsweek they believed the two episodes hardened his hatred of women and made him more ruthless in later crimes.
He was released early. Most reports give the year as 2000; Xinhua's reports of the verdict and execution say he began his crimes after his release in 1999. After he came out, China Newsweek reported, he joined a group that begged and stole, then decided after a failed job that working alone was safer. He lived mainly by theft and robbery, the Beijing News reported.
Official accounts agree that the killings began in 2000 but do not agree on which case came first. CCTV's legal affairs program Fazhi Zaixian reported that the first was the killing of a couple in their seventies in Chuanhui District, Zhoukou, in Henan, on September 19, 2000, a case that went unsolved for more than three years. Xinhua's account of his arrest said his first killings were on October 1 and 2, 2000, in Fuyang, in Anhui, where he killed a 63-year-old woman and two of her grandchildren. The list of his confessed crimes published by the Beijing News in November 2003 began with a case in Fuyang in the winter of 2000, in which three people died. The Beijing Times put the start of the 26 cases at September 2000.
The pace rose in 2001. On August 15, 2001, in Linying County, Henan, Qiu Yunxian, a woman in her forties, and her two children, aged 12 and 9, were killed in their home as they slept, CCTV reported. Police told the program that the house had no surrounding wall and was easy to enter. Yang avoided homes with dogs, strong doors or walls he could not climb, they said, and picked those with the least protection.
His confession, as the Beijing News published it, also listed two killings in a village near the county town of Ye, in Pingdingshan, in the winter of 2001, and two in Xihua County, Zhoukou, in the autumn of 2001.
Most of the killings took place in Henan in 2002 and early 2003, many of them in the counties around Luohe, along the north to south National Highway 107, China Newsweek reported. The confession list published by the Beijing News gave 17 cases in Henan. Among the dated ones:
July 28, 2002, Dengzhou: four people killed.
October 22, 2002, Xiping County: two killed and one injured.
November 8, 2002, Shangcai County: four killed and one injured.
November 16, 2002, Weishi County: two killed.
December 4, 2002, Luyi County: two killed and one injured.
December 6, 2002, Xiping County: four killed and one injured.
December 13, 2002, Yanling County: three killed.
January 27, 2003, Tongxu County: three killed.
February 5, 2003, Xiangcheng County: three killed and one injured.
March 23, 2003, Minquan County: four killed.
The same list included undated cases in Linying, Fugou and Xihua counties in 2002 and the spring of 2003, and a case in the winter of 2002 near the border of Zhengyang County in which an elderly man who sold tobacco and liquor was struck with a hammer; whether he died was not stated. Women and girls were sexually assaulted in most of the listed cases.
Two of the Xiping cases were described in detail by the Beijing News. On October 22, 2002, a farmer and his six-year-old daughter were killed. His wife survived. On December 6, 2002, the family of Liu Zhanwei was attacked. Four people died in the house, and his mother died in the hospital about ten days later. His father, who was 68, survived because he had been sleeping in a neighboring building.
Yang struck in Henan mostly on market days, when the crowds made it easy for a stranger to pass unnoticed, the Beijing News reported. In one Xiping case he bought the hammer at the local market, looked over the house in daylight, and after the killings buried the hammer near some old graves, threw his clothes into a river and walked about three hours to Luohe to leave by train. Police found that hammer at a grave site on November 16, 2003, after his arrest. He had told them it was beside two old graves at the edge of the village; it was found a few meters away, beside four new ones, China Newsweek reported. In court he described another case in Henan after which he threw his clothes into a manure pit and fled in his underwear, paying 5 yuan for an intercity bus, the Chengdu Business Daily reported.
In 2003 he moved north. On April 2, 2003, a couple were killed in a village in Cao County, near Heze, in Shandong. Lü Hongpeng, a captain of the Cao County criminal police, later questioned him about the case. He told the Beijing Times that Yang had been overcharged by more than 200 yuan at a bathhouse in Heze and, in anger, had ridden his bicycle to nearby villages and killed two people. Another Cao County detective, Liu Haisheng, told the Beijing News that Yang had drifted away from home, lived mainly by theft and moved by stages from theft to killing.
On August 5, 2003, in a village in Xingtai County, Hebei, Sun Shengjun, his wife Li Shuzhi and their daughter were killed, the Beijing News reported. Their son survived because he was not sleeping at home that night. A drawer had been forced open, but Yang later said he found no money. Police recovered gloves at the scene, which he later admitted he had left there; the axe used had been stolen from a villager.
Three days later, on August 8, 2003, Wei Xianzeng, a vegetable grower from Neiqiu County, and four members of his family were killed in the makeshift shelter on the plot they rented near Shijiazhuang. Police found the case closely matched the Xingtai killings and the Henan cases, and the Hebei police began a province-wide search. It was his last known killing, the Beijing News reported.
Chinese press reports named only some of the dead. What they record about the families is that most were poor farmers. China Newsweek reported that Yang avoided well-off families, toward whom he felt inferior. The Wei family grew vegetables on rented land near Shijiazhuang. Sun Shengjun's family lived in a village in Xingtai County. The families in Xiping and Linying were farming households in villages around Luohe.
Some relatives learned of the trial only from reporters. Wei Xianzeng's uncle, who was nearly 60, told the Beijing News on the night of the verdict that he had not known a trial was being held. He said he would have borrowed money to travel to Henan if he had known. He and another nephew had repeatedly asked the Shijiazhuang police for news, and when he asked to go to Henan to learn more, the police told him not to.
Police and prosecutors described a consistent pattern. He chose remote villages and poor homes, often scouted them by day, and entered at night while the families were asleep. The weapon he used most often was a hammer, China Newsweek and the People's Court Daily reported, and prosecutors told the court he had also used other weapons, the Beijing News and the Chengdu Business Daily reported.
He covered great distances without a vehicle. Police described him as hardworking: he walked long distances to and from crime scenes, China Newsweek wrote, and in Hebei he rode a bicycle between cities. To avoid leaving shoe prints, he pulled socks over his shoes. He robbed in the poor countryside and spent the money in better-off small towns, and he never struck in a city, the Beijing Times and the Shanghai Youth Daily reported. Police said he carried a map of China and picked villages at random near wherever he happened to be. He told investigators he never thought of stopping.
He kept a diary and wrote about his crimes after committing them, China Newsweek reported, and often burned the pages later. Robbery was a motive in many cases, but in some he took only a few yuan, CCTV reported. A police officer told the program that he probably went in for money, and that he killed mainly so that no one could identify him.
For years the killings were investigated one by one. Police in each county began by assuming the killer was local, China Newsweek reported. Villagers were fingerprinted, gave blood samples and were questioned. In one Xiping case, investigators were misled by the idea that the killer was a local man who used a small hammer; Yang had in fact left that night for Xuchang.
Innocent men were held. China Newsweek reported that a man in Anhui, C. J., was detained on suspicion in one of the cases and sent to a reeducation through labor camp before he was cleared. The head of the local criminal police brigade declined to explain the case to reporters. A man in Henan, Y. D., was wrongly accused in a 2000 case in Zhoukou and was not released until June 28, 2003.
The cases were linked slowly. In November 2002 the Henan provincial police tied together cases in Linying, Xiping and Shangcai counties and set up a joint investigation headquarters, China Newsweek and the People's Court Daily reported. The provincial task force's internal briefing at one stage listed 12 cases with 39 people dead and 4 seriously injured. Henan's police circulated a profile of the suspect and offered a reward of 100,000 yuan; tips came in, but none led anywhere. CCTV reported that investigators described the man they were looking for as familiar with rural life, aged 30 to 40, slightly built, with a past record of theft or robbery and a knowledge of how police work. A profile circulated to police put his height at 1.60 to 1.67 meters.
Professor Li Meijin, a criminal psychologist at the People's Public Security University of China, had profiled the offender before the case was solved. She told the Beijing Morning Post that she had described him as a habitual criminal who had served time and was motivated mainly by money. She had not seen sex as a main motive, she said, because he destroyed that evidence at the scenes.
On August 15, 2003, a deputy minister of public security chaired a meeting in Henan with criminal investigators from Anhui, Henan, Shandong and Hebei. The meeting joined the killings in the four provinces into one case, which became the Ministry of Public Security's first supervised case of 2003, the Beijing News reported. The ministry linked the Anhui and Shandong cases to the Henan series in August 2003, China Newsweek reported, and the Cao County police in Shandong linked their April killing after an expert review. CCTV reported that the ministry made the link on the basis of similar times, places, targets and methods, and held two meetings in Zhengzhou with police from the four provinces.
That same month the two Hebei killings, at Xingtai and Shijiazhuang, took place within three days. Hebei detectives concluded that one man had committed both and predicted that he would move on to Baoding, China Newsweek reported.
Yang did go to Baoding, he later told police, and from there he rode a bicycle to Cangzhou, a city in eastern Hebei. He told police that his time in Cangzhou was the happiest of his life, China Newsweek reported; he stole 6,000 yuan there, the most he ever got.
On November 2, 2003, the criminal police brigade of the Xinhua sub-bureau of the Cangzhou Public Security Bureau received a tip that a man from Henan with no identification was staying at a hotel in the city and behaving suspiciously, the Life Daily and Xinhua reported. Officers began watching him. On November 3 they saw him near a primary school and followed him, and when he ran toward the railway station they detained him, Xinhua reported. He had a folding knife and 500 yuan on him. Asked his name, he said it was Yang Xinhai.
Early reports differ on the circumstances. The Beijing News and the South China Morning Post said that officers inspecting entertainment venues had noticed him acting suspiciously. Agence France-Presse, citing Xinhua, also reported that he was detained during a routine inspection of entertainment venues, and in its first report gave the name of the man arrested as Wang Ganggang, with Yang Zhiya among his other names.
The Cangzhou detectives noticed that he had a Henan accent, a small build and other features that matched the ministry's profile of the four-province suspect, the Life Daily reported. They took a blood sample, which was type B, the same type recorded for the suspect in the case files. Samples went to the Hebei Provincial Public Security Department for DNA testing. The People's Court Daily reported that the DNA matched hair and other evidence from several crime scenes. On November 5 the Hebei police confirmed the match.
Senior provincial officers arrived in Cangzhou on November 5 and formed a special interrogation command, with 13 questioners in three teams, Xinhua reported. Questioning began at about 6 p.m. At about 10:30 that night, Yang began pointing out crime scenes on a map. He admitted 17 of the 18 cases on the ministry's list, all except a September 1 case in Bozhou, in Anhui, and added five killings in Henan that were not on the list. On November 6 a ministry official coordinated a joint review of the case.
He did not give way at once. He told the interrogators that they could not pile every case in the country on him, and that he would admit what they had evidence for, Xinhua reported. When they told him about the DNA match, he claimed that he was the one percent the test would miss. Asked how he thought of the people he had killed, he said he had never thought about it, and that he did not know whether they deserved to die. Police told China Newsweek that once he was talking he liked to describe his crimes, spoke loudly and at length, and recalled old cases accurately; the only error they found was the location of the buried hammer.
In mid-November the Hebei Public Security Bureau's propaganda director, Shi Guizhong, told AFP that the death toll was at least 65 and that further details would come from the ministry. The Beijing News and the Chongqing Evening News, citing the Beijing Youth Daily, reported that he had confessed to 22 cases since 2001, with 65 people killed, 5 seriously injured and 23 sexually assaulted, most of them in attacks that killed whole families. The South China Morning Post, citing the Beijing News, gave a breakdown by province: in Henan, 49 killed and 5 seriously injured; in Anhui, 6 killed; in Hebei, 8 killed; and in Shandong, 2 killed.
Yang gave different reasons at different times. In the CCTV program's interrogation footage he said that he simply felt a desire in his heart that drove him to kill. Whether the victims deserved to die, he said, was not a question he cared about. He said he seemed to be cut off from society and did not care about it; he thought only of himself. At another point in the same footage he said that money was the main motive and that revenge was also part of it.
According to Xinhua, he described the killings as driven by a need for excitement and by resentment of women who had rejected him, and said a killing in Shijiazhuang followed a rejection by a sex worker. Lü Hongpeng, the Cao County captain, said Yang had told him he felt very lonely during his years of drifting. Officers who questioned him said he kept returning to one complaint: why other people had things that he did not. Lü linked this to his childhood. His grandfather had been classified as a landlord, which Lü said had set the family apart from the 1960s on, and poverty and failure in the cities made it worse.
Under questioning before the trial, Yang said he hoped for a chance to reform, and that if he was not given one he wanted to donate his organs, the Beijing News reported. China Newsweek reported that after his arrest he said he regretted not having spent the 500 yuan he still had on him.
Li Meijin, who had profiled the case before the arrest, told the Beijing Morning Post after the verdict that Yang did not have a psychological disorder. In her view he had a fully formed criminal personality, the product of a life spent mostly in crime, and he had become numb to human life and lost all sympathy for others. She told the Xinmin Evening News that his normal childhood, good grades and talent for drawing pointed to a criminal personality rather than an antisocial one.
Wang Dawei, a professor at the same university, told CCTV that killings are usually driven by love, property or revenge, and that Yang's did not fit those patterns clearly. He described Yang as hostile toward women and children and as having antisocial traits, and linked this to his detentions and conviction. Lü Hongpeng described him to the Beijing Times as intelligent and articulate, contradictory and deeply hostile to society. Liu Haisheng, his colleague, said Yang had some psychological distortion and a wish for revenge on society, but was not mentally ill.
The Xinmin Evening News reported that police in Xinyang and Zhumadian linked crime among migrant workers from southern Henan to poverty and a local tradition of going south to steal; Li Meijin described a labor-based subculture in the region that shaped migrants' choices. The reporter wrote that Yang's normal development had been interrupted for reasons that were not known.
The arrest came in the same weeks as the arrest of Huang Yong in Pingyu County, also in Zhumadian prefecture, who was accused of killing young people he had lured away. The two cases set off a public argument in the Chinese press about the police practice of not reporting a crime until it was solved. The Xinmin Weekly argued in November 2003 that the public had a right to know about dangers in their communities, and that in both cases people had not been warned until the suspects were caught, in Yang's case by chance. It noted that Shenzhen police had begun issuing a weekly crime report in October 2003, and quoted experts who said the law protecting the right to know was weak.
There was also an argument about language. On November 16, 2003, the Beijing News called Yang a demon and a "demon king of killing" on its front page and in an editorial. A student from Hebei wrote to the paper that the label was improper for a man not yet tried, and that reporting should carry no emotional coloring. The paper's commentator Fang Yuan replied on November 21 that the legal distinctions between suspect, defendant and criminal belonged in court, and that the label was fair given his confession and the DNA evidence. Another Beijing News commentator, Ma Shaohua, wrote that a broken relationship could not explain crimes on this scale, and questioned theories of an inborn criminal personality.
The Henan public security authorities assigned the case to the Luohe police, and the trial was held in Luohe, Xinhua reported. The prosecution, led by Wen Guoshan, took over the case in December 2003 and filed charges on January 9, 2004, CCTV reported. The case file ran to more than 30 volumes. More than ten news organizations sent reporters to Luohe the day before the trial, but the court released no information, the Beijing News reported.
The trial opened at 8 a.m. on February 1, 2004, in Courtroom No. 1 of the Luohe Intermediate People's Court. It was closed to the public because the case involved the privacy of victims, including minors, the Beijing News and the Chengdu Business Daily reported. The room seated more than 300, but about 30 people were present. Journalists from national media waited outside, and local officials reportedly watched a video feed from another room, the Beijing Times reported. More than 40 bailiffs were brought in from across the city, and armed police entered the building from 6:30 a.m.
Yang arrived at about 7:30 a.m. in a prison van escorted by police cars, which entered by a back gate to avoid reporters. He wore a yellow prison uniform and vest, with handcuffs and heavy leg irons that made him walk slowly. The presiding judge was Yang Qingjiu, the court's vice president in charge of criminal cases. Four prosecutors and two defense lawyers took part. The prosecution's materials stood about half a meter high, and the indictment ran to more than 100 pages, the Chengdu Business Daily reported.
Prosecutors went through all the cases one by one: where each weapon came from and where it went, the motives, the methods and the escape routes. The physical evidence included a hammer and an axe, as well as his confession, the Beijing Times reported. No witnesses testified, the Beijing News was told. Yang answered questions clearly and quickly, recalling the times and places of each crime, according to people in the courtroom quoted by the Beijing News. His court-appointed lawyer argued that he had confessed some crimes voluntarily after his arrest.
Reports differ on whether he admitted everything. The Chengdu Business Daily reported that in the morning session he refused to admit two of the charges and would not describe where or how those two offenses took place, and a bailiff described him as evasive. The Beijing Times reported that he admitted all the charges. The court broke from 12:30 to 1 p.m.; Yang ate flatbread and mutton soup with the court staff. The hearing ran until the evening.
The verdict was read in the evening of February 1. The Chengdu Business Daily and the Beijing News put it at about 7:30 p.m.; the Beijing Times said the judge read it at 7:05 p.m. The court found Yang guilty of robbery, intentional homicide, rape and intentional injury, Xinhua reported. Xinhua's report of the verdict said that after his release in 1999 he had committed 26 cases of violent crime in rural Henan, Shandong, Anhui and Hebei, killing 67 people and injuring 10. The Beijing News report of the verdict added 23 rape victims.
The sentences were death, with lifelong deprivation of political rights and confiscation of all personal property, for robbery; death, with lifelong deprivation of political rights, for intentional homicide; death, with lifelong deprivation of political rights, for rape; and five years in prison for intentional injury. Combining them, the court imposed death, lifelong deprivation of political rights and confiscation of all his personal property.
Yang said in court that he accepted the verdict and would not appeal. He asked that the court's documents not be sent to his parents, the Beijing Times reported. A source told the Beijing News that night that his parents did not yet know of the verdict. Court staff told the Chengdu Business Daily that the Luohe court had no facilities for lethal injection and that all its past executions had been by shooting. At 7:40 p.m. he was driven back to the detention center.
Reports on the night of the verdict said he had 15 days to appeal, and that if he did not, the Luohe court would send the case to the Henan Higher People's Court for review; China News Service and Xinhua, reporting the execution, said he had not appealed within the 10-day period. The Henan Higher People's Court reviewed the case and approved the death sentence, Xinhua reported.
On the morning of February 14, 2004, the court read the order for his execution to him in Luohe. After his identity was confirmed he was taken to the execution ground and shot, Xinhua's reporter Lu Huan wrote from Zhengzhou. State television reported the execution, Reuters said.
Reports gave his age at his death as 35 (AFP) and 38 (Reuters). AFP, citing the portal Sina, reported that he had told investigators he would have moved on to Tianjin, and perhaps Beijing, if he had not been caught. China Newsweek had reported in December 2003 that he named Jinghai County, in Tianjin, as his next target, and Xinhua reported that he had planned three more crimes in Shandong and Hebei.
Two days after the execution, a Xinmin Evening News reporter visited his home village. His mother, who looked somewhat like him, would not say when his father would be home. She could not remember when he had left school and did not know what he had done after leaving home. She knew only that he had robbed people, and she kept saying that he was short and could not have done such things. She refused to look at photographs of him until her husband came back, and she said she would not recognize her son if she passed him in the street. Older villagers remembered an honest boy who did well at school and dug wild vegetables after class; younger ones barely remembered him at all. A retired teacher at the local junior high school had heard of him but could find no record of him.
Chinese papers placed the case at the top of the country's modern serial killings. The Xinmin Evening News wrote in 2004 that 2003 had produced two of the worst serial killers since the founding of the People's Republic, Huang Yong of Pingyu, who killed 17, and Yang Xinhai of Zhengyang, who killed 67, both from Zhumadian. When People's Daily Online reviewed recent serial murder cases in 2012, after a case in Yunnan, Yang's case had the highest death toll of the seven it listed. Lü Hongpeng, the Cao County captain, said the case should be written into criminal investigation textbooks, because police might meet cases like it again.
Foreign coverage was limited to wire reports. Reuters called him one of China's worst serial killers. The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong gave him an English nickname drawn from the Chinese press's demon label.
Proven by a final judgment: the 26 cases in which 67 people were killed and 10 injured, under the charges of robbery, intentional homicide, rape and intentional injury (Luohe Intermediate People's Court, February 1, 2004; approved by the Henan Higher People's Court; Xinhua). The names of individual victims come from Chinese press reports of his confession and trial; the text of the judgment was not reported.
Counts that changed over time: his first confession in November 2003 was reported as 22 cases, 65 killed, 5 seriously injured and 23 rape victims; the indictment and verdict covered 25 or 26 cases (reports differ), 67 killed and 10 injured. One early commentary gave 69 killed or injured, of whom 65 died. China Newsweek reported 25 cases and 57 dead in one summary, although its own list of cases added up to more. CCTV gave 78 victims, 67 of whom died.
Not admitted: a September 1 case in Bozhou, Anhui, on the ministry's list, which Yang did not confess to, according to Xinhua. He denied two charges in court, according to the Chengdu Business Daily, but the Beijing Times reported that he admitted all of them.
Details that vary between sources: his birth year (1968 in the judgment as reported, 1970 in CCTV and Beijing Times reports); the years of his reeducation terms (1988 and 1991, or 1990 and 1993); whether his last release from prison was in 1999 or 2000; the first killing (Zhoukou, September 19, 2000, or Fuyang, October 2000); his age at execution (35 or 38); the time the verdict was read; and the number of days he had to appeal (15 or 10).
Claims in circulation that the reports do not support: that he wore oversized shoes or burned his clothes after the attacks (reports say he pulled socks over his shoes, threw his clothes into a river or manure pit, and burned his diary pages); that he tried to stab the arresting officers; and that wire reports described a trial of less than an hour (Chinese reports describe a hearing of about 11 hours).
July 17, 1968: Yang Xinhai is born in Zhengyang County, Zhumadian, Henan (date as given by police; some reports give 1970).
At about 16 or 17: leaves senior high school in his final year and leaves home.
1988: two years of reeducation through labor, Xi'an (1990 in one Xinhua report).
1991: one year of reeducation through labor for pickpocketing, Shijiazhuang (1993 in one Xinhua report).
1996: convicted in Zhengyang County after an attempted rape; sentenced to five years.
1999 or 2000: released early.
September or October 2000: first killings reported, in Zhoukou, Henan, or Fuyang, Anhui.
August 15, 2001: Qiu Yunxian and her two children are killed in Linying County, Henan.
July to December 2002: killings in Dengzhou, Xiping, Shangcai, Weishi, Luyi and Yanling.
November 2002: Henan police link cases in three counties and set up a joint task force.
January to March 2003: killings in Tongxu, Xiangcheng, Xihua and Minquan counties.
April 2, 2003: two people killed in Cao County, Shandong.
June 28, 2003: a man wrongly accused in a 2000 Zhoukou case is released.
August 5, 2003: Sun Shengjun, Li Shuzhi and their daughter are killed in Xingtai County, Hebei.
August 8, 2003: Wei Xianzeng and four family members are killed near Shijiazhuang.
August 15, 2003: the Ministry of Public Security joins the cases into its first supervised case of 2003.
November 2, 2003: Cangzhou police receive a tip about a man without identification at a hotel.
November 3, 2003: he is detained in Cangzhou and gives his name as Yang Xinhai.
November 5, 2003: DNA match confirmed; he begins to confess that evening.
November 16, 2003: police recover a hammer from a grave site in Xiping County.
December 2003: prosecutors take over the case.
January 9, 2004: charges filed.
February 1, 2004: closed trial at the Luohe Intermediate People's Court; sentenced to death that evening; says he will not appeal.
February 14, 2004: executed by shooting in Luohe after the Henan Higher People's Court approves the sentence.