Yang Xinhai was born on July 29, 1968, in Zhengzhou county, Henan, the youngest of four children in a poor farming family. He left school at seventeen and worked as an itinerant labourer around central China. He served two labour-camp sentences in the 1990s, for theft and for attempted rape, and by his own later account the turning point was a girlfriend who left him after learning about the record.
From 1999 to 2003 he killed sixty-seven people in Henan, Anhui, Shandong and Hebei. He walked at night, often for miles, chose an isolated farmhouse, went in while the family slept and killed everyone in it with an axe, a hammer, a shovel or a meat cleaver. Whole households died at once, children included. He raped twenty-three women in the course of it. He wore shoes several sizes too large and burned his clothes afterwards, and because he never took anything and had no connection to any victim, there was nothing for the local police to work with. The killings were investigated as separate cases in four provinces for four years. He also used the name Yang Zhiya.
He was arrested on November 3, 2003, in Cangzhou, Hebei, during a routine sweep of a local entertainment venue for suspicious persons. He was carrying nothing incriminating. His DNA, taken as a matter of course, matched evidence held in four provinces.
He confessed to sixty-seven murders and twenty-three rapes and made no attempt to minimise any of it. Asked at his trial why he had done it, he said that when he killed people he had a desire, that he did not care whether they died, and that it was not his concern whether they were good people or bad.
He was tried in Luohe, Henan, convicted, and executed by shooting on February 14, 2004. He was thirty-five. His is the largest confirmed murder total of any individual in modern Chinese history, and the case is cited domestically as an argument about rural policing and about the millions of internal migrant workers who move through the country without leaving a record anywhere.