Almost nothing is known about Zhang Lisong, and what is known comes from a few sentences in a state newspaper, relayed abroad by wire services on Friday, September 25, 1998.
He was thirty when he died, which puts his birth in about 1968. The Legal Daily, the state legal newspaper, described him as a peasant and gave him a nickname: the Monster Murderer.
For roughly a year, from about March 1997, he moved across Hubei province in central China committing murder, rape and robbery. Nine people were killed. Six were raped. Whether those two groups overlap, and who any of them were, has never been reported.
Police caught him on March 1, 1998.
Within seven months he was dead. He was sentenced to death and, in the formula Chinese courts use, stripped of his political rights for life. He was shot after a public sentencing rally in Hubei. The newspaper did not say on what day the execution had taken place.
That interval, from arrest to trial to sentence to the execution ground in no more than seven months, is the one thing about the case that can be measured. Everything else rests on the state's word.
No judgment has been published. No court record is accessible. Nobody has named the nine people who died, and no account exists of how he killed them or how he was caught. The figure of nine is a number announced by the state and relayed by a state newspaper, and no independent account of it has ever appeared.