Zhang Yongming was born in 1956 in Nanmen, a village in Jinning County near Kunming in Yunnan. Little is recorded about his early life. In 1974, at eighteen, he stabbed his sixteen-year-old cousin in the neck with a kitchen knife while the boy was asleep in the same bed; the cousin blocked the second blow with his hand and survived. Zhang was arrested and sentenced to death in 1979 for intentional homicide. The sentence was reduced, and he was released in September 1997, given land near his own village, and went back to farming.
Between March 2008 and April 2012 he killed eleven boys and young men from the area. The court found that he strangled them, with his hands or with tape, and took the bodies to his house. Remains were dismembered and some were burned.
What made the case internationally famous was what he was said to have done with the bodies. He is reported to have sold flesh at the local market as ostrich meat, and to have fed some of it to his dogs. Police accounts describe remains found in the house at his arrest. These claims come from press reporting and from the court's characterisation of the case rather than from any published forensic record, and the reporting of them is uneven; the convictions themselves were for intentional homicide.
He was called the cannibal monster in his own village well before any charge, because of the bags left hanging outside his house that appeared to contain bones. One father of a missing twelve-year-old told a reporter that until the arrest nobody in the village had doubted him.
The failure of the authorities is the substance of this case in China. Boys had been going missing near Zhang's home since 2008. Local police did not investigate, and the disappearances were made public not by them but by the parents of the missing, whose campaign gave the case its Chinese name, the bizarre serial disappearance case. Some parents feared their sons had been taken for forced labour. Only in early May 2012, after national media coverage, did the Ministry of Public Security send investigators to Yunnan. Twelve police officers were later sacked or disciplined for ignoring the missing person reports.
He was arrested on May 9, 2012, during enquiries into the disappearance of one of the last victims, a nineteen-year-old.
The Kunming Intermediate People's Court convicted him of intentional homicide in July 2012 and sentenced him to death, with deprivation of his political rights for life. The court said he had used cruel means and that the circumstances and consequences were especially serious. He confessed after the verdict and did not appeal. The Yunnan High Court upheld the sentence, and he was executed on January 10, 2013, aged fifty-seven.
He was reported as a suspect in a larger number of disappearances than he was charged with, given as seventeen in one account and as many as twenty in another. Neither figure was tested in court. The count here is the eleven he was convicted of, with a twelfth for the killing behind his 1979 death sentence.