On the morning of April 25, 2012, Han Yao, a twenty-year-old student at the Yunnan University of Technology and Business who was doing construction work in the village of Nanmen, near Kunming, was sent by his foreman to fetch documents from an office twenty minutes away. He left the office at 9:10 by the back way, to save time, down a secluded road screened by trees and rubble. By ten his phone was switched off. That night the foreman had a friend call Han's mother, Cheng Lianyan. The next morning she went to the Jincheng police station. The officers told her that her son had probably met someone online or got into a fight.
She went to Nanmen with his photograph and was told at once about other young men who had vanished there. The police dismissed that as rumor. At a second station, in Jinzhen, an officer asked her what evidence she had that anyone was missing. So she investigated herself. Meeting the parents of four other missing youths, she found within two days that every disappearance had happened between nine and eleven in the morning along the Nanmen ditch, right beside the house and fields of a farmer named Zhang Yongming. She took what she had to the Kunming papers, which ran it prominently on May 3. That day the Kunming Public Security Bureau formed a special task force.
Zhang was arrested at his home on May 7, 2012. Inside police found Han Yao's recently dismembered body and his phone, SIM card and bank cards. Buried in the house and in his fields were the remains of about ten people. Villagers had long seen plastic bags hanging from the house with what looked like broken bones sticking out of them, and in Nanmen he had been called the cannibal monster before any charge was brought. Police reported finding human eyeballs preserved in bottles and what appeared to be human flesh hung up to dry. It was further alleged that he fed flesh to his dogs and sold it in the local market as ostrich meat. Those claims come from police statements and press reporting; the conviction was for intentional homicide.
He had been a killer long before. He was born in Nanmen in 1956; one Chinese source gives August 1955. In 1974, at eighteen, during a sleepover, he stabbed his sixteen-year-old cousin and schoolmate, Lu Turong, in the neck with a kitchen knife at about four in the morning as they shared a bed. Lu blocked the second blow with his hand and screamed, and Zhang's parents disarmed their son. Lu survived eight stab wounds. Zhang was held up to public criticism in the village and sent for six months of reeducation through labor; the explanation given was that he had been sleepwalking. In 1978 he lured Yang Shurong, a boy of sixteen he had been paired with to burn bricks and sell rice for the production team, into his home with the promise of eighteen yuan, strangled him, broke his limbs and buried him curled in a fresh hole outside the village. He fled to Chengjiang County and was arrested half a month later.
In December 1979 the court sentenced him to death with a two-year reprieve for intentional homicide. The sentence was reduced several times, and he was released in September 1997 after nineteen years. His parents had died, his siblings had moved away and the family house had fallen in. The village gave him some farmland and a minimum living allowance. He tended the fields at first, then let them go barren, lived on odd jobs, never married, and grew more reclusive year by year, rarely seen except when he went to play Go in the local park. Villagers disliked him for the old murder.
The disappearances began, by the police count, on May 1, 2007, when twelve-year-old Li Hanxiong vanished on his birthday. His father had sent him home early from the fields to cook rice for lunch, and the boy took a detour to retrieve some clothing and apparently crossed the riverbank beside Zhang's house. When his father reported him missing that afternoon, the Jincheng police told him to come back after twenty-four hours. The next day a neighbor told him he and others had seen Zhang pacing the riverbank half an hour after the boy disappeared. The father told the police. They did not investigate.
Others escaped him and were not believed either. In 2008 Zhang asked a schoolboy named Yang Minggui to help him carry timber, then pulled a rope around his neck; the boy broke free and told his parents, who did not go to the police. After Xie Haijun disappeared on January 27, 2011, his father called the deputy police director and named Zhang, and a week later was told the police would not look at him because he was mentally ill. On December 1, 2011, Zhang tried to slip a belt around the neck of a seventeen-year-old walking home from a late study session; the boy fought him and a neighbor pinned him down. Zhang told the police it was a prank, paid thirty yuan toward the boy's treatment and was let go. Many parents came to believe their sons had been kidnapped to work in illegal brick kilns, a fear fed by a missing man who had once resurfaced after escaping from one, and they spent thousands of yuan searching.
The Kunming Intermediate People's Court tried him in July 2012. His lawyers argued that he was mentally ill; the court found him fit to be tried. On July 28 it convicted him of intentional homicide for eleven killings between March 2008 and April 2012, finding that he had strangled the victims with his hands or with tape near Nanmen and the Xinyun and Rongchen cold storage plants and taken the bodies home to dismember, burn and bury them. It said he had used cruel means and that the circumstances and consequences were especially serious, and sentenced him to death with deprivation of political rights for life. He showed no remorse and would not apologize. After the verdict he confessed and did not appeal, and the Yunnan Provincial High People's Court upheld it. He was executed on January 10, 2013.
Police confirmed eleven dead, all male. Apart from two older men, one of thirty-eight and one of eighty, they were between twelve and twenty-two; among the named are Zhang Haijun and Chen Tao, both sixteen, and Cai Yunwei, seventeen. Seventeen people had gone missing from Nanmen since his release, and he was suspected in as many as that. Twelve police officers were dismissed or disciplined for dereliction of duty, among them Da Qiming, the Jinning police chief, and Zhao Huiyun, head of the Jincheng station. The police defended themselves by saying that the disappearances had seemed a lower priority than the local drug problem.