On April 9, 1996, a young woman surnamed Yang was raped and strangled in the women's lavatory of the No. 1 Wool Textile Mill in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia. The eighteen-year-old worker who reported finding her, Huugjilt, was arrested for it, convicted of murder and hooliganism, and executed in June, sixty-one or sixty-two days after the killing, during a national campaign against crime in which cases were pushed through at speed. His parents, Li Sanren and Shang Aiyun, spent the next eighteen years petitioning.
Zhao Zhihong was born in 1972 in Yongxing village, in Liangcheng county of Ulanqab. On October 23, 2005, police arrested him at a kindergarten in the Xincheng district of Hohhot where he was working, and he volunteered dozens of crimes, among them the April 9 killing at the textile mill. Chinese reporting had called the unknown killer the demon of Inner Mongolia; he also came to be called the smiling killer. He was a repeat offender with a previous conviction.
His confession did not reopen the Huugjilt case for nine years. When Hohhot prosecutors took Zhao to a closed trial in November 2006, they charged nine of the ten rape-murders he had confessed to and left out the 1996 killing, and no verdict was announced. The pressure to reopen came largely from a Xinhua reporter in Inner Mongolia, Tang Ji, who was later honored by the agency for it. On November 20, 2014, the Inner Mongolia High Court agreed to rehear Huugjilt's case, and on December 15 it quashed the 1996 judgments and declared him innocent. The next day prosecutors added the 1996 killing to the charges against Zhao. On December 30 the court awarded Huugjilt's parents 2,059,621.40 yuan in state compensation, and an inquiry into the officials who had handled the original case began.
On February 9, 2015, the Hohhot Intermediate People's Court announced its judgment, dated January 26, convicting Zhao of intentional homicide, rape, robbery and theft and sentencing him to death, with fines and compensation to the victims' families. The first- and second-instance courts found twenty-one crimes proved, the 1996 killing among them. The Inner Mongolia High Court rejected his appeal in late April 2015.
The Supreme People's Court, reviewing the death sentence, confirmed seventeen of the twenty-one: between September 1996 and July 2005, in Hohhot, Ulanqab and elsewhere, Zhao had killed six people and raped two girls and ten women, and committed repeated robberies and thefts. It declined to confirm four, and one of them was the killing of Yang in 1996. A senior judge of the court explained in writing that the evidence that Zhao had done it was insufficient to confirm, and that this did not mean Huugjilt's exoneration had been wrong: the grounds for acquitting Huugjilt were that the case against him had never been proved.
Zhao was executed at Hohhot on the morning of July 30, 2019, fourteen years after his arrest. He refused to see his family before he died.
The case left a gap that has never been closed. Huugjilt was cleared because the evidence against him was insufficient; the man who confessed to the same killing was never held by the highest court to have committed it. The 1996 murder remains officially without a proven killer, and it is remembered in China chiefly as the case of a teenager put to death sixty-one days after he walked into a police station to report a crime.