Zhao Zhihong was arrested in Inner Mongolia, in northern China, in October 2005, and he confessed to more than 20 crimes, among them robberies and killings, committed over almost a decade. One of them was a killing that, as far as the courts were concerned, had been solved long before. On April 9, 1996, a woman surnamed Yang was killed in Hohhot, the regional capital. An 18-year-old factory worker named Hugjiltu, who had gone to the police to report the crime, was convicted of her murder and executed in June 1996, 61 days after her death.
Zhao's confession did not lead quickly to a reckoning. Prosecutors left the 1996 killing out of his indictment, his trial was adjourned in 2006 and not resumed until 2015, and only in December 2014 did the Inner Mongolia Higher People's Court declare Hugjiltu not guilty. Zhao was then tried, convicted and sentenced to death. When the Supreme People's Court reviewed the sentence, it confirmed 17 crimes, including the killing of six people, but declined to confirm four others. One of the four was the killing of Yang in 1996. Zhao was executed at Hohhot on July 30, 2019. He had maintained throughout that he committed the crime that cost Hugjiltu his life, and the highest court had found that claim unproved.
Zhao was born in 1972 in a rural county of Inner Mongolia. Xinhua, reporting the first-instance judgment in February 2015, gave his birth as May 1972 and described him as Han Chinese, with a junior-high education and no job. The Supreme People's Court's ruling, as the People's Daily printed it in 2019, gives a birth date of September 5, 1972 and describes him as a farmer. China News Service, in February 2015, named his home village in the same county.
Little else is publicly known about his early years. The court record shows one conviction before his arrest in 2005. In October 2003 he was sentenced to six months in prison for theft, and he was released in December 2003. Because he went on to commit crimes within five years of finishing that sentence, the courts treated him as a recidivist under Chinese law, a factor that calls for heavier punishment.
On the evening of April 9, 1996, a woman surnamed Yang was found dead in Hohhot. The People's Court Daily, the newspaper of China's court system, later reported that she was found at about 9:15 p.m. Her age and full name have not been published. An uncredited report in March 2015 called her a young woman.
The person who reported the crime was Hugjiltu, an 18-year-old ethnic Mongolian who worked at a cigarette factory. Agence France-Presse, citing China Daily, reported in December 2014 that he had been questioned for 48 hours before he confessed. On May 17, 1996, the Hohhot Intermediate People's Court sentenced him to death for intentional homicide, with lifelong deprivation of political rights, and to five years for hooliganism, with the death sentence to be carried out at once. On June 5, 1996, the Inner Mongolia Higher People's Court rejected his appeal. He was executed on June 10, 1996.
Reports differ by a day on the interval. Xinhua and China Daily described him as sentenced and executed 61 days after the killing; Radio Free Asia put it at 62 days after the crime, and a 2015 China Daily report at 62 days after he was charged. An uncredited 2015 report gave the first-instance sentencing date as May 23, 1996 rather than May 17; the High Court's own retrial account, as the People's Court Daily reported it, uses May 17.
Hugjiltu's parents spent years petitioning for the case to be reopened. AFP wrote in December 2014 that the family had spent nearly a decade trying to prove his innocence.
What Zhao did over the next nine years is known chiefly through the courts' findings. The Hohhot Intermediate People's Court, in its 2015 judgment, found him responsible for 21 criminal incidents between April 1996 and July 2005, in Hohhot and another city in Inner Mongolia. According to The Paper, a Shanghai news site, those findings covered killings that left ten people dead, offenses against 13 women and girls, robberies totaling 31,400 yuan and thefts worth more than 3,500 yuan. China News Service reported that the youngest of the victims was 12.
The Supreme People's Court, reviewing the death sentence, narrowed that list. It confirmed 17 crimes committed between September 1996 and July 2005, in Hohhot and other places in Inner Mongolia. Six people were killed. Two girls under the age of 14 were among the victims of the other charges. There were also repeated robberies, including robberies in people's homes and robberies of large sums, and repeated thefts. According to the court, he killed in order to silence witnesses.
The ruling as printed by the People's Daily gives one of the confirmed killings as an example. On the morning of September 5, 1996, Zhao killed a woman who worked as a weighbridge operator at a factory. DNA evidence linked him to the crime, and he confessed to it.
Some of the property crimes were heard in public in 2015, and the reports of those hearings give a little more. Prosecutors alleged that on the evening of May 19, 1996, Zhao robbed a woman on her way home from work. Between 1998 and 2000 he carried out several thefts of cash and gold rings worth more than 3,000 yuan in all. At the January 2015 trial he admitted the robbery and most of the thefts but denied stealing one gold ring in 1998. On appeal in April 2015, the public part of the hearing dealt with one robbery in 1996 and two thefts, in 1998 and 2003, worth 2,980 yuan in total.
The names of the victims of the confirmed crimes have not been published, and the courts heard the homicide charges and other charges in closed session to protect the victims' privacy.
Zhao was caught on October 23, 2005, according to China News Service and Radio Free Asia. The Supreme People's Court's ruling, as the People's Daily printed it, gives November 23, 2005 as the date of his formal arrest on the charges that were later tried. Chinese media, China News Service said, came to call him "the smiling killer."
After his arrest he confessed to more than 20 cases of robbery, killing and other crimes, the People's Court Daily reported. He told investigators that the first killing of this kind he had committed was the one in Hohhot on April 9, 1996, known in Chinese reporting as the "4·9" case. The Supreme People's Court noted in 2019 that he had confessed to the Yang killing on his own initiative and had consistently maintained it.
On November 28, 2006, the Hohhot Intermediate People's Court heard Zhao's case behind closed doors. Prosecutors charged nine killings. The 1996 killing was not among them. Zhao himself raised the omission in court, and the hearing was adjourned. According to China News Service, the case was not heard again until after Hugjiltu's case had been retried. China News Service wrote in February 2015 that his parents had not visited him in his nine years in custody.
While in detention, The Paper reported, Zhao wrote a document in 2006 that he called an application to pay with his life, repeating that he had committed the 1996 killing and asking prosecutors to look into it fully.
The adjournment later gave rise to a widely repeated story that his execution had been stopped at the last minute in 2007 so that the 1996 case could be preserved. The Supreme People's Court rejected that story in 2019: no first-instance judgment against Zhao existed until 2015, it said, so there had been no death sentence and no execution order to halt.
On November 19, 2014, the Inner Mongolia Higher People's Court decided to retry Hugjiltu's case, and his father received the decision the next day, the People's Court Daily reported. On the morning of December 15, 2014, the court announced its retrial judgment. It set aside the 1996 conviction and the appeal ruling and declared Hugjiltu not guilty, on the ground that the facts were unclear and the evidence insufficient.
The court gave three main reasons. The way of killing he had described in his confession did not match the autopsy findings. The blood-type evidence used against him identified only a type, not a person, and so could not show that he alone was responsible. His statements were unstable and conflicted with other evidence; Xinhua reported that his description of the victim did not match her height or hairstyle. The hooliganism conviction, the court said, had rested on nothing but his own confession. AFP added that the court found the DNA evidence did not definitively link him to the crime.
The court said that the case met the conditions for state compensation and that work on holding those responsible to account had begun. AFP, citing Xinhua, reported that a deputy president of the court gave the parents 30,000 yuan, a personal gift rather than an official payment. On social media, AFP wrote, many people said the sum was not enough and called for the officials involved to answer for the case.
The next day, December 16, 2014, the Hohhot People's Procuratorate announced that it had added the 1996 killing to the charges against Zhao, as intentional homicide, with other charges.
On December 25, 2014, Hugjiltu's parents applied for state compensation of 3,723,335.50 yuan. On December 30, the Inner Mongolia Higher People's Court decided to pay them 2,059,621.40 yuan, and the decision was delivered on the morning of December 31, Xinhua reported. The award was made up of 1,047,580 yuan for his death and funeral costs, 12,041.40 yuan for the 60 days he had been held, and 1,000,000 yuan for emotional harm. The parents told Xinhua that money could not bring back a life. His father said the question was not whether they were satisfied with the amount: it was a kind of comfort for the spirit, and no more.
Zhao's trial opened at the Hohhot Intermediate People's Court on January 5, 2015, and lasted three days. The robbery and theft charges were heard in public before more than 60 people, among them deputies to the people's congresses, members of the political consultative conference, journalists and members of the public. The homicide charges and other charges, with some of the robbery and theft charges, were heard in closed session because they involved the victims' privacy. China News Service reported that he faced four charges covering 22 cases.
Neither Zhao nor his family hired a lawyer, and the court appointed two lawyers through the Inner Mongolia legal aid center. They argued that the evidence on the robbery and theft charges was insufficient. Zhao again said in court that he had committed the 1996 killing, China News Service reported, and declined to argue for himself: "I don't want to make any defense for myself, because the crimes I committed are too great."
His parents did not attend. His mother told China News Service that he had written to the family from detention but that they had not replied, and his father said he would not see him.
On the morning of February 9, 2015, the Hohhot Intermediate People's Court announced its judgment, which the People's Daily's later report dates to January 26, 2015. It convicted Zhao of intentional homicide, with other charges, and of robbery and theft. It imposed two death sentences, for homicide and for a second count, each with lifelong deprivation of political rights. For robbery it imposed 15 years and a fine of 50,000 yuan, and for theft one year and a fine of 3,000 yuan. The combined sentence was death, lifelong deprivation of political rights and a fine of 53,000 yuan. He was also ordered to pay 102,768 yuan in economic losses to the civil plaintiffs.
Xinhua reported that the court found Zhao to be the true culprit in the 1996 killing. The court described the crimes as especially vile in nature and cruel in method, with very great harm to society, and noted that he was a recidivist. It accepted that he had confessed truthfully, but not that he had surrendered or performed meritorious service, and it held that the confession did not justify a lighter sentence. Legal scholars quoted by The Paper explained that a confession to further crimes of the same kind as those already under investigation counted only as a candid confession under Chinese law, not as surrender.
Zhao appealed. The Inner Mongolia Higher People's Court opened the second-instance hearing on the morning of April 14, 2015, and examined the facts of all 21 cases that day, the Beijing News reported. Again the homicide charges and other charges were heard in closed session. In the public part, Zhao said he could not remember times or places and did not want to go over the details again. In the afternoon he pressed his claim to meritorious service, arguing that he had disclosed many crimes the police did not know about and that his confession in the 1996 case counted as a major contribution. He told the court that the law existed to save people, that ten years in custody had changed him, and that he hoped to repay society through labor.
His appointed lawyers said he accepted all the charges but had a strong wish to live. In closed session they argued that the evidence was insufficient on two of the other charges, four of the homicide charges and one theft.
The appeal court rejected his appeal and upheld the first-instance judgment. The People's Daily, printing the Supreme People's Court's ruling in 2019, gives the date of the appeal ruling as April 26, 2015.
The reopening of the Hugjiltu case turned attention to the officials who had handled it. Two days after the acquittal, a former deputy police chief in Hohhot who had led the 1996 investigation was taken away for investigation on suspicion of crimes connected with his duties, The Paper reported. China Daily wrote in July 2015 that he had been accused of extracting a confession by torture, dereliction of duty and taking bribes, and that he remained under investigation. In October 2016 The Paper reported that a first-instance court had given him a three-year term on a charge of illegally possessing guns and ammunition. The charges against him, the report said, centered on conduct after 2000.
In March 2015 the president of the Supreme People's Court, Zhou Qiang, told the national legislature in his annual work report that the courts deeply reproached themselves for letting wrongful convictions happen and that courts at every level should learn a serious lesson from such cases, according to a report carried by Inquirer.net that discussed the Hugjiltu case alongside his remarks. The same report said detectives had admitted that their work was measured by an annual quota of solved cases.
In July 2015 China Daily reported that the two judges who had presided over Hugjiltu's 1996 trial had been appointed to the trial committee of the Hohhot intermediate court. A court official said the appointment was not a promotion and would not protect them from punishment if misconduct were found. Hugjiltu's mother said the inquiry had run for seven months with no result made public, and asked why the two judges still held their posts.
On February 1, 2016, the authorities in Inner Mongolia announced that 27 people had been held responsible. The former deputy police chief was dealt with separately under criminal law. The other 26, from the police, the procuratorate and the courts, received Party or administrative discipline, from warnings and serious warnings within the Party to administrative demerits, Radio Free Asia and Inquirer.net reported. Hugjiltu's mother told Radio Free Asia that the handling had been too hasty. She did not want anyone put to death, she said, but she wanted those directly responsible to answer for her son's life. His eldest brother said the family was thoroughly disappointed and would pursue the matter through legal channels. A lawyer interviewed by the station said that Party and administrative discipline had been put in place of legal responsibility.
Zhao's death sentence then went to the Supreme People's Court for review. The head of the court's Fifth Criminal Division described the review in a written interview published on the day of the execution. The judges examined the full file of Zhao's case and the file of the Hugjiltu case. Members of the panel twice questioned Zhao at the Hohhot No. 1 Detention Center. The panel heard the views of the Supreme People's Procuratorate, and the case was referred to the court's adjudication committee.
On July 2, 2019, the court approved the Inner Mongolia High Court's ruling upholding the death sentence. Of the 21 crimes found by the lower courts, it confirmed 17 as established by clear facts and reliable, sufficient evidence. It declined to confirm four, from 1996 and 1999. In those four, the court said, Zhao had confessed on his own initiative and consistently, but parts of what he confessed contradicted the other evidence, so that no single conclusion could be drawn and the standard of proof was not met. The division head listed examples of the problems: inconsistent statements, a shoe-print length that did not match the size of his foot, details of the victims that he could not describe, and physical evidence that had been lost or could no longer be used.
The killing of Yang was one of the four. According to the division head, the witness statements, the examination of the scene and the autopsy showed only that Zhao had lived nearby and had the opportunity to commit the crime. His account of the time of the killing, of what the victim was wearing and of other details conflicted with the evidence. The court also corrected two claims that had spread in the press and online. It said tests carried out in 1996 had found no biological trace of the attacker, contrary to reports that such evidence had been found and later lost. It also rejected the story of a last-minute halt to his execution in 2007.
The court was careful to separate its finding from Hugjiltu's exoneration. "The retrial of the 'Hugjiltu case' ended in acquittal because the evidence that Hugjiltu committed intentional homicide was insufficient, not because Zhao Zhihong admitted to being the real killer," the division head said. Because Zhao had confessed before any court had tried him, he added, part of the public had long regarded him as a self-confessed killer in a case no court had examined.
China Daily reported the court's reasoning: the main evidence against Zhao in the 1996 case was his own confession, and significant contradictions between that confession and the other evidence meant he could not be proved guilty. The ruling did not affect Hugjiltu's exoneration, the court said, and it had "deeply learned the lessons" of his case.
On the morning of July 30, 2019, the Hohhot Intermediate People's Court executed Zhao under an order signed by the president of the Supreme People's Court, with officers of the procuratorate present to supervise, the court system's news service reported. Before the execution he refused to meet his close relatives.
In its announcement the Supreme People's Court repeated the confirmed findings: 17 crimes between September 1996 and July 2005, intentional homicide, with other charges, including robbery and theft, in Hohhot and other places in Inner Mongolia, with six people killed. The crimes, it said, were especially vile in nature and cruel in method, with very grave consequences, and his recidivism called for heavier punishment. His confession did not earn leniency.
China Daily, reporting the execution the next day, put the 1996 case at the center: Zhao had drawn wide attention, it wrote, because he claimed to be the real killer in a case for which a teenager had been wrongly convicted and executed 23 years earlier.
The 1996 killing. Zhao confessed to it after his arrest in 2005 and, according to the Supreme People's Court, consistently maintained it, and the Hohhot court in 2015 found him to be the culprit. The Supreme People's Court did not confirm that finding in 2019, holding that the evidence did not meet the standard of proof. In law the killing of Yang has not been attributed to him, and Hugjiltu has been declared not guilty of it. Who killed her has not been established by any court.
The number of victims. The trial courts found 21 crimes, with ten people killed, according to The Paper. The Supreme People's Court confirmed 17, with six people killed. The killings in the four unconfirmed incidents rest on Zhao's confession only. China News Service reported in 2015 that he faced 22 cases at trial, and the People's Court Daily reported that he had confessed to more than 20.
His age and dates. Xinhua gives his birth as May 1972; the ruling printed by the People's Daily gives September 5, 1972. China Daily's English reports gave other ages, 42 at arrest in a 2015 report and 56 in 2019, which match neither. His custody began on October 23, 2005, according to China News Service and Radio Free Asia; the court ruling records a formal arrest on November 23, 2005.
The 2007 reprieve story. Reports that Zhao's execution was halted at the last minute in 2007 were rejected by the Supreme People's Court, which said no death sentence against him existed before 2015.
1972: Zhao Zhihong is born in a rural county of Inner Mongolia (May, per Xinhua; September 5, per the court ruling as printed by the People's Daily).
April 9, 1996: a woman surnamed Yang is killed in Hohhot. Hugjiltu, 18, who reported the crime, is later charged with her murder.
May 17, 1996: the Hohhot Intermediate People's Court sentences Hugjiltu to death.
June 5, 1996: the Inner Mongolia Higher People's Court rejects his appeal.
June 10, 1996: Hugjiltu is executed.
September 1996 to July 2005: the period of the 17 crimes confirmed by the Supreme People's Court, with six people killed.
October 2003: Zhao is sentenced to six months for theft; he is released in December 2003.
October 23, 2005: Zhao is taken into custody; he confesses to more than 20 cases, including the 1996 killing.
November 23, 2005: formal arrest, per the court ruling.
November 28, 2006: closed hearing in Hohhot; prosecutors charge nine killings but not the 1996 case; Zhao objects and the hearing is adjourned.
November 19, 2014: the Inner Mongolia Higher People's Court decides to retry Hugjiltu's case.
December 15, 2014: Hugjiltu is declared not guilty.
December 16, 2014: prosecutors add the 1996 killing to the charges against Zhao.
December 30, 2014: the High Court awards Hugjiltu's parents 2,059,621.40 yuan in state compensation.
January 5, 2015: Zhao's trial opens in Hohhot.
February 9, 2015: the Hohhot Intermediate People's Court sentences him to death (judgment dated January 26).
March 2015: Supreme People's Court president Zhou Qiang tells the national legislature the courts deeply reproach themselves for wrongful convictions.
April 14, 2015: appeal hearing at the Inner Mongolia Higher People's Court.
April 26, 2015: appeal rejected.
February 1, 2016: Inner Mongolia announces that 27 people have been held responsible for the 1996 case.
July 2, 2019: the Supreme People's Court approves the death sentence, confirming 17 crimes and declining to confirm four, including the 1996 killing.
July 30, 2019: Zhao is executed at Hohhot.