Anshan is a steel city in Liaoning. In the summer and autumn of 2003, six women who took a taxi home alone late at night did not arrive. Most of them worked in the city's service trade and were going home after their shifts.
The driver carried a rope. He would take a woman who had got in by herself to somewhere isolated and strangle her, with the rope or with his hands, take her cash and anything worth having, and leave the body down a roadside wastewater well or out in open ground. The property came to something over six thousand yuan across all six. The oldest of them was forty-six. The youngest was seventeen.
When the dates are given they vary: June to July in one account, from May into October in another.
By the autumn, people in Anshan were afraid to get into cabs at all and the trade was visibly affected.
At 12:47 a.m. on November 28, 2003 detectives came into a flat in the Shengousi area of Lishan District and pinned a man down on the bed where he was sleeping face down. He did not struggle and said nothing, and let them dress him and walk him out to the car. Zhou Wen was thirty-eight, a quiet man who drove as a relief driver, taking other men's cabs on their off shifts. He confessed almost at once.
He had also kept a record. After each killing he had written down where he left the body, and he led detectives from site to site with it. Asked why he had written it, he said he had known he would slip up one day and had wanted to be sure he could remember.
He was not new to this. From 1981 to 1983 he had been held in a juvenile reformatory for the rape of a young girl. In 1988 he was sentenced to fourteen years for rape, robbery and theft; the sentence was reduced and he came out in 1999. He got a taxi license and started work.
What he told the police was that he resented women who went out alone in the middle of the night. He also said he hated women generally, and put it down to his wife having had an abortion without his consent. That account comes from the police announcement of the arrest and the reporting that followed.
On the morning of December 30, 2003 the Anshan Intermediate People's Court heard the case in two hours and sentenced him to death. Many of the victims' families were in the courtroom. The conviction is reported as one for robbery, the six deaths being treated as having occurred in the course of taking the women's money; other accounts describe it as robbery and murder. One report of the execution dates the trial verdict to December 1.
The Liaoning Provincial High People's Court rejected his appeal on January 12, 2004. He was shot the next day, January 13, at thirty-nine. The China News Service report of the execution said in its headline that he had shown no repentance even as he went to it, and in an interview the day before, he said he felt no remorse.
The six women have never been named publicly. Their ages are known, and that each was alone, and that each had done nothing but get into a licensed taxi at night in a city where that was the ordinary way to get home.