Zhou was born in 1972 and lived in Changsha, in Hunan province. Between October 11 and November 26, 2009 he met six men aged twenty-three to forty through internet forums for sexual contact, brought them to a room he had rented, and hanged them during sessions involving restraint and asphyxiation.
He was arrested and convicted, and executed by lethal injection on August 29, 2014, nearly five years after the killings.
The case was reported outside China largely in the gay press, where the framing was on the vulnerability of men meeting strangers privately in a country where such contacts were made online and not discussed. The victims were not named in Chinese reporting.
The accessible record is short reports of the conviction and the execution. No judgment is published, and the account of the mechanism of the deaths comes from those reports.