The 30-Year Manhunt for China’s Most Elusive Serial Killer
Lengthy article. rbbm.
Aug 14 2018
AP Photo
The 30-Year Manhunt for China’s Most Elusive Serial Killer
Why did Gao Chengyong rape and mutiliate 11 women—and why did he stop?
By Robert Foyle Hunwick
August 14, 2018
It was Chinese New Year, a weeklong celebration of fireworks and family to scare up good fortune and dispel evil spirits, when the killer went on the prowl again.
He picked a young worker walking home, and followed a ways behind. He’d done it before, many times, enough to perfect his technique, but things did not go as planned that winter’s night. His crimes were already notorious and the target realized the danger; she fought back tooth and nail, locked the door, and frantically called her husband.
It was then, she
said, that her would-be killer reappeared, grinning outside her window. When her husband reached her, the couple checked again: there he still was, still laughing. By the time police arrived, though,
the smiling apparition had vanished into the New Year’s night, blending into the carefree popping of corks and firecrackers—and the 14-year pall of fear and suspicion one phantom had managed to cast over a remote city of 1.7 million in the world’s
largest authoritarian country.
“Our parents used to talk about it sometimes,” Sun, a friend who grew up near the northeast city where at least one of the killings occurred, told me. “When we were growing up, kids weren’t allowed to go out after dark… and my mom
never let me wear anything red.”
In August 2016, nearly three decades after the killings began, and after years of inactivity from the killer, police sensationally revealed the most unremarkable suspect: Gao Chengyong, a 52-year-old recluse who shared a campus grocery store with his wife. Gao quickly confessed, Chinese media reported. Suggestions that there may have been other survivors, or that Gao had killed more, came to naught. During sentencing in March of this year, prosecutors addressed only the official charges: the rape, mutilation, and murder of 11 women."
"Twenty-five-year-old Ms. Zhu had been rooming long-term at the fleapit Taolechun Hostel before she had the misfortune to run into Gao. Her decomposing body was found 10 days later, stripped, raped, her throat cut. Afterward, Gao had gone home, perhaps alone, or to his wife or one of his sons, who usually saw him only once a year, around Spring Festival; one of the times he liked to hunt.
It would be his final crime. Perhaps, at 38, the homicidal urges had waned along with his physical strength.
Since his arrest in 2016, though, Gao has proved a case study in disinterested sociopathy; asked why he took a first six-year hiatus after 1998, he told investigators he “didn’t know.” Gao has given only detailed recollections of his actual crimes, all delivered with a deadpan disposition. “Gao’s calmness is unimaginable… terrifying. He remembers everything clearly,” one interviewer said. But he has offered no clue as to motive—or how he eluded the manhunt for nearly three decades."