Danwei has a lengthy report on serial killers in China, many of whom are unknown by the public due to a lackadaisical police force and propaganda officials who don’t want to stories reported. The article starts with a graphic description of a killer who, together with his girlfriend, would lure young women to his apartment, torture them, steal their bank account information and money, and then dismember their bodies:
Almost ten years after their last victims — two prostitutes robbed of 160,000 yuan — were found stuffed down a drain, Yang Shubin’s kill team were discovered playing happy families, running a successful foot massage parlour and billiard room. The Harbin police view the case as both a major success — and an unprecedented case in recent history.
But the case is not unprecedented.“China has a serial killer problem,” Beijing criminologist Professor Peng Weimin (a pseudonym by his request) told me over a two hour dinner of dumplings in Beijing. Sipping from his beer, small flecks of grey in his donnish black hair, Peng reeled off a series of anecdotes concerning various killers from the past. He knew the details of some cases, but often he was able to offer just outlines: prostitutes that washed up on a river bank in Shenzhen, tales from a north-eastern city where dozens of schoolchildren never came home.
Read the propaganda directives banning reporting on several murder cases in September, mentioned in the Danwei report, via CDT.
