What Famous Real-Life Serial or Deranged Murder Cases Are There?

Some earth-shaking cases, when they are first exposed to the world, look like nothing more than very minor matters.

The Nehe case was like that.

October 23, 1991, Hangzhou, Zhejiang.

In the interrogation room of the Yongjin Police Station of the Shangcheng District Public Security Sub-bureau, a young police officer had just finished questioning a good-looking woman from the Northeast. Head down, finishing up the record, he asked routinely: besides this case, is there anything else you want to confess?

The woman looked dazed. She seemed about to speak and stopped, hesitated for a long time, and finally let out one sentence.

As soon as she said it, the officer across from her was stunned. He jerked his head up, mouth agape, his face full of disbelief.

What the woman described was this: after he had satisfied his lust, he threw her into the cellar.

In that 6-meter-deep cellar, 42 dead people were piled one on top of another.

“We killed more than twenty people in the Northeast.”

More than twenty people?

What kind of case could kill that many people?

If there really were such a case, it would have caused an uproar long ago. Wouldn’t Hangzhou have heard of it?

Besides, however you looked at her, she didn’t seem like someone capable of pulling off a case that big.

At first the police didn’t take this woman seriously at all.

Wasn’t it just using a pretty face to lure men who fantasized about a fling, getting them to follow her obediently and then be robbed obediently?

Doing this with her were two other men.

After questioning, the police initially concluded that they had indeed committed crimes, but at most it was a “honey trap” using sex as bait.

Translator’s note: A “honey trap” (仙人跳, literally “immortal’s leap”) is a classic scam in which a woman lures a man somewhere and her accomplices then rob or extort him.

This was originally just an insignificant interrogation.

The guard was lax, and the questioning wasn’t pushed hard.

If what she said was true, the principal culprit in such a shocking case would certainly be executed once it was confirmed. Why would she need to confess voluntarily?

The officer carefully recalled again every word the woman had slowly spoken.

He hadn’t misheard. What she said was: “I have another big case, much, much bigger than this one.

If I tell you about it, I will certainly die, and you will certainly earn great merit.

We also killed more than twenty people in the Northeast. I hope your bureau chief can come see me.”

Was she crazy?

The young officer was full of doubt, but he still didn’t dare neglect it and quickly reported the situation to his superiors.

The leadership considered various possibilities and decided they still needed to verify the information the woman from the Northeast had provided.

The reason was simple: in case what she said was true, this would be a shocking case that would rock the whole country.

Whoever let such a case slip through because of a work error would be guilty before the people.

No one could bear that responsibility.

On receiving the order, the police at Yongjin Station sent an urgent telegram to the Nehe County Public Security Bureau, at one mao four fen per character, simply to confirm whether such a case existed.

Nehe was where the woman and her two accomplices had come from.

Nehe is in Heilongjiang. At the time it was still a county, and the nearest big city was Qiqihar.

The next evening, Nehe’s reply arrived.

It was only four characters: “No such case found.”

Although Hangzhou didn’t get a satisfactory answer, they weren’t too disappointed, because after getting the basic outline of the case from the woman, they had also questioned one of her accomplices.

The woman’s name was Xu Lixia.

Her two accomplices were Jia Wenge and Li Xiuhua.

The police chose Li Xiuhua as the point of breakthrough, because according to Xu Lixia, Jia Wenge was the backbone of the group, and his mouth would certainly not be the first to open.

After psychological pressure, Li Xiuhua too finally broke and revealed one case after another that they had committed in Nehe, including how the killings were done, where the bodies were buried, and so on.

This information basically matched what Xu Lixia had confessed. The two were questioned separately, yet the results were consistent, which strongly proved that these things had really happened.

Something so terrible had really happened.

An incredible detail was that both Xu Lixia and Li Xiuhua claimed that the people they killed were all hidden in the vegetable cellar dug under the kitchen of their home.

Dozens of corpses, including people killed more than a year earlier, had all been thrown in there to rot and stink.

Just imagining such a scene makes your scalp crawl.

The Yongjin Station went to the telecom building again, and this time sent a telegram to the Qiqihar Public Security Bureau.

Not long after it was sent, a long-distance call from the Qiqihar bureau came through to Hangzhou.

What Qiqihar said was completely different from Nehe’s version. They told their colleagues at the Shangcheng sub-bureau that the case’s authenticity was beyond doubt, because more than ten bodies had already been dug up at the scene.

Li Yanzhen, wife of the case’s principal culprit Jia Wenge, killed herself out of fear of punishment as soon as she learned the police were at the door. Jia Wenge was the second man arrested together with Xu Lixia. This name must be remembered, because he is the chief culprit.

The accomplice Sun Wenli was also in Nehe. He didn’t manage to flee and was caught.

Qiqihar also said the Heilongjiang Provincial Public Security Department had immediately formed a task force led by a deputy director, which was rushing to Nehe, and they would also send people to Hangzhou to arrange escorting the suspects back to Heilongjiang.

The Hangzhou police from top to bottom were gratified, because the criminal leads they had found were confirmed and their work hadn’t been wasted. But they also worried for their Heilongjiang colleagues, since one could imagine how complex investigating such a major case would be.

Yet everyone still badly underestimated the difficulty.

The difficulty in the Nehe case didn’t lie in getting the killers to confess. After all, faced with ironclad evidence, they had no way to argue.

So where did the difficulty lie?

In clarifying and reconstructing what had happened, and in determining the number and identities of the victims.

Because the Nehe crime scene can be called the most horrifying crime scene in contemporary Chinese criminal history, and the work of recovering, dissecting and examining the bodies that fell to the forensic examiners was the hardest of all.

Dozens of badly decomposed bodies were piled into a mound. The lower they were, the older and more decomposed they were, so the work grew harder and more nauseating the further down it went.

In the words of one forensic examiner who took part, when digging out the bodies, “a touch of the hand brought up a lump of sticky, greasy green mud, the result of the bodies decomposing,” not to mention the enormous assault on sight and smell that you can imagine without being told.

Leading the forensic team on this case was Cui Daozhi, a firearms and toolmark examination expert at the Heilongjiang Public Security Department.

He would later become one of the Ministry of Public Security’s first group of specially invited criminal investigation experts and receive the national award for outstanding contributions to public security science and technology.

As soon as the Nehe case surfaced, Cui Daozhi drove overnight from Harbin, jolting along for 6 hours, to reach Nehe and immediately begin the scene examination.

The police initially told him they estimated about 10 victims.

Actually, even that estimate struck many people as incredible: in such a small one-story house, 10 people had been killed and nobody noticed?

But as soon as the cellar was opened, Cui Daozhi immediately made a decision: he recommended to his superiors that police be drawn from several surrounding cities and counties and divided into examination, body-recovery, recording, mapping and physical-evidence groups.

For no other reason than that he could see at a glance that there were far more than 10 victims.

He knew well that this case would certainly shock the country and was rare even in criminal history.

The only female forensic examiner on the task force was Gao Xinyu, now at the DNA laboratory of the Criminal Technology Detachment of the Qiqihar Public Security Bureau.

She had graduated from the Department of Forensic Medicine at China Medical University not long before and was drawn into the task force.

She worked with Cui Daozhi for more than 20 days straight, doing autopsies by day and writing autopsy reports by night.

Because she’d left in a hurry when she got the assignment and hadn’t brought a thick coat, when the cold at the scene became unbearable, she simply draped the dead people’s clothes over herself and kept working.

Yu Wenjun, a forensic examiner with the local Nehe Public Security Bureau, was also at the scene that year.

That such a huge and terrible case had happened in his hometown made him feel ashamed, so he rushed to take on the dirty, exhausting work.

Decades later, his account was still detailed down to the hair, as if one were there: “Retrieving bodies from the big vegetable cellar wasn’t really that hard. What really tested us was retrieving bodies from that small pit, 6 meters deep, 1 meter long and only 55 centimeters wide.

That Jia Wenge, he was smart. When the cellar couldn’t hold any more bodies, he dug a hole 50 centimeters away from the cellar, then made a small pit, and threw the bodies into the pit through that hole.”

“The stench at the scene really was indescribable.

I went down again and again in my white coat. After moving the bodies out of the big cellar, I started going into that small pit.

The pit was like a half-sealed oil drum. I was stuck in there with very little room to move, surrounded by the stench of corpses and rotting flesh and limbs. Whenever I pushed a body, puffs of white vapor rose up.”

“I’d been wearing a gas mask with activated carbon, but then I found the activated carbon was useless, so I stopped wearing it.

I just kept working like that, breathing in the stench, and as I worked I suddenly lost control of my bladder and bowels, couldn’t breathe, and lost consciousness all at once and fainted in the pit.”

In this way, dozens of bodies, whole and not, saw the light of day again. Some still had the handcuffs, shackles, chains and ropes the killers had put on them.

The forensic examiners, in a yard at more than ten degrees below zero, set up a temporary work shed, used wooden boards as tables, and began the autopsies.

Beside them, five or six large iron pots were set up. They needed to clean large numbers of bones so they could take bone measurements to identify the bodies.

In the roiling boiling water and rising steam, white bones floated and sank, appearing and disappearing.

This scene is the most tragic image of the Nehe case.

This was the Nehe case.

…people, and the crime scene was in an ordinary home with people coming and going and neighbors living all around. The bloody facts warn us: never let your guard down. Evil may be right beside you and me.

The large number of victims, the brutality of the killers, the horror of the scene: these factors have kept this series of gang crimes near the top of the list of major Chinese cases that most defy ordinary people’s understanding for many years.

Of the six principal offenders, Xu Lixia was the most unusual.

She went from a victim who narrowly escaped death to an accomplice who helped the villain do evil.

Although in the end it was her confession that led the police to Nehe, that still couldn’t atone for her crimes.

How did this lamentable change of identity come about?

Xu Lixia was born in 1964. At the time of the events she was only 27.

Her home was in Qiqihar, Heilongjiang. She was a childcare worker at the nursery of the staff housing area of a factory called the Jianhua Factory.

Although Nehe was under Qiqihar’s jurisdiction, geographically it was 150 or 160 kilometers away, at least three hours by car.

Xu Lixia had no relatives there. How did she end up there?

Later, when she thought about all this, Xu Lixia was so full of regret she wished she could go back to when everything was stable and live an ordinary, unremarkable life.

But there was no going back. She could only go over the first half of her life again and again: her parents died when she was young, the four sisters depended on one another, and her eldest sister raised her.

After high school she went to work at the factory, married, had a child, but didn’t get along with her husband and they often argued.

At first, whenever they quarreled, she ran to her eldest sister’s home, and her sister always told her to put up with it for her son’s sake.

That one time, only that one time, she didn’t want to hear her sister nagging again, so she didn’t go to her sister. Instead, as if bewitched, she went to the bustling Qiqihar railway station to kill time.

That was November 1990, 31 years ago.

And so she met that devil.

His name was Jia Wenge, a year older than Xu Lixia, a worker at the Nehe Agricultural Machinery Factory.

Starting in 1988, Jia Wenge and some friends had gone together to nearby market towns like Laolai, Longhe and Changfa, buying, slaughtering and selling cattle, and business was good.

Later, with capital, he also opened a candy factory, rented a factory building and got a license, with himself as the legal representative.

But nobody knew why he kept going to crowded stations, as if he were looking for something.

In the sea of people at the railway station, Jia Wenge singled out Xu Lixia.

Maybe because she was good-looking, maybe because she was tall and stood out in the crowd. There’s also a claim that Jia Wenge mistook her for a prostitute looking for customers.

In any case, he locked onto her, and from then on she could never escape his grasp.

He went up and struck up a conversation, asking her this and that.

Xu Lixia was naive and had a good impression of this handsome young man, so she opened up.

Jia Wenge figured out her background and learned she wanted to leave Qiqihar, so he went along with it and said, why don’t you come with me to Nehe, I can help you find a job there, or you can work at my factory.

A seemingly simple ploy, yet in that distant era, in that remote city, it could make someone believe without a doubt.

But that is what happened.

As if her soul had been hooked, Xu Lixia followed Jia Wenge onto the train from Qiqihar to Nehe.

Jia Wenge’s home was very close to Nehe railway station, less than a kilometer away, in an alley near the Nehe Seed Management Office.

It was a single-story house with three rooms, only fifty or sixty square meters.

The house was rented. The landlords were an elderly couple who lived next door in the west room.

Living in the rented east rooms, besides Jia Wenge, was his wife Li Yanzhen.

Now no one in the world can tell us what Xu Lixia saw when she first entered that dim room, what she guessed, and what feelings rose in her.

That night, Jia Wenge raped her.

In that room where no one could see and no one could hear, Xu Lixia alone endured Jia Wenge’s unrestrained abuse.

After he had satisfied his lust, what did Jia Wenge do?

He bound Xu Lixia’s hands with wire and then choked her by the neck as hard as he could.

Jia Wenge wanted to kill her.

To him, he had gotten what he wanted from her, so the body in front of him had no further value, and the only ending was to dispose of it like garbage.

Xu Lixia passed out.

Jia Wenge dragged her into the kitchen, opened the cellar and pushed her in.

Having done all this with practiced ease, he felt only the satisfaction, and the emptiness, that come after both lust and the urge to kill have been sated.

But Xu Lixia miraculously woke up.

The first sense to return was smell.

A stench too thick to dissolve, like solid walls, closed in around her and forced its way into her nose, her windpipe and her lungs.

It was the stench of corpses, given off by many bodies that had been rotting for who knew how long.

The bodies were right underneath her, layer upon layer, one on top of another.

Some were so badly decomposed they were sticky like mud, and when she pressed her hand on them it slipped.

Only a faint ray of light came from above, but it was enough for her to make out where she was.

She was in a cellar.

The cellar had become a pit of the dead, almost all its space filled with corpses.

She saw, just centimeters from her face, faces made ferocious and eerie by the enormous pain suffered before death, grimacing, rotting and stinking, as if they had countless grievances to whisper to her.

Next came sharp pain.

Her hands and feet were bound tightly with wire that cut deep into her flesh, leaving it a bloody mess.

But she wasn’t afraid of the smell, wasn’t afraid of the dead, wasn’t afraid of the pain.

She no longer knew nausea or fear. Her stomach had long since been emptied by vomiting, and her heart was empty too.

She only wanted to live.

She couldn’t die together with these corpses.

The cellar was 6 meters deep; getting out wasn’t easy.

She struggled to straighten up and pushed hard against the cellar lid.

Something resting on the lid rolled off and smashed on the floor. It sounded like a water vat.

She immediately felt the lid get lighter. With more force, she flipped it over.

With the last of her strength, she climbed out of the cellar.

Now she was in a larger space.

The stove, the pots and basins, the broom, the lumps of coal… everything showed this was a kitchen.

It should have been the warmest place in an ordinary home, not a living hell hiding the darkest evil in the world.

“Are you human or ghost?”

A man’s voice came from behind her.

She glanced back.

It was him, the man who had raped her.

Jia Wenge looked astonished, as if he couldn’t believe anyone could climb out of that deep cellar and return to the land of the living.

She couldn’t scream. She only wanted to crawl away.

The farther from that devil the better. Even if she died, not beside him.

At that moment, she fainted again.

While she was unconscious, she didn’t know that by climbing out of the cellar she had bought herself another year of clinging to life, but had also made herself a sinner who sold her soul.

What awaited her was a stretch of time worse than death, neither human nor ghost. What she was about to see were bestial acts that broke through the lowest limits of humanity.

When Xu Lixia woke again, Jia Wenge was sitting beside her.

Strangely, the look in his eyes was no longer just lust and murderous intent.

There was something else in it. She couldn’t understand it, but it frightened her even more.

He said to her, I really didn’t expect you to climb out of there. You’ve really got something, guts, ability.

I like you. Since you got out, I’ll let you go, but on one condition: you’re not going back either. You stay here and work with me.

What?

She heard every word clearly, but she couldn’t understand at all.

She asked blankly, work with you?

What do you mean?

He smiled and pointed down.

The ones down there, you’ve seen them?

I want you to follow me and do whatever I tell you. You bring people here, and then I—

She understood at once.

She was educated and wrote a good hand with a pen, so she knew the idiom “to act as the tiger’s chang.” What he wanted was for her to be the chang.

Translator’s note: In folklore, a chang (伥) is the ghost of someone killed by a tiger, which then serves the tiger by luring new victims to it.

He wanted her as bait, as an accomplice, as a partner, to help him harm people.

She shook her head hard.

She thought, this man must be insane. How could he make such a demand of someone he had just tried to kill?

And how could I agree?

I’d rather die.

Seeing her shake her head, he smiled again.

He said, do you know what I did last night while you were unconscious?

I took lots of photos of you naked. Want to see them?

Then I’ll develop them and post them everywhere, and send them to your husband and your son to look at. How about that?

Only then did she realize her body was almost completely exposed, and her lower body was in tearing pain.

The shame that had briefly receded rushed back into her.

Just the thought that he might be telling the truth, that her husband and son might see those unbearable poses and acts, filled her with mortification and terror.

Don’t, don’t do this.

She was on the verge of tears.

He ignored her and kept talking.

He said, don’t forget, you told me where you work. I sent someone to Qiqihar and found your home.

Your husband, your son, they still live there. I know everything about them.

He also said, if you won’t work with me, I won’t be polite. I’ve killed so many people, two more won’t make a difference.

Do you believe me?

I believe you, I believe you.

She cried uncontrollably.

The man in front of her was a devil.

He knew what she feared most, knew her greatest weakness.

Her relationship with her husband may not have been good, but she wouldn’t watch him suffer a disaster he didn’t deserve, least of all one she had brought on him.

And she would even less allow anyone to harm her son. He was her only hope in life, her last line.

I beg you, I beg you, don’t hurt them. I’ll do whatever you say. Don’t hurt them.

She knelt before him and handed over her soul.

6

From then on, Xu Lixia lived a miserable life that others could not imagine.

She was forced to throw away the most basic sense of shame, to treat herself as a tool, using her looks to lure male travelers who came to Nehe from elsewhere and deliver them into Jia Wenge’s clutches.

She also had to satisfy Jia Wenge’s lust at all times.

She, Jia Wenge, Jia Wenge’s wife Li Yanzhen, and Jia Wenge’s other mistress Wang Yanling maintained a deeply warped relationship, living together under one roof.

At the same time, she was forced by Jia Wenge to watch him commit his crimes.

She watched those innocent victims resist in vain, struggling to death like chickens, ultimately unable to escape their fate of a violent death.

The most shameful and the most terrifying, these two feelings pulling back and forth, could effortlessly destroy anyone’s normal mind.

That was how it was for Xu Lixia, sinking a little further every day in this situation.

To keep from going mad, the only way was to shut off her feelings and become a walking corpse.

During her time with Jia Wenge, Xu Lixia did try to run.

Once, she ran away, was caught and brought back, beaten savagely, and thrown into that cellar again, locked in with the dead.

To end any thought of her going to the police, Jia Wenge made her hands bloody too: he forced her to take part in a killing, and she stabbed a victim to death.

This was how Jia Wenge tormented and threatened her, completely destroying her will to resist.

In the end, she did become an accomplice to murder who was no longer innocent.

Years later, a detachment leader at the Nehe Public Security Bureau provided the following account: a father and son who sold soybeans were lured into the Jia house, and the killers attacked the father first.

The father resisted fiercely and shouted to his son in the yard to run.

The son had a chance to escape, but to save his father, he rushed into the house to fight them to the death.

Xu Lixia and another accomplice helped Jia Wenge overpower the son, stabbed him several times, and killed the father and son.

At the moment Xu Lixia took part in killing this father and son, did she struggle or hesitate?

Did she think of quietly helping, letting this father and son, as unfortunate as she was, escape?

All we can see is that she had already willingly become the chang and sold her soul to Jia Wenge.

There is no greater sorrow in the world than this.

When Xu Lixia met Jia Wenge and came under his firm control, it was right in the middle of Jia Wenge’s criminal career, at the transition between two patterns of crime.

In the earlier pattern, Jia Wenge lured, raped and killed alone.

In the later pattern, he grew bolder and bolder and found, by various means, accomplices willing to do it with him, committing crimes as a group.

Xu Lixia burst into his life just when he was looking for accomplices, which was also one of the main reasons she survived.

So how many victims were there before Xu Lixia?

Jia Wenge’s killing began around July 1990.

In the second half of that year, 20 women were lured to his home one after another, and Jia Wenge took their lives by strangling them with rope, choking them, stabbing them and other means.

He buried 19 of the bodies in the kitchen cellar. For some unknown reason, the 20th was taken to the Nehe Town Urban Construction Nursery and buried there.

After keeping Xu Lixia by his side, Jia Wenge resolved to recruit more people to commit crimes together.

Xu Lixia arrived in November 1990, and by early January 1991 he had put his team together.

From then on, Jia Wenge never acted alone again.

Gradually, Xu Lixia came to know all the members of this little gang:

Li Yanzhen, Jia Wenge’s wife.

Jia Wenge’s first job after junior high was as a sand-pouring worker, and his master at the factory then was Li Yanzhen’s adoptive father. The two probably started dating through that connection.

After they married, Jia Wenge lured people home, raped and killed them, and Li Yanzhen saw it all. She knew full well that the man she shared a bed with was an extremely deranged criminal, yet she never dared make a sound.

Wang Yanling, 27, a coal mine worker from Fangzheng County, Heilongjiang.

She was Jia Wenge’s mistress, and the most loyal partner, who had been at his side from the very beginning of his crimes.

Before Xu Lixia appeared, the job of using her looks as bait had been hers.

…years old, a worker at the wholesale department of the Nehe vegetable company.

Li Xiuhua had long done some petty theft with Jia Wenge, but he and Sun Wenli probably joined the gang around March 1991.

That day, another young woman was lured into Jia Wenge’s house, just as Xu Lixia had been.

In Jia Wenge’s eyes, the young woman surnamed Zeng was Li Xiuhua’s and Sun Wenli’s initiation pledge. He ordered Li Xiuhua and Sun Wenli to gang-rape Miss Zeng.

After the two finished, Jia Wenge said to Sun Wenli, kill her.

Sun Wenli looped a rope around Miss Zeng’s neck and pulled hard.

Jia Wenge watched him struggle for a long time, grew impatient, and drove a knife deep into Miss Zeng’s chest.

Twice.

And so another cold body was pushed into that dark, almost bottomless cellar.

From January to July 1991, Jia Wenge, Xu Lixia and Li Xiuhua lured 22 people to Jia Wenge’s house one after another and killed them. Not one escaped.

22 people, 22 bodies, all met the same fate as the bodies of the 20 earlier female victims.

In that 6-meter-deep cellar, 42 dead people were piled one on top of another.

Yet the killers went on eating and sleeping in this house as if nothing were wrong.

Jia Wenge and Li Yanzhen also had a daughter, about 7 years old at the time.

How they did such monstrous things under the eyes of that innocent child is chilling to think about.

Perhaps it’s better not to guess how it all happened in that house. We can’t get the answer anyway, and at least this way we won’t be woken by nightmares.

The killing paused in July 1991.

Not because conscience had awakened, but because summer had come.

First, summer was the off-season. Fewer people came to Nehe on business, so there were fewer targets.

Second, as the weather grew hotter, the 42 bodies in the cellar began to give off a strong stench.

For a while people outside might not smell it, but the noses of those inside couldn’t stand it, even if their minds could bear it perfectly well.

So Jia Wenge decided to go elsewhere.

He would take Xu Lixia and Li Xiuhua with him, while Li Yanzhen and Sun Wenli stayed behind in Nehe.

Li Yanzhen was used to submitting meekly and obeyed her husband’s arrangements completely, even though the dead in the cellar terrified her so much that she couldn’t sleep even after taking sleeping pills every night, and could only numb her nerves by going to all-night movies.

Jia Wenge, Xu Lixia and Li Xiuhua went south, roaming through Suzhou, Hangzhou, Jinhua, Ningbo, Sanming, Fuzhou, Xiamen and other places.

They used the old method: Xu Lixia would lure single men to secluded places, and they would rob them.

The unfamiliar surroundings kept them from killing casually.

So when police at the Suzhou railway station found them suspicious and took them into custody, they didn’t attract much attention. The police treated it as an ordinary minor case.

No one imagined that these three were carrying an enormous bloody case.

On them the police found more than 3,000 yuan in cash, several out-of-town ID cards, some oral anesthetics and other items.

When they contacted the public security bureaus where the IDs had been issued, they found that one of the ID holders, a man surnamed Xie from Xiaoshan in Hangzhou, had reported a few days earlier that he had been lured with sex by a gang in Hangzhou and robbed of his money.

Under the rules on case jurisdiction, the case naturally had to be transferred to the Hangzhou police.

Back in Hangzhou, a careful search turned up two more ID cards: one belonged to a man surnamed Zheng from a flour mill in a city in Jilin, the other to a man surnamed Zhang from a coal mine in Heilongjiang.

When they checked with the local bureaus, the Hangzhou police found that both men had been missing for a long time.

That raised alarm.

The Yongjin Station immediately decided to step up the questioning.

It was that very night that Xu Lixia, in a flat voice, said the earth-shattering sentence: “We also killed more than twenty people in the Northeast.”

That was October 23, 1991, and the Nehe case, hidden for more than a year, had its first chance of being broken open.

Xu Lixia had been waiting for this day for a long time.

Saying that sentence was a longing she had suppressed deep inside for a long time.

She knew that once she said it, the road ahead led to death, but she said it without hesitation.

It was her cry for help, and her redemption.

It was the only chance left in her life to become human again.

Early winter of 1991, Nehe, the yard of Jia Wenge’s house, beside that terrible cellar.

After grueling work beyond ordinary imagination, the task force’s forensic examiners finally recorded the physical characteristics of all 42 bodies. The police then compared them against missing persons reported nationwide during the same period and determined the identities of more than 20 of the victims.

The legal proceedings that followed moved quickly.

The solid evidence from the scene examination was the decisive force that sent Jia Wenge and the others to the execution ground.

On January 8, 1992, the Qiqihar Intermediate People’s Court found Jia Wenge guilty of murder and robbery and sentenced him to death with lifelong deprivation of political rights; guilty of rape, sentenced to 6 years in prison; guilty of theft, sentenced to 10 years in prison; the sentence to be carried out was death with lifelong deprivation of political rights. It found Li Xiuhua guilty of murder and robbery, sentenced to death with lifelong deprivation of political rights; guilty of rape, 10 years; guilty of theft, 3 years; the sentence to be carried out was death with lifelong deprivation of political rights. It found Xu Lixia guilty of murder and robbery, sentenced to death with lifelong deprivation of political rights; the sentence to be carried out was death with lifelong deprivation of political rights. It found Sun Wenli guilty of murder, sentenced to death with lifelong deprivation of political rights; guilty of rape, 10 years; the sentence to be carried out was death with lifelong deprivation of political rights. It found Wang Yanling guilty of robbery, sentenced to 13 years in prison and deprivation of political rights for 2 years; guilty of theft, 4 years; the sentence to be carried out was 17 years in prison and deprivation of political rights for 2 years.

Jia, Li, Xu, Sun and Wang all refused to accept the verdicts and appealed to the Provincial Higher People’s Court.

On January 20, 1992, the Provincial Higher People’s Court rejected the appeals, upheld the original verdicts, and approved the death sentences of Jia, Li, Xu and Sun in accordance with the law.

Jia, Li, Xu and Sun were executed in accordance with the law.

These ugly souls were erased from the world.

…more than… people.

But for the smaller part of them, we will never know who they were or where they came from.

Their families can only grow old in longing, day after day, month after month, year after year, never getting the answer they want.

This harm was brought on them by the killers.

The killers were not only Jia Wenge. Xu Lixia was among them too.

She certainly knew this.

From the moment she was pushed into the cellar, her heart died. The first time she helped Jia Wenge kill, her humanity died. Being shot later was only her third death.

Even if she was unwilling to accept such an ending, she had nothing to complain about.

Before her execution, Xu Lixia wrote a 12-page farewell letter to her eldest sister: “Sister never dreamed that her naive, lively little sister would suddenly turn into a hateful murdering demon.

To speak from the heart, I’m not what people say, killing inhumanly, eating human hearts and livers, willingly luring people and killing them.

I was entangled by a group of demons and couldn’t get free.”

“Now that things have come to this, I can only hate myself and blame myself. I hate that I was too weak and too naive, and didn’t see the dark side of society.

I blame myself for not understanding the law and believing the lies of bad people, so that I was deceived and took the road of crime.”

Xu Lixia certainly deserves pity, but having done what she later did, she must certainly be condemned.

Yet whether with sympathy or contempt, one question still stands before each of us: if it were you, at the most desperate point of your life, facing the dividing line between life and death, good and evil, human and ghost, what choice would you make?

What answer could you give?

If Xu Lixia’s part in this succession of crimes was mechanical and passive, her heart full of resistance and unwillingness, then the instigator of it all, Jia Wenge, without doubt greatly enjoyed his killing.

Why would this ordinary worker hold life and law in such contempt?

Ever since the case came to light, this question has troubled a shocked public.

Because the case was solved very quickly, and the trial and execution that followed were carried out with the efficiency peculiar to that era, we lost the chance to probe Jia Wenge’s dark inner world.

This question will never have an answer.

We can only draw as close to the truth as possible from the little material that remains and make guesses grounded in the facts.

First guess: Jia Wenge ate people in order to gain extraordinary sexual ability.

That Jia Wenge ate his victims’ organs has been confirmed by multiple sources.

One is the local gazetteer: the Nehe City Gazetteer (1986–2005) records that Jia Wenge “took out the victims’ internal organs and cooked and ate them together.”

Another is people who were closely involved in the case.

Xu Lixia’s defense lawyer, Xu Guixia, now discipline inspection secretary at a bank in Qiqihar, has said that Jia Wenge was a deranged killer: “He killed people in order to eat them.”

There is also this rumor among the public: “It is said that Jia Wenge’s sexual ability was very poor before, and he repeatedly failed to perform with his wife. Later he heard that you are what you eat, and with this belief, he began to kill. After killing, he cut off the genitals and boiled and ate them… After eating the genitals, Jia Wenge’s sexual ability really was miraculously enhanced.”

Second guess: for money.

Although Nehe isn’t large, it has long been known as the “Hometown of Chinese Potatoes” and the “Hometown of Chinese Sugar Beets,” and is also a major producer of high-quality soybeans. Commercial activity was fairly brisk, with plenty of travelers coming and going.

These travelers from all over carried thousands or tens of thousands of yuan in cash, coming here to look for business opportunities.

Jia Wenge may have targeted this group precisely because he saw rich pickings.

As early as June to July 1989, before he met Xu Lixia, Jia Wenge robbed 616 yuan in the woods near Nehe railway station. From October 1989 to January 1991, he committed 11 thefts, stealing 3 color TVs and cattle and sheep worth 12,600 yuan. Between January and July 1991, relying on Xu Lixia to lure victims home with her looks and then killing them, he robbed 9,630 yuan. In mid-…, roaming through Liaoning and Jilin, he robbed another 4,940 yuan and 5 gold rings.

We can see that Jia Wenge’s crimes escalated step by step from robbery and theft to rape and murder.

Later, killing may have given him greater pleasure, but he never forgot to grab the rabbit while beating the grass. His craving for money remained considerable.

Moreover, after committing his crimes in Nehe, we can see that Jia Wenge led his gang south.

In the south, they didn’t kill, only swindled.

Of course, this may also have been because the surroundings were unfamiliar and the conditions for their crimes weren’t right.

Third guess: to satisfy his desire for control.

This can be seen in how Jia Wenge treated Xu Lixia.

Did he have to spare Xu Lixia’s life?

Not necessarily.

If he needed someone to offer her body as bait, he already had a mistress, Wang Yanling. Why choose Xu Lixia, who was clearly not absolutely loyal to him?

His accomplices objected to this too.

As events proved, their crimes were exposed precisely because of Xu Lixia.

But Jia Wenge stubbornly insisted on keeping such a time bomb by his side.

The only explanation is that this was his way of showing he controlled everything: whoever he wanted dead died, and whoever he wanted alive lived.

Another example: to build his accomplices’ nerve for killing, Jia Wenge forced Sun Wenli, after he joined, to kill with his own hands and to cook and eat the victims’ organs together with him.

Wasn’t this also a way of showing his accomplices, “You must obey me”?

Now we cannot possibly know when Jia Wenge’s urge to kill was first kindled, or what kindled it.

We only know that in the year and a half from June 1989 to January 1991, he successfully tried his hand at theft and robbery, and through this “practice,” he grew bolder and his methods more brutal.

Under the combined effect of these three factors, Jia Wenge broke through the most basic line of being human and degenerated into a devil abhorred by men and gods alike.

Not content with his own degeneration, he also drew out the inborn evil in others and dragged them down with him into the abyss of human nature.

31 years have passed, and to this day, Jia Wenge is still the name the people of Nehe fear most, and Xu Lixia’s fate still makes the people of Nehe sigh.

The place where it all happened, the yard where Jia Wenge and the others killed, has become an abandoned house, its windows broken and walls collapsed, and no one dares live there again.

Only the kitchen floor, completely sealed with cement, gives off an ominous air.

Beneath it, 42 wronged souls once wandered.

Beneath it, a woman with a tragic fate was once imprisoned too.