Blood In the Streets

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After her regular Thursday-night game of mah-jongg, Wang Guiyu headed on foot for her home in the polluted industrial city of Wuhan in the eastern-central province of Hubei. The 41-year-old cut through a busy night market, then turned down a long, narrow road called Jinshui Alley. It was midnight, the street was dark, and safety was on Wang's mind. Six months earlier she had stopped wearing gold jewelry whenever she had to take this walk. As Wang opened the metal gate to her new, middle-class apartment block, an attacker struck from behind, smashing her head with a brick. Wang stumbled, screamed and struggled desperately to get inside the apartment building. She didn't make it. Her assailant spun her around and plunged a watermelon knife into her chest seven times. Then, as neighbors peered out from above, the killer fled.

In the summer of 2001, six other women in Wuhan were attacked by a man with a knife, four of them fatally. The city's newspapers didn't cover the cases—they almost never write about unsolved crimes. But word spread rapidly through the local grapevine, and a rumor arose that the killer targeted his victims because they were dressed in red. "Everybody was so terrified of the Red Dress Killer," recalls a woman selling tomatoes in Wang's neighborhood, "that we started wearing a lot of blue."

They were right to be scared. The night after Wang's murder, a 20-year-old woman from neighboring Hunan province, who had been lured to Wuhan by its employment possibilities only three weeks earlier, headed home at 3 a.m. from a night market where she had a job washing dishes. At dawn, a neighbor discovered her corpse on the building's stairs. "She had just started climbing when he stabbed her," says the neighbor. She had 38 stab wounds. The Red Dress Killer had struck again.

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When China was under the ultra-rigid control of Chairman Mao—with every adult reporting to a work unit or a nosy neighborhood committee—people could barely get away with bicycle theft. That overly restrained but safe China is now long gone. Big Brother isn't watching so carefully anymore (unless you're a political dissident) and tens of millions of Chinese are on the move, wandering to different parts of the country in search of jobs. Society is all shook up, and anonymity is now possible for the first time, especially in immigrant magnets like Wuhan. One of the darker results is a phenomenon once thought to exist only in the decadent West. "We've reached the age of serial killing in China," says Wang Dazhong, a famed criminal investigator who trains cops at the Chinese Peoples' Public Security University in Beijing.

A string of brutal cases has sparked growing fear. A cement-truck driver named Hua Ruizhuo was executed last year for picking up prostitutes near the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel in Beijing, handcuffing them in his van, raping them and dumping their bodies in rubbish heaps around the city. He killed 14 women. Around the same time, police in China's northeastern province of Jilin captured Piao Yongzhi, who murdered an undisclosed number of longhaired women, keeping their tresses in bags at his house. He flayed the face of one victim, cooked it in a wok and ate it.

China's police claim to solve 85% of the country's regular murder cases. But they're way behind when it comes to serial killings, a seemingly universal form of evil that flourishes most in societies under stress. The inexperience of Chinese investigators in this field was vividly exposed by a gang of four murderers in the central province of Henan who evaded capture for months in 2000. Their modus operandi was to break into homes using battering rams. Once inside, they killed the inhabitants, frequently castrating male victims with cleavers. They left behind calling cards: cloth masks with eye holes burned out by cigarettes. But the gang's deadly spree was province-wide, and there was insufficient coordination between police forces of the various towns and districts. In addition, the gang confused the police with a surprisingly simple ruse. "The killers changed shoes for each crime," says criminal investigator Wang. "The treads police collected didn't match." By the time the cops connected the dots, the gang had murdered 77 people.

One night in February 2001 in nearby Hunan province, six police officers in the city of Yueyang—200 kilometers southwest of Wuhan—paid a call on the cramped, three-bedroom apartment of Duan Guocheng, a 29-year-old security guard who lived with his parents. The officers wouldn't tell Duan's mother, Hu Yunxiang, why they were there, but they stayed all night, sitting in her living room where the only decoration is a poster of Chairman Mao. Next morning, Duan came home, peeked in through the window—and took flight. The officers chased him into a vegetable market, but Duan escaped. The police then broke the news to Duan's family that they suspected him of murdering nine women—most of them dressed in red at the time of death.