Predatory Transients

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Later, neighbors would recall the blood leaking from the tote-box on the back of Ma Yong's motorcycle, the screams they heard but ignored, and their bewilderment over why Ma scrubbed his floor so often. For most of the past half-century, such activities would have alarmed nosy neighborhood committees or piqued a work unit's interest. No more. In the southern Chinese boomtown of Shenzhen, declared in 1980 as one of the nation's first special economic zones, nearly all the 5 million inhabitants are strangers who arrived from across China only in the past decade. Neighbors aren't particularly interested in what goes on down the hall; they'll probably be moving on themselves before long. As the police tell it, that new anonymity helped Ma and a female accomplice lure a dozen women to their Shenzhen home, chop them to bits and secretly scatter their body parts along a riverbank without drawing suspicion. "I thought he was odd," says Ma's neighbor Zeng, who is from Sichuan province. "But so many people come and go that I didn't pay much mind."

"Predatory transients" are what police call serial killers who strike across vast areas or move to places where they have a better chance of getting away with murder. They were rare in China a decade ago, when internal travel by citizens required official permission. Now, with the easing of residence permits and 120 million migrants already living in the cities, criminals and killers, too, have hit the road. In addition to detaining Ma, a native of Hunan province, police have in recent weeks held a man in Hebei province on suspicion of killing 65 people in four provinces, and another in Henan for allegedly murdering 17 boys. Cops, long reliant on heavy-handed monitoring of neighborhoods, struggle to maintain law and order amid China's increasing freedoms: the incidence of violent crime has risen 73% over the past five years. "Society now has blind spots that have become a heaven for killers," says Ren Jiantao, head of the School of Government at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, who warns that serial killing in Shenzhen, China's migration capital, is "just a few years ahead of everywhere else [on the mainland]."

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In Shenzhen, the first stop for most new arrivals is a local labor bazaar. Hopefuls put on their best clothes, pay a dollar for admission and enter a hall packed with hundreds of brokers offering jobs and better lives. On May 26, Zhang Ping, a long-haired, 19-year-old woman freshly arrived from Hubei province, left the Senxin Labor Market with such a broker. "I shouted after her to leave her mobile phone on," says Zhang's father, who had accompanied her there.

Zhang never answered that phone again. By late September, 11 other young women had vanished in the same Shenzhen district, Buji. A month later residents noticed a strange smell along Buji's river. "We thought it was dead rats," says a man named Hu who drives an illegal motorcycle taxi. "But then police pulled out body parts." Around the same time, police circulated a list of missing women to Shenzhen's labor markets. After months without progress, they caught a break when, according to a manager at one market, an unregistered broker, Ma Yong, was found to have bribed his way into running a booth. In his briefcase they found a résumé for one of the missing girls and notified police. Local reporters say a search of Ma's home revealed victims' shoes and bloodstains, and that Ma confessed.

To combat serial crimes, law-enforcement officials have tried to improve their technology and methodology. They have created a national computer network that registers suspects from across the country. It helped police catch the suspected Hebei killer, who was detained outside a nightclub before a check was run on his name. Urban police forces can also tap into the registries of upscale hotels. Four forensics labs in major cities now run ballistics tests and check the DNA of suspects and victims, and one such lab reportedly identified the decomposed bodies of the Shenzhen women. Closer to street level, the Ministry of Public Security is instituting "community policing" to move cops out of big precinct houses and into smaller, neighborhood stations.

Yet China's new anonymity might enable criminals to outwit even more sophisticated police work. The accused killer in Henan province, Huang Yong, reportedly picked up boys in Internet parlors in his rural county and brought them home before torturing and killing them. According to police, Huang even buried six bodies in his yard without attracting attention; he was caught only when one boy escaped. Police have so far resisted one obvious measure to fight crime: better public relations. They curtailed newspaper reporting on the growing number of missing boys until the killer had been apprehended, and they have ordered newspapers in Shenzhen to stop covering the murders there. Police like announcing cracked cases but fear coverage of unsolved ones will make them look incompetent. The result, unfortunately, is an unenlightened public at increasing risk from China's serial killers.