After 28 years, law catches up with murder suspect

Li Qian
A murder suspect who has been on the lam for 28 years has been arrested and will stand trial, according to the Qingpu District People's Procuratorate.
Li Qian

A murder suspect who has been on the lam for 28 years has been arrested and will stand trial, according to the Qingpu District People’s Procuratorate.

The suspect, surnamed Wang, was implicated in the killing of a 3-month-old girl and her mother, surnamed Zhuo, in a fifth-floor flat in Qingpu on June 14, 1990, when he was only 18 years old.

When Zhuo’s husband, surnamed Gu, returned home from work he found his wife lying lifeless in the bathroom. Police were called to the scene and they found his dead daughter in a bedroom wardrobe, prosecutors said.

An autopsy showed Zhuo was smothered to death. The baby suffered a blow to the head and died of brain injuries.

Police obtained fingerprints at the scene and traced them to Wang, a local vocational school student. By that point, Wang had fled Shanghai and police put him on a wanted list.

Thanks to advances in facial recognition technology, police finally tracked down Wang in Anhui Province, where he was living under the surname Xu. DNA tests revealed his real identity, prosecutors said.

Wang told police that Gu was his classmate’s brother and he had visited Gu’s home several times to play video games, which were a luxury in the early 1990s, according to prosecutors.

Wang is said to have became addicted to video games and on the day of the murders he skipped class and snuck into Gu’s home. While rummaging in the living room, he alerted Zhuo, who started shouting for help from the bedroom, prosecutors said.

Zhuo’s screams startled Wang, who rushed to cover her mouth, according to prosecutors. During the struggle that was said to have ensued, Wang smothered Zhuo after she slashed at him with a knife.

As he prepared to flee the scene, Wang heard a baby crying in the bedroom. Fearful that it would alert the neighbors, he threw the baby into the wardrobe, say prosecutors.

After leaving Gu’s home, he boarded a train and left Shanghai. For a time, he allegedly lived by begging on the streets in Hunan and Guangdong provinces.

In the mid-1990s, he went to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and became a cook at a restaurant in the regional capital of Urumqi. In 1997, a customer was said to have helped him obtain a fake identity card.

Later, he went to Zhejiang Province, where he opened a hot pot restaurant and met his future wife. After they married, the couple moved to the woman’s hometown in Anhui Province. When Wang was apprehended, he had three restaurants and two children.


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