Between 1983 and 1985, a villager from Yangyuhe Township in Shang County, Shangluo Prefecture, Shaanxi Province, committed the largest single-person murder case in New China—killing 48 people in his own home and burying the bodies in his yard, all for a mere 573 yuan.
He was of sound mind, showing no signs of mental illness, yet he brutally killed 48 lives, claiming he had “three non-killings” and that he killed these people to “eliminate harm” for the nation.
This villager was named Long Zhimin—a name burdened with the debt of 48 lives. 
From 1983 to 1985, strange things were happening in various townships of Shang County. Some farmers returning from work in other cities or shopping in town mysteriously disappeared. By May 1985, 37 people had been reported missing to the public security departments. If it weren’t for Du Changying’s brother feeling something was wrong after not returning home with Long Zhimin from the market, the Long Zhimin murder case might have continued. Long Zhimin came to collect money with Du Changying’s brother’s IOU, which led Du Changying to catch onto a clue and turn Long Zhimin in to the police. Coincidentally, another group searching for people was also looking for Long Zhimin. Therefore, the police began to take this case very seriously.
Multiple People Mysteriously Disappear
On January 11, 1985, Jiang Sanhe, the deputy party secretary of a village in Shangguanfang Township, and others returned from work in Xi’an and planned to go home from the West Gate bus station. There, they encountered the short-statured Long Zhimin, who told them he had work at home, digging a pigsty, offering 5 yuan per day. Jiang Sanhe went alone and never returned home. His brother, Jiang Yinshan, took leave from Shengli Oilfield to return home and continued searching until May. During this time, he reported the situation to relevant departments several times but received no response. On May 28, in a noisy crowd, the Jiang family saw the person they were looking for. After months of searching, the Jiang family learned that Long Zhimin often appeared at the West Gate bus station and other places, and after the Spring Festival, he would occasionally lure some men and women from the market.
The two search teams exchanged information, realizing the seriousness of the situation, and brought Long Zhimin to the public security organ to report the case. Both missing persons were related to Long Zhimin, so the county public security bureau decided to detain him for interrogation. Facing the questioning, Long Zhimin’s statements went back and forth: “I took Du Changying’s straw, he owed me 20 yuan. Where he went afterward, how would I know? Jiang was called by me to work, and he left after finishing. Building a pigsty doesn’t take long, just an afternoon. He stayed at my place for a night and left early the next morning. How would I know where he went afterward?”
What could a short, simple-minded, bald, barefoot farmer do? Even the police hesitated about whether to detain Long Zhimin, but ultimately decided to lock him up and check his home the next day.
The House Reeking of Rotting Corpses
On the morning of May 29, 1985, two police officers went to Long Zhimin’s home in Wangdi Village, Yangyuhe Township. Long Zhimin’s windows were all blocked with mud bricks, making the house as dark as a cellar. The uneven earthen floor inside showed signs of being dug up; there were some dark purple spots on the wooden ladder leading to the loft, like bloodstains. Long Zhimin’s wife, Yan Shuxia, was paralyzed from the waist down and behaved strangely. When questioned by the police, she would say one moment, “There’s nothing in the house,” and the next, “Once, several people came to our house, I slept on the kang at night and heard some noise outside, and the next day those people were gone.” When asked what happened, she would fall silent. After a while, she would say without context, “When I washed the clothes, the water was red.”
The west wing of Long Zhimin’s house was cluttered with all sorts of junk—straw, empty bottles, rags, and more. You could only see the ground by kicking things aside; the east wing was even darker and more polluted, filled with debris, where you’d walk into a face full of cobwebs and dust.
During the search, the two police officers found the situation suspicious. After finishing the search, they immediately returned to the station to report, leading to another police dispatch to Long Zhimin’s house that afternoon. This time, the village security director was present and told the police that Long Zhimin’s house smelled bad, and villagers were unwilling to visit.
Detective Captain Wang Kucheng could distinguish a different kind of stench from the foul smell, one he was familiar with—the smell of rotting corpses. Upon careful searching, Wang Kucheng found two naked male bodies, embracing each other, under a pile of scattered straw near a radish pit in the east wing.
The police stopped the search and sealed off the scene. The detention center was instructed to handcuff Long Zhimin and put leg irons on him.
To prevent Long Zhimin’s accomplices from escaping, committing suicide, or killing each other to silence witnesses, the police directed rural cadres and militia security groups in the southwest townships, especially in Shangzhao Village where Long Zhimin lived, Renzhi Township where he was originally from, Jinling Temple Town where his wife’s family resided, and Liuwan Township near Wangdi Village, to urgently mobilize and monitor those with criminal records or bad behavior in their jurisdictions, as well as to keep an eye on anyone behaving suspiciously. The crime scene in Wangdi Village was surrounded and sealed off by an armed police unit, with armed guards stationed at all exits leading out of the village.
The Pit Full of Corpses
Since the implementation of the household responsibility system, the long-silent bell of Wangdi Village rang again.
On the afternoon of June 2, village cadres stood on the old, nearly ruined stage and announced a decision to the gathered villagers. Due to legal considerations, the decision was not given a formal form, so it was not written down or recorded but was delivered orally. Thus, the village cadres did not use words like “announce” or anything similar, even avoiding giving the villagers the impression that they were “conveying a decision from above.” There was no decision, just a matter. “I have something to tell everyone. This case is still under investigation, to avoid any leaks and to facilitate further investigation by the police, please refrain from leaving the village for the time being unless it’s urgent.”
The police speculated that Long Zhimin might have accomplices. Some of the more astute villagers quickly understood the true meaning behind this “ban.”
They discussed, “If it’s about preventing leaks, the news has already spread by onlookers from other villages days ago. If Long Zhimin’s accomplices were in other villages, they would have either escaped or destroyed evidence by now. The police suspect Long Zhimin’s accomplices are right here in Wangdi Village!” People looked at each other with questions in their eyes. In the days that followed, doors and windows were shut, and when people met, they only exchanged brief greetings without much conversation, creating an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and tension throughout the village.
Meanwhile, among the two bodies discovered by the police, one was Du Changying, but the other was not Jiang Sanhe but a boy of sixteen or seventeen. Returning to Wangdi for a third search, the police found a full fertilizer bag behind the east door panel—inside was the body of a woman, around 50 years old, also not Jiang Sanhe.
The discovery of three bodies immediately caused a sensation. Villagers of all ages poured out to watch.
The security director and several militiamen maintained order. The police set up a perimeter.
The county party secretary in charge of law and order, the public security bureau chief, and leaders from the Shangluo Prefecture and Administrative Office successively arrived at the scene. The police, equipped with police dogs, searched Long’s house again but found nothing new. According to villagers, there used to be a radish pit in front of Long Zhimin’s house, now filled and planted with cabbages. This caught the attention of the police.
Yan Shuxia pointed out the location of the radish pit to the police, which was less than a meter from the threshold. After digging a few shovels, a militiaman unearthed some corn leaves. Beneath a thin layer of soil was a layer of corn stalks. The police then called for more people to dig around, clearing a space three meters long and two meters wide. When they lifted the corn stalks, they found eight or nine bodies, stacked like firewood, heads and feet interlocked, neat and compact, with evidence of at least another layer below. Those present were horrified by this nightmarish scene.
The police officers at the scene issued an order: “Pause the examination, report to the provincial department immediately!”
Three Burial Pits
A squad of armed police sealed off the burial site, with another company on standby in the city and the independent company of the military sub-district on alert. The regional public security bureau established a wireless connection with the site. The next day, after the arrival of Vice Director Zhang Jingxian of the Shaanxi Provincial Public Security Department and a team of criminal investigators, the excavation work resumed. Bodies were exhumed, photographed, recorded, and autopsied. By 7 p.m., the number of bodies exhumed had risen to 20. As night fell, the examination work stopped. Wang Kucheng made the only light-hearted comment during that time to Bureau Chief Zhou Yu: “This is like the Terracotta Army in Lintong!”
At dawn on May 31, the excavation and autopsy work on “Pit No. 3” resumed, and the body count continued to rise. By 11 a.m., “Pit No. 3” was cleared, revealing a total of 33 bodies. For a murder case in peacetime, this was an astronomical number!
The examiners walked out of the enclosure, removed their masks, and exhaled deeply. However, the police did not dare to relax, as there was no indication that the case would expand further, but also no sign that it would end here.
After a brief rest, everyone, armed with metal-tipped rods, began probing the ground around Long Zhimin’s house. No one wanted to find anything more, and if they did, they hoped it would be related evidence. Their psychological endurance had reached its limit.
At this moment, around 11:30 a.m., as a police officer inserted the rod into the ground once more, he suddenly froze, drawing everyone’s gaze. He felt a void under his rod. “Pit No. 2” was discovered this way. This pit was two meters east of “Pit No. 3,” inside Long Zhimin’s pigsty, similar in shape, running north-south, two meters long, one meter wide, and 1.5 meters deep. Eight skeletons were exhumed, neatly arranged, heads and feet interlocked, identical to “Pit No. 3.” It was evident that the victims in this pit were killed before those in “Pit No. 3.”
As the examination work continued, the news spread among the public, shaking the entire Shangluo area like an earthquake. People flocked to Wangdi Village like a tide. As early as May 29, after the discovery of three bodies in the house, due to the condition of the bodies and the unusual way they were hidden, it had caused quite a stir in the surrounding areas, with people from nearby villages coming to watch. Although the news reached Shang County town, the fact of three murders had not exceeded the public’s experience, so few people from the town came.
After the discovery of “Pit No. 3,” the situation changed; the number of townsfolk among the onlookers noticeably increased. From May 30, the scene around Wangdi Village, within dozens of miles, was described by a villager as “like a temple fair!” The roads leading to the east and west of Wangdi were bustling with traffic. As for visitors from other counties in Shangluo, they initially came by chance, but later, groups made appointments to come. How many people visited Wangdi that week? According to villagers, there were at least several tens of thousands.
A central task force led by Chen Piyao and Vice Minister Yu Lei of the Ministry of Public Security was dispatched to Shang County. A rapid investigation organization was established involving leaders and departments at various levels from central to rural. The core leadership team was headed by Zhang Jingxian, Vice Director of the Provincial Public Security Department, with Wang Dianwen, Deputy Secretary of the Prefecture Committee, as the deputy leader. Under this group were the interrogation team, investigation and visitation team, and scene examination team. At the suggestion of Bai Yuji, the Prefectural Party Secretary, a mass case-solving group was also established. During the day, as the excavation and examination work was in full swing, relatives of the missing would cry out in the crowd of onlookers. Encouraged by well-meaning onlookers, they attempted several times to rush past the cordon to identify the bodies but were stopped by the armed police, leading to dissatisfaction, crying, and accusations among them and the crowd, with some troublemakers even shouting and causing disturbances. By the afternoon, over a hundred people had gathered in front of the Shang County Public Security Bureau, demanding that leaders come out to speak and to identify the bodies. Among them, someone criticized the police for not noticing anything beforehand, saying, “They’re just a bunch of freeloaders.”
To “Eliminate Harm” for the Country?
The police’s investigation of survivors and interviews with the victims’ families ruled out the possibility of accomplices or any political or superstitious motives, leading to a preliminary conclusion: the perpetrator was Long Zhimin alone, with the motive of obtaining free labor and financial gain.
The police found 15 bankbooks with a total of 533 yuan, 3.13 yuan in cash, 91.5 jin of grain coupons, 4 watches, and 1011 pieces of various evidence in Long Zhimin’s home.
During one interrogation, when repeatedly asked by the interrogator if there was hidden stolen money elsewhere besides the 573 yuan, Long Zhimin replied, “No need to ask anymore, it’s just 573 yuan. I didn’t kill just for money; I was eliminating harm for the country!”
“What?”
“I have three non-killings,” Long Zhimin continued, “I don’t kill scientists, I don’t kill government officials, and I don’t kill workers. I only kill the disabled, the ignorant, and the foolish…”
Regardless of Long Zhimin’s reasons for saying this, the investigation results showed that most of the victims and survivors, except for a few with low intelligence or disabilities, were of sound mind and were strong laborers from rural areas, the backbone of their families.
On August 30, 1985, the Shangluo branch of the Shaanxi Provincial Procuratorate filed charges against Long Zhimin and his wife for intentional homicide.
On September 20, 1985, the Intermediate People’s Court of Shangluo Prefecture sentenced the couple to death. They appealed, but the appeal was rejected by the Shaanxi Provincial High Court, upholding the original sentence.
On September 27, 1985, Long Zhimin and his wife were executed.
Why Kill?
For Long Zhimin’s insane killing spree, there seemed to be no explanation other than psychological perversion.
Li Guoxue, a 57-year-old taxi driver from Shangluo, vividly remembers the grand public trial at the stadium where Long Zhimin and his wife were sentenced to death. He couldn’t understand: why did Long Zhimin kill so many people?
In fact, this was one of the puzzles that baffled the investigative authorities at the time: Long Zhimin’s prolonged killing spree was beyond the endurance of a person with a normal mind. Trading 48 lives for just 573 yuan was beyond comprehension.
The ability to live with increasingly rotting corpses, to move them out alone in the dead of night, and then stack them neatly in an orderly manner was even more unbelievable.
At that time, Shaanxi Province did not yet have a forensic psychiatric evaluation institution. The investigative authorities invited experts from Xi’an Medical University and Northwest University of Political Science and Law to conduct a psychiatric test on Long Zhimin.
After a day of testing using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, experts concluded: one, Long Zhimin showed no signs of mental illness; two, he was quick to respond and answered questions clearly, indicating he was intelligent.
Experts also had a conversation with Long Zhimin regarding the case:
Q: Why did you strip the victims of their clothes?
A: Why would dead people need clothes?
Q: Why did you wash the clothes?
A: They last longer when clean, and they don’t smell.
Q: Why did you cut the hair of the dead?
A: I heard that everything decomposes after death, except for hair. If you bury the hair too, you could identify the person through it later.
Q: Isn’t keeping the hair the same as keeping evidence?
A: I was thinking of selling it when I had enough.
Q: Why did you stack the bodies so neatly?
A: To save space.
Q: 573 yuan for 48 lives, that’s only a few yuan per person. Didn’t you calculate that?
A: We can’t call the rich people, and those we can call don’t have much money.
Q: Aren’t you afraid to live in the same house with dead bodies?
A: What’s there to fear? Dead people are still people.
Q: Have you ever been scared while killing?
A: To say I wasn’t scared would be a lie. Once, I killed someone upstairs… In the middle of the night, I heard noises, thump-thump. I thought, what’s going on? Could it be a ghost? But the Communist Party says there are no gods or ghosts. I got up, lit the lamp, and my hand was shaking while holding the oil lamp. What could I do? I recited Chairman Mao’s quotes: ‘Be determined, fear no sacrifice, surmount every difficulty to win victory…’ When I went upstairs to look, guess what? There was a piece of rotten plastic on the ground, and the blood from the dead guy had dripped down from the floorboards, hitting the plastic and making that sound! I found a basin to catch the dripping blood and went back to sleep.
Medical experts analyzed that Long Zhimin’s motives for killing were threefold: one, to obtain money; two, to gain labor; three, to satisfy sexual desires. In the later stages, it evolved into an addiction to killing, deriving pleasure from the act.
According to investigators, Long Zhimin showed no remorse for his crimes. Upon hearing his death sentence in court, Long Zhimin said, “I can’t understand it.”
Before his execution, the judge asked him, “Why can’t you understand? You killed so many people…”
Long Zhimin: “Huang Chao killed eight million, and he wasn’t sentenced to death. Why am I being sentenced to death?”
