It was Chinese New Year, a weeklong celebration of fireworks and family to scare up good fortune and dispel evil spirits, when the killer went on the prowl again.



He picked a young worker walking home, and followed a ways behind. He’d done it before, many times, enough to perfect his technique, but things did not go as planned that winter’s night. His crimes were already notorious and the target realized the danger; she fought back tooth and nail, locked the door, and frantically called her husband.

It was then, she said, that her would-be killer reappeared, grinning outside her window. When her husband reached her, the couple checked again: There he still was, still laughing. By the time police arrived, though, the smiling apparition had vanished into the New Year’s night, blending into the carefree popping of corks and firecrackers—and the 14-year pall of fear and suspicion one phantom had managed to cast over a remote city of 1.7 million in the world’s largest authoritarian country.

“Our parents used to talk about it sometimes,” Sun, a friend who grew up near the northeast city where at least one of the killings occurred, told me. “When we were growing up, kids weren’t allowed to go out after dark ... and my mom never let me wear anything red.”

Between 1988 and 2002, multiple women were murdered in the cities of Baiyin, Gansu province, and Baotou in Inner Mongolia, some five hundred miles to the northeast. Media reports on the crimes would come under the strict control of China’s propaganda departments and, even today, outsiders reporting on the subject are met with a near-impenetrable wall of silence. Still, stories spread: the victims were young, female, pretty; their bodies had been horribly desecrated; the killer was said to favor long-haired girls, in high heels, wearing red. Only some of these tales were true—but they were the worst ones.