“I’ve been waiting for you here all this time,” Mr. Liu reportedly said to the police when they arrived at his house.

The gruesome killings took place at a hostel in Huzhou, in neighboring Zhejiang Province, on a November night in 1995, according to a local security official quoted by the newspaper China Daily. Two men who spoke with Anhui accents checked in at the hostel reportedly with the intention of robbing other guests, the official said.

But when one guest, surnamed Yu, caught them stealing, the two men were said to have killed the guest. To cover up their crimes, they then beat to death the couple that ran the hostel as well as their 13-year-old grandson, according to China Daily.

The police in Anhui opened an investigation into the killings, but the trail soon went cold.

“The biggest challenge was the suspects and the victims had no previous relationship,” said Xu Zhicheng, one of the local investigators, according to The Paper. “It was very difficult for us to follow the vine to find the melon.”

During his more than three-decade long career, Mr. Liu found modest success as a writer. In 2013, he was accepted into the official China Writers’ Association, and he was the recipient of a prestigious local literary prize, according to The Paper. But Legal Evening News, a Chinese newspaper, reported that Mr. Liu told the police that, for years after the killings, he found it difficult to sleep at night because of what he had done.