(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)
One year ago today, 57-year-old Zhang Yongming was executed in China, just six months after a court in the province of Yunnan convicted him of murder. Zhang, a farmer, was modern China’s answer to Fritz Haarmann: authorities believe he killed young men and boys, cannibalized parts of their bodies and sold the leftover flesh at the village market.
Convicted of eleven murders, he’s suspected of six more.
When young people started disappearing in the neighborhood, the police initially assumed they’d been kidnapped and sold for slave labor, a sad situation that’s all too common in present-day China.
Witnesses reported that Yongming began selling meat at the local market, which he had never done before, after 1997. The meat, which he sold as ostrich meat, was cured and dried.
When police finally searched Yongming’s house, they found strips of human flesh that were hung up to dry around his house. He kept dozens of human eyeballs preserved in alcohol in bottles, which police said looked like “snake wine.” Investigators said Yongming likely fed human remains to his dogs. In a nearby vegetable garden, police found bones believed to be human.
This wasn’t the first time Zhang had faced the death penalty, either: in 1979, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but the sentence was reduced and he was released from prison in 1997. The government even helped him get back on his feet by giving him a bit of land and a monthly allowance.
But Zhang simply couldn’t stay on the straight and narrow: by the spring of 2008, he’d started killing again, and the murders didn’t stop until his arrest four years later.
Following his conviction in July 2012, he confessed to his crimes and didn’t bother to file any appeals. He reportedly showed no remorse and didn’t offer any apologies for his victims’ families or any explanation for his conduct.
Zhang’s victims.
On this day..
- 1848: Thomas Sale, game - 2020
- 1868: Heli Freymond, the last beheaded by sword in Switzerland - 2019
- 1917: Marguerite Francillard, seamstress and spy - 2018
- 1870: John Gregson, drunk and disorderly - 2017
- 1946: Laszlo Bardossy, former Prime Minister - 2016
- 1430: Ten men beheaded, and an eleventh man married - 2015
- 1879: Benjamin Hunter, in the Hunter-Armstrong Tragedy - 2013
- 1937: Martemyan Ryutin, for his affair - 2012
- 2010: An al Shabaab rebel commander - 2011
- 1645: William Laud, given to the devil - 2010
- 1934: Marinus van der Lubbe, for the Reichstag fire - 2009
- 1775: Yemelyan Pugachev - 2008