True Crime & Mystery

A courtesan elected Prime Minister of the Flower Kingdom went out for a drive in Shanghai in June 1920 and never came back. Six days later her body was found in a wheat field. The case was broken by the one thing nobody thought to hide, the licence plate on the borrowed car.

In 1727 a complainant in Guangdong bound himself to the penalty for false accusation and reported that his young cousin had been poisoned. The next morning the grave was opened and the grave was empty. The man who had stolen the body was the man who had come to court to report the death.

In 1247 a Southern Song judicial commissioner named Song Ci finished the earliest surviving systematic manual of forensic medicine in the world. In it he recorded a case solved by laying every sickle in a village out in the summer sun and watching which blade drew the flies, and a method for seeing wounds on bare bone through the red light of an oiled paper umbrella.

A school official who supervised the building of a running track disappeared in 2003. He had been killed and buried under the track itself, and for sixteen years the children of the county ran over him every morning. Ten officials knew, and for sixteen years nothing moved.

For fourteen years a killer worked in one Chinese city, leaving prints and traces at every scene and never being caught. The case broke not on a fingerprint at all. It broke on a blood sample taken, for an unrelated reason, from a man who was a distant relative of the killer and did not know it.

In the first month of 692 the chancellor Di Renjie, the man the English-speaking world knows as Judge Dee, was dragged into a prison cell and accused of treason. He confessed on the spot. Then he wrote his defence on a strip of silk, sewed it into his padded coat, and had the coat sent home to be made lighter for the warmer weather.

On 22 August 1870 the governor-general of Liangjiang was stabbed to death in the street outside his own office in Nanjing. The assassin was caught on the spot and gave three different motives over eight months of interrogation. The official finding was that nobody sent him. One hundred and fifty years later, that finding is still the problem.

In 1873 a low-ranking examiner in Zhejiang pushed a silver needle into a dead man and drew it out black. He had not washed it the way the manual required. Three years, two imperial commissioners and one public autopsy later, the case became the first great scandal of the late Qing, and one of the earliest Chinese murder cases followed day by day in a newspaper.

In March 1992 a twenty-two-year-old medical student was killed in a teaching building in Nanjing, and the only thing the killer left behind was a description given by two campus guards. The case stayed open for twenty-eight years. It was closed by a man who never appeared on any suspect list, and by a stretch of DNA he had inherited from his father.

On 6 July 2020 a man in Hangzhou walked into a police station and reported that his wife had vanished. For the next ten days he was on television, weeping and offering a reward. Nineteen days after she disappeared, the police found her in the septic tank beneath the building. This is the case of Xu Guoli and Lai Huili, and of the two tons of water nobody could explain.