China’s ‘Jack the Ripper’ executed
BEIJING: A serial killer dubbed China’s “Jack the Ripper” for the way he mutilated several of his 11 female victims was executed, three decades after the first murder, the court which sentenced him said.
The court in the northwest city of Baiyin, Gansu province, which handed him the death sentence in March last year announced on the Twitter-like Weibo that it had been carried out.
China’s supreme court had approved the execution, it said.
Gao Chengyong, 54, robbed, raped and murdered 11 women and girls between 1988 and 2002 in Gansu and the neighbouring Inner Mongolia region.
In March 2018, he was found guilty by the Baiyin City Intermediate People’s Court and handed death sentences for both robbery and intentional homicide, and lesser sentences for rape and dishonouring corpses.
Gao targeted young women wearing red and followed them home, often cutting their throats and mutilating their bodies, according to state media reports. The youngest victim was eight years old. Some victims had their reproductive organs removed, the Beijing Youth Daily said when Gao was arrested in 2016. “To satisfy his perverted desire to dishonour and sully corpses, many of his female victims’ corpses were damaged and violated,” the court said on Weibo when he was convicted.
Police had been hunting Gao for years. “The suspect has a sexual perversion and hates women,” police said in 2004 when they linked the crimes for the first time and offered a reward of 200,000 yuan (RM120,000) for information leading to an arrest.