Uncle’s DNA snared ‘Jack the Ripper’
He selected girls and young women wearing red, followed them home, raped, murdered and mutilated them.
Gao Chengyong, the man dubbed China’s Jack the Ripper, then stopped the killings and returned to his family and unsuspecting neighbours. Until his deadly past finally caught up last week.
In a raid on his wife’s grocery store, police in northwest China caught one of its worst serial killers and rapists, 28 years after he first struck. Gao, 52, has confessed to killing 11 women between 1988 and 2002, the Ministry of Public Security said.
The youngest was 8, but most were in their twenties and lived alone. He slashed their throats and mutilated the genitals of some victims, according to Chinese media. Nine were killed in Baiyin, near Gao’s home in Gansu province and two were killed in Baotou, Inner Mongolia.
In 2004 the announcement of a NZ$36,000 reward for information was the first time that police publicly linked the deaths. Gao laid low and the trail went cold.
The breakthrough followed a focus on cold cases by the Criminal Investigation Bureau, which began a new investigation in March to re-examine DNA and other biological evidence.
Police had fingerprints, footprints, semen and DNA from the crime scenes, but Gao’s village had been excluded from a mass fingerprinting programme.
They got a break when his uncle was arrested for a minor offence and police found that his DNA was a close match to the killer and the net closed in.
Villagers said Gao was a quiet, antisocial man who worked away in metal refineries but returned home at New Year to see his family.
Gao’s elder son, who was born in 1988, told Meirirenwu, a social media site, that he ‘‘didn’t quite understand’’ his father, whom he saw only once a year.
He said Gao hit his mother as they argued about his gambling losses.
She had asked him to return to Baoyin to help to run her grocery store.
When Gao was a teenager he had hoped to become an air force pilot but failed the exam twice, which he blamed on ‘‘political reasons’’.
Cui Xiangping, whose sister was stabbed 22 times and had her hands and other body parts removed, said: ‘‘I once thought this case would never be cracked. After getting the news yesterday [Monday] evening, my mother’s mood has been unstable throughout, weeping all the time.’’