Captured killer

Police think they have caught China’s “Jack the Ripper” long after first murder.

BEIJING: Police believe they have captured a serial killer dubbed China’s “Jack the Ripper” for the way he mutilated several of his 11 female victims, state-run media reported yesterday, nearly three decades after the first murder.

Gao Chengyong, 52, was detained at the grocery store he runs with his wife in Baiyin, in the northwest province of Gansu, the China Daily said.

The newspaper said that he had confessed to 11 murders in Gansu and the neighbouring region of Inner Mongolia between 1988 and 2002, citing the ministry of public security.

Mr Gao allegedly targeted young women wearing red and followed them home to rape and kill them, often cutting their throats and mutilating their bodies, according to reports. The youngest victim was eight years old. Some victims also had their reproductive organs removed, the Beijing Youth Daily added.

“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 (about 1 million baht) for information leading to an arrest.

“He’s reclusive and unsociable, but patient,” they said at the time.

The original Jack the Ripper was a serial killer active in east London in the late Victorian era, who is widely believed to have murdered five women, mutilating several of them. Those killings have never been solved. Mr Gao was identified after a relative was put under house arrest in Baiyin over allegations of a minor crime and had his DNA collected and tested, the China Daily said.

Police concluded the killer they had been hunting for 28 years was a relation, and Mr Gao’s DNA matched the murderer’s, it added.

There were no immediate explanations as to why the killings stopped in 2002.

Miscarriages of justice are not rare in China, where the use of force to extract confessions remains widespread.