A serial killer dubbed China’s “Jack the Ripper” for the way he mutilated several of his 11 female victims was executed yesterday morning, three decades after the first murder, the court that sentenced him said.
The court in the northwestern city of Baiyin in China’s Gansu Province, which handed him the death sentence in March last year, announced on Sina Weibo that it had been carried out.
The Chinese Supreme People’s Court had approved the execution, it said.
Photo: AFP
Gao Chengyong (高承勇), 54, robbed, raped and murdered 11 women and girls between 1988 and 2002 in Gansu and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
In March last year, 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 dishonoring corpses.
Gao targeted young women wearing red and followed them home, often cutting their throats and mutilating their bodies, state media reports said.
The youngest victim was eight years old.
Some of the victims had their reproductive organs removed, the Beijing Youth Daily said when Gao was arrested in 2016.
“To satisfy his perverted desire to dishonor and sully corpses, many of his female victims’ corpses were damaged and violated,” the court said on Weibo after his conviction.
“The motives of the defendant’s crimes were despicable, his methods extremely cruel, the nature of the acts vile and the details of the crimes serious,” the court added.
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 (US$29,094 at the current exchange rare) for information leading to an arrest.
“He is reclusive and unsociable, but patient,” the police profile at the time said.
A lead in the case came when police collected and tested the DNA of one of Gao’s relatives over a separate minor crime, the state-run China Daily reported.
Police concluded that the killer they had been hunting for 28 years was a relation and Gao’s DNA matched the murderer’s.
Jack the Ripper was a serial killer active in London in the late Victorian era, who is believed to have murdered five women, mutilating several of them.
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