Title: GUANGZHOU Ripper

Dates: 1991 to 1992

Overview: Her genitals were excised with a knife, but the injury did not prevent police from finding unspecified evidence of sexual intercourse. Five more slayings followed.

Status: Cold Case. Still on the loose.

Hard-line communist societies once faced a selfimposed disability in dealing with serial killers, since state propaganda organs routinely denied the existence of serious crime in a workers paradise. Authorities in the former USSR learned the grim truth over a span of two decades, from butchers like Gennadiy Mikhasevich (36 victims), Andrei Chikatilo (52 dead), Nikolai Dzhumagliev (at least 100 slain), and Anatoly Onoprienko (51 victims), but the notion of serial murder was still new to the People's Republic of China in 1991, when an unknown stalker surfaced in Guangzhou (formerly Canton).

The slashers first victim was reportedly found on February 22, 1991, vaguely described as a woman in her early twenties. Her genitals were excised with a knife, but the injury did not prevent police from finding unspecified evidence of sexual intercourse. Five more slayings followed in the next six months, each victim reportedly subjected to a sexual assault, then smothered, stabbed, or strangled, after which the bodies were dismembered, stuffed into rice bags, and dumped on rubbish heaps in the bleak suburbs where Guangzhous floating population lives in dismal squalor. And then, the murders stopped.

Thus far, there had been no press coverage of the crimes in China, marking the case as a success in terms of propaganda, even though the murderer remained at large. Chinese authorities ran out of luck in March 1992, when a seventh victim washed ashore in the nearby British colony of Hong Kong. As described in the South China Morning Post, number seven had been slit from throat to stomach, then crudely stitched shut again, her finger severed almost as an afterthought. Because no women were reported missing from Hong Kong, it was assumed the corpse had floated in from mainland China, and so the Guangzhou Ripper was belatedly exposed.

Even then, it was impossible for mainland homicide investigators, reared from childhood under communism, to believe that their system would spawn such a monster. Zhu Minjian, head of Guangzhous provincial Criminal Investigation Department, told reporters, In all my thirty years with the force, I have never come across anything like this. Perhaps he copied from the West. Zhu said there had been progress on the case, but he was not prepared to share details. We are putting a lot of effort into this case, he declared. We've got to solve it.

Or, perhaps not. More than a decade after the first press report of the crimes, Chinese authorities have yet to name a suspect in the string of murders they found so shocking. Unless the killer has been secretly detained-unlikely on its face, considering the rash of prior publicity-we must assume that Guangzhou's Ripper has performed a successful disappearing act.