A 21-year-old woman was murdered while running in a park in Hubei province’s central region. The killer, who had been convicted of homicide, robbery, and desecration of a body, was recently executed after his death sentence was carried out.
The incident occurred on November 1, 2021, when the victim, identified as Zhu, vanished after exercising at a park near her home in Zhushan County. Local police launched an intensive search, and four days later the body’s discovery was confirmed among shrubs. Six days after that, investigators apprehended a suspect living nearby, a man with the surname Zhang, who had reportedly been released from prison in 2016 following an 18-year sentence for rape, theft, and related offenses.
The press reported that Zhang admitted carrying a knife with the intent to steal on the day of the crime and followed Zhu up to the park’s summit, where he snatched her phone and dragged her to a secluded spot to stab her repeatedly. The following day he returned to the scene to engage in acts involving the corpse and to discard the knife and other evidence.
The court ruled that Zhang acted with premeditation and cruelty, causing serious harm to both the victim’s family and society at large, and sentenced him to two years in prison for desecration of a corpse and to capital punishment for homicide. The sentence was carried out on the specified date.
The victim’s family was notified of the execution this Monday and expressed a sense of relief after receiving the news. Zhu had previously worked with her mother in the southeastern city of Shenzhen and had returned to her hometown shortly before the crime to prepare for a public-sector job.
Authorities do not publicly disclose official figures on executions, but a 2019 Amnesty International report noted that thousands of executions are believed to take place in China.