It was the morning of 19 November, 1995, and not far from Nanjing in the city of Huzhou, slept the people of a small guesthouse positioned at the end of the road.
In one of the rooms sat Mr. Liu Yongbiao and his accomplice, waiting until the time was right to begin fleecing the other guests of their money and possessions. As they lurked about the guesthouse, Mr. Yu, one of the other guests, caught them and fought back. To Yu’s doom, Liu and his accomplice bludgeoned him to death. As a means to cover up what they had done, the two men from Nanling, Anhui, also not far from Nanjing, later went on to murder the couple that owned the guesthouse and their grandson in the same way.
As Liu sat in his 2017 hometown, surrounded by his various publications, the police came knocking. “I have been waiting here for you all this time”, Liu can be heard saying on the video of his capture released by the police.
Although the police did not disclose exactly how they found Liu, they did note that new DNA evidence was of assistance in the eventual capture of the 1995 quadruple murderers, and possibly the contents of Liu’s next book.
In 2005, Liu published a book called The Guilty Secret in which he states in the preface that he has already started work on a follow up that “he hoped would be a literary sensation”; a cold-case thriller that was to tell the story of a murdering female author, who escapes capture time and time again; he was to entitle the book “The Beautiful Writer Who Killed”.
Aside from his novel, Liu had produced a collection of reworked historical fiction, which had been turned into a 50-series TV show, while he was appointed a member of the China Writers Association and was published in a magazine printed in Hefei. As the number 1 suspect in this grisly crime, Liu will likely pen his next novel from behind bars.
Xu Zhucheng, the original policeman assigned to the case, has recently been quoted as saying, “The suspects did not have any relationships with the victims… we found it hard to follow the vine all the way to the melon”. Due to ID regulations in the early 90’s and no video surveillance, this made it difficult for police during the initial investigation to track the killers.
After the police arrested Liu, he handed them a note written to his wife, in which he allegedly confesses his crimes to her, quoted as saying, “I lived in fear for 20 years [and] I knew the day would come… I can finally be free from the mental torment I’ve endured for so long”.
The case of Liu Yongbiao is somewhat similar to that of Dutch author Richard Klinkhamer, who, similar to his Chinese counterpart, wrote a book called Mince Day, which details seven ways in which he “could have killed his wife”. Other notable murderers come authors include England’s Juliet Hulme, who murdered her best friend’s mother, changed her name and went on to become a historical detective fiction writer; Austrian prostitute serial killer Johann “Jack” Unterweger, who went on to write a series of poems, stories and his autobiography from jail; and Chilean acclaimed author Maria Carolina Geel, who shot her lover in a fit of rage before embracing his dead body, witnesses claimed.
Back in Anhui, Liu is currently being held in custody awaiting his trial.
