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Chaoyang Jane Doe was a woman found dead next to a side road of the Capital Airport Expressway in Beijing's Chaoyang District. The woman had been stabbed to death and had three tattoos on her arm written in Chinese characters; the meaning of two has yet to be ascertained.
Case[]
On 3 August 2008, the police were informed of a decomposing body found in the grass on the green belt of the Capital Airport Expressway in Beijing, China. The corpse, which was heavily decomposed, belonged to a young woman dressed in a vest with an apple pattern and blue sports shorts.
An autopsy was conducted, which determined that the woman had been stabbed to death and that she had been dead since early July 2008. The police deemed the investigation a homicide and determined that she had been killed elsewhere before being disposed of at the location she was found in, with the summer heat speeding up decomposition.
The police looked into women who went missing in Beijing in June and also extracted DNA from the decedent, but none of these leads proved to be of assistance. She didn't match the missing women's descriptions, and her DNA was not included in China's database. Since the decedent didn't have anything pointing to her identity, such as documents, a mobile phone, and no recorded information, such as bank cards, bus cards, or shopping receipts, the police's only lead was the tattoos. The first character of her tattoo was "陸", the surname "Lu". The other two characters the police couldn't recognize were very uncommon. The second one had the radical "山" on top and the radical "正" on the bottom, while the third character had the radical "人" on the top and the radical "力" at the bottom.
The police believed that they might be family names since they didn't recognize the words and nobody on the police could pronounce them. The police checked China's household registration system, but nobody had a name containing those characters, and their computers didn't have an input method to type out the characters. The police reasoned that due to how rare the characters are, the person who applied the tattoo would remember them. They visited over 30 tattoo parlours in the Chaoyang District, but none of the owners remembered giving the tattoo or recognized the characters. The tattoo artist did lend their expertise in another way, explaining how the thickness of the character strokes was uneven and that the deceased may have done the tattoo herself. The police then asked the text information center of the Ministry of Education to try and see if they knew of the characters, but they also did not recognize them.
The police expanded the scope of the investigation to scholars who studied the Chinese alphabet and got their first lead as an elderly man living in Guangdong Province recognized the third character. The police travelled to Guangdong province and interviewed the man, who explained that the character was old Cantonese and pronounced as "oh", the same way as the character "鹅". The police then visited the Beijing offices in Hubei and Guangxi to uncover whether the other character was also part of a local dialect but to no avail.
On 14 October, the police published photos of the tattoos and characters online and on the news, offering a reward of 10,000 yuan to anyone who could definitively pin down the characters' origin. The bounty resulted in lengthy online discussions and leads, but the police heard of a promising one when a taxi driver from Hangzhou named Lao Wang recalled seeing the characters. He remembered that Taoist priests, when drawing talismans in his hometown, Anqing, would use the last two characters and that they were pronounced as "gong" and "wei", respectively. Police questioned Taoists, who said that Taoist talismans often contain some variant characters that seem to be pieced together. The two characters were likely to be related to Taoist culture, but they didn't know the meaning or pronunciation.
Another man named Mr. Yang, who was a collector of classic texts, came forward, telling police that he had seen the characters before as they were in an old dictionary. The second character was pronounced "ding" and meant "a prominent place on a small hill". The third character was pronounced "le" and meant "dry" or "do", with the two characters together meaning "to work on a small hill protruding from the ground"
The police got one more lead regarding the characters from a man named Mr. Lan, explaining that they were part of the Zhuang dialect or language and the characters were purely phonetic when placed together with no meaning. The three characters put together were likely a name, either of the deceased herself or somebody she knew, with the name being "Lu Zheng'e". Lu was a common name in Guangxi, and it was reasoned that the deceased may have been a guest from Guangxi. The police in Guangxi were informed but couldn't identify the deceased or anybody with that name.
Characteristics[]
- Long hair.
- Tattoo on left forearm containing two Chinese characters of unknown origin.
Clothing and accessories[]
- Vest with an apple pattern.
- Blue sports shorts.
- Red headband.