Jingmen Jane Doe

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Jingmen Jane Doe was a woman found floating in a small pond in the village of Lüchong, Yanmenkou, Jiangmen, Hubei Province, China. She was initially misidentified as a local woman, with the woman's husband being convicted of her murder, though this was overturned when the woman was found alive. Reportedly, a second family had come forward to identify the woman. However, they were turned away at the time due to police believing the body belonged to the first woman, and they have never come forward since.

Case[]

Discovery[]

On the 11th of April, 1994, the child of a villager had been sent to school, though upon his return, he noticed what looked like a body floating in a nearby small pond and immediately reported it to the village chief. The child led the chief to the pond, and following a short investigation, the chief took the child with him to the local police and reported the discovery.

Authorities quickly retrieved the body from the pond with the help of other villagers and began examining the corpse. Despite decomposition and the body being bloated from the process, authorities identified the body as belonging to a female and that she had been dead for about two months. The villagers were questioned if they recognized the body, but they responded that she didn't look familiar and may have lived elsewhere since no one in the village was reported missing. Police then examined her clothing but could not obtain any further leads and sent her body to the Jingshen County Public Security Bureau. Investigators from the Bureau were sent to the scene but could not get any physical evidence that could explain how the decedent had died. However, examinations of her body found 6 wounds on the back of her head that appeared to have been caused by blunt force trauma and not the result of a fall.

During their investigation, police found the pond had heavy foot traffic, with villagers often fishing there. Authorities could not surmise how the woman had been dead for two months in the pond yet was never noticed until April. The investigators considered putrefaction, though they noted that it would not have happened quickly with how small the pond was. With drifting in the pond not being possible for the body, it is suspected that the woman's murderer had held her body for two months before dumping her in the pond sometime before the child saw it. Due to the village's low murder rate, the case was immediately made a priority, and notices were sent to the Yanmenkou Township and the surrounding villages requesting families with missing female members to come forward. This soon led police to meet a woman who said her daughter, Zaiyu Zhang, had gone missing in January of 1994.

Misidentification[]

Authorities looked into Zhang's case and found that she was close to the decedent's estimated age and the same height as her. In addition, Zhang was noted to have piercings and a lateral incision due to experiencing dystocia while giving birth. According to reports, Zhang's mother never saw the woman's body but immediately identified her as Zhang based on the description of the body. Zhang's brother, who was present during the identification and saw the body, would note that he was hesitant because the woman did look like his sister but did not wear the clothes she would have worn. Police repeatedly urged him to reconsider, but he refused and requested another identification method. Authorities presented him with both DNA testing and cranial image overlap. Still, there were no local professionals to conduct it, and contracting experts from Beijing would be expensive with the police refusing to pay for these methods. Due to the Zhang family already struggling financially, this was turned down, and the police dismissed the mother's further observation that the clothes did not look like they belonged to her daughter. Reportedly, authorities remarked that the person only needed to be identified, not the clothes.

After finding one of Zhang's coworkers and having them identify the body as hers, police believed the body truly belonged to her and began investigating her life. Zhang was considered an intelligent and educated woman, though she never pursued higher education and worked in a factory in Yanmenkou. In 1986, she married a former soldier named Xianglin She, who often traveled outside their village for work opportunities. He began working as a security guard in 1987 before relocating to the Gaoguan Reservoir for the same position. He was often away from home, though Zhang had never shown any disdain for the fact that he was often gone. Instead, the couple often needed help with money because Xianglin had a habit of immediately spending his paycheck after obtaining it. Additionally, Xianglin was described as having a short temper, leading to many verbal arguments between the couple.

In 1991, Xianglin was reported to have been caught cheating on Zhang with another woman at his job, though he and Zhang amended their relationship respectfully, as described by their families. However, in 1993, Zhang began to suffer from mental illnesses in association with facing layoffs at the factory where she worked. She is stated to have likely suffered from depression and took medication for it, though the arguments between her and Xianglin began to increase. She was described as incredibly anxious and even fell seriously ill in October of that year, leading to Xianglin having to care for her. She would then suddenly go missing on the 20th of January, 1994, with no signs of foul play in her home. According to her mother, her winter coats and other personal items were still inside her house. Her disappearance was reported to authorities, but it has not been detailed what actions were taken before she came forward in April.

Authorities immediately named Xianglin the prime suspect in the case. They began questioning Zhang's coworkers, who claimed he had told her, "I want to kill Zaiyu Zhang," while she was seriously ill. Xianglin is reported to have not behaved well during the search efforts and often heavily drank and slept. Despite unverified evidence, police took it as fact and arrested him. He was forcibly relocated to a hotel in Madian for residential surveillance, and told him Zhang was dead. Xianglin was reportedly devastated and asked to see her body, but police denied this request. Instead, they told him traveling to where her body was held would take too long and began interrogating him about her. He said she had run away from home after an argument, and he had entirely cut off all contact with his former mistress. The investigators reportedly did not believe him and repeatedly asked him how he killed Zhang despite denying involvement in her death and his pleas to see her body. He was arrested after thinking that Zhang's body may have been misidentified.

During this, the coroner updated the decedent's cause of death as drowning due to a substance reportedly found in her stomach despite police noting that the area had heavy foot traffic. During his detainment, Xianglin's family requested to see Zhang's body and was denied, along with Xianglin's mother being denied when she asked if she could see her son. Police then tracked down Xianglin's former mistress and obtained information that he had visited her several times during the disappearance to ask her to marry him, which police considered the motive for Zhang's death. Xianglin was ruthlessly interrogated for ten consecutive days before he broke down and claimed he did not want to be with Zhang anymore and deal with her mental illness. Therefore, he killed her to be with another woman. However, Xianglin is reported to have given four different confessions during this time.

According to authorities, his first confession was rejected because he did not detail how he had disposed of her body, with investigators demanding he provide a different confession. During his second confession, Xianglin claimed he and a friend beat Zhang to death with stones before throwing her body into a well. This confession was later thrown out after a short investigation of the well and his friend.

During his interrogation, police searched the pond again and found a snakeskin bag with stones and twine tied to it. This evidence was brought to Xianglin, and after a third rejected confession, he finally gave a confession the police found satisfactory. He was then charged with Zhang's murder, and his case was sent to the prosecutor. However, it was rejected, citing Xianglin's unreliable confession and reliance on circumstantial evidence. Authorities were instructed to keep investigating, and the case was later resubmitted on the 28th of August. Before his trial began, Zhang's family, along with the signatures of 200 other villagers, sent a letter to the court stating that Xianglin was a "morally deprived drunk that picked fights and killed his mentally ill wife so he could stay with his mistress". The Zhang family and the villagers then pressured their local government to give Xianglin a severe punishment, leading to the case being forced to go to trial despite the lack of solid evidence on the 22nd of September. The prosecution later started on the 7th of October.

Xianglin claimed he was tortured and forced to confess, with the defense arguing that all of the evidence was circumstantial, though he was still sentenced to death by the end of the trial on the 13th of October. During this time, Xianglin's mother was conducting her investigation and was finally able to visit her son later. Believing his story that Zhang had run away, his mother set out to find her and obtained a lead in December of that year in the village of Yaoling. According to the villagers, a mentally ill woman had entered the village and refused to talk to any of them. Instead, she chose to sleep at the cemetery and never ate with anyone in the village. Pitying her, the villagers gave her clothes and food, with one villager allowing her to stay in their home for a short time before she left the village with no clue as to her current whereabouts. She looked very similar to Zhang and spoke in the same dialect as her, leading Xianglin's mother to request that the villagers sign a letter stating this information to be sent to investigators. However, this was dismissed, and she claimed that she was either making it up or that the villagers saw a different woman.

Due to Chinese law requiring cases with death rulings to be reviewed by a higher court, Xianglin's claim was submitted and soon rejected by the higher court in January 1995, citing the inconsistency of Xianglin's confessions and the circumstantial evidence. Despite Zhang's family and the villagers signing a petition to execute Xianglin quickly, the Hubei Provincial Court rejected it and responded that death sentence cases need solid evidence. Therefore, Xianglin was ordered to be given a retrial. Still, the lower courts refused to hold it due to the risk of losing the death sentence ruling, thus leaving the case in limbo. At the same time, Zhang's family continuously pressured prosecutors to execute Xianglin, reminding prosecutors that the evidence was faulty, along with sightings of Zhang. A letter would soon be delivered to authorities from another village claiming they had seen Zhang with the villagers signing it. However, this resulted in authorities detaining Xianglin's mother and brother for nearly 11 months due to their continuous petitions. Police then went to the village claiming they saw Zhang and demanded they change their testimonies, though when they refused, they were threatened with being arrested for perjury. The villagers were detained for 3 to 4 months afterwards, with some fleeing their homes upon release.

During his time in prison, Xianglin detailed in several diaries how the police had tortured him, resulting in him losing the ability to stand and walk. Additionally, he claimed that it had even resulted in him losing a part of his finger, and he wasn't allowed to drink or sleep. He reported that he had been asked to draw a map of Zhang's murder by police, though due to him not knowing what Lüchong looked like, he was shown the location on the map and told to draw it. Once he did so, police recorded it as evidence.

Retrial of Xianglin[]

On the 23rd of November, 1997, Xianglin's case was finally given a retrial, and on the 15th of June, 1998, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Xianglin appealed this conviction, though at the same time, Zhang's family and the village sent a petition to the court requesting that they reject the appeal. The court sided with the Zhang family and finalized Xianglin's conviction.

However, on the 28th of March, 2005, a woman entered a village and walked to the Zhang home. After entering, she proclaimed that she had returned and was Zaiyu Zhang. She did not understand why everyone was shocked to see her after so many years. She reminded her brother that she had sent him a letter years before, though he had thought it was a tasteless joke being made by a third party and neglected to tell anyone he received it. Zhang would then ask where her husband was, and when told he was in prison, she demanded to know why. Once told what had happened, she quickly left to report to the prosecutors and police that she was alive and not the body found in the pond. Following a DNA test to confirm that she wasn't an impostor, she was identified as Zaiyu Zhang, not the deceased woman found years earlier.

Two days later, the ruling on Xianglin's case was quashed, with a retrial being ordered that followed with an acquittal. Xianglin was released on bail, though Zhang had to be committed to a mental hospital for psychological stress caused by reporters questioning her. Once she was discharged, she would explain that she did indeed run away due to her mental struggles and then suffered a bout of amnesia. She claimed she had married a man in Shandong and had a son but was afraid to return home because she believed everyone had moved on with their lives. Xianglin was declared not guilty in his retrial and was awarded 700,000 yuan in compensation for his false imprisonment. He reported that he had not blamed Zhang for what happened to him but instead blamed political corruption.

A re-investigation was conducted to find the identity of the now-unidentified woman, though no further details could be brought to light. Xianglin and Zhang have not remarried, with Xianglin stating she already has a family elsewhere, and the officers involved in Xianglin's false imprisonment were ordered to have disciplinary hearings. Reportedly, during the beginning of the investigation in 1994, a second family had come forward believing the body belonged to a family member. However, they were turned away as the police regarded the body as belonging to Zhang. This family has never come forward since, and it is unknown if police have tried to track them down.

Characteristics[]

Upturned nostrils.
Signs that she had given birth at least once during life.
Pierced ears.
Short hair that had been pulled back.

Clothing and accessories[]

Snakeskin bag with stones and twine tied to it.
Black bodybuilding pants.
Yellow wool vest.
A shirt with a black bottom noted to be made from safflower.
Bra.
Black leggings.
Blue shorts.
Eggplant-colored shoes described as 'warm'.
Red and black socks.