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Malanzhou Jane Doe was a woman whose dismembered body was cut into six parts and found within a woven plastic bag in the Malanzhou River in Malanzhou, China. Her body is described as having been dismembered professionally. She was initially misidentified as Xiaorong Shi, with Xingshan Teng being falsely accused of her murder, but Teng has since been acquitted. Her murderer remains unidentified.
Case[]
Discovery[]
On 27 April 1987, the police force of Mayang County in the Hunan Province was informed of the discovery of body parts floating in the Malanzhou River. Reportedly, an elderly resident of the Malanzhou Village had noticed a woven plastic bag in the water and retrieved it out of curiosity, only to discover a severed human leg inside. A search of the areas surrounding the river produced more parts from the same body, including the decapitated head. The body was concluded to have belonged to a woman, with the cheekbones on her face showing signs of damage inflicted by either a blunt instrument or a severe fall. Once all the available parts were found, police concluded that the woman's body had been severed into six parts. Immediately, the authorities prioritized the case, with officers given a month to solve the case. Detectives believed the woman's death was out of passion with an additional sexual motive due to the gruesome manner in which her body had been disposed of. An analysis of her dismembered body would indicate that her killer had professionally removed her body parts. Following the discovery, owners of a ferry operating service reported seeing body parts floating downstream, with detectives noting that she had been killed elsewhere. Additionally, a villager in the nearby Malan village reported hearing a woman's screams and cries for help in the direction of Malanzhou. However, it was not specified when the villagers had heard the noises.
Liumei Yang[]
Police proceeded to investigate anyone known to have "promiscuous sexual relationships", though this would result in identifying and discovering the woman who was heard screaming alive and well. After exhausting leads, authorities searched missing person records in the area and located two women who were reported missing at the time. The mother of the first woman came forward to explain that her daughter had gone missing in March and was believed to have been killed by her boyfriend. When provided a photograph of the daughter, detectives noted that she looked very similar to the decedent, though it was ruled out when her blood type did not match the woman. The second person to come forward was a hotel manager reporting the second woman as a missing waitress from his business. According to the manager, the waitress was Liumei Yang, likely from Guizhou Province. She had gone missing in March and was the sixth child in a family of seven. However, he explained to authorities that Yang was likely not her real name due to the lack of ID cards owned by Chinese citizens living in rural areas at the time.
In further statements provided by the manager, he explained that it was common for employees to quit their jobs without notice; therefore, when Yang stopped appearing for her waitressing job, he was not concerned. He had only become concerned and reported Yang missing when he heard of the body parts found in the river. He described Yang's physical features to detectives, who then believed she looked pretty similar to the decedent despite the body having a severely damaged face and lacking personal items. Authorities proceeded to investigate the case, assuming that the body belonged to Yang and sent a message to authorities in the Guizhou Province to ask if a woman was missing in the area under the same name. However, the police in Guizhou Province responded that there were no women in the province named Liumei Yang despite everyone who had associated with Yang only knowing her by this name.
Soon, detectives were alerted that the manager had not been truthful since he had been in Yang's home after her sister resigned from being a waitress in 1986. Additionally, it was discovered that Yang refused to be a waitress and instead wanted to enter the medicinal herb industry, which the manager aided her with alongside managing his hotel. The manager was not questioned about this for a few months, though after his questioning, he was ruled out as a suspect and gave police Yang's address. Authorities then traveled to the Luping village in Guizhou Province in October to investigate Yang's home.
During the investigation, detectives were informed that Liumei Yang was not the woman's real name and that it was instead Xiaorong Shi. She had been 18 years old at the time of her disappearance, and detectives were able to obtain samples of her hair. Additionally, they were informed Shi had the same blood type as the decedent, cementing their belief that the woman was Shi. Everyone associated with Shi was ruled out as a suspect, and authorities were left stumped on what could have happened to the woman.
Misidentification[]
After reaching a dead end while investigating Shi's family and friends, authorities began to investigate butchers and surgeons in the area, observing that her dismemberment had been done professionally. This eventually led them to a 39-year-old butcher named Xingshan Teng. Teng was noted to have been born in Malan village, near where the body was discovered and had been previously enlisted in the Chinese army before becoming a butcher. He was quickly labeled a suspect and publicly described as only having a primary school education, an alcoholic, rude, spiteful towards his mother-in-law, and physically abusing his wife under his mother's orders. In addition to the assertion that Teng had gone to the hotel Shi had been at to make arrangements with the women and brought her home, these details were unsubstantiated but presented as fact.
On 6 December, Teng was detained and questioned about his involvement in the case. He admitted to bringing a woman to his home, though he would detail that she had been a foreigner and didn't know her name. He would respond with uncertainty to further questions until he was asked if he had visited the hotel where Shi worked, confirming he had. He was then shown a photo of Shi and asked if she was the foreigner he had brought home, which he confirmed again. After being told that she was dead and started being questioned about her murder, Teng recanted his confession and insisted that he was innocent. Authorities then locked Teng in the interrogation room for several days while beating him and refusing to allow him to sleep until he finally confessed.
According to Teng, he and Shi had an "ambiguous" relationship. While meeting up with her for sexual favors in April, he began to suspect Shi had stolen the yuan he kept under his pillow and chased her out of his home. He then put her on hold while she screamed before strangling her. He then proceeded to retrieve his butcher tools, dismember her, and dump her remains into the Malanzhou River. After giving this confession, he was taken back to his ex-wife and children, where he whispered that he was being wrongly accused and would not allow the government to do this. His picture was taken, and he was ordered to hand over the murder weapon, which he said was an axe at his brother's home.
While Teng awaited trial, authorities attempted to conclusively identify the decedent as Shi, though it lacked the proper materials due to DNA technology being in its infancy. Detectives opted to have the body undergo a skull reconstruction process and cranial image overlaps to identify the woman as Shi. On 23 January 1988, authorities revealed that the skull reconstruction matched despite some inconsistencies and formally identified the body as belonging to Shi after receiving confirmation from her family. Additionally, Teng's axe was not tested for blood, but a single hair was found on it and determined to belong to someone with Shi's blood type. The woman's wounds were ruled to match the type of incisions made by the axe.
Before his trial, the judge and prosecutor visited Teng, who professed his innocence but was told to repent and seek mercy. He was also told that he would receive a lawyer but discovered that his lawyer was state-appointed, leading him to claim they all conspired against him. Reportedly, the lawyer did not attempt to argue for Teng's innocence and was sentenced to death. He would continue to insist he was innocent, though no one believed him except for his ex-wife, who would claim that the statements that he committed domestic abuse, among other claims, were false. It was true that Teng was ordered to beat his wife, but not by his biological mother. Instead, he was ordered by his mother-in-law to lock himself and his ex-wife in their bedroom and strike parts of their bed to make it appear like he was beating her. Teng had filed for divorce to relieve the pressure his ex-wife's mother put on them both but continued secretly communicating with occasional visits.
Following his trial, Teng filed an appeal, allowing his ex-wife to use this time to try and convince others of his innocence. She found that a member of Teng's family was a lawyer and attempted to hire him, though he simply dismissed him as a killer and wished not to be associated with him. After the ex-wife started crying in front of him, though, the family member said that he would at least try his best out of pity. However, after months of investigation, he could not find evidence to acquit Teng save for faults in the evidence against him. Additionally, he found evidence that the path leading to the crime scene had been flooded despite Teng's confession that he had chased her on foot. The family member organized a public survey with many citizens attesting to his respectable character. He then sent this to the court to give Teng a retrial and remove the death sentence.
On 19 January 1989, the death sentence was held, with Teng notably screaming that he was innocent. Per Chinese law, the case was handed to a higher court for approval of the death sentence, which was approved. Teng was then executed on 28 January by a gunshot to the head and buried on a mountain far away from the ancestral cemetery where his family would lay to rest. The deaths of his parents coincidentally followed soon after.
In 1992, a letter that was reportedly written by her requesting to come home arrived at Shi's home. One of her sisters asked her husband to investigate the mailing address in Shandong Province to see if it genuinely was Shi. Shocked, the husband found Shi alive and well at the address. According to her testimony, she had been abducted by human traffickers in 1987 and sold in an arranged marriage to a farmer named Jieyou Zhao, in which Shi had two children with him and his wife. Shi reportedly did not return with her sister's husband to Guizhou Province to report on her status. However, she would later come home in 1994 only to become horrified that an innocent man was executed for her "murder". Shi began a new life in her village, though due to village policing at the time, authorities were unaware that Shi was alive for some time. Shi was fully informed of the situation after the hotel manager explained it to her and was left shocked, as she had never known Teng nor had any sexual relationship with him. She proceeded to beg the courts to acquit Teng and grant him a retrial, though despite her being the "murder victim" who was alive and well, she was ignored. Shi and her husband would later receive ID cards and be arrested for drug trafficking, with them even granted a trial, though Teng still never received a retrial. In 2004, Teng's two children, a son and a daughter, were now adults and sued the courts after experiencing years of torment for being the children of a "murderer" and even being fired from their jobs by association. They would claim that due to the grief brought by Teng's unjust execution, their family suffered from an illness that would take their grandparents' lives. Once the trial went forward, the Hunan Province Court finally granted a retrial for Teng's case and ordered DNA tests to be conducted on Shi to confirm her identity. In 2005, Teng was posthumously acquitted of the murder after nearly two decades of being labeled a killer.
His surviving family was awarded over 600,000 yuan in compensation, while many of the detectives in his case were reprimanded. Reportedly, no further punishment occurred for the detectives.
Characteristics[]
- Type A blood.