The case of a murder which occurred in Nanjing in 2003 is finally at an end, with the recent confirmation of the victim’s identity. While police knew who had committed the killing, they were not until now able to say just who he had killed.
On Tuesday of this week, 22 February, the Nanjing Public Security Bureau brought to an official end the case which began on 25 October, 2003, when they were alerted that a female body had been found in an empty room Nanjing’s Yuhuatai District.
Initial investigations quickly revealed that they were dealing with a homicide case.
The task force assigned was able to gather much suspicious evidence at the scene, but nothing that would identify neither the murderer nor the victim.
Subsequently failing a breakthrough, the case was at an impasse. And it was to stay that way for a long time, reports The Paper.
“Limited by the investigative conditions of the time, the case was never going to be solved quickly”, said Ji Shengzhi (纪圣智), who is now Party Secretary for the Gaochun District branch of the Nanjing Public Security Bureau.
Ji continued, “However, thanks to careful and standardised, rigorous material-evidence preservation, a strong guarantee for solving the case in the years to come was provided”.
In their attempts to do so, police have over the past decade travelled to Huai’an, Lianyungang and Suqian in Jiangsu Province, as well as Lai’an and Mingguang, and other places, in neighbouring Anhui Province.
With an additional focus on identifying the victim, officers turned to CCTV’s missing person initiative, “Wait for Me” (等着我). Therefrom, they performed a one-by-one screening of the data on more than 40,000 missing persons. But still no luck.
Finally though, 2021 ushered in a major breakthrough, when a man surnamed Fan was suspected of committing a major crime. Fan was brought in for questioning on 15 September of that year, whereupon he explained the facts of the killing. According to his account, he had met the deceased the day before the crime, but did not know her identity.
Subsequent notices offering a reward for the victim’s name also failed to turn up anything, reports ChinaNews.com.
But then on 24 January of this year, computers assisted in restoring a facial portrait of the victim, which was then posted online. It received more than 16 million views in just a few days.
Finally, the police received a call from someone in Henan Province, who said that the woman in the portrait was very similar to his sister, surnamed Wang, who disappeared in Nanjing in 2003. Police drove immediately for 9 hours to Guangshan County in Henan to carry out a comparison. As Chinese New Year approached on 31 January, Nanjing’s finest finally confirmed that the victim was indeed Wang.
Following this, and the earlier confession by the killer, Fan’s criminal processing continues.
