Mr. Yang Xinhai was as wicked, if not more wicked, than any serial killer that has ever plagued the
towns, cities and villages of the USA. He was certainly worse than anyone who’s left blood
splatters and body parts within the pleasant green borders of the UK - the home of Jack the Ripper.
So, why, you might be thinking, is Yang Xinhai, aka the Monster Killer, completely unknown to you?
The short answer is he was so incredibly barbaric and so infinitely cruel that he
became an embarrassment to China. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the Chinese true crime series
about him. Yang is yet to hit Netflix, but for us, he certainly deserves a place on the
list of the worst of the worst of the world. The Chinese Communist Party had never seen
anything quite like him. They were shocked such a specimen of a human could exist in their country,
and when they heard his troubling excuse as to why he did what he did, they relegated him to
the dustbin of Communist history. He was a big black mark on society, a mostly peaceful society
where violent crime is concerned. Yang himself would one day have a lot to say about society.
So, here at the Infographics Show, we’re bringing him back. We think his excuse for
becoming a prolific serial killer is fascinating, so first, let’s have a look at what, in general,
makes a person become a serial killer. While only about 1% or less of the general
population is considered to be full-blown psychopaths, and maybe one-quarter of people
exhibit various psychopathic traits such as narcissism, impulsivity, lack of empathy,
and superficial charm, many serial killers are psychopaths. A study at Columbia University
found that 86.5% of serial killers on record met the criteria for psychopathy,
which means ticking the right boxes on something called the Hare Psychopathy Checklist.
The same study said that 87.5% of serial killers met the criteria for sadistic
personality disorder. They actually enjoy seeing people suffer at their own hands,
as Yang certainly did. Killing was sport to him. Unlike some serial killers,
he wasn’t interested in the aftermath. He didn’t want to stay near the bodies,
or take parts of them home with him. He was driven by the violence and the fear of his victims,
some of whom he didn’t kill immediately. He was a sadist. At least, that’s what we can gather
from the little information the Chinese police have made public about his crimes.
But psychopaths, in general, don’t kill people. You all likely know or have met
a psychopath. You might have dated one or worked with one, and despite their flaws,
they probably aren’t going out at night and tearing strangers to pieces. There’s more to
serial killers than psychopathy, a lot more. It’s hard to predict who will become a serial
killer. They’re not easy to pin down. Otherwise, we’d have minority reports on certain kids,
and they’d never become killers. Even so, researchers in the US have found many
serial killers share certain childhood traits, such as chronic bedwetting or setting fires,
and a big one, seeming to enjoy hurting animals, but this might just be a consequence of childhood
neglect. Neglected kids don’t usually start killing, but we can say that the majority of
serial killers faced trauma in childhood. Something else usually happens, perhaps a
serious head injury that affects their faculty of reasoning, or maybe they learn to associate
violence with sex, and in many cases, the kids witness or experience extreme violence and later
normalize it. There aren’t many serial killers in the world because so many things have to
go wrong for one to develop and begin killing. It’s thought right now, in the US, there might
be 25 to 50 serial killers, and the majority of them would have had abnormal childhoods.
With this in mind, let’s look at the childhood of today’s killer. Are there any clues in his
childhood that might help us understand why he became such an incredibly cruel adult?
Yang was born on July 17, 1968, which wasn’t a great time for the rural poor in China.
This was the time of leader Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (May 16, 1966 – October 6, 1976). Prior
to this (1958 – 1962), Mao had failed in his campaign to make China Great Again in what was
known as the Great Leap Forward. Up to 50 million died, mostly from starvation, disease, or being
worked to death, and according to the historian Frank Dikötter, at least 2.5 million people were
beaten or tortured to death. In Dikötter’s book, The Great Leap Forward, he cites the Chinese
historical archives, describing unbelievable horrors, such as people selling their kid for
a bowl of rice or, in one case, a parent being told by local officials (cadres) to bury his child
alive because the starving kid stole some grain. Such horrors were widespread. Imagine growing up
in that environment, which wasn’t very long ago. In the Cultural Revolution, when much of China got
behind Mao to weed out the counter-revolutionaries and so-called bourgeois elements of society,
teachers were sometimes dragged out of their classrooms by students and beaten to death.
Neighbors snitched on neighbors; property was violently confiscated, and the intellectual class
was often publicly humiliated and sent to the countryside in their millions. Persecution was
pervasive; violence and fear were everywhere you looked. This all happened when little
Yang was learning how the world worked. The investigative historian and writer of
numerous books on serial killers, Peter Vronsky, states that in Europe and the US, there was a boom
of serial killers in the 20th century, with those killers being the children who grew up around WWI
and WWII. Vronsky has stated that there might be a connection between widespread economic
hardship and kids who become killers. He’s said there might be another serial killer surge when
the children of the 2008 economic crisis get older. Maybe the pandemic and the Ukraine war,
with all the hardship they’ve caused, could bring about another golden age of serial killers…If they
can get past the omnipresent CCTV, that is. It’s interesting that in the early 1990s
and early 2000s, China experienced a serial killer boom. The killers, or most of them,
had grown up in the age of Mao. This included a man who murdered 25 students he’d lured from
gaming arcades in Henan. Then there was the man known as China’s Jack the Ripper, Gao Chengyong,
a devoted family man and greengrocer who viciously mutilated 11 women in Gansu Province from 1988 to
2002. And let’s not forget Cheng Peng, who, from 1988 to 1995, killed six people and fed some of
them to his beloved dogs. If you look at the full list of Chinese serial killers during this boom,
many were born and grew up during those dark days under Chairman Mao’s rule.
Little Yang certainly experienced economic and social devastation in his town in Zhengyang
County, Henan. His desperately poor parents would have known famine very well. There’s a
good chance they saw people fight over the flesh of dead animals or eat tree bark or
boiled leather. They were brutally poor in what was an extremely poor part of China.
Henan Province was one of the worst places to be during the famine. Over a million people – one in
eight – died from starvation or cadre brutality. There are reports of people being beaten to death
for trying to leave their village. In the city of Xinyang, which was close to where Yang grew up,
almost entire villages starved to death. You could walk into a village, and there’d be no one around
at all. The trees were all stripped of bark. Even the dogs had been eaten. Talk about eerie.
According to a witness who spoke to the writer Yang Jisheng,
bodies were scattered on the roads out of Xinyang, many of them with chunks of flesh
removed for human consumption. His famous book on the matter, Tombstone, talks about a girl.
Both her parents died, and she then killed her brother and ate him. The book is banned in China.
Such barbarity is not often discussed in public. We don’t know what horrors Yang saw as a child,
but he couldn’t have escaped the brutal impact of those times completely. Judging by what he’d
later say, we are confident he didn’t. He did at least grow up after the famine of the Great
Leap Forward, but since his town was at the epicenter of this Chinese disaster, he no
doubt knew what hunger and cruelty felt like. He had very little trust or faith in society.
Yang was the youngest of four children, living in what the press called a dilapidated house. He was
smart but was said to be very introverted. He didn’t have many friends, and despite
his relatively high IQ, he had little interest in studying. At age 17, 1985, he took one look around
his impoverished village and told his parents he was leaving. There was as yet nothing to suggest
this boy would become unimaginably cruel. His father just said he was angry, and he left,
never to return back to his home village. It didn’t take him long to fall foul of the
law. Little is known about his life back then, perhaps due to the Chinese government wanting
to keep his case quiet, but we do know that he would drift from town to town looking for
work. He was arrested in 1988 and 1991, both times for theft, which led to stints in labor
camps. It seems he had a girlfriend around this time, but she didn’t wait for him to get out of
the labor camp. The angry young man got angrier. It’s also worth pointing out that another trait
of psychopathy is getting involved in pretty crime at a young age. Almost all serial killer
psychopaths, such as Ted Bundy, can’t resist stealing or engaging in other small crimes.
Yang graduated to murder in 2000. Again, it’s unclear where he started since Chinese police seem
to have put a gagging order on his crimes. Often reports of murder were left out of the Chinese
daily newspapers, and Chinese citizens only found out about them online on internet forums. It was
the same in Communist Russia. The government would often cover up cases of serial murder
since the Communists liked to say such depraved behavior only happened in the decadent West.
What we do know is that Yang would often get around by bicycle, traveling from town to town
in the provinces of Anhui, Hebei, Henan, and Shandong. He would ride to a village and scope
it out, carefully picking his prey. These were usually families who lived in isolated houses
at the edges of the village. When Yang had secured the information he wanted,
he’d ride to their house in the middle of the night, so he could catch them sleeping.
His murder weapon of choice was usually a knife, a hammer, an axe, or even a shovel,
and he never used the same murder weapon twice. Yang would enter the house and immediately go to
the bedrooms, bludgeoning, stabbing and slicing the men and the older boys first. He’d leave
the girls and women until last, and no matter how much they pleaded for mercy, he’d kill every last
person or, at least, would try to. If anyone ever survived, they looked like they’d been
in a fight with an angry pterodactyl. Yang was what criminal profilers call
“forensically aware,” meaning he knew how to evade detection. He’d bury the murder weapon
or throw it in a river, as well as burn the clothes he was wearing when he committed the
crime. He also changed shoe size to make cops believe several killers were at work.
Sometimes he’d plod around in shoes way too big for him, knowing that cops often look for
footprints. Yang must have known something about serial killing. After he was caught, some media
reported that he had a notepad where he’d write down his ideas for movies about serial killers.
Details of each murder are scant, but some of the ghastly crimes did become public knowledge.
In October 2002, he sneaked into a house, killed the husband first, then the daughter,
and lastly, he tried to kill the pregnant wife, though she miraculously survived her
injuries. His weapon, this time, was a shovel. On December 6 that year, a grandfather named Liu
Zhongyuan arrived at his house in the village of Liuzhuang in Henan to find his son and daughter
and their two children dead. He said his wife was alive, her eyelids noticeably moving, but she died
ten days later in hospital. The grandfather, who’d stayed at their new house that night,
told the press, “We planned to move to the new house on December 9. Who can imagine that they
experienced such tragedy only three days before?” Yang had used a hammer, which he’d buried,
and he’d thrown his bloody clothes in a river. Regarding modus operandi, Yang’s murders weren’t
difficult to connect, even though the police never let the public know there was a serial
killer on the loose. The first time Yang killed is thought to have been September 19, 2000,
when he slaughtered two family members. Less than two weeks later, he slaughtered three
members of a family. Each time, he sneaked into their house at night and slaughtered them as
they slept. His crimes were similar to those of the USA’s Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker,
but Yang offered no devil excuses, and he’d rack-up a much longer list of victims.
Yang kept on killing, murdering just seven people in 2001 but in 2002, he murdered 33 people, each
time attacking afamily or a couple. In Zhumadian in Henan, he murdered five people in one house,
the highest number he’d kill in one night’s work. He murdered four people at once a few times,
and on August 8, 2003, he killed another 5-person family in a village outside of the city of
Shijiazhuang, Hebei province. What China had on its hands wasn’t dissimilar to the axe murders
in the US back at the start of the 20th century. The Chinese police wouldn’t ever fully explain
what Yang had done in those houses, but they did talk about extreme cruelty and bloodbaths.
Three months after his massacre of five in Shijiazhuang, Yang was in the city
of Cangzhou in the same province when police picked him up at what the media described as
an entertainment venue. Some media stated it was a nightclub. Reports say he acted suspiciously,
so police asked him to go with them to the station. Again, details are scarce, but
it’s likely they recognised his face because they soon took a DNA sample from him. The game was up.
Yang might have been forensically aware, but it’s not as if he’d committed those murders
with a Hazmat suit on. The cops soon connected him to crimes in four provinces. He subsequently
confessed. All added up, his reign of terror in just three years had led to the violent deaths
of 67 people, with ten people very seriously injured. His crimes also included very serious
sexual misconduct, something we cannot describe here. Had he not been caught when he was, he might
well have gone on to kill over 100. If you look at his crimes and what he had to say about them,
it seems he was just getting started. Soon the Chinese media was aflame,
with some Chinese news reports stating that Yang was even worse than killers in the USA.
Some Chinese citizens vented their concern about how the Ministry of Public Security had kept his
crimes under wraps. In China, everyone is familiar with the term “weichi wending,” which translates
as “maintaining public stability.” Things must never look like they are getting out of hand,
so the cops don’t always tell the media what’s been going down regarding crime. Still,
had people known a madman was in their midst, they might well have put better locks on their doors.
Now we’ll ask the question we asked at the start. Why would a man do such things? Yang
always tried to make sure everyone was dead. His barbarity was about as bad as it gets in
the world of serial killers. The crime scenes he left were absolutely devastating. Young or old,
he attacked them like a monster. His answer to that, at first, was that
he was upset that his girlfriend had broken up with him when he was first sent to the labor camp.
To most Chinese citizens, this seemed stupid and not the least bit sincere. There had to be more.
His second answer made more sense. He said: “When I killed people, I had a desire to kill
more. This inspired me to kill more. I don't care whether they deserve to
live or not. It is none of my concern.” These were the words of a psychopath.
He had zero empathy. Many serial killers who’ve been caught also discuss killing as an addiction,
one that usually spirals so much out of control that they get sloppy and get caught.
Yang’s childhood may also have played a part in his crimes. He also explained:
“I have no desire to be part of society. Society is not my concern.” In another interview,
he said, “Killing people is very usual, nothing special.” Where did he learn that
killing was “usual”? Maybe when death was a common occurrence, back in the days of Mao.
It’s also interesting what a policeman told the Jiangnan Times about Yang.
The cop said Yang was never interested in getting money from his victims. He added,
“He committed crimes to merely hurt society.” We should also mention that despite many Chinese
citizens living through hell in the recent past, the country has a very low crime rate on the
whole, including a very low violent crime rate. China only has a murder rate of about 0.50 per
100,000, compared to the USA’s 7.8 per 100,000. China is a relatively safe and friendly nation.
It feels safe when you visit, but no country in this world, it seems, is 100% serial killer proof.
On February 14, 2004, the 35-year-old Yang, then already known as China’s worst-ever serial killer,
breathed his last breath and was put to death by a firing squad.
Now we think you need to hear about Germany’s serial killer boom back when its population
was feeling the brunt of hard times, “WW2 Serial Killer Even the Nazis Wanted
Dead - Dr. Satan” or this one, “Serial Killer Who Sold His Victims as Hot Dogs.”