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Web addiction leads to grisly murder mystery in Sichuan

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On the morning of October 24, Mr. Zhu stepped through the doors of his grandfather’s high-rise apartment in Neijiang, Sichuan, China and into a scene from his nightmares. His 93-year-old grandfather lay still in the bed, his face white as a sheet, his upper body covered in blood. A quick check confirmed the obvious: the elder Mr. Zhu was dead.

Who would kill a 93-year-old?

According to Sina Games, when Neijiang detectives first visited the scene on October 24, they were baffled. Why would someone kill a 93-year-old man? His family was equally baffled. Aside from occasional trips outside to sell knick-knacks, the nonagenarian didn’t get out much, and the family wasn’t aware of any enemies or grudges their grandfather might have had. The only hint at the crime’s motive apparent on the scene: a wicker basket belonging to the elderly victim had disappeared from his apartment. Police also found a single cigarette butt on the apartment’s terrace.

Neijiang, Sichuan, China

Neijiang, Sichuan, China

The initial inspection of the crime scene showed that the attack bore a striking resemblance to a string of robberies that had plagued Neijiang over the month of October. The victim lived on the top floor of his building and the suspect had apparently entered from the roof via the window at night, which matched the MO in the previous robberies. But when police captured the perpetrator of the earlier crimes, it became apparent that he couldn’t have committed the murder. The Neijiang forensics lab also determined that the DNA collected from the discarded cigarette at the murder scene did not match the DNA of the suspect in the other robbery cases.

So, police were back to square one. Detectives returned to the crime scene to conduct further investigation and found that in the terrace’s vegetable garden, a thin dirt outline revealed by the rain suggested an rectangular object – probably a brick – that was once there had been recently displaced. Given that the Neijiang medical examiner had ruled the elder Zhu’s death a homicide caused by blunt force trauma to the head with a rectangular object causing skull and brain damage, detectives suspected that the missing brick might be the murder weapon.

Unfortunately, they had no idea where the killer might have put it after the crime.

A stone-carved confession

Three days after Zhu’s October 23 murder, detectives returned to the scene again, hoping to recover the brick or find some other clue that could point them in the right direction. They succeeded. In faint scratches on the stone of the apartment’s terrace, they found the following message. (Note: in the below image the difficult-to-see writing is highlighted in red):

zyl-message-murder-highlight

The message contains an apparent mistake (the author used an incorrect homophone character) and the final character is only partially visible, but the message is still easy to decipher: “ZYL, please forgive me.”

Detectives guessed that given the context of the message and given that the victim’s surname was “Zhu,” the letters “ZYL” were probably initials. A quick check revealed that indeed Zhu had a great-granddaughter with the initials ZYL.

Zhu’s great-granddaughter was never a serious suspect herself given that she was just 14 years old. But her initials appearing at the crime scene suggested that the perpetrator had a connection to her, and a little additional legwork determined that Zhu had previously brought classmates to visit her grandfather’s home.

Among those classmates, a 17-year-old boy surnamed Li caught the detectives’ attention, mostly because all of the other classmates that had visited her grandfather seemed unlikely suspects. Li also fit with a story police heard from one of the elder Zhu’s neighbors, who said she had seen a young man hanging around the area prior to the crime.

Police picked up Li for questioning on October 28 at a local internet cafe, and he quickly confessed to the murders.

How a boy became a killer

Li told police that he had just returned to Neijiang after working elsewhere, but he didn’t want to go home. What he wanted to do was play online games. Although he continually visited internet cafes, in the weeks before the murder Li had so little money that he could not afford a place to sleep. Remembering his visit to Mr. Zhu’s home with his classmate, Li began to access the terrace of Zhu’s apartment, spending his nights sleeping on the floor there. The elder Zhu caught him once and chased him away, but nothing further came of it.

Eventually, though, Li needed money to keep playing, and the idea of committing a robbery entered his mind. Being familiar with the elder Zhu’s apartment at this point, it was his first stop. But when Li reached the apartment, his humiliation at being driven out by the elder Zhu began to gnaw at him, and he thought about revenge. By his own telling, he hemmed and hawed at some length, picking up the brick and entering Zhu’s room repeatedly but not being able to go through with the attack. Finally, after several failed attempts, Li stepped out onto the terrace, smoked a single cigarette, and picked up the brick again. He stepped back into the room, smashed Zhu three times in the head with the brick, and then left the apartment with RMB 160 (US$26) in cash and Zhu’s wicker basket. He threw the bloodied brick off of the building’s roof.

A subsequent search of the surrounding area turned up Li’s discarded brick, confirming the veracity of his tale.

As crazy as this story seems, Li’s crime isn’t as uncommon as you’d think. Gaming and web addiction is a serious problem in China, and this is far from the first time that a gaming addict has been driven to robbery and murder in an attempt to fund his gaming habits.

See: Nightmares uncovered after girl dies at Chinese web addiction rehab school

(Source: Sina Games)

This post Web addiction leads to grisly murder mystery in Sichuan appeared first on Tech in Asia.


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