The three miners befriended a lonely, luckless man and offered him work down an iron mine in eastern China. After working together for 10 days, the three pushed a 100kg boulder down a steep tunnel, crushing the man to death. They reported it as an accident.
Days later, three men and a woman turned up at the mine, saying they were the dead man’s relatives and demanding compensation. The mine owner offered them €100,000 if they agreed not to report the death to officials.
Prosecutors and the police now say that this death, in Shandong province in 2014, was one of many in which a sophisticated network of con artists dispatched isolated, hard-up men, some mentally impaired, and dressed up their deaths as accidents to swindle compensation from mine owners.
The investigation led the police to Shisun Village in southwestern China, where mine murders for cash appear to have become a cottage industry. Of the 74 suspects indicted in late May in 17 killings, up to 40 were from Shisun Village, prosecutors said. The police said they were still investigating reports of another 35 possible victims.
But Shisun is not the only place where such cases have cropped up. A search of court judgments online and news reports of court verdicts turns up dozens of instances across China of gangs killing homeless people and workers in dark, isolated chambers far underground, and using the deaths to defraud mine owners. There have been at least 34 such cases over the past two decades, Caijing Magazine, a prominent business weekly, estimated in June.
The allegations have prompted anguished debate across China about the social and legal failings that led people to make a living by murdering vulnerable strangers, and fanned speculation about whether the crimes were inspired by a bleak cult movie with a similar plot.
Shisun is a hardscrabble, hollowed-out farming village of 5,000 people nestled in the corn-and-bamboo-covered hills of Yunnan province. Many villagers work in factories and on building sites in distant provinces, leaving farming and childcare to aging parents and grandparents.
Dapper suits
Those who stay behind often live in crumbling homes of mud and wood. But on the main street, rows of three-story concrete houses suggest budding prosperity. Wang Fuxiang owns one of those houses, as well as a restaurant in a nearby city. With his dapper suits and loud, casual wear, the kind seen more often on suburban golfers than on dirt farmers, Wang (39) appeared to be among the lucky few who had escaped the hard life.
But it did not go unnoticed that Wang and several other villagers would abruptly disappear for days, weeks or months, and return flush with cash, which they often squandered on gambling binges, neighbours recalled. Some thought the men might be selling drugs.
“He never told me what he did,” said Wang’s daughter, Hu Yun (17). Nor, apparently, did she try to pin him down on the question. About two years ago, she started to sense that something was amiss. “I began to get the feeling that there was something not right about the way he’d been making money,” she said recently in an interview at her home.
A middle-aged farmer who lived nearby was blunter. Asking that his name not be used for fear of recriminations, he wrote a letter in case he was ever asked about the cases, which said, “There are eight homes in this little village that have been built from human blood.”
The mystery began to unravel two years ago, when the Yunnan police received an anonymous message saying that the man killed in the Shandong iron mine had been working under another man's identity. (The victim's real identity, if it has been determined, has not been announced.) Another mine killing late that year in Inner Mongolia, a region of northern China, also left clues pointing to Shisun Village and nearby areas.
Detectives descended on Shisun and began questioning villagers. What they found were organised gangs devoted to serial killing for cash. Some participants recruited and killed the victims, having won their co-operation by promising good wages, friendship, even marriage. Others posed as the grieving family members who turned up at the mine to demand compensation, police have said.
The gangs disguised the identities of their victims, using stolen or bought identity papers that they persuaded or tricked victims into using, ensuring that their real families would not learn of their fate. Most victims were quickly cremated by their fake families, making identification even harder and erasing clues about their deaths.
Handsome payouts
Discovery is further complicated because the families of marginalised drifters are unlikely to file a missing-person report. Even if they did, they would be unlikely to know when the men had last been seen alive or where, and when simply being out of touch had turned into their being missing or dead.
The other side of the equation that kept the business humming is the mine owners, who paid handsome sums to the impostor families in order to keep the deaths quiet. If a fatal accident were reported, the owners feared, safety regulators would shut down the mine for months while they investigated, several mine owners told police after the killings came to light.
If these killings sound like the plot of a thriller, that may be no coincidence. A similar case inspired the 2003 film Blind Shaft, a Chinese drama about two men who kill fellow miners for their compensation. In what seems to be an endless loop of life imitating art imitating life, some officials have said that the movie became an instruction manual for the recent killings.
"Some viewers saw the film Blind Shaft and found a way to get rich," the township government that oversees Shisun Village said in a notice posted outside the village committee office. "The culprits showed no compassion at all for life, and in particular kin and friends who were mentally impaired became assets used to make money."
The movie's director, Li Yang, dismissed as "ridiculous" the idea that suspects in isolated corners of the countryside had seen his film. Because of its grim plot, Chinese authorities banned the film before it was released, and it has rarely been seen except by urban film enthusiasts. Even Li had difficulty tracking down bootleg DVDs of it, he said.
Still, many people have heard of the movie, and when the cases started coming to light, they were immediately described as "Blind Shaft killings". Similar cases first entered China's national consciousness in the late 1990s, when a gang with dozens of members was convicted of killing 28 migrant workers in Shanxi province. Those killings inspired the movie, Li said.
Since then, the Blind Shaft scheme has been firmly implanted in the national psyche of a country peppered with thousands of notoriously dangerous mines. Most likely, the Shisun gang heard of it by word of mouth. According to available court records, the pace of such killings appears to have picked up in recent years, possibly because compensation payments have grown.
Similar crimes
As China’s regulators have clamped down on mine safety, driving down the number of accidents, the stricter regulation has perversely encouraged some mine operators to hide fatalities and pay off victims’ families, increasing the incentive to carry out the crimes.
In 2011, nine men from Leibo County in Sichuan province were convicted of similar crimes, and police said gangs from there had committed at least 20 murders in mines. In 2014, 21 defendants were convicted in Handan, northern China, of killing four migrant workers in faked mine accidents. Last year, 10 men were convicted in the Ningxia region of killing five people in the same way.
The recent killings have veered from the movie version in at least one conspicuous way. In the movie, the killers extorted 30,000 renminbi, or about €4,000 today’s rates, in hush money for one death. The Shisun Village gangs extracted payments of €65,000 to €110,000 from mine bosses, according to news reports.
If he were to remake the film today, Li said in a telephone interview, “it wouldn’t have anything different, except the amounts of money scammed would be larger and the perpetrators would be gangs”.
The charges against the Shisun suspects include homicide, faking accidents, swindling compensation, fraud and hiding crimes, though police have not said publicly who is being charged with what. Long prison terms, and death sentences for the ringleaders, are likely, if similar cases are a guide. Chinese courts almost invariably convict, and the suspects have not been allowed to publicly answer the charges.
Wang was arrested early last year. His daughter, Hu, now acknowledges that he may have innocent blood on his hands. “I think he did do something, but I don’t blame him,” she said. “He was doing it so that we could live a better life.”
New York Times
