The Red Era: Living in Seclusion in a Siheyuan as a Boss

Chapter 677 "The Eight Tigers of Criminal Investigation"!!!
Liu Yong's trip to Shanghai included a special visit to his mentor, Gu Shen, and he returned with a wealth of knowledge and insights.

As always, Teacher Gu showed him great care and concern, not only sharing his valuable experience from decades of police work, but also personally introducing him to two other legendary figures among the "803 Three Musketeers," as well as several top criminal investigation experts known as the "Eight Tigers of Shanghai Criminal Investigation."

Liu Yong felt refreshed and inspired during his in-depth exchanges with these industry leaders, and countless sparks of inspiration ignited during the intellectual exchanges.

The real-world cases and crime-solving insights shared by these senior investigators in Shanghai gave Liu Yong a deeper understanding of criminal investigation work.

If his holiday hadn't been coming to an end, he would have loved to stay in Shanghai a few more days to continue learning from these seniors.

As he parted ways with his teachers and colleagues, Liu Yong was reluctant to leave and secretly vowed to apply what he had learned on this trip to his future crime-solving work.

Among the elite "803" of the Shanghai Public Security System, the "Three Musketeers" and the "Eight Tigers of Criminal Investigation" each have their own strengths and show their unique style.

Teacher Gu Shen is known for his superb interrogation skills, and he can always capture key information from the subtle changes in the suspect's facial expressions;

Chief Captain Zhang Shenghua is skilled in crime scene investigation and can often find key clues to solve cases from a single hair or fingerprint at the crime scene.
Jiang Xin, one of the "Eight Tigers," is a renowned forensic artist who can accurately reconstruct the appearance of suspects based solely on vague descriptions from eyewitnesses, thus opening a breakthrough in the investigation.

On the eve of his departure, Liu Yong, the head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Yanjing Municipal Public Security Bureau, developed a strong interest in Jiang Xin, a rising young portrait expert.

After in-depth discussions, Liu Yong sincerely invited Jiang Xin to visit the Criminal Investigation Department of the Yanjing Municipal Public Security Bureau for professional exchanges and to provide professional training for the department's portrait sketching expert team.

Faced with this warm invitation from the capital's criminal investigation department, Jiang Xin gladly accepted this rare opportunity for exchange after reporting in detail to her superiors.

Thus, during Liu Yong's trip back to Beijing, he unexpectedly gained a fellow traveler who was a highly skilled portrait artist.

On their return journey, Liu Yong and Jiang Xin chose to take the train along the Beijing-Shanghai line.

During this long journey, the two had a long talk, and the topic always revolved around the key role of forensic portrait technology in criminal investigation.

Faced with Director Liu's sincere request for advice, Jiang Xin, a senior portrait expert, shared her knowledge without reservation.

He recounted his practical experience in using composite sketches to assist the police in solving numerous major cases.

From capturing key features from subtle eyewitness descriptions to reconstructing the appearance of suspects using professional techniques, each case vividly demonstrates the unique value of this technology in solving cases.

One such case is as follows:
One morning in July six years ago, a young woman wearing a wrinkled dress went to the Huaihai Middle Road Police Station to report that she had been robbed while under the influence of drugs.

"Yesterday afternoon I was dancing at Ke Xiang Dance Hall and met a guy who was a pretty good dancer, so I danced a few songs with him."

The man was of medium height, in his thirties, quite thin, with a parted hairstyle, a slightly hooked nose, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt, gray trousers, and brown leather sandals. His eyes were incredibly captivating; I felt completely mesmerized by him.

"Then he said the atmosphere here was so-so and that he would take me to a nice place to have some fun."

I agreed, and he took me to Huaihai Park on a red motorcycle.

It was already dusk when I arrived. He asked me if I was thirsty and then gave me a can of coconut juice.

After drinking it, I felt dizzy, weak all over, and just wanted to sleep.

After that, I don't know anything anymore, and I slept until this morning.

When I woke up, I found myself lying on a bench in Huaihai Park. All my valuables were gone. The coconut juice the man gave me must have been contaminated.

"Tell me what you lost," said the police officer from Huaihai Middle Road Police Station who was in charge of receiving the report.

"A 'Jinggongshe' watch, a gold ring, a gold bracelet, and a genuine leather handbag containing more than three hundred yuan."

And that guy made my skirt look like dried plums; he definitely took advantage of me. Luckily, it wasn't torn, so at least he has some conscience!

……

This is the eighth similar case of robbery under the influence of anesthesia that the Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau has received in the first half of this year.

The Criminal Investigation Division of the Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau compiled the descriptions of the perpetrators in these eight cases of robbery under the influence of anesthesia, as described by the victims.

We invited Jiang Xin, a forensic artist from the Shanghai-Haikou Railway Public Security Bureau and one of the future "Eight Tigers of Criminal Investigation," to draw a forensic portrait, which was printed into a notice and posted throughout major locations in the city.

Meanwhile, at the behest of the bureau leadership, the municipal bureau produced a special series of programs on Shanghai Oriental TV's "Oriental 110" program focusing on robbery cases involving drugging victims, highlighting the commonalities among the eight cases—

The victims were all women, and the method involved first giving them a drink, then robbing them of their jewelry and money after they fell asleep.

Police are appealing to the public for any suspicious leads related to the case. They also urge everyone, especially women traveling alone, to be cautious and avoid going to parks, cinemas, or other entertainment venues with strangers at night, and to never eat or drink food from strangers.

Finally, a simulated portrait drawn by Jiang Xin was shown for a full 20 seconds.

For the next six months or so, similar robberies involving anesthesia disappeared.

The suspect seemed to have vanished into thin air, leaving no trace, and the citizens of Shanghai gradually returned to their normal lives.

……

Until the evening of April 22, a year later, the Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau's Criminal Investigation Corps, also known as "Criminal Police 803," was involved.

"803" received a report from the Minhang branch: a reservoir reported that human remains were found at the reservoir dock.

Upon receiving the report, Zhang Shenghua, the head of the Criminal Investigation Corps, and Wu Hongta, the deputy head, immediately led the investigation and technical personnel from the First Detachment and the Major Crimes Detachment of the Criminal Investigation Corps, as well as the forensic doctors from the Forensic Medicine Department of the Criminal Science Institute, to the scene at 21 p.m. that night.

The first person to discover the dismembered body was Li, a reservoir employee.

According to Li, in the afternoon, a company imported logs from abroad and made them into rafts that floated down the Huangpu River to the reservoir dock. The logs were to be unloaded at the dock and then loaded onto trucks to be sent to the unloading point designated by the cargo owner.

Li, wearing rubber boots, jumped onto the raft, intending to cut the ropes binding the raft so that his colleagues could hook the logs one by one to the shore.

Before he could even start preparing for his homework, two bulging packages hanging by the side of the raft caught Li's attention.

One was a black and white striped snakeskin bag, and the other was a black leather bag, both emitting a fishy, ​​foul smell.

Out of curiosity, Li opened the two items to examine them, only to find that the snakeskin bag was full of human tissue...

Li was so frightened that he almost fell into the water, and then immediately notified his colleagues to call the police.

After on-site investigation, the investigators concluded that this was not the primary murder scene, nor even the site where the body was disposed of.

The bag containing the body parts must have been thrown into the reservoir from somewhere else, caught on a raft, and then brought to a certain reservoir.

Therefore, the clues obtained were extremely limited, and there was basically no trace or physical evidence.

The forensic autopsy revealed that the dismembered remains belonged to an adult woman who died about two weeks prior. The body was highly decomposed and her appearance was completely unrecognizable. She was approximately 40 years old, and a notable feature was the presence of seven gold teeth in her mouth.

Based on the characteristic of having seven gold teeth, criminal investigators found a missing person in the missing persons information from half a month ago.

Ah Ying, who was 42 years old at the time, was temporarily living in the Ji'an Road area.

The investigators located the dental clinic that had given her the dentures and found Ah Ying's information in the medical records.

After further investigation, it was discovered that she was a former educated youth who had returned to the city after being divorced twice.

After returning to the city from her rural post in Central China in the early 1980s, she had no legitimate source of income.

The public generally had a negative reaction to her, saying that this woman made a living by dancing with men and "exchanging foreign languages" with them.

However, given her looks and income, she certainly couldn't afford to go to those high-end dance halls, so the investigators judged her to be a "sneaky prostitute" who frequented mid- to low-end dance halls.

This gave the investigators a real headache; the social relationships of these "dark nightingales" were enough to make anyone's head spin.

Apart from relatives and friends, most of them are just casual acquaintances, so it's not easy to investigate them thoroughly.

To find out who Ah Ying danced with in the end and who she left the dance hall with, we must visit the mid-to-low-end dance halls that Ah Ying frequented.

Since none of the investigators could dance and never went to dance halls, their initial forays into the area resulted in many comical situations.

Lao Bao, the deputy head of the Criminal Investigation Team 1, who is also one of the "Eight Tigers of Criminal Investigation," said: "We don't dance, and we never go to those kinds of places."

The dance hall was so dimly lit and the people were so disorganized; I felt very uncomfortable and out of place inside.

"I may feel uncomfortable, but the case still needs to be handled."

To this end, "Criminal Police 803" selected several detectives who had a talent and aptitude for dancing, and gave them a period of "intensive training" by teachers from the Shanghai Dance School.

Once the investigators had finally danced to a decent level, they went into the dance halls to conduct their investigations.

Finally, some useful clues were found and several suspects were identified.

The most valuable clue is that someone saw Aying at the Tonglin Dance Hall on the afternoon of April 8th, getting on a red motorcycle with a man nicknamed "Slingshot" and leaving. This time coincides with the forensic doctor's description of Aying's time of death.

The investigation revealed that the person behind the "slingshot" was brought back to the station for questioning, but the results were disappointing.

Because the person who "slingshot" was out of town at the time and had a solid alibi, they had no choice but to rule him out as a suspect.

The remaining four suspects were also cleared of suspicion one after another, and by early May, the case had reached a stalemate.

...A few days later, new developments emerged.

On the evening of May 7, the Xujiahui branch of the Public Security Bureau received a report that a lot of meat scraps had been found in a manhole in an old-style public housing building in Dong'an New Village.

Therefore, Lao Bao, the deputy head of the first detachment of the Criminal Investigation Corps of the Municipal Public Security Bureau, led the investigation and technical personnel of the first detachment to the scene, accompanied by Lao Chen, the deputy director of the Criminal Science Institute.

After arriving at the scene, Lao Chen used his mobile phone to call Lao Wang, the director of the forensic medicine department of the Criminal Science Institute, who was at the scene in Jin County. He asked Lao Wang not to return to his unit after finishing at the scene in Jin County, but to come over immediately.

When I answered the phone, Lao Wang had already finished his on-site investigation in Jin County and was on his way to the city.

As soon as Lao Wang heard that there was a new case in Xujiahui District, he immediately told the driver to change direction and head towards Dong'an New Village.

According to the person who reported the incident, the manhole was a sewer specifically for discharging feces.

For some unknown reason, the iron cover of the manhole cover was "push" up by something that caused the entire Xincun residential area to smell terrible.

The neighborhood committee then reported the incident to the housing management department, requesting that someone come and clean up the mess.

That afternoon, after the sanitation workers lifted the manhole cover, they found a lot of bits of meat floating on top of the feces and sewage inside, and immediately called the police.

Despite the nausea and stench, Lao Wang and his assistants scooped up all the pieces of meat, one by one.

Upon inspection, these pieces of meat, roughly the size of mahjong tiles or ping-pong balls and numbering over two hundred, were found to be human tissue, as the fat layer of the meat was yellow, while the fat layer of other animals is white.

Immediately after seeing the bag, the order was given to continue the search, and as a result, another ear and two more...

At this point, the meat chunk was officially identified as human tissue.

Based on the elasticity of the flesh and the degree of hair development, Lao Wang determined that the deceased was an adult male.

The pieces of flesh were then taken back to the forensic lab for further examination, while Lao Bao led investigators from the Criminal Investigation Team 1 and the Major Crimes Team to conduct a search.

Since the pieces of meat were found in the sewer connected to the public housing unit, the primary crime scene must be inside this building, which actually simplifies the matter.

So, Lao Bao called in the neighborhood committee cadres and the local police officer to investigate the basic information of the residents in this public housing building.

Three households with bad records were identified, including Zhang, who had a prior robbery conviction and lived in a room on the first floor.

Xie, who has a prior conviction for organized human smuggling and lives in a room on the third floor, and Guan Wei, who has a prior conviction for theft and LM and lives in a room on the second floor.

Of course, the other residents should also be investigated, since there are plenty of precedents of first-time murderers dismembering the body.

After checking, all the residents in the building, including Zhang on the first floor and Xie on the third floor, were found to be innocent. Only Guan Wei, who lived on the second floor, could not be ruled out as a suspect.

Guan Wei was 37 years old at the time, single and unemployed. He had been dealt with by the public security authorities multiple times for theft and LM. After his last release from prison, he lived in a suite with his brother and sister-in-law.

At the time, Guan Wei's brother, who was a taxi driver, was still out on duty.

Guan Wei was not home either; his room was locked. Only Guan Wei's sister-in-law and nephew were home.

His sister-in-law stated that she did not have a key to Guan Wei's room, therefore the investigators were temporarily unable to search Guan Wei's room.

However, during the inspection of public areas, a trace amount of substance resembling blood was found on the kitchen sink and was immediately taken out and sent to the forensic institute for testing.

Meanwhile, most of the police force temporarily withdrew, leaving a small group to stake out the building and wait for Guan Wei to return home.

After midnight on May 8, Guan Wei took a taxi home.

As soon as he opened his room door with his key, the neighborhood committee officials sent Guan Wei away on the pretext that the police station was looking for him. Then, the investigators took the opportunity to enter Guan Wei's room and search it.

As a result, investigators found a blood-stained blanket in Guan Wei's dresser and a large amount of washed bloodstains on the sofa.

Additionally, a cutting board was found on the wardrobe, and there were bloodstains on the cutting board as well.

The investigators took samples of the bloodstains one by one and sent them to the criminal investigation institute for testing.

If all of this is human blood, then Guan Wei's room is very likely the primary crime scene in the dismemberment case.

At this moment, Guan Wei's sister-in-law was trembling with fear.

She never imagined that her usually taciturn brother-in-law would do such a beastly thing.

An hour later, the test results from the forensic institute came back: the blood on the cutting board was type AB, and the blood type of the meat found in the manhole was also type AB.

Therefore, Lao Bao ordered a sudden interrogation of Guan Wei.

Guan Wei initially tried to deny everything, saying that the blood on the water bucket was chicken blood, which he left behind when he killed the chicken, and that the blood in the room was also chicken blood, which he left behind after cutting the chicken's throat and the chicken flapping into his room.

Later, faced with irrefutable evidence, Guan Wei's psychological defenses crumbled.

"Guan Wei, you are a prime suspect in the murder case. We already have plenty of evidence. You must honestly confess your crimes and not try to evade responsibility!"

Guan Wei, his face ashen, said in a low voice, "I did kill someone."

The interrogator quickly asked, "When was the murder?"

Guan Wei: "May 4th afternoon."

Where did you commit the crime?

"You all saw it, right here in my house."

"Why kill him?"

"For money."

"What about the people who were killed?"

"It was all broken; the parts that didn't break were thrown into the Huangpu River."

"Who did you commit the crime with?"

"Just me."

Guan Wei confessed that the person he killed was a crew member on an ocean liner named Hua Xin, whom he met while dancing.

He saw that Hua Xin had a lot of money, and since he was short of money at the time, he tricked Hua Xin into coming to his home on the afternoon of May 4th under the pretext of currency trading.

Guan Wei gave Hua Xin coconut juice laced with sleeping pills, and then strangled him with a rope while he was unconscious.

Then, they took the HK$20,000 and US$3000 that Hua Xin was carrying for themselves.

After leaving the body under the bed overnight, on May 5th, taking advantage of the brother being out driving and the sister-in-law taking the nephew out to play, Hua Xin was... flushed down the toilet, while the bones were put into a snakeskin bag and thrown into the Huangpu River by ferry.

The experienced Lao Bao immediately judged that part of Guan Wei's statement was true, while the other part was not.

For example, regarding the disposal of the body, Guan Wei claimed that it was done only once.

However, based on Lao Bao's experience, even if the bones being thrown were unbreakable, one person could never throw them all at once.

Unless he's carrying large bags and pushing a bicycle, but that would obviously make him a conspicuous target.

Therefore, Guan Wei must have accomplices.

So, Lao Bao instructed the interrogator: "This kid must have accomplices, and he must have other cases on his hands. Keep interrogating him!"

Therefore, a new round of interrogation began.

"According to the information we have, besides killing this person, you have other crimes. If you don't confess, you won't get through this."

Guan Wei remained silent for a full ten minutes before finally saying, "Yes."

"have what?"

"He also killed other people."

"Man? Or woman?"

"woman."

"The time, place, and method of murder must be clearly stated without any concealment."

He then confessed that on April 8, he used coconut juice laced with sleeping pills to knock down a middle-aged woman who worked in the sex trade in his house.

Then they strangled her and looted all her gold and silver jewelry.

Guan Wei disposed of the victim's body on April 9 using the same method he used on Hua Xin.

(End of this chapter)