"Aunt Mei case" Zhang Weiping was sentenced to death at the final instance: he was sentenced to prison for abduction three times, and it was verified that at least 11 children were abducted and trafficked
Zhu Yuanxiang, Senior Correspondent, The Paper
death penalty!
On December 10, 2021, the Guangdong Higher People's Court upheld the first-instance criminal sentence of Zhang Weiping.
Zhang Weiping is the principal perpetrator of a series of child abduction cases involving "Aunt Mei". He has been sentenced three times for child abduction and has confessed to 14 children for child abduction, including 11 cases verified by judicial organs and 11 children abducted.
Most of the children abducted by Zhang Weiping 15 years ago were boys aged one or two.
Zhang Weiping abducted and sold the children to Heyuan, Guangdong and other places through the introduction of "Aunt Mei".
In 2017, the Guangdong Provincial Public Security Department organized the police in Guangzhou, Huizhou, Dongguan and other places to set up a special task force for Zhang Weiping's child abduction and trafficking cases.
After Zhang Weiping and Zhou Rongping were arrested, the Guangzhou Intermediate People's Court and the Guangdong Higher People's Court successively tried the case.
On June 9, 2017, Zhang Weiping identified the crime scene in Shapu Town, Zengcheng, Guangzhou.
Photo courtesy of the interviewee
When the gavel fell, the defendant Zhang Weiping faced the most severe punishment.
"If there is no other way, no one can save him." Zhang Weiping's father told The Paper (www.thepaper.cn) that his son was a person who "unchanged after repeated teachings"; Zhang's mother also said that his son was "stealing the baby and selling it". "Unethical things."
The two old men now have a headache about how to educate and raise Zhang Weiping's 16-year-old son-poor academic performance, withdrawn and rebellious.
Zhang Weiping, born in 1971, is a native of Suiyang County, Zunyi, Guizhou.
In his childhood and adolescence, he was seen by the villagers as a herding baby who would help the family with farm work; after dropping out of junior high school, he went south to work in Guangdong.
How did he walk out of the mountains from an ordinary wage earner to a notorious "human trafficker"?
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Take a two-hour bus ride from Suiyang County to a small town called Huangyang, and then walk about 4 kilometers along the winding mountain road to reach Qingxi Village, Zhang Weiping’s hometown.
Qingxi Village is an administrative village with more than 3,400 people. The villagers’ houses are scattered on the hillside.
It used to be a provincial-level poor village, and most of the adult laborers went out to work.
"Before poverty, our standard of living was hovering on the national minimum guarantee line." Yin Ji, director of the Qingxi Village Committee, told The Paper that now the village's per capita disposable income is more than 7,000 yuan a year.
Qingxi Village, Huangyang Town, Suiyang County, Guizhou Province.
Picture of The Paper, reporter Zhu Yuanxiang
Zhang Weiping's parents live in an old brick house on the first floor at the entrance of the village-this is the house of their second son.
The old couple have three children and one daughter. The daughter is married outside the city. The eldest son is a primary school teacher, the second son is doing voluntary work, and the younger son Zhang Weiping is in prison in Guangdong.
The two elders currently live with the son of Zhang Weiping, his grandson in junior high.
When a reporter from The Paper came here to interview on April 26, Zhang Weiping's mother Wu Zhenghui had just cut a bamboo basket of hogweed and returned.
"Now I can't carry pig grass." The 79-year-old sighed.
The family raises two pigs every year, and the annual income of several thousand yuan "to slaughter" at the end of the year is the main savings of the two elderly people throughout the year.
The corn and vegetable fields on the hillside belonged to the "battlefield" held by Zhang Weiping's father, Zhang Xiaorong.
This old man who had served as a soldier in his youth became a Grade 4 disabled due to a broken arm. He still insists on farm work for his living.
Zhang Weiping was born in this mountain village 50 years ago.
On the third day of his birth, his illiterate mother named him "Taoping" (sound).
"I just want him to be safe and sound." Wu Zhenghui said, her son was in the Zhang family as a "Uyghur" character, so he was later called "Zhang Weiping".
In the memory of his father, Zhang Xiaorong, the "fourth" Zhang Weiping was very obedient when he was a child, and started herding cattle at the age of six or seven.
Later, when he studied in the village school, Zhang Weiping would use his spare time to do farm work, and would often go herding cattle and cutting pigs after school.
Villager Liu Yongkuan taught Zhang Weiping when he was a substitute teacher for elementary school.
In his impression, Zhang Weiping is thin and has poor academic performance, but he is more active.
In the second grade, Zhang Weiping dropped out of school.
At the age of 19, Zhang Weiping, like many young people in the village, had a dream to go out of the mountains to the southern coastal city a thousand kilometers away.
For these young people from the countryside, working part-time may be a more realistic way out than studying.
In Houjie Town, Dongguan, Zhang Weiping went to work in a shoe factory. Five years later, he went to a chemical fiber factory in Zengcheng, Guangzhou.
Zhang Xiaorong remembers that Zhang Weiping sent a total of 1,500 yuan to his family during the years when he worked in Guangdong.
"In the first few years, he would go home for the New Year, but later he returned less." Zhang Weiping's cousin Li Zhengxue recalled that Zhang Weiping was dressed well when he returned to the village. He would smile and say hello when he saw people. Better than his elder brother".
Zhang Weiping when he was young.
A remake of The Paper by reporter Zhu Yuanxiang
Wu Zhenghui, a mother, cares about her son's marriage.
In her impression, Zhang Weiping’s first girlfriend was a Hunan girl, and they met while working. Zhang Weiping took her back to her hometown twice.
"The girl has a sweet mouth, she will call us Mom and Dad." Wu Zhenghui said. The Hunan girl gave birth to a son for Zhang Weiping. Unfortunately, the child died a few months after he was born, and the two broke up later.
Around 2004, 33-year-old Zhang Weiping met a local girl named Song in Zengcheng, Guangzhou. The girl was 8 years younger than him. The two fell in love and lived together.
Wu Zhenghui said that because of the busy farming season, neither she nor her wife went to Guangzhou to attend the wedding of her son. Later, she went to Guangzhou for a few days when her grandson was born.
The old lady Wu frowned and said that the daughter-in-law in the southern city had never come to Qingxi Village with her son. She broke up with Zhang Weiping after many years, and then remarried.
Little is known that before Zhang Weiping got married, he had associations with at least two women who had missed their feet.
These two secret romances also link him to "child trafficking".
"Human Trafficker": He once committed crimes with a misplaced woman and was arrested three times for kidnapping and trafficking in children
For a long time before marriage, Zhang Weiping did not go to work in the factory-perhaps because he was tired of assembly line work.
He wandered around almost all day, and he really had no money, so he went out on a motorcycle and took guests to collect some fares.
I don't know when Zhang Weiping got into gambling and often went to some places to play "slot machines".
His life was haunting, and he sometimes went to whoring.
According to his later confession, in 2003, he met a Sichuanese woman who missed her feet in Tangwu Village on Licheng Street, Zengcheng. The two had frequent contacts, "I call her'little sister'... I feel that I have developed feelings with her. ".
Zhang Weiping said that after about a year of dating, the "little sister" took two boys aged one or two to him and asked him to "help" contact the buyer.
In fact, before getting to know the "little sister", Zhang Weiping also dated a woman surnamed Chen who had missed her feet, and helped her abduct a boy.
It was precisely because of this case that Zhang Weiping was sentenced for the first time.
The case occurred in 1998, and the location of the case was Shijie Town, Dongguan City.
On August 14 that year, the 7-month-old son of Chen Demou, a migrant worker in Shijie Town, was kidnapped.
The verdict showed that after the kidnapped child was transferred to Zengcheng, Guangzhou, Chen Ying, a Sichuan native, asked Zhang Weiping, who was working in Zengcheng, to “help”.
"She was in her 20s and was a young lady in Shitan Town." Zhang Weiping confessed that at that time he and Chen Ying had a close relationship, and the two had lived together. "She spent some time with me, and during that time she lived in My Chemical Fiber. In the factory dormitory."
After Chen Ying found Zhang Weiping with the kidnapped child, Zhang Weiping contacted a buyer surnamed Xie through a fellow villager and sold the baby boy to him for 9,500 yuan.
Zhang Weiping stated that Chen Ying only gave him 500 yuan for "referral fees" afterwards.
Three months after the incident, Zhang Weiping was arrested by the police.
In July 1999, the Dongguan City People's Court sentenced Zhang Weiping to six years imprisonment and fined 3,000 yuan for the crime of kidnapping and trafficking in children.
Zhang Weiping was sentenced to six years in prison for kidnapping and trafficking in children for the first time.
The picture shows the judgment (part of) that year.
Photo courtesy of the interviewee
In fact, this case is not the first time that Zhang Weiping abducted and trafficked children. He concealed an earlier case that year.
In the criminal facts later verified by the judiciary, Zhang Weiping’s first kidnapping of children was in 1997-12 years after the incident was detected by the police.
On August 6, 1997, on a construction site in Beilian Village, Gaobu Town, Dongguan City, the eight-month-old son of worker Zhong Yuhai disappeared.
It was 26-year-old Zhang Weiping who abducted the child.
According to the criminal verdict, Zhang Weiping abducted Zhong Yuhai’s son and took him to Xintang Town, Zengcheng City. He contacted the buyer through Hu Zhigan, a fellow in Huangyang Town, and made an illegal profit of 10,000 yuan.
At the end of 2009, 12 years after the incident, Zhang Weiping was arrested by the police.
In the second year, the First People's Court of Dongguan City sentenced him to seven years in prison and fined him 4,000 yuan for the crime of kidnapping and trafficking in children.
Zhang Weiping was detained to Guangdong Yingde Prison to serve his sentence. This is his "three imprisonment"-in addition to his first six-year sentence for kidnapping and trafficking in children, he was also sentenced to ten months for theft of motorcycles (attempted) in 2007 .
After Zhang Weiping was released from prison in August 2015, he went to Zengcheng to borrow money from the "little girl" he knew well, but failed to do so.
After that, he returned to Zunyi City, Guizhou Province, and pooled money to run a mahjong hall, but the business was not good.
A few months later, he went to Guiyang, the capital of the province, where he started his old job of soliciting customers on motorcycles.
His son also transferred to an elementary school in Guiyang for the fourth grade.
"I heard he rented a basement with his son in order to save money." Zhang Weiping's mother Wu Zhenghui said.
Probably one day in March or April 2016, several policemen brought Zhang Weiping's 11-year-old son to Wu Zhenghui's house in Qingxi Village, Suiyang County.
Only then did Wu Zhenghui and his wife realize that their son had been arrested by the police again.
The burden of raising minor grandchildren has since fallen on the shoulders of the two elderly people.
Zhang Weiping was arrested by the police in Yunyan District, Guiyang City on March 11, 2016.
A week ago, his fellow villagers Zhou Rongping, Yang Chaoping, Liu Zhenghong and others were arrested by the police.
They were all taken to the Zengcheng District Branch of the Guangzhou Public Security Bureau.
After Zhang Weiping and his four fellow villagers were arrested, the child abduction case that occurred 11 years ago finally surfaced.
As the principal culprit in this series of cases, Zhang Weiping abducted and sold at least 9 children in three years.
This is Zhang Weiping's "Four Enters into the Palace"-three of them were due to child abduction.
Death row prisoners: Become a "neighbor" before committing the crime, confessing to 14 children abducted and trafficked
Zhang Weiping was taken away by the police in March 2016 because he was involved in a case involving Zhou Rongping in the same village.
It turned out that on January 4, 2005, Zhou Rongping, Yang Chaoping, Liu Zhenghong, and Chen Shoubi, who worked in Zengcheng, Guangzhou, joined forces and stormed into the rental house to bind and control a woman, and forcibly took away his 1-year-old son Shen Cong.
After that, Zhou Rongping handed the child to his cousin Zhang Weiping to trade, and made a total of 13,000 yuan in illegal profits.
In the past 11 years, Zhou Rongping thought it was all right.
During this period, Zhou Rongping, Chen Shoubi and his wife and Yang Chaoping started a steel bar business in their hometown of Guizhou. Yang Chaoping also served as the village committee director for two years, and "post-80s" Liu Zhenghong bought a small car to "make money" with a rental company.
These people have become the "capable men" of Qingxi Village.
After his son Shen Cong disappeared, Shen Junliang, a native of Henan, embarked on the road of finding a son and accusing him.
Through investigations and online pursuits, the police finally arrested Zhou Rongping and Zhang Weiping in March 2016.
On March 26, 2021, Shen Junliang and Zhong Dingyou, the parents of abducted children who participated in the second trial, were interviewed at the gate of the court.
Picture of The Paper, reporter Zhu Yuanxiang
After being arrested, Zhang Weiping confessed that in addition to Shen Cong, he also abducted 11 children.
In addition to the two cases involved in his two previous sentences, he has accounted for 14 cases involving abduction and 14 children abducted.
Among the above-mentioned cases Zhang Weiping confessed, 3 cases could not be verified due to lack of evidence and other reasons, including the 2 child abduction cases that he confessed to be carried out with the "little sister", which could not be detected because the identity of the "little sister" could not be verified.
Finally, the court found that Zhang Weiping committed 9 crimes from 2003 to 2005. In addition to the two crimes committed in 1997 and 1998, Zhang Weiping was involved in 11 cases and 11 children abducted.
The trajectory of Zhang Weiping's activities during the crime was mainly concentrated in Guangzhou, Dongguan and Huizhou.
Most of the boys he abducted were traded to Zijin County of Heyuan City, Wuhua County of Meizhou City and other places through "Aunt Mei".
The period from 2003 to 2005 was a period of high incidence of Zhang Weiping's crimes.
At that time, he was in his 30s, with darker skin, a little thin body, and a height of 1.65 meters.
He understands Cantonese, usually speaks Mandarin, but also speaks some Sichuan dialects-he knows many Sichuanese workers while working.
Sometimes in order to conceal his identity, he claimed to be a Sichuanese.
Before committing the crime, Zhang Weiping often went to the rental house near the factory to "hang out", and his target was young boys.
"I had the habit of gambling back then," Zhang Weiping later confessed, "a kid is abducted to sell the child for money."
Affected by the patriarchal feudal concept, some rural areas have "adopted" boys.
Driven by the needs and interests of the "market", lawbreakers are desperate to abduct and sell children.
Since the 1990s, my country’s public security organs have successively launched special operations to "anti-abduction", but the phenomenon of child abduction has continued to be repeatedly banned in some places.
Zhang Weiping, who has "experience" in child trafficking, often looks for targets near the factory.
After migrant workers get married and have children, they usually do not live in factory dormitories, but rent cheap houses near the factory.
During the day, migrant men go to work in factories or construction sites, while mothers and elderly people take their children and do housework in rental houses.
After Zhang Weiping locked the target by "stepping on the point", he was generally not in a hurry to do it.
He would call "Aunt Mei" first, and she would look for a buyer; then, in the name of finding a job or renting a house, he became a neighbor of the target boy's house, and rented him next to, opposite, or upstairs and downstairs from the child's house.
Normally, he would get close to the boy's family without incident.
He likes to call himself "Little King", saying that he is a native of Sichuan or Guangxi, so that those who come to Guangdong from other places can call him "hometown".
"He usually greets people when he sees people, as familiar as his family." Xie Shuiying, the mother of the kidnapped child Zhong Bin, remembers that Zhang Weiping, who rented near her home, "likes children very much" and often buys snacks for her children, such as steamed buns. , Cones, candy.
"I know the child well, so that I don't cry or make trouble when I take him away in the future." Zhang Weiping confessed.
At noon on December 31, 2004, after obtaining Xie Shuiying's consent, Zhang Weiping carried Zhong Bin, who was more than one year old, outside to "buy sweets" and never came back.
The other three abducted children Liu Peng, Ouyang Jiahao, and Li Chengqing were also abducted by Zhang Weiping in a similar situation to Zhong Bin.
On October 7, 2003, in a rented house in Boluo County, Huizhou City, 59-year-old Fu Renhui held his grandson Liu Peng in the house to "grind the oil," and the "hometown" who rented next door came to help. 1-year-old Liu Peng disappeared; on May 26, 2005, Ouyang Chunyu was doing housework in a rented house in Zengcheng, Guangzhou. He came out of the kitchen 5 minutes later and found that his 2-year-old son Ouyang Jiahao, who was playing at the door before, had disappeared. I learned that I was taken away by the "Sichuanese" next door; on August 7, 2005, Ouyang Yanjuan brought 1-year-old son Li Chengqing in the rental house, and her husband's co-worker "Xiao Wang" came over and said to take the child out to "buy buns and eat" , Never seen since...
It has been more than 15 years since the incident occurred. The four abducted children, including Li Chengqing and Zhong Bin, have yet to be found.
Since November 2019, Guangzhou Zengcheng police have successively recovered five other children abducted and trafficked by Zhang Weiping through DNA matching and other "smart new policing" technologies.
Some parents showed pictures of abducted children.
Picture of The Paper, reporter Zhu Yuanxiang
In December 2018, the Guangzhou Intermediate Court sentenced Zhang Weiping to death for the crime of child trafficking.
Two years later, the Guangdong Provincial High Court upheld the death sentence of Zhang Weiping.
"Negative teaching material": I shed tears on TV seeking relatives, and confessed "Aunt Mei" a year after his arrest
Zhang Weiping was sentenced to death. Ouyang Yanjuan, the mother of the kidnapped child, was relieved, but she was also a little worried: if Zhang Weiping dies, then his middleman "Aunt Mei" and the children who traded through "Aunt Mei" will Harder to find?
When they met Zhang Weiping 15 years ago, Ouyang Yanjuan and his wife really helped him. They didn't expect the story of "Farmer and Snake" to happen around him.
It was July 2005. Hunan native Ouyang Yanjuan and her husband Li Shuquan were working in Guangdong, renting in Boluo County, Huizhou City.
One day, a man called Xiao Wang from Sichuan came to visit.
"He said his family was poor and he came out to look for work." Li Shuquan sympathized with "Xiao Wang" at the time. Seeing that his foot was injured, he took him to the clinic, paid for him to heal the injury, and let him live and eat at home for a week. "Xiao Wang" said that he could not find a job, so Li Shuquan helped him find work on the construction site and made him his own worker; "Xiao Wang" said he had no money to rent a house, and Li Shuquan asked him to rent a house opposite to him live together.
Before long, "Xiao Wang" took Li Shuquan's 1-year-old son out to "buy buns and eat" and never came back.
It was not until 11 years later that Li Shuquan and his wife knew that the "Xiao Wang" who took the child was not Wang, but Zhang Weiping's real name was Zhang Weiping.
A photo of Ouyang Yanjuan's son Li Chengqing before being abducted.
Photo courtesy of the interviewee
On November 2, 2017, when the trial of the first instance opened, Li Shuquan, who was sitting in the gallery of the court, stood up and asked Zhang Weiping angrily: "I was so good to you, why did you do such a thing?" Zhang Weiping sitting in the defendant's bench He lowered his head and said nothing.
In the court that day, a female prosecutor of the Guangzhou City Procuratorate and the plaintiff Shen Junliang successively stated the injuries caused by Zhang Weiping’s abduction of children.
Shen Junliang choked up and insisted on reading the speech-his wife Yu Xiaoli did not come to court, and after her son was abducted, she suffered from schizophrenia.
Every victim's family was hit hard by the kidnapping.
Yang Jiang, the father of the kidnapped child Yang Jiaxin, committed suicide by jumping out of the window in the train toilet on his way back to Sichuan after three years of finding a child in Guangdong to no avail.
Towards the end of the trial that day, Zhang Weiping suddenly said: "I hope the court will give me a heavier sentence and sentence me to death. It will be executed immediately. It is also considered an explanation to the victim's family." The judge asked him, "When did you begin to repent?" "Just today." ."He said.
Zhang Weiping, who was "four into the palace", was accustomed to the interrogation of the police and judges, but could not face the eyes of the parents of the kidnapped children.
After being arrested in March 2016, Zhang Weiping initially denied that he committed a crime.
After several rounds of interrogation, he confessed to the fact of child trafficking, but he still intentionally concealed some important details and the persons involved.
It was not until March 2017, one year later, that after multiple family members of the victims identified and corroborated by relevant evidence, did Zhang Weiping confess more criminal facts and confessed the important person in this series of child trafficking cases-"Aunt Mei".
According to his account, the nine children he abducted from 2003 to 2005 were all completed through "Aunt Mei".
Each time he would take out 1,000 yuan from the illegal income of about 12,000 yuan and pay it to "Aunt Mei" as an "introduction fee."
According to Zhang Weiping's description, the Guangzhou police painted a simulated portrait of "Aunt Mei" and published it on the Internet.
"Aunt Mei's real existence," Zhang Weiping said in the second instance of the Guangdong High Court, "but the portraits of Aunt Mei were not very similar." At present, "Aunt Mei" has not been brought back to justice.
A mock portrait of "Aunt Mei".
The picture on the left is an announcement by the Guangzhou police, and the picture on the right is drawn by Lin Yuhui, a portrait expert.
During his detention in the detention center, Zhang Weiping liked to watch the CCTV family search program "Waiting for Me" hosted by Ni Ping.
"I shed tears every time I watch this show, especially when family members are reunited." He later told the police, "I thought a lot after watching that show..."
For his own ending, Zhang Weiping was obviously mentally prepared.
When the first instance opened, he asked the court to impose the death sentence; in the second instance, he said that he would obey the death sentence of the first instance.
The news of Zhang Weiping's "stealing of the baby" and the death penalty are now known to almost everyone in his hometown, Qingxi Village in the north of Guizhou.
His eighty-year-old father called The Paper in mid-May this year and said that he hoped that Zhang Weiping "better not die", "his son, how do we raise the two elderly people?"
During the interview, Yin Ji, the village director of Qingxi Village, told The Paper that the civil affairs department had included Zhang Weiping's son in the subsistence allowance, and would give him more than four hundred yuan of living allowance every month.
The village cadre also said that Zhang Weiping has become a "negative teaching material" for legal education in the village. "We must remind the villagers that no matter whether they are in the village or outside, they must not do illegal or bad things."
From the western mountains to the coastal cities, from wage earners and "human traffickers" to today's death row prisoners, 50-year-old Zhang Weiping has reached the end of his life.
"Negative teaching materials", or the greatest value of his life's contribution.