The Notorious Female Serial Killer Who Evaded Capture For 20 Years

On December 28, 1999, one half of a serial killer couple was executed for his crimes. The other would evade capture for the next twenty years.

Between 1996 and 1999, a man named Fa Ziying and a woman named Lao Rongzhi engaged in a series of financially-motivated crimes, including kidnapping, robbery, and murder in four different cities in China. The couple met at a friend’s wedding in 1993.

Lao was largely responsible for choosing targets to rob and murder, often while working in the nightlife industry. She was directly involved in brutally killing five of her and Fa’s seven victims and held responsible for the death of the remaining two. One of Lao and Fao’s victims was a three-year-old girl, the daughter of a couple they held captive and murdered before stealing valuables from the family’s home.

Lao and Fa’s crimes might have continued into the 2000s and beyond had Fa not been outsmarted in 1999. The couple held a man, Yin Jianhua, captive in a dog cage they had purchased for that purpose. The goal was to convince Yin’s wife, Liu Min, to pay Yin’s ransom. When Yin refused to cooperate, Fa went outside and convinced a carpenter named Lu Zhongming to follow him back to the apartment where Yin was being held. Fa stabbed Lu twenty times in the bathroom and presented his severed head to Yin as proof that he and Lao would follow through on their threats to kill him if he did not go along with their ransom plot.

After Yin arranged a meeting for wife would deliver the ransom to his kidnappers, Fa strangled Yin to death with a wire. Fa then arrived at Yin and Liu’s marital home with a homemade gun. Liu convinced Fa to wait there, saying that she needed to collect the money from her friends and colleagues. Instead, she fled and went straight to the police. After a tense standoff and an attempted escape, Fa was arrested.

What happened to Lao? After her boyfriend’s arrest, she fled Hefei for Wuhan. For the next twenty years, she adopted various aliases to hide in plain sight while engaging in prostitution, waitressing, and later working as a car saleswoman to support herself. She was eventually caught on film via surveillance cameras and identified by police, who arrested her at a watch shop in a mall in 2019. According to police, Lao did not commit any crimes after Fa’s arrest.

Lao claimed in court that she did not willingly participate in the murders and was coerced by Fa. She was found guilty and executed on December 18, 2023.