Perfect Crime Chapter 5

When she told Hou her plan, he was horrified. “You’re crazy,” he said. “That man is your husband and my friend.”

But Lihua had anticipated his fear. She leaned close, her tone soft yet threatening. “If you refuse,” she hissed, “I’ll tell him everything about us, about the nights you came to my house while he was gone.”

Hou froze.

He was sixty then, his body weaker than it once was. If Zhao learned of the affair, Hou wouldn’t stand a chance. The younger man would beat him to death.

Lihua’s words left him cornered.

Either Zhao died, or Hou’s reputation and possibly his life would.

At first, he tried to talk her out of it, but Lihua was relentless. She assured him there was no risk.

“He hardly comes home,” she said. “Once he’s gone, I’ll tell everyone he left me. Nobody will suspect a thing. We’ll bury the body deep in the woods. It’s overgrown; no one ever goes there.”

Hou sat silent for a long time, trembling.

Between a ruined reputation and a single monstrous act, he chose the latter.

Still, he knew the two of them didn’t have the strength to take Zhao down. So he suggested bringing in Ye Minhui.

His motives weren’t pure; he also wanted to implicate the man who had stolen the woman from him.

Minhui initially refused, pale with fear. But Lihua begged, cried, and promised they would finally be together afterward. Against his better judgment, he gave in.

The three of them spent days planning. Hou and Minhui even went into the nearby mountains to dig a pit in advance, hidden among thick pines.

Then they waited.

On the night of October 30, 2009, Zhao came home exhausted after a day in the fields. He ate dinner quietly and soon fell asleep.

Lihua waited until his breathing deepened, then slipped outside and called the two men.

By the time Minhui arrived, Hou was already pacing nervously near the gate. Lihua opened the door, expression cold and determined. She handed each man a wooden stick she had prepared days before.

They crept into the darkened room where Zhao snored faintly beneath his worn cotton quilt.

With a silent nod, both men raised their sticks.

Two brutal blows struck his skull.

Blood splattered across the bed as Zhao’s body convulsed once, then went still.

Lihua turned on the lamp. Zhao’s head had caved in, crimson spreading fast across the pillow.

“Is he dead?” Hou whispered hoarsely.

She bent down, pressed two fingers under his nose, and then straightened slowly. “Not yet.”

Grabbing a rope, she looped it around her husband’s neck and pulled. “Help me,” she snapped at them.

Hou hesitated, paralyzed by terror. Minhui, sweating and trembling, stepped forward. He grasped the other end and pulled until Zhao stopped twitching.

When it was over, silence fell heavy as a tomb.

Lihua wrapped the body in a thick plastic sheet, and together they dragged it out into the night. The trio carried the corpse deep into the mountain forest and buried it in the pit they had dug earlier.

By the time they returned, dawn was pale on the horizon. Lihua scrubbed the floors, washed the bloodstained bedding, and burned Zhao’s work clothes in the clay stove. Then she dusted her hands, straightened her back, and went to the early morning market.

To anyone she met, she smiled faintly and said, “My husband just caught the first bus out for a new job.”

By the afternoon, she slept peacefully in the same bed where her husband had been murdered hours earlier.

For months, nobody questioned her story. But as years passed and Zhao never came home, whispers returned. Some villagers quietly speculated that something might have happened. Yet without evidence, the rumor remained just that, a story told over tea and cigarettes.

Lihua remarried and moved to another county. Hou Wenguo married again and went to live with his new wife. Only Ye Minhui stayed behind, tending to his sickly spouse and burying his guilt beneath the routines of daily life.

Zhao Quancheng faded from memory until the inmate Liu Yun wrote his letter thirteen years later.

Once the police pieced the confession together, they returned to the same forest with Li Wenhao leading the search. Though thirteen years had passed, vegetation reclaiming the slopes, Li managed to locate the very site described.

When the digging began, the smell of soil turned heavy and sour. And then, deep beneath tangled roots, fragments of a decayed plastic sheet emerged. Inside were remains, bones darkened by time, skull fractured in two.

Forensic results confirmed it was Zhao Quancheng. Details of the damage matched the suspects’ confessions exactly.

On March 20, 2023, the Intermediate People’s Court of Guangde City pronounced its verdict:

Liu Lihua, found guilty of intentional homicide, was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve and permanent deprivation of political rights.

Ye Minhui and Hou Wenguo received life imprisonment, also stripped of political rights forever.

None of the three appealed their sentence. The court’s judgment ended a mystery that had lain buried for thirteen long years.

Justice had come at last. The murderers received their punishment, and Zhao Quancheng’s restless spirit could finally rest in peace.

As for Liu Yun, the prisoner whose letter started it all, he was formally credited for aiding in the resolution of a major concealed homicide a rare case of unintentional merit.

But the greatest credit still belonged to the investigators of the Lingchuan County Public Security Bureau. It was their persistence, meticulous attention to detail, and refusal to dismiss a rumor that brought light to a story buried beneath more than a decade of silence.

END