EVEN FACING DEATH Zhong Weiyang was looking for an angle. Dressed in a purple pullover and jeans, the unemployed youth attempted to excuse his participation in the most ghastly murders involving foreigners in the mainland in at least half a century.
'I was born in the countryside and I didn't have much education,' Zhong told the Nanjing Intermediate People's Court on Friday. 'I am the only son of my parents and I was spoiled in my childhood. I didn't understand the law.' Two months earlier, Zhong - together with Liu Guangyuan, Ding Shanyang and Zhang Eryang - all jobless men between 18 and 21 years old from the northern Jiangsu provincial county of Shuyang - climbed through a second-floor window in the Nanjing home of German automobile executive Juergen Pfrang. They were there to make a midnight robbery, but when things went wrong the four ended up butchering Pfrang, his wife Petra and their two teenage children, Sandra and Thorsten.
According to the testimony of police examiners and the defendants, who were apprehended at the scene of the murders, it was a gruesome frenzy. Pfrang was found with 45 wounds, including 24 head and neck injuries. His wife was hacked 80 times. The killers showed no less mercy for the children, passing one another knives to finish the deadly business.
Making sense of such violence has been a difficult undertaking and it is hardly surprising that surviving members of the Pfrang family came to believe the killings were an assassination committed to hide financial irregularities at the joint venture where Juergen Pfrang worked.
What emerged from last week's two-day trial, however, was a disturbing tale of shiftless men, enamoured with money, and uniformly blind to how their actions drove them mercilessly towards their fate. 'I wanted to live like a rich man,' Liu Guangyuan told the court.
Facing almost certain death, the four were led into court, shackled and mortified. Only Zhong Weiyang, the gang's so-called 'brains', seemed to find any kind of composure. He testified how he had lived in Nanjing for eight years and hatched the plan to form a small-time crime ring that would rob taxis, steal bicycles and maybe burgle homes. He recruited Liu Guangyuan, another hometown native living in Nanjing, and together they returned to Shuyang to find Zhong's childhood friends Ding and Zhang.
The four men, apparently, were not poor - they certainly had enough to eat. Zhong had blown the better part of 2,000 yuan (about HK$1,871) his father had handed him gambling in the days before the murders.