Spring has come to the flatlands of central China. Weak sunshine seeps through a blanket of haze and is outshone by violent bursts of lemon yellow from flowering rape fields. In between lie swathes of unripe, green wheat, the other staple crop in Pingyu, a poor county of 940,000 people in the heart of Henan, one of China's most heavily populated provinces. Later, the crops will be harvested, mostly by elderly people; many of Pingyu's young have left for the eastern seaboard, where they help make up a millions-strong migrant workforce building China's cities, staffing its restaurants and minding its children.
Huang Yong, however, stayed behind. A loner, the 27-year-old lived by himself in the family home in Dahuang village, a settlement of run-down, brick courtyard homes surrounded by spindly trees, off a deeply rutted dirt road. Here, aggressive dogs, barking themselves hoarse behind low, ragged wooden gates, ensure visitors feel unwelcome. 'Be careful,' villagers warn; the dogs may be rabid.
The few villagers willing to talk - most put their head down and scurry away when approached - say they have no idea how Huang supported himself, since he did not appear to work. They speculate his parents sent money from the city, where they were the migrants in an inversion of ideal family relations.
Yet if Huang seemed lazy to the outside world, the slight, introverted man with heavy black eyebrows, a longish face and full lips secretly was busy. No one knows when he began spending long hours in internet cafes in Pingyu, the county town, befriending his victims with tips on how to win online games. What is known, though, is that on Sunday, September 23, 2001, the killer struck - probably for the first time.
The day is burned in the minds of farmers Lu Dequan and his wife, Wang Xiaochun, of Luwan village, 45 minutes' drive from Dahuang. Like many isolated farming families, they rented a room in Pingyu so their sons, 16-year-old Ningbo and 14-year-old Ningchao, could attend school in the town. The boys' parents hoped that one day they would graduate from university, get good jobs and help the family prosper.
'Ningbo rang me at about two in the afternoon to say he was going to an internet cafe for a couple of hours,' says Lu, whose square, tanned face - with a milky, blind left eye - looks decades older than his 42 years. Lu sits on a rattan chair that stands on the bare dirt floor of his living room, under a high, steepled roof of woven reeds. The walls are flaking white paint. 'Later that day, I got a call from Ningchao saying that Ningbo hadn't come home. The next day he still wasn't back and I went to the police station to report him missing.'
The Pingyu police, he says, turned him away. 'They said, 'If you can't find your son, don't come here, go out and look for him on the streets.''