Chapter 1

This was a peculiar case.

After the killing, the perpetrator appeared to have constructed a perfect alibi.

Then the police received footage from the crime scene, sent by the victim after he was dead.

Every time the suspect told another lie, another video arrived.

Eventually, he was brought to trial and convicted.

On the surface, it looked like a battle of wits between a killer and a dead man.

1

I'll call the victim Ma Xiaohu.

His body was found in a remote mountain forest within our jurisdiction.

His head was covered and his entire body tightly bound, wrapped up like a stuffed rice dumpling.

The forensic examination placed his death at approximately seven in the evening on August 25. The cause was asphyxiation.

It looked as though someone had restrained him and deliberately suffocated him.

We examined the call records and WeChat conversations on his phone. Before long, we identified a key suspect: Zhou Gang.

The messages revealed a long-standing grudge between the two men.

On the evening of the death, Xiaohu had arranged to meet Zhou in that same forest.

He'd also threatened to expose a secret unless Zhou paid him.

We suspected that Zhou, unwilling to remain under another man's control, had decided to kill him.

That afternoon, my colleague Liu and I brought Zhou in for the first interview.

Asked where he'd been at around seven on the night of the killing, he answered almost without hesitation.

More importantly, he had three witnesses.

We checked their accounts and found no evidence that he was lying.

Our prime suspect had been eliminated at the very first stage.

2

The case turned twenty-four hours after the death.

The provincial Public Security Bureau's tips inbox received an anonymous email about the case.

It contained a video.

A man in a black jacket was walking through the trees, carrying a bag. He kept looking around as he made a phone call.

His face was clearly visible.

Zhou Gang.

A careful examination confirmed that the footage had been taken near the crime scene.

It was only fifteen seconds long.

A date-and-time stamp placed it at six that evening—one hour before Xiaohu died.

We immediately asked the technical team to authenticate it.

They found no signs of tampering.

That left two questions.

First, Zhou had been at the scene. He'd lied.

Second, who had recorded him?

There had been a third person there that night.

Who?

We asked the technical team to trace the anonymous email. Whoever had filmed it might have witnessed the entire crime.

Meanwhile, we interviewed Zhou again.

3

I went straight to the point.

“Zhou Gang, you said you never went to Dayu Mountain that day. A witness has footage of you at the scene at six that evening. How do you explain that?”

He looked incredulous.

“There was a witness? Someone filmed it?”

Liu played the recording.

Zhou watched, then sat in silence for half a minute.

Suddenly, as though something had occurred to him, he admitted the man in the video was him.

“You were there on the night of the killing. You killed Ma Xiaohu!”

“No, no! I didn't kill anyone! I'm only admitting I was there.”

“Then why did you lie?”

His answer struck us as absurd.

He'd had a feeling something would happen to Xiaohu that night, he said. Afraid of being implicated, he'd denied visiting the scene.

He even volunteered that he'd fabricated his alibi.

The three witnesses, he claimed, were friends he'd paid to lie for him.

It had all been a precaution. If something happened to Xiaohu, he didn't want to be dragged into it.

So he'd prepared an alibi in advance.

He hadn't expected anyone to film him.

Then he described his visit to Dayu Mountain.

According to Zhou, he'd only gone to meet Xiaohu and clear up their misunderstanding face-to-face.

He arrived at about six.

Xiaohu wasn't at the meeting place, so he called him.

A phone rang behind him.

Following the sound, Zhou found Xiaohu lying in the undergrowth.

He was bound, his head covered, struggling for his life.

Zhou didn't know who wanted him dead. Terrified that the attacker might still be nearby, he'd fled down the mountain.

He described himself as a cautious man. Seeing Xiaohu's condition, he'd decided the young man couldn't last much longer.

The police would inevitably find their calls and messages and come looking for him.

To avoid getting into a situation no amount of explaining could fix, he'd paid three friends to say he hadn't been there.

What he hadn't foreseen was the recording.

He finished by stressing his innocence.

“Officer, I really didn't kill him. At worst, I failed to help. But I was scared! That isn't a crime, is it? The real killer must have been nearby. He filmed me so he could pin it on me!”

We ended the interview.

Zhou had put us on the back foot. He was remarkably quick at adapting.

First he'd denied being there. The moment we produced footage, he'd changed his story.

The video proved he'd visited the scene at six.

But it also proved someone else had been there.

Zhou now insisted that the person behind the camera was the killer.

Without further evidence, there was little we could do about that argument.

He remained our strongest suspect, however. Given his lies as well, we applied to the procuratorate for authorization to arrest him.

4

We questioned the three alibi witnesses again.

Every one of them insisted he'd told the truth and stood by his original statement.

It seemed Zhou had paid them well. Afraid of being held responsible for false testimony, they'd apparently decided to keep going.

Soon afterward, the colleagues tracing the email reported back.

The account hadn't been identity-verified. Finding the sender's real details was almost impossible.

The IP address did establish that the email had come from the Dayu Mountain area.

Perhaps the sender was a local villager who was afraid to come forward.

The footage suggested they'd seen more than they were telling us—possibly the entire killing.

Finding this person was crucial.

We sent officers to conduct door-to-door inquiries in the surrounding area.

Two days of questioning produced nothing.

5

Just as the investigation stalled, another anonymous email reached the provincial bureau.

A new account. Again, no verified identity.

Again, footage from the scene.

This recording was twenty seconds long.

Its time stamp read 6:02 p.m.—two minutes after the first video.

A man in black was pinning a bound man to the ground.

We identified the man in black as Zhou Gang.

The man beneath him was Ma Xiaohu.

The image was indistinct, but Zhou appeared to have both hands around Xiaohu's neck.

We could hear Xiaohu begging.

“Don't kill me! I won't tell anyone your secret! Please let me go!”

Zhou shouted back, “You can barely keep yourself alive, and you're still trying to play me? Secrets? Tell the King of Hell when you get down there!”

Then he got up quickly and disappeared from the frame.

Xiaohu remained on the ground, still struggling beneath the covering over his head.