Killer caught 32 years after murders

A man convicted of electrocuting three hotel guests 32 years ago in Shanghai and elsewhere in the country has been sentenced to death with a reprieve in Shanghai No.2 Intermediate People's Court, local media reported Sunday.

With the sentencing of the defendant, Ai Hongguang, authorities closed the book on one of the country's more infamous unsolved murder cases.

At the time of the murders, law enforcement agencies in Shanghai and Jiangxi Province devoted massive resources to solving the crimes. Investigators interviewed more than 1,000 people and visited the scene of every subsequent death caused by electrocution.

However, they were unable to get a break in the case until national authorities combined the country's regional fingerprint databases, making it possible for investigators to match a fingerprint pulled from a crime scene at a Shanghai hotel in 1981.

Ai checked into the hotel in August 1981 under the guise of an employee from a hospital in Heilongjiang Province. Because the government hadn't yet established the country's national identification card system, he was able to stay there under an assumed name.

Ai shared the room with his first victim, Li Huijia, a purchasing clerk from a company in Qingdao, Shandong Province. It was common for travelers to share hotel rooms with strangers at the time. Li had come to Shanghai on business and was carrying 200 yuan ($32.70), which was a large sum of money in the early 1980s.

Li was found dead in the room two days later. His money and wristwatch had been stolen. There was no sign of Ai, who never checked out.

Police found a dozen burn marks on Li's neck and head and determined he had been electrocuted. They uncovered several suspicious objects in the air vents above the room, including a 7-meter piece of electric wire with two pieces of metal attached to one end.

Investigators determined that the killer connected the wire to one of the room's lamps and used it to electrocute Li. They tried to find out who shared Li's room that night, but the suspect had made up the name of the hospital he wrote on the hotel's check-in form.

Police were able to collect several fingerprints from the room's air vent. They believed the prints most likely belonged to the killer. However, the prints didn't match any of the 400,000 fingerprints that local police had on file.

Later that month, another hotel guest was attacked under similar circumstances. This time, however, the victim survived. The description he gave to police bore many similarities to the descriptions of Li's roommate given by employees from the hotel in Shanghai. The suspect was 1.7-meters-tall and had a heavy northern accent.

In September 1981, two more people were killed in the same fashion in the cities of Shangrao and Jiujiang in Jiangxi Province.

The case stayed cold until April 2012, when a technical officer with the Shanghai police discovered a match for the hotel fingerprints in a recently created national database.

Police identified the suspect as Ai, who had been sentenced to three years in prison in 1983.

The Shanghai police sent officers to the suspect's hometown, but his family had left.

Neighbors told police that Ai often worked at construction sites. After a wide search, police finally caught Ai in a remote village in Shangrao. Ai told police that he committed the four attacks, but later withdrew his confession in court.

The court found Ai guilty based on other evidence, including the police interrogation video, similar handwriting samples and the identical fingerprints.

The court had to get special permission to prosecute the case because the 20-year statute of limitations had expired.