Reborn in 97, I solved a cold case at the Municipal Bureau

Chapter 367 Dying with Unresolved Feelings (Flashback)
On the morning of May 7, 1997, Zhou Yi arrived at the Nanhu Street Police Station and sensed that something was amiss.

"Zhou Yi, quick, the director's calling a meeting!" Zhang Ning shouted as soon as he saw him.

Zhou Yi quickened her pace to catch up with her master, and asked nervously, "Master, what's going on?"

"I don't know, we'll hear what the director has to say later."

In the police station's simple meeting room, the police officers entered one after another, with Jin Lei sitting at the front looking solemn.

He looked up and asked, "Is everyone here?"

Just five minutes later, Zhou Yi followed his colleagues out, but his face was full of doubt.

He asked Zhang Ning in a low voice, "Master, the director just told us to conduct a search in the jurisdiction, but he didn't specify what we were looking for."

An older policeman, about the same age as Zhang Ning, gave a wry smile and shook his head.

Zhang Ning replied in a low voice, "The director said to focus on checking trash cans, garbage dumps, and nooks and crannies where no one goes. I guess they're mostly looking for body parts."

Zhou Yi was startled. He had been working for more than half a year, but he had never seen a corpse before. This time, they were actually looking for body parts.
"Keep your mouth shut. Don't tell your family about this. The Jin family isn't saying anything openly because they're afraid the news will leak out. Stay with me. If we find anything, don't react too strongly," Zhang Ning instructed.

Zhou Yi nodded repeatedly, his face full of the nervousness and unfamiliarity of a new police officer facing a major case.

……

On May 6th, a gray, old travel bag containing body parts weighing a total of thirteen kilograms was retrieved from the eastern section of the Nansha River in Nanming District.

On May 7th, all grassroots police stations in Nanming District received a notice requiring them to deploy all police forces to thoroughly search their respective jurisdictions. The Municipal Public Security Bureau Command Center clearly instructed that, in order to avoid causing social panic, strict confidentiality must be maintained and information leaks must be prohibited.

Between May 7th and 8th, police discovered body parts at nine different locations, including a construction site on Huahe Road, Xiaohong Bridge, Hongqi Road bus stop, and bushes near the side gate of Pinghe Road Hospital.

The body parts found at seven locations were packed in black garbage bags and discarded in garbage cans or garbage dumps. The lightest piece weighed only 1.2 jin (approximately 0.6 kg), and the heaviest weighed only 2.6 jin (approximately 1.3 kg).

The body parts found in the abandoned well at the Huahe Road construction site are quite similar to those retrieved from the Nansha River. They were also found in an old travel bag, but slightly smaller. The bag was dark blue with faded red five-pointed star patterns and weighed nine jin (approximately 4.5 catties).

In addition, a snakeskin bag weighing 15 kilograms was found in the grass near the side gate of Pinghe Road Hospital. It contained a large number of human bones and some internal organs.

Including the first bag of body parts found, there were a total of ten bags.

According to the forensic inventory, the ten bags of body parts contained human tissue, internal organs, and bones, but the victim's head and clothing have not yet been found.

As of May 8th, a total of 359 pieces of body parts have been discovered.

Song Yiming and Xu Nian spent a full day and night in the forensic room piecing together the body, barely managing to reconstruct it.

This dismemberment case involving more than 300 pieces of a body shocked the entire provincial public security, procuratorial, and judicial system, as such a heinous dismemberment case had never occurred in the province before.

There have been cases of dismemberment before, but the bodies were usually cut into about ten pieces to reduce their size and make them easier to carry and dispose of.

More than three hundred yuan is already an absurd amount.

The forensic autopsy revealed that, apart from the palms and soles, the body parts were cut relatively evenly into human tissues of about four to six centimeters in length. In other words, most of the body parts were only the size of an apple, or even smaller.

The internal organs were mostly left intact and largely uncut.

Inside the snakeskin bag found in the bushes by the side gate of the hospital, an almost complete human skeleton was discovered, except for the head, hands and feet. The sacrum and hip bones were the most intact, and there were still traces of female human tissue.

Xu Nian's working hours are short, and even though she is a professional forensic doctor, she couldn't help but rush out of the forensic room several times to take a deep breath.

Only Song Yiming completed the autopsy with his brows furrowed the entire time.

However, because the deceased's fingerprints were destroyed and the fingerprints on the surface of the ten fingers were deliberately cut off, the forensic autopsy did not yield much useful information.

Furthermore, due to the severe dismemberment of the body, the forensic doctor was unable to determine the exact time of death from the body parts alone, and could only determine from the degree of decomposition of the body parts that the deceased had been dead for more than 24 hours.

Furthermore, the cause of death could not be determined.

On May 10th, a sewer on Daguan Street in Nanming District became blocked, causing sewage to overflow onto the road. After receiving a repair call, the repair company sent someone to unclog the pipe.

As a result, two plumbers pulled a human head out of the sewer and immediately called the police.

When Wu Yongcheng arrived with his men and sealed off the scene, they discovered that the sewer pipe was a complex network connecting seven or eight nearby sewer outlets. However, it had become blocked here due to being clogged with other garbage, making it impossible to pinpoint the actual location where the body was dumped.

The head, pulled from the sewer, was beginning to decompose, but the face was not damaged, and it was clear that the deceased was a pretty young woman.

After Song Yiming took the head back, he compared the cuts with the already pieced-together dismembered body and found that they basically matched, confirming that the head belonged to the victim in the Fifth and Sixth Dismemberment Case.

After the incident, Wu Yongcheng and the Third Brigade worked tirelessly, compiling a list of missing persons reports from across the city, but they couldn't find a matching missing person. It wasn't until the head was discovered on May 10th that, based on the victim's age, height, and weight, they narrowed their search to Hongcheng University.

The reason for focusing on Hongda is that at least 70% of the eleven locations where body parts have been found are relatively close to Hongda.

Huahe Road and Hongqi Road are located on the west and north sides of Hongda respectively, with a straight-line distance of no more than 100 meters.

After investigation by the school, a highly suspicious target was quickly identified.

Lu Xiaoshuang, a 19-year-old student majoring in Financial Management in the Class of '96 at Hongda Accounting College.

According to Lu Xiaoshuang's roommate, Lu Xiaoshuang left school on Friday, May 3rd, after finishing her classes in the afternoon and has not returned since.

Wu Yongcheng quickly retrieved Lu Xiaoshuang's household registration information and discovered that her parents were both sent-down youths living far away in the Northwest, and that she was staying with relatives in Hongcheng.

They immediately went to the Lu family to find out what was going on and learned that Lu Xiaoshuang rarely came back after starting university, and spent most of her spare time working outside to earn money.

Her second uncle even said in front of the police that his niece was ungrateful and didn't know how to respect her elders after making money outside.

However, as the investigation into Lu Xiaoshuang deepened, the Third Brigade learned that the reason Lu Xiaoshuang spent all her spare time working was to earn tuition fees for herself.

Her classmates said that Lu Xiaoshuang was usually very frugal, eating only salted vegetables and steamed buns all year round, and rarely eating meat or vegetables.

Due to her long hours of part-time work, Lu Xiaoshuang was not very familiar with her classmates and roommates. Almost everyone described her personality as introverted, withdrawn, quiet, and unsociable.

It's as if it's someone who would disappear and no one would care much about or pay attention to.

Because of the poor conditions in the Northwest where Lu Xiaoshuang's parents live, the Lu family said they do not have telephones, and Lu Xiaoshuang usually communicates with her parents mainly through letters.

Therefore, in order to quickly confirm the identity of the deceased, the responsibility of identifying the body fell on the school.

The school arranged for a teacher and two of Lu Xiaoshuang's roommates to identify the body, one of whom was Mo Youyou, who slept in the bunk above Lu Xiaoshuang.

Soon, the three confirmed that the deceased was Lu Xiaoshuang, a student from Hongda University.

On that day, the Hongcheng City Public Security Bureau tried every means to contact Lu Xiaoshuang's parents, who lived far away in the Northwest. On May 12, Lu Xiaoshuang's parents traveled a long distance to Hongcheng.

Her father, Lu Guohua, turned white overnight, prematurely aged, wore a pair of broken glasses held together with white tape, and trembled all over.

This young intellectual, who left Hongcheng for the Northwest, was full of vigor and ambition. More than twenty years later, he finally returned to his hometown, only to collect the body of his nineteen-year-old daughter.

There is nothing more despairing in this world!

On the day the victim's identity was confirmed, due to the severity of the case, the potential for social panic, and the unique status of Hongda as a representative of Hongcheng's educational resources, the provincial department approved the establishment of a special task force for the "Five-Six Dismemberment Case" and dispatched additional criminal investigation and technical experts to Hongcheng to assist in solving the case.

The task force entered Hongda that day to conduct a comprehensive investigation.

As the case's influence continued to spread, and as the special task force's investigation became more extensive and thorough, the entire city of Hongcheng was shrouded in a bloody terror.

For a long time, Hongcheng became deserted at night, and the streets were deathly silent. Even enterprises and institutions that originally operated on a three-shift system, such as hospitals and factories, were required by higher authorities to cancel the middle shift that ended at midnight and switch to a two-shift system of day and night shifts to prevent employees from walking alone at night.

Over a period of three months, the task force started by investigating Lu Xiaoshuang's social relationships and gradually expanded the scope of the investigation, eventually interviewing nearly three thousand people.

This includes Lu Xiaoshuang's family, university teachers and classmates, junior and senior high school teachers and classmates, colleagues she had contact with during her work, residents near the eleven body disposal sites, migrant workers and released prisoners, as well as butchers, doctors and professional autopsy personnel with professional dismemberment techniques and abilities.

Despite such a large-scale investigation, no clues or leads were found, but instead, many other problems, both big and small, were uncovered.

As the case has stalled, rumors have spread and unfounded speculations have become rampant, causing widespread anxiety.

The Hongcheng police were under tremendous pressure.

Three months after the incident, the provincial department disbanded the task force and withdrew from Hongda, citing the lack of progress in the case.

After Wu Yongcheng led the members of the three teams in a three-month-long struggle, the city leaders temporarily suspended the investigation of the case on the grounds that it would cause a negative social impact.

On May 6, 1998, a year after the Hongda case, the case remained unsolved.

On the anniversary of Lu Xiaoshuang's death.

Her father, Lu Guohua, and mother, Su Xiuying, committed suicide by drinking pesticide in front of Lu Xiaoshuang's grave.

He left four blood-written words on his daughter's tombstone: "I will die with my eyes open!"

　Given that it has already been met with a lot of criticism, I have changed the chapter title.
　　
　
(End of this chapter)