Anti-gang campaign: Female bureau chief

The former site of the Shiqiao County Phosphate Fertilizer Plant is located at the northernmost part of the county town, right next to an old riverbed that has been dry for more than ten years.

The factory went bankrupt in the late 1990s, and the equipment was sold as scrap metal long ago. Only a few rows of empty factory buildings and a rusty sulfuric acid storage tank stand in a patch of weeds.

Because of excessive levels of pollutants remaining in the soil, this land has never been redeveloped or utilized. Even farmers in the surrounding area are unwilling to grow vegetables here, and it has become so overgrown that even stray dogs avoid it.

The location Zhou Wenxuan marked for burying the body on the list was at the bottom of the sulfuric acid pool.

Back then, in order to save money, Fengmao directly mixed the tailings containing radioactive materials with the waste from the phosphate fertilizer plant and dumped it into the sulfuric acid pool. The surface was filled with construction waste and then covered with a layer of cement. From the outside, it looked no different from an ordinary abandoned industrial site.

If Zhou Wenxuan hadn't written down the precise latitude and longitude coordinates in the list, the search team might not have found anything even after searching inch by inch for a month.

The search team used large-scale demolition equipment.

Two rock drills started working at five in the morning and it took nearly four hours to break and lift the reinforced concrete cover plate, which was more than 30 centimeters thick, on the surface of the sulfuric acid pool.

The sight beneath the cover left everyone speechless for several seconds—the bottom of the pool was filled with grayish-white industrial waste and dark red rusted sediment, reaching a depth of over three meters in some places. The waste contained a large number of severely corroded metal barrels and crystals of unknown chemical composition, and the air was filled with a pungent, acidic smell.

Environmental protection technicians used a portable detector to measure the water level at the poolside, and the levels of heavy metals and radioactivity were both off the charts. Everyone present was required to put on protective clothing and gas masks.

The excavation work was much more difficult than at the construction site in the east of the city, because the chemical residues in the sulfuric acid pool corroded the remains far more severely than in ordinary soil.

Forensic pathologist Lao Zheng, along with two assistants, personally went down to the bottom of the pool and used small shovels and brushes to clean away the waste residue bit by bit.

The search dog kept whimpering at the edge of the pool; such a reaction is only seen in professionally trained police dogs when they smell deeply rotting human tissue.

At 12:30 pm, Lao Zheng's shovel struck the first bone—a section of femur severely corroded by chemicals, its surface pitted and uneven, like rotten wood eaten by insects.

Immediately afterwards, in a layer of debris less than forty centimeters away from the femur, a second bone fragment and several blackened and deformed teeth were discovered.

The cleanup operation lasted a full day.

By evening, the forensic team had extracted partial skeletons from the bottom of the sulfuric acid pool from two sets of remains, which were much more severely corroded than the four sets of remains found at the construction site in the east of the city.

However, Lao Zheng still found a gold ring on the finger bone of the first skeleton that had not been completely corroded. On the inside of the ring were two blurred but still faintly discernible letters.

He asked the technician to take a picture with a macro lens and perform image enhancement. A few minutes later, two words appeared on the screen: "Xiufang".

That was Chen Xiufang's engagement ring.

Chen Xiufang's remains were corroded by strong acid in a sulfuric acid pool for five years, and her fiancé is still waiting for an explanation.

The other person on the list who was buried with her was also found in the same layer of rubble. Based on the shape of the pelvis and the degree of tooth wear in the remains, the forensic doctor determined that he was a man around 40 years old, about 1.75 meters tall, with an old fracture and healing mark on his right clavicle.

This feature perfectly matches the physical characteristics of Old Ma, the missing miner from Fengmao Sand and Gravel Plant.

On the afternoon of the third day of the excavation of the sulfuric acid pool, the search team found the burial site of the drug dealer mentioned in Zhou Wenxuan's confession in an abandoned power distribution room on the other side of the former phosphate fertilizer plant site.

The power distribution room is a two-story red brick building. The windows are long gone, and the door frames have been removed. The cement floor on the first floor is piled with withered leaves and garbage blown in by the wind.

Old Zheng and his team scanned the area with ground-penetrating radar and discovered a clear cavity signal under the base of the electrical distribution cabinet in the northeast corner of the first floor.

After breaking through the cement, a skeleton was indeed found buried in the concrete.

The comminuted fracture of the forehead of the skull showed radial cracks extending from the point of impact outwards in seven or eight directions. These were indeed marks left by a blunt instrument with angular edges, such as a crowbar, which perfectly matched the record on the list that "Shen Wangshan personally executed him".

After the excavation of the power distribution room was completed, the search team did not immediately call it a day, because there were still six burial sites on the list, located in different places within Shiqiao County.

For the next twenty days or so, Jiang Ruolan led the task force and search team to dig down one location at a time, following the coordinates on Zhou Wenxuan's list.

A new tomb was unearthed on the north slope of the hill behind Qingshipu, containing two skeletons curled up side by side. Their time of death was close to that of Meng Zhaoyang and Lin Xiaomei.

At a depth of 60 meters below the deepest abandoned ventilation shaft in the Chenjiagou mining area, the search team descended with ropes and found three stacked remains wrapped in old burlap sacks at the bottom of the shaft, which were also printed with the logo of Fengmao Group.

The three remains were later identified as those of three miners who went missing in a mining accident ten years ago. At the time, Fengmao claimed that they had "left the mine on their own to work elsewhere," and the records still state "missing."

Two more sets of remains were unearthed from beneath a building foundation pit that had been backfilled for many years in Chengguan Town, Shiqiao County. The woven bags used to wrap the bodies were filled with construction debris, and the cause of death was the same: blunt force trauma to the skull.

A male skeleton was unearthed from the bottom of an abandoned fishpond in the northern part of Yi'an City. The skeleton was bound with a cement block by an iron chain, and the hands were tied behind the back with wire. Metal components identical to those found in tools from Tang Yuanqing's hideout were extracted from the wire.

Two more bodies were unearthed from the foundation of the slated demolition area of ​​bungalows behind Yi'an Railway Station.

Twenty-three days, eleven burial sites, nineteen sets of remains.

Including the seven bodies found in four locations behind Qingshipu Mountain, four bodies found in one construction site in the east of the city, and three bodies found in two locations at the phosphate fertilizer plant, all the burial sites marked on the list have been found.

From the first holdout killed during the demolition of the shantytown in the eastern part of the city in 1998, to Chen Xiufang and Wu Guilan, who were finally silenced in 2018, Fengmao Group buried 37 lives underground in this city over 20 years, and the special task force dug them all out in less than a month.

The last batch of remains was unearthed on the 23rd day of the twelfth lunar month, which is the eve of the Lunar New Year.

Yian experienced its heaviest snowfall of the winter, starting in the early morning and covering the entire city in white by noon.

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