At seven o'clock in the morning on the second day of the month in two thousand five, pedestrians hurried along Longtoubao Street in Beihuan City. On the sidewalk, dozens of square frozen chunks of meat were kicked around underfoot by passersby. Old Zhang immediately went over to clean them up, but suddenly felt a shock. Old Zhang, a former police station chief with extensive experience, felt that these rock-hard frozen meat chunks were simply human flesh, so he hurriedly called the police. The Criminal Investigation Brigade of the Hualin Branch conducted a forensic technical examination and confirmed that these meat chunks were not livestock meat but indeed human flesh. The deceased was a middle-aged man who had been placed alive in a freezer and frozen to death after taking a large amount of sleeping pills. And so the curtain rose on this bizarre and convoluted serial murder case. Because the victim's head had not been found and no missing-man report had been received citywide, the victim's identity could not be confirmed, and the case quickly reached a dead end. Yet bizarre incidents kept emerging one after another. Before long, two businessmen from Hangzhou were defrauded of mobile phones worth one million in Beihuan, then bound with white tape and suffocated to death. The wealthy woman Dai Yueqin died strangely of gas poisoning. A gay man, Wei Yingmin, was also bludgeoned to death with an ashtray in his residence. After analysis and study, the police determined that there were certain internal connections among these cases. However, although the task force worked day and night, cracked several cases in succession, and captured many criminals, the perpetrator was a former criminal police officer who had been expelled from the public security force and had strong counter-investigation awareness. As a result, these cases, all carefully planned by him as proxy killings, appeared to have no direct connection with this case. Soon, a member of the fishing association fished a decomposed human head out of Qingyun Lake, and it too was unrelated to this case. For a time, the task force was lost in thick fog and faced enormous pressure. Under the leadership of Brigade Chief Liu Jian, the Criminal Investigation Brigade of the Hualin Branch racked its brains and took a new approach. They carefully pieced together the frozen corpse fragments and finally restored the victim's bodily form at the time of freezing. Based on a series of experiments and measurements, technical experts finally reached a startling conclusion: the victim could only have been frozen to death in one type of freezer, a Yang one hundred eighty-five-liter freezer. Based on this, investigators combed every street and alley in Beihuan City and checked all customers who had purchased that model of freezer over the years. Finally, in a small restaurant, they identified the victim: Zhao Dahong, general manager of Hailuo Entertainment City. The case took a sudden turn. Because Zhao Dahong was a habitual womanizer, many of the glamorous women around him and their boyfriends were suspected of harming him. Investigators checked them one by one and eliminated them one by one, until they finally traced Lin Yayun, the girlfriend of the criminal Yang Haitao. She was the mysterious woman in the yellow dress who had been the broken lead in the earlier investigation. After Lin Yayun learned that her boyfriend was a murderer, she fled to a Buddhist nunnery. Liu Jian, chief of the Criminal Investigation Brigade, appealed to her emotions and reasoned with her, and soon broke down her resistance. Using Lin as bait, they lured out the deeply hidden criminal Yang Haitao. When Yang sensed that Lin's phone call was bait, the police had already surrounded his residence. This vicious, highly intelligent criminal, who had frozen and dismembered corpses, scattered them in the streets several times, challenged the police, and repeatedly killed to silence witnesses, was finally captured. The officers launched one operation after another, enduring great hardships as they moved through Shaanxi, Anhui, Guangzhou, Henan, Ningxia, and countless other provinces. With the strong cooperation of sister units in various provinces and the use of modern investigative techniques, they cracked in one fell swoop the extremely cruel criminal gang led by Yang Haitao, which was highly experienced in counter-investigation, and captured all the criminals. Because of the bizarre nature of the crimes and the exceptional wisdom of the investigation, this case was included as a classic case in the Ministry of Public Security's training archives.
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