On July 28, 2022, 3-year-old Chengcheng disappeared, and 22 days later, most of his remains were found by a creek far from ...... village
* Locked up the suspect - 56-year-old Zhong (Chengcheng's second grandmother) in the same village. Regarding the motive for the killing, Zhong said during the interrogation that because his two sons were in prison, he had low self-esteem and jealousy, so he vented his personal anger on Cheng Cheng, who happened to pass by her house.
On November 30, 2023, this case was tried in the first instance of the Intermediate People's Court of Pu'er City, Yunnan Province**, Zhong retracted his confession in court that he had not killed Cheng Cheng, and Zhong's defender suspected that Cheng Cheng was killed by others. The court adjourned and will announce the verdict at a later date.
Ultraman slippers and sword hilt that were found.
A 3-year-old boy disappeared from his father's eyes while playing.
A large-scale search of the whole village was fruitless.
In July 2022, Mr. Zi's family returned to their hometown, and on the afternoon of the 28th, he and Fa Xiao drank tea and chatted in the house, and their 3-year-old son Cheng Cheng played hide and seek with other children in the yard. However, before the cup of tea was finished, Mr. Zi found that Cheng Cheng was gone.
Sung Sung was playing in the yard in blue Ultraman slippers before he disappeared.
Mr. Zi anxiously called his wife and mother, and the family searched and shouted around the village, but there was still no trace of Chengcheng. Subsequently, more and more relatives and villagers also participated in the search.
Many people remember that that afternoon, Chengcheng's second grandmother, Zhong, behaved very positively. Zhong's husband, Zi Mouyi, is the brother of Mr. Zi's father. Chengcheng's mother, Ms. Liang, was unfamiliar with the terrain around the village, so Zhong led her to search the steep slope below the village, taking the relatively easy but more winding machine farming road. Zhong took a look here, looked at that, and walked for a long time. At about 17 o'clock that day, Zhong found two small shoe prints and asked Ms. Liang if they were left by Chengcheng.
Ms. Liang wasn't sure if it was Chengcheng's shoe print, so Zhong called Mr. Zi and wanted Mr. Zi to identify it. When Mr. arrived, it was immediately clear that it was the shoe print left by Ultraman Narari's slippers. The mountain road is rugged, how can a 3-year-old child who grew up in the city, wearing a pair of slippers that do not fit, come here?Everyone's hearts sank. Focusing on the location of the shoe prints, the soldiers began to search for them in several ways. As night fell, more and more people participated in the search. At around 9 o'clock in the evening, two groups of searchers found the hilt ...... of Chengcheng's Ultraman slippers and Ultraman's sword
It is understood that on July 28, the "Chengcheng abduction and trafficking case" was filed and investigated at the Jingdong Yi Autonomous County Public Security Bureau.
The Jingdong Yi Autonomous County Public Security Bureau initially filed a case on the grounds of trafficking.
Recalling the details of Cheng Cheng's disappearance, Mr. and Mrs. Zi felt more and more that Zhong's original behavior was strange. Zhong's house was no more than 100 meters away from the courtyard where Cheng Cheng disappeared, and on July 28, two search teams went to Zhong's door and wanted to search for it, but Zhong told the search team each time that her home had been searched several times. The search team had to make a brief search in the courtyard and left.
In addition, after discovering Cheng Cheng's shoe prints, Cheng Cheng's grandmother proposed on the spot that she wanted to ask ** to send a police dog to search, but Zhong said to Cheng Cheng's grandmother that it would cost a sum of money to hire a police dog, which was not cost-effective.
The child's body was found more than 20 days after going missing.
Zhong is suspected of intentional homicide**.
On August 20, 2022, ** told Mr. and Mrs. Zi that on the afternoon of the 19th, most of Chengcheng's remains were found by the villagers by a small stream far from the village, and there was still the remaining part of the Ultraman sword not far away. **Patchwork the sword** showed it to Mr. Zi for identification, and he confirmed that the sword was bought for Chengcheng by himself. In August, Pu'er was in the rainy season, and it rained heavily on those days, and the child's remains were revealed after the husband speculated that the child's remains were buried and washed away by the torrential rain.
In September, Zhong was arrested on suspicion of intentional homicide. According to the evidence submitted by the procuratorate, among the more than 40 interrogation records after being arrested, nearly half of the records of Zhong made a confession of guilt, and many of the records denied that he had committed the crime.
Although Mr. Zi's family and Zhong's family do not have much contact on weekdays, there are no conflicts and disputes before, and they are very friendly and polite when they occasionally meet. Zhong's family was originally in good condition, but after Zhong's two sons were imprisoned for telecommunications fraud, Zhong's family had less contact with people in the village.
Zhong mentioned in the transcript that she felt that her two sons were not angry, and her grandson was still young and pitiful, and she thought that because her son was in prison, the people in the village looked down on her, and she had an inferiority complex. She didn't want to go to someone in the village to entertain her, and whenever she saw other people's children returning to her hometown during the New Year's holidays, she felt very uncomfortable.
The evidence presented by the Prosecutor to the Tribunal also included the testimony of 102 witnesses. A number of witnesses said in their testimonies that Zhong, who was originally more cheerful, often looked unhappy and reluctant to speak after his two sons were imprisoned for crimes.
The suspect had confessed to committing the crime out of a moment of anger.
After killing someone, he took advantage of the rainy night to throw the body.
On the day of Cheng Cheng's disappearance, at about 14:10 on July 28, Mr. Zi's youngest daughter went to Zhong with other children and informed Zhong that her grandson Xiaofeng (pseudonym) had kicked and soiled her pants and obtained Xiaofeng's apology. Since Mouyi also mentioned in an investigation that he and Zhong both felt that Xiaofeng was only 6 years old and would not kick a girl several years older than him into anything. Although he apologized, he felt uncomfortable.
Zhong mentioned in the transcript that she felt uncomfortable because her grandson Xiaofeng apologized to her husband's young daughter. Less than half an hour after apologizing, Cheng Cheng came to the kitchen of Zhong's house alone, and Zhong poured his anger on Cheng Cheng.
At that time, Zhong saw that Cheng Cheng wanted to leave, so he chased after Cheng Cheng and forcibly hugged Cheng Cheng, in order to stop Cheng Cheng from calling to be discovered by other adults, Zhong pinched Cheng Cheng's neck with his hand, and after a while, Cheng Cheng stopped struggling and his body softened. Zhong took a pocket in the firewood room near the pigsty, put Chengcheng's body in the pocket, put it in the gutter at the foot of the wall of the flue-cured tobacco room, and found items to cover it.
The courtyard of Zhong's house is not completely closed and has multiple exits. The surveillance video of Zhong's house obtained by the case-handling organ shows that the surveillance can photograph some areas in the direction of the main gate of Zhong's house. At around 14:35 on July 28, Zhong's house monitoring ** heard the voice of a child calling the second grandmother in Mandarin. After Mr. and Mrs. Zi and some villagers identified the voice of the Mandarin-speaking child included in the surveillance** as Chengcheng's voice. After a while, Zhong asked the child, "What are you running?".Zhong's voice gradually became blurred, and the sound of the child suffocating could be heard. Subsequently, the surveillance captured Zhong entering and exiting the pigsty.
At about 14:52, the surveillance ** photographed Zhong going out to mow the grass, and the pocket in front of Zhong's apron was bulging. Zhong mentioned when making a transcript that she took Chengcheng's Ultraman slippers and sword hilt away before going out.
Zhong also mentioned that she pretended to go out to mow the grass, but in fact she went to the field below the village, took off her shoes with Ultraman Chengcheng and pressed two shoe prints, and then walked to another place to discard Chengcheng's shoes and toys. The surveillance video of Zhong's house captured that when Zhong returned home after going out to "mow the lawn" for about half an hour, the pocket of her apron was empty.
The red dots are the areas where the village has disappeared, the blue dots are the areas where slippers and sword hilts are found, and the yellow dots are the areas where shoe prints are found.
The surveillance video also captured that at nearly 1 o'clock in the morning on July 29, on a rainy night, Zhong wore a white hat and a flashlight to go home from the main gate, and left home not long after wearing a yellow hat.
Zhong once mentioned in the transcript that she also searched with everyone after she came back from mowing the grass, and after Chengcheng's shoes were found by the villagers, there were family members squatting there crying, she was afraid to come forward to look, and felt that Chengcheng's body could no longer be placed at home, and it must be taken out. In the early morning of the 29th, the villagers who were looking for people were eating supper outside her husband's house, she found an excuse to return home, carried Cheng Cheng's body and went out, and ran to a place where she had been before, leaving Cheng Cheng's body there, and then returned to the village to continue to participate in the search until dawn.
The prosecution argued that he should be sentenced to death for intentional homicide.
The defense said that the possibility of homicide could not be ruled out.
When the Pu'er City People's Procuratorate prosecuted, it found that Zhong X had used strangulation methods to illegally deprive the minor victim of Chengcheng's right to life, and that Zhong X should be investigated for criminal responsibility for the crime of intentional homicide.
In the first instance, Zhong retracted his confession in court. Zhong said that she had never killed Cheng Cheng, that she was honest and honest in her daily life, that she did not have much contact with her husband's family, and that there were no contradictions, and that she hoped that the court would conduct a fair and just trial.
Zhong's defender did not recognize the authenticity and relevance of some of the evidence provided by the public prosecution. The defender believes that during the investigation, the interrogation methods of the case-handling organs were inappropriate, and the facts of the public prosecution's accusation that Zhong X killed Cheng Cheng were unclear and the evidence was insufficient, which could not show that the evidence provided by the prosecution had formed an evidentiary chain, and the possibility that someone else had killed Cheng Cheng could not be ruled out in this case.
The prosecutor believes that the existing evidence is objective and true, the facts of Zhong's crime are clear, the evidence is credible and sufficient, the case has a vile social impact, the harm to society is extremely great, and there are aggravating circumstances, and Zhong should be sentenced to death for intentional homicide.
On November 30, 2023, after the trial, the Pu'er Intermediate People's Court announced an adjournment, and the case will be announced at a later date.
*: Red Star News reporter Chen Qingyuan.