CHINA GHOST BRIDE HORROR
Gang kills women for dead grooms
January 28, 2007
WHEN farmer Yang Donghai approached a poor family asking to 'buy' their mentally-handicapped daughter for an arranged marriage, they agreed, thinking she would have a better life.
The tradition of marrying women to dead men is still alive in Asia, as seen in this Malaysian wedding. In China, dead women are also married to dead men. -- SIN CHEW DAILY
But Yang, 35, was only telling half the truth.
He later killed the girl and sold her corpse as a 'ghost bride' to the family of a dead single man.
Chinese police have arrested Yang, and two other men, Liu Shengbao and Hui Haibao, for killing two young women and selling their corpses as part of this dark custom.
And they believe that there might have been many other victims.
In certain parts of China, it is believed that young men who die unmarried should go to their graves accompanied by women who will be their dead wives in the afterlife. Often, these women die natural deaths.
Yang, who is from western China's Shaanxi province, has confessed to killing the girl, who he bought for 12,000 yuan ($2,400) last year.
He had initially intended to sell her into a marriage as promised.
Then he ran into Liu at a guesthouse in Yanchuan county, where the latter offered him RMB10,200 for the girl's corpse.
WORTH MORE DEAD
Yang refused, but changed his mind when Liu said that the woman would be worth much more dead than alive.
Two days later, they poisoned then strangled the woman.
The next day, they took her body by taxi and sold her corpse to Li Longsheng, an undertaker who police said specialised in buying and selling dead women for 'ghost weddings'.
Yang and Liu received 16,000 yuan for the body.
Realising that it was an easy way to make money, Yang roped in his old acquaintance, Hui, for his ghost bride business.
Last November, they went looking for a prostitute they knew.
But she threw them out after they said that they could not afford to pay her 300 yuan for her services.
They returned the next morning and killed her. On 3 Dec, they sold the body to Li. This time, they made only 800 yuan because Li was not happy with the 'quality' of the body, reported the London's The Times.
The police discovered that Li made a name for himself in Xixian county by selling clothes to dress the dead and by handing out cards that offered to help families in need of matchmaking services for the afterlife.
Most of his 'clients' sought young and good-looking dead brides for their sons.
Li usually paid between 8,000 yuan and 10,000 yuan for a body and sold it for as much as 35,000 yuan.
After Yang and his two accomplices were arrested on 4 Jan, he showed little remorse.
'I did it for the money. It was a quick buck,' Yang said, according to the Legal Daily paper.
'If I hadn't slipped up early, I would do a few more.'
Li has also been arrested.
Yanchuan county police believe that the dark trade went beyond these cases.
'It's lucky that the case was cleared up in time or we don't know how many more women would have been killed by them,' the London reported Mr Zhang Zhangyan, the Yanchuan county chief of police officer, as saying.
'These people thought they had found a short cut to wealth.'
Instead, they now face the death penalty. - Reuters.