Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Today's episode is a fan favorite. The audio in the story has been remastered for today's episode. In 1984, in a small city in northeastern China, a security guard stood outside of a warehouse working an overnight shift.
The guard heard a noise coming from some bushes nearby, but he didn't think much of it because this was a safe town and usually the hardest part of his job was just staying awake. But suddenly, two thieves in ski masks emerged from those bushes and they rushed the guard.
They grabbed him and they slammed his head against the outside wall of the warehouse, and the guard fell to the ground in a daze.
Chapter 2: What happens when a security guard encounters thieves in 1984 China?
One of the thieves quickly gagged the guard, bound his hands and feet, and then told him he would need to keep his mouth shut if he wanted to stay alive. Terrified, the guard laid there and watched as these two thieves opened up the warehouse door and ran inside.
This robbery would shake the local community, but it was nothing in comparison to the horrific crimes it would set off and the gruesome discovery the police would soon make on the outskirts of town.
But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. So if that's of interest to you, please replace the cream inside the Follow Buttons Oreos with toothpaste. Okay, let's get into today's story.
On July 25th, 1984, a 35-year-old woman named Zhao Xiao Lian stood in her doorway talking to an agitated man in Liaoyuan City in northeastern China. The man was a friend of Zhao's husband, Li, and he kept pacing back and forth, and he was loud and very animated when he spoke.
Zhao glanced over her shoulder and saw her seven-year-old daughter drawing a picture at a small table in the front room, and Zhao turned and asked her husband's friend to please keep his voice down. The man nodded and then did lower his voice and then told Zhao everything was going to be okay. By the end of the night, she wouldn't have to worry or keep the secret she was hiding anymore.
She just needed to follow the instructions he had given her.
The man then said goodbye and wished her luck. Zhao closed the door and just stood there in silence for a second. Then she forced a smile onto her face and turned and walked over to her daughter. Zhao was about 5 foot 3 inches tall, with black hair and dark brown eyes, and her daughter looked a lot like her.
Zhao told her daughter she could finish her drawing later, because for now, she was going to go stay with her uncle for a while. And right away, Zhao's daughter's face lit up and she ran to the door. Zhao followed her and slipped on her favorite pair of shoes. They were red sandals with a low heel. Then she took her daughter's hand and they both walked outside.
The pair made their way through the neighborhood that lay on the outskirts of the city, not far from the surrounding mountains. Streets were lined with small gray wooden houses, and Zhao basically knew everybody who lived in these houses. This was a neighborhood where multiple generations of families had grown up right alongside each other.
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Chapter 3: Who is Zhao Xiao Lian and what situation does she face?
Soon nodded and walked to the front of the room. Then with the captive audience in front of him, he said, first, self-immolation, setting yourself on fire, was a rare way for somebody to kill themselves. And often when self-immolation occurred, the person doing it was doing it to make a political statement of some kind.
And so Soon did not think this woman, who was found in the middle of nowhere and didn't leave a message behind, was making some sort of statement. Before the other officers could argue, Soon said there was actually an easier way to prove this woman didn't kill herself.
He said the officers had searched the entire area near the river, but they hadn't found a gas can or any other container that could have held the fuel that burned her.
So either this woman doused herself in gasoline and then walked for miles before lighting herself on fire, or, and Soons said this was way more likely, someone else doused her in some sort of fuel, murdered her by setting her on fire, and then ran off with the gas can. The officers just stared at Soons. Even if he was arrogant, most of them admitted he had made a good point.
But an officer asked him, well, okay, if somebody else killed her, why was there only one set of footprints, which appeared to be the dead woman's footprints? Detective Soon said that was a great question and they would need to look into that. But it was hardly a reason to chalk this whole thing up to suicide.
Soon told the police chief he was sure they had a murder case on their hands and he knew he could solve it. And the chief didn't hesitate. He said, OK, they would treat the woman found at the river as a homicide victim, and Detective Soon would lead the investigation. Later that day, Soon walked to the river with several other officers.
He held a file folder of photographs that had been taken at the scene the day before. Soon knew that some of his colleagues wished he had kept his mouth shut. It would have been a lot easier if they deemed this a suicide, closed the case, and simply moved on. But Soon was sure he had made the right call.
He refused to believe that a woman could just set herself on fire and not leave any trace of how she'd done it or why. And when Soon stared down at the footprints that were still on the riverbank, he knew he was right. He crouched down and took out a photograph of the red sandals the police had found there the day before.
He glanced between the footprints and the photo, and he knew the officers had been right. The prints matched the sandals. But soon caught something else the others had missed. He gently pressed his hand down into the ground, not far from the footprints, and he was able to make a handprint. However, the ground was so wet that the moment he removed his hand, that print quickly vanished.
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Chapter 4: What leads Zhao to leave her home with her daughter?
Sun flipped through the diary and found the last entry. It was dated just a few days before her death. He read the entry and it really took him by surprise, because basically it was one complaint after another about her husband, Li. And all these complaints basically boiled down to the same thing. Zhao clearly believed that Li cared more about money than about his family.
Detective Soon bagged the diary as evidence. Now he just needed to track down Zhao's husband. A few hours later, Detective Soon and members of his team met with Li's boss at the supply company where he worked. And Soon got right to the point and said the police needed to find Li right away. They knew he was traveling for business, so Soon asked where Lee had gone and where he was staying.
But the boss got this confused look on his face. He said Lee was not on a business trip. Lee had been away from work, but because he had said he had this family issue that he needed to attend to. Soon didn't say anything in response to this, but this seemed like a major revelation. It meant Lee had very likely lied about where he was, at least to his boss and to his brother-in-law.
Soon asked to see where Lee worked, and the boss led the police to an office filled with several desks. He then pointed them to Lee's desk and then left the cops on their own. Soon began rifling through Lee's desk, and under a stack of papers, he found a photograph of a woman. And it was not Zhao.
Then Detective Soon caught a break that could only happen in a small tight-knit community where basically everybody knew each other. One of the other officers who was with Soon looked at the photo of this woman and said he recognized her. He couldn't remember her name, but he was sure she had been Lee's girlfriend when they were younger. Detective Sun felt like he was onto something big.
He already suspected Lee in this murder. And now this piece of evidence helped him come up with a theory. Maybe Lee murdered his wife and then went on the run to be with his old girlfriend. And lying about the business trip would have given Lee cover to be out of town for a couple of days before anybody thought something suspicious was going on.
For the rest of the day, investigators spoke to Lee's friends. And finally, they found a man who could identify the woman in the photo. The man told them that the woman was definitely Li's ex-girlfriend, but she had gotten married years ago and moved to a city that was about a three-hour train ride away.
So the following morning, two days after Zhao's body had been found, Sun took a train ride, and he found Li's ex-girlfriend at her house. But he realized pretty quickly this was a waste of time. Lee's ex answered all of Soon's questions, but she said she had not seen Lee or even exchanged letters with him in over a decade.
So Soon turned right around and hopped back on the train for the long ride back home. And during this ride, Soon felt frustrated. He felt totally lost. Lee really seemed to have fled, but now Soon had no idea where to look for him. And he knew Lee had at least a couple of days jump on him.
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Chapter 5: What gruesome discovery does a farmer make by the river?
However, later that night when Ho and Zhao got across the river, it was Ho who whispered in Zhao's ear that Li wasn't there. And that in fact, he'd lured her here just to make sure she never told the police anything about the robbery. Then it was Ho who sexually assaulted Zhao and burned her to death. but that was not the only horrific crime Ho had committed.
Because Li had followed his advice and planned to leave town and go into hiding like he suggested. But right before Li was about to leave town, which was days before Zhao was killed, Ho met up with Li, beat him to death with a hammer, and then disposed of his body outside of the city. So after all of this, Ho believed he'd gotten away with two murders.
But when that letter that was supposedly written by Lee arrived at Zhao's sister's house, Detective Sun compared it to other letters Lee had written, and he quickly realized the handwriting didn't match.
So Sun began working with a handwriting analysis expert and compared the letter to documents and correspondence from Lee's family and friends and from employees who worked at the warehouse that had been robbed. And that's how Sun figured out that Ho had actually written that letter. Police would eventually locate Lee's body, at which point Ho would confess to everything.
Ho was sentenced to death and was executed, all to cover up some stolen pipes. A quick note about our stories, they are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved, and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes. The Mr. Ballin Podcast, Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Stories, is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr. Ballin.
Our head of writing is Evan Allen. Our head of production is Zach Levitt. Produced by Jeremy Bone. Research and fact-checking by Shelley Hsu, Samantha Van Hoose, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway, and Camille Callahan. Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear. Audio editing and post-produced by Whit Lacascio, Jordan Stidham, and Cole Lacascio. Mixed and mastered by Brendan Cain.
Production coordination by Samantha Collins. Production support by Antonio Minata and Delaina Corley. Artwork by Jessica Clogsden-Kiner. Theme song called Something Wicked by Ross Bugden. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast.
If you enjoyed today's story and you want to hear more like it, go ahead and check out our YouTube channel, just called Mr. Ballin, where we have hundreds more stories a lot like this one, but most of them are not available on this podcast. They are only available on that YouTube channel, which again is just called Mr. Ballin. So that's going to do it. I really appreciate your support.
Until next time, see ya.
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