MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories
The Red Sandals (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)
Mon, 02 Jun 2025
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 about it. This was a safe town, and usually the hardest part of his job was staying awake. But suddenly, two thieves in ski masks emerged from the bushes, and rushed the guard. They grabbed him, and slammed his head against the outside wall of the warehouse, and the guard fell to the ground in a daze. One of the thieves quickly gagged the guard, bound his hands and feet, and said he needed to keep his mouth shut if he wanted to stay alive. Terrified, and struggling to keep his eyes open, the guard watched as the two thieves opened 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.For 100s more stories like these, check out our main YouTube channel just called "MrBallen" -- https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallenIf you want to reach out to me, contact me on Instagram, Twitter or any other major social media platform, my username on all of them is @mrballenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What happened on the night of the robbery?
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. 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 Xiaolian 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.
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Chapter 2: Who was Zhao Xiaolian and what was her situation?
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.
Usually, that was something Zhao loved about this place, that sense of community. But now, all she could imagine were her neighbors staring out at her from their windows, trying to figure out the secret that she was hiding from everyone. After walking for a few more minutes, Zhao's daughter let go of her mother's hand and ran down the street to her uncle's house and then knocked on the door.
As this happened, Zhao prayed her brother was actually home. In 1984, nobody where Zhao lived had a car. In fact, even bicycles were seen as a luxury. If people needed to travel for work, they could catch a bus or train from the city center, but typically they just walked everywhere. The people in this area at the time also did not have telephones.
So if they wanted to get in touch with somebody out of town, they wrote letters. And if they needed to talk to someone close by, they simply walked over to their house to see them. So it was not uncommon to show up at somebody's house unannounced and to find that nobody was home. But luckily, Zhao saw her brother open up his door and he hugged Zhao's daughter.
And as this happened, Zhao felt like a huge weight had been lifted. She got to the house, and before her brother could say anything, she told him that she needed him to watch her daughter, while she walked to the clinic in town to see a doctor. He said of course, he'd love to watch his niece, but he asked Zhao was she okay?
Zhao said it was no big deal, she just had a little stomach ache and wanted to get some medicine for it. Zhao then thanked her brother, hugged her daughter tight, and said she loved her. Once her brother closed the door behind them, Zhao turned and started walking, but she did not head to the clinic. Instead, she rushed back home.
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Chapter 3: What gruesome discovery did the farmer make?
He told them they needed to come with him to the river right away. But the officers told the farmer to just rest for a minute and explain what was going on here. However, the story the farmer told them was so shocking, they thought the old man must be confused. But the farmer insisted he knew what he was talking about and begged them to follow him.
So eventually, the officers called over a few other cops and told the farmer to lead the way. The farmer, still exhausted from his run, led the police out of the station, and then they all walked 12 miles back to the river. When they finally got there, the two officers followed the farmer to a tree on the riverbank, and right away they could see the old man had been telling the truth.
But they still didn't want to believe what their eyes were seeing. because laying on the ground, the officers saw a naked charred corpse. They could tell it was a woman who was maybe a little over five feet tall, and she had severe burns all over her body. The burns were so bad that it was impossible to make out her facial features, let alone see any identifying marks.
The officers tried to stay calm, but they had never seen anything like this before. They spent most of their shifts breaking up fights in town or occasionally investigating robberies. That was it. The two officers walked away from the body and joined the other cops, who also had no experience in a case like this. But they did know they had to search the area for potential clues.
So they split into teams, with one group searching the riverbank and the other searching the nearby farmland. On the riverbank, about 20 feet from the body, something caught one of the cops' attention. It was a woman's burned blouse and pants and a pair of red sandals. Just then, another officer called out, and the cop staring at the clothes and the sandals snapped to attention.
Then he joined the other group and saw them looking at a single set of footprints on the riverbank. And it didn't take them long to match those prints to the red sandals. The police continued to search the area, but they didn't find anything else that stood out. And since they had a body and only one pair of footprints that matched the red sandals they'd found, they thought they'd figured it out.
This woman had come to the river alone, set herself on fire on the riverbank, and taken her own life. The following day, July 27th, a detective named Soon Eugene sat at the back of a small, brightly lit meeting room at the local police station. Detective Soon was in his early 30s and had black hair and dark eyes.
He listened to a group of officers talking to the police chief about the autopsy report they had received for the body they discovered by the river. Soon had not been a part of the group at the river, but he needed to speak to the chief, so he sat there and waited. The officer said that the autopsy report did not identify the woman, but it gave a pretty clear picture of how she died.
The body had not been burned after death. She had black carbon foam in her lungs and blood vessels, and that indicated she had been breathing while she was burning. This meant the fire and related smoke inhalation had killed her. And so these officers were saying they felt like that confirmed their theory, that this woman had basically lit herself on fire to commit suicide.
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Chapter 4: What led Detective Soon to suspect foul play?
soon looked around and saw there was an empty office in the corner. So he scooped up the file folder with the crime scene photos inside and then led Zhao's brother into the office and closed the door behind them. Once they sat down at the small table inside the office, Sun asked the man when was the last time he had seen his sister.
He said Zhao had dropped off his niece a couple of days ago before going to the clinic, but she never came back. So he'd brought his niece to his other sister's house and then spent a whole day walking everywhere and talking to everyone to see if they had heard from Zhao, but nobody had. Sun looked at the man with pity in his eyes.
The man was already so upset and Sun hated that he was about to cause him a whole lot more pain. Sun opened the file folder and pulled out photos of the woman's blouse and the red sandals that had been found at the river. He asked Zhao's brother if he recognized the clothing. Zhao's brother stared at the photos and started shaking his head like he didn't want to accept what he was seeing.
But eventually, he looked up and said, yes, those are definitely Zhao's clothes. Sun told the man he was very sorry to say this, but they had recently found his sister's body near the river, and he believed someone had murdered her. Zhao's brother immediately broke down sobbing.
Sun gave the man a couple of minutes to compose himself, and then he apologized for pressing him at a time like this, but he wanted to know why Zhao's husband had not already reported his wife missing. Zhao's brother wiped the tears away from his face. Then he said that Zhao's husband, Li, was on a business trip hours away, so he wouldn't have had any idea about what was going on.
Detective Sun promised he would find whoever had done this, and then he asked Zhao's brother to please not speak publicly about his sister's death. Sun believed holding back information could be crucial in identifying the killer. Zhao's brother nodded and said that he and his other sister would not say a word.
Later that day, Detective Soon walked through Zhao's house to her and her husband's bedroom. Now, this was not a crime scene, but Soon hoped something there might point him in the right direction. He searched the dresser and bedside tables, but didn't find anything that stood out. He crossed the room and opened up the drawer of a wooden desk that was pressed against the wall.
Inside, he found playing cards, photos, and a blue hardcover notebook. He opened up the notebook and looked at the first page and quickly realized this was Zhao's diary. 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.
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Chapter 5: What did Zhao's diary reveal about her life?
And he knew Lee had at least a couple of days jump on him. Moreover, traveling by train through smaller towns in this region would allow Li to almost completely disappear because a lot of those trains didn't require a passenger to provide identification. Sun could ask for help from other police departments, but Li could be almost anywhere in China by this point.
Hours later, Soon got back to the police station, and he was surprised when the chief greeted him with a huge smile on his face. Soon asked him if there had been some miraculous break in the case while he was gone. The chief said no, nothing like that had happened. However, he did have something exciting to show him.
The chief walked with Soon out back behind the station, and immediately Soon's face lit up. The other officers were all out there, standing next to a row of brand new bicycles. The chief told Soon he had met with members of the city government and discussed the murder case they were dealing with, and he told them it was larger in scope than anything they had ever dealt with.
And so the city government wanted to help the police solve the crime, and they figured by giving them bicycles, that would help them cover more ground and also just generally speed up the process. Even though Soon had spent most of the day feeling really bad about his investigation, feeling like it was going nowhere, now he couldn't help but feel rejuvenated. These bikes were a huge deal.
It meant his team could travel much farther and talk to more people far more efficiently. And Soon reminded himself that this was a community where almost everybody knew everybody. So someone out there had to know something about Lee that could point the police in the right direction. They just had to go out there and find that person.
Over the next several days, Soon and his team were out in force on their bikes, speaking to Lee's friends, his family, and just people all over the community. And finally, about a week after the discovery of Zhao's body, their work paid off. police got a tip from a factory worker in town.
The man didn't say much, but he told them to take a closer look into a robbery that had taken place at the factory's warehouse. Soon was quite familiar with this robbery. It had been a big deal in town. A large quantity of expensive steel pipes had been stolen from that warehouse, but the case had gone unsolved for months.
Soon didn't see how stolen pipes could possibly connect to Zhao's murder, but he'd been desperate for any new leads, and now he felt like he had one. So he took his bike and rode right over to the warehouse. When Soon walked inside, he saw men driving lifts through this vast open space, transporting materials across the floor to get ready for shipping.
One of the shift managers waved at Soon and then trotted across the floor to meet him. The guy was in his late 20s, and he introduced himself as Ho Le Chung. He led Soon into a nearby office that he said would be quieter than the warehouse floor. Once inside, Sun took a seat at a desk across from Ho and right away asked him what he knew about the missing steel pipes.
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Chapter 6: What inconsistencies were found in Zhao's husband Li's story?
Last year, law and crime brought you the trial that captivated the nation. She's accused of hitting her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe, with her car. Karen Reid is arrested and charged with second-degree murder. The six-week trial resulted in anything but resolution. We continue to find ourselves at an impasse. I'm declaring a mistrial in this case.
But now the case is back in the spotlight. And one question still lingers. Did Karen Reid kill John O'Keefe? The evidence is overwhelming that Karen Reid is innocent. How does it feel to be a cop killer, Karen? I'm Kristen Thorne, investigative reporter with Law & Crime and host of the podcast, Karen, The Retrial. This isn't just a retrial. It's a second chance at the truth.
I have nothing to hide. My life is in the balance and it shouldn't be.
I just want people to go back to who the victim is in this. It's not her.
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A couple weeks later, in early August, Detective Soon and his team continued to collect more information on Lee's possible involvement in the warehouse robbery. But they still weren't any closer to tracking him down. Soon sat at his desk, pouring over his notes from the robbery and the murder case like he did every day. And suddenly, he heard someone run into the building, screaming.
It was a man who was dripping with sweat and looked like he might pass out. Soon ran over to him, grabbed the man a chair so he could sit down, and asked him what was wrong. The man told him he had been out walking in the mountains just outside of town, and he saw these four guys pour gasoline over another man and then light him on fire. For a second, Soon just stood there in shock.
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