Man Murdered Stranger With Down's Syndrome As Cremation Substitute In China

A Chinese court has upheld a suspended death sentence for a man who kidnapped and killed a person with Down’s syndrome to enable another man to be buried instead of being cremated.

The convicted man, identified only as Huang, was hired in 2017 by the family of a wealthy man from Guangdong province who was dying of cancer. The dying man’s wish was to have a traditional burial and go against the government’s ban on traditional burials that only allow the deceased to be cremated.

Wanting to fulfill his last wish, his family hired Huang to find a decoy body that would be cremated in his place when the man died in February 2017.

But little did the family know, Huang committed a murder to provide for the substitute body. He spotted a man who appeared to have Down's Syndrome picking litter along the road in March 2017. Huang persuaded his victim, identified as Lin Shaoren, to get into a car and abducted him. Lin was made to drink a large volume of liquor until he passed out.

Huang confessed to the court how Lin was placed unconscious into a coffin that was prepared in advance and was sealed inside it with four steel nails. The coffin was then carried to a crossroad and swapped with the deceased cancer stricken man’s coffin two days later when the family was scheduled to send it over to the funeral home. Lin’s body was cremated while the other man’s body was secretly taken to a secluded area for a traditional burial.

After Lin’s sudden disappearance, he was reported as a missing person. However, it took police more than two years to uncover the crime and track down Huang after police used surveillance footage to solve the crime.

Huang was given a suspended death sentence in September 2020 which he appealed against. The Guangdong Higher People’s Court eventually dismissed the plea in December 2020 and a suspended death sentence was upheld.

This means that if Huang does not reoffend after two years, the sentence will be commuted to life in prison. Although the murder was committed in 2017, the case only gained much attention a week after an article about the incident came to the notice of a wider online audience in China.

The family who hired Huang was found guilty of "insulting a corpse", but they were not handed a prison sentence. It is unclear if they had to instead pay a fine. The family paid a total of 107,000 yuan (US$16,345), of which 90,000 yuan went to Huang while the rest went to a middleman named Wen, according to the South China Morning Post.

As China has increasingly been campaigning for people to refrain from burying their dead, some regions have imposed an outright ban on burials, the BBC wrote. This rule was intended to save land and discourage extravagant burial ceremonies.