National Forensic Doctor
Chapter 645 - 589: Excellent

Chapter 645: Chapter 589: Excellent

Jiang Yuan and his team were fully prepared for the latest developments, seriously dividing into several squads to follow the leads of Zhang Haobin’s several ex-girlfriends and investigating them separately.

As it turned out, there was no need.

If the Zhang Family’s heads, such as Zhang Xiulan, still had a sense of counter-surveillance, the 20-year-old Zhang Haobin, once the fearless scion of Litang Township’s Zhang Family, was arrogant to the point of wanting everyone to know how awesome he was. He never hid his activities, especially not when it came to having beautiful girlfriends. For Zhang Haobin to set his social media profile to "semi-public" for six months was already a display of respect for his current girlfriend.

As his several mobile phone numbers were exposed, almost all of Zhang Haobin’s movements and timelines could be found on various social media platforms. Text and photos, sometimes videos, were available without the need for police to toil in their search.

When the police brought photos and names to interrogate Zhang Haobin again, he completely fell apart and confessed in detail to the murder methods and the burial sites.

It should be said, Zhang Haobin had already crumbled once before; it was only because his family had given him a preemptive warning that he managed to hold on a little longer.

However, when a new set of evidence emerged, Zhang Haobin’s defenses utterly collapsed.

The 20-year-old Zhang Haobin didn’t quite understand the difference between the death penalty, a reprieve, and life imprisonment. With his personality, he fantasized a life of luxury and pleasure. Rather than being locked in prison for 20 years, coming out at 40, he would prefer...

This thought, people at 40 generally disagree with, but that’s how a 20-year-old thinks.

Most importantly, Zhang Haobin wasn’t immediately facing the death penalty, and with Meng Chengbiao’s coaxing and provoking, Zhang Haobin slipped up.

He didn’t realize that for the police, there was a huge gap between filing a case and solving one. Especially with burial cases, if the murderer keeps tight-lipped, sometimes the body really can’t be found. In such cases, even if the death penalty can be handed down, it might be delayed for a long time.

Of course, with so much information exposed, facing Jiang Yuan, it was very difficult for Zhang Haobin to achieve this goal.

So he collapsed, and collapsed. It could be considered a time and energy saver for both parties. From this perspective, Zhang Haobin was also wise. Given his modus operandi when committing crimes, if Jiang Yuan were to scrutinize him closely, he wouldn’t have lasted long anyway.

Wu Junhao led his team to the location Zhang Haobin had indicated. They indeed found two women’s bodies under a cliff.

"This guy had quite a plan in mind, intending to find some detonators later to collapse this cliff, and then these bodies would have been even harder to find," Meng Chengbiao, who came with Jiang Yuan to examine the bodies, recalled the information Zhang Haobin had confessed, feeling a chill.

"No matter how well he hides the bodies, what use is it if he himself gives it away," Wu Junhao said, but he also felt that Zhang Haobin’s plan was cruelly sophisticated. If he had actually managed to collapse the cliff, thousands of tons of earth and rock would bury the site. The depth could be more than ten meters, and even if the place was known, it would not be easy to dig them out again.

"He planned to blast the cliff... was he planning to bury more bodies underneath?" Jiang Yuan looked at the position of the graves, very close to the cliff, which didn’t seem to be chosen randomly.

Meng Chengbiao "hummed" and said, "I think he intended that, but he didn’t express it explicitly."

Uncommitted crimes couldn’t be convicted, so Meng Chengbiao couldn’t keep holding onto them.

"Neither of the victims’ families reported the missing girls?" Jiang Yuan stood waiting, with two forensic assistants and two young police officers digging ahead.

Meng Chengbiao’s face grew darker: "The two girls he picked were both orphans."

"Huh?" Jiang Yuan was somewhat surprised.

"When a fool turns into a devil, that’s what happens. His first crime might have been coincidental, but after that, it became a pattern," Meng Chengbiao said coldly, "like a ritual."

The police officers on the scene instantly grasped his meaning; many criminals actually have similar tendencies, especially the less educated ones. He didn’t understand why, nor did he want to know why. They just committed crimes following their successful experiences, and by fluke, they often managed to avoid detection for a time.

Meanwhile, some criminals with higher education levels often liked to innovate, and in changing their methods, they often ended up incriminating themselves.

"It’s been dug up," reported the forensic assistant.

Jiang Yuan and the others approached and began to carefully shovel away the dirt, collecting the skeletal remains from the grave.

The death time for both bodies was less than two years, meaning Zhang Haobin had only killed his two previous girlfriends in the last two years.

Why there was such a change was probably due to some unique psychological journey of his own, but Jiang Yuan and his team didn’t care.

For such people, as long as you could ensure their execution, that was enough; understanding more would only bring more frustration.

During the process of collecting the bones, a luminescent blue dumpling flowed into Jiang Yuan’s hands:

Yu Dongyue’s legacy: Japanese Makeup Art (LV2)—Yu Dongyue considered her face a canvas, painting on it a blueprint for hope. She often fantasized about being a princess, an ugly duckling, dreaming her parents would descend from heaven and take her away... But her fantasies never became reality. Only when she made herself up seriously, would men treat her seriously—how she wished she could rise on the wind, becoming a free and easy swan...

Jiang Yuan silently collected the legacy, counted Yu Dongyue’s bones, found the hyoid, and confirmed its fractures, that was it.

...

With the deepening of the interrogation, the number of cases involving the Zhang Family turned out to be many times that of the Jin Family.

It was then that Jiang Yuan could understand why the old detectives used to value pre-trial investigations so much. For a long time, many police stations had treated the pre-trial division as the core for solving cases.

Catching a veteran thief and digging deeper, finding more cases, naming more suspects, linking one to another, there wasn’t any need to spend time and effort solving the cases, and the quantity of solved cases was even higher.

Take the Zhang Family, for example; with relatives spread across several families, nearly a hundred people could end up in prison, with the longer-term convicts facing execution, and the median sentence would have to be upwards of five years.

Jiang Yuan could imagine that four or five years later, when the people of the Zhang Family and Jin Family began to gradually "graduate" from prison, the officers at Litang Township Police Station would definitely be overwhelmed with work.

In fact, the best approach would be to keep the Zhang Family and Jin Family living in a separate area, which would also facilitate the provision of necessary police support, and if needed, even their dining and daily consumption could be arranged, and a certain amount of work provided, like in simple labor-intensive industries...

"Chuanxing, let’s work on new cases," Jiang Yuan called Wang Chuanxing over to continue helping him organize the cases.

Even small cases have all their essentials; searching through them alone was far too inefficient.

Wang Chuanxing seemed quite enthusiastic. Phrases like "eradicating evil completely" were still very attractive to detectives. Following Jiang Yuan on cases, they could achieve comprehensive results, which everyone intuitively felt good about.

Moreover, as the Litang Township’s police station completed a rapid and large number of cases, continually reporting the achievements also caught the attention of superiors.

Soon, Cui Xiaohu once again arrived in Ningtai County... Litang Township with a full smile on his face.

Station Chief Tang Xiaobo greeted the comrade from the ministry with a bewildered face.

As a veteran police station chief rooted in the countryside for more than twenty years, Tang Xiaobo had rarely seen any provincial officials, and it was his first time ever seeing staff from the ministry.

If he were a decade or so younger, Tang Xiaobo might have other thoughts, but at his current age and work status, he only found it outrageous.

Looking at Cui Xiaohu’s smile, Tang Xiaobo couldn’t help wondering: We’re all working at the police station, you guys are even just temporary workers, how come all you colleagues are so exceptional?