A 47-year-old Chinese woman who spent most of her life searching for her young brother’s cruel killer recently reached her goal, putting her target in prison after nearly three decades.
Li Haiyu’s heartbreaking tale of revenge began in December of 1992 when the woman’s father and another man started arguing about wages. Things got so heated between them that at one point, the other man decided to get back at Haiyu’s father by kidnapping his 9-year-old son, Li Huanping, as he left school. Police were called and a search for the boy and his kidnapper was organized in the area around their village in Hunan Province. Li Huanping’s clothes were found on the outskirts of a nearby village, but his body was only found in February of the following year, by which time his kidnapper had disappeared. The police report concluded that he had been stabbed and abandoned in a sugarcane field, but his father didn’t tell his wife and five daughters the truth until his dying day, letting them hold on to the hope of one day being reunited with Li Huanping.
According to the Xiaoxiang Morning News, Li Haiyu started searching for her younger brother in 1997. She knew he had been abducted and traveled to the provinces of Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou and Guangxi to find him, facing all sorts of challenges. She was cheated by people looking to take advantage of her desperation to find Li Huanping and almost abducted herself on at least two occasions. But she never gave up hope.
It was only in 2014, when her father took his own life leaving behind a note for his family, that Li Haiyu learned about her little brother’s fate. Her father wrote that he had never given up the search for his son’s killer, but after years of fruitless searching, he just couldn’t bear waking up every day. At first, Haiyu was angry about her father’s deceit, but later understood his desire to protect them from the cold hard truth of her brother’s brutal death, and decided to carry on the search for his killer.
In his final note, Li Haiyu’s father revealed the name of his son’s murderer, Yi Mouqing, as well as his home town and details about his appearance, so the woman moved to Ningbo, in Zhejiang, and waited there until she found someone fitting Yi’s description. Da Wan News reports that Li Haiyu struck up a conversation with the man under pretext of looking for a job, and managed to learn his name, Yi Mouhua. It was close enough to raise suspicion, but not enough to alert the authorities, so Li Haiyu stayed in touch with him in order to learn more information.
Despite being sick to her stomach about acting friendly to her brother’s murderer, Li Haiyu spent roughly three years talking to Yi Mouhua, getting to know him and trying to earn his trust. Then at one point, when the opportunity presented itself, she asked him if he was Yi Mouqing or Yi Mouhua, because she had heard people call him both, to which he casually answered: “My name is Yi Mouhua, but Yi Mouqing is my childhood name. Two names, but one person.”
Li Haiyu bit her tongue with excitement when she heard her brother’s killer confirm his identity, but she didn’t let it show, for fear of raising suspicion. She then contacted the police and accompanied them as they arrested the runaway criminal just so he could see who had orchestrated his capture. The arrest was inducted in 2020, but a Chinese court ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict the suspect. In November of 2022, the Procuratorate overruled the previous decision and in September of this year, Li Huanping’s killer was once again brought before a judge.
Yi Mouqing admitted to luring his rival’s son with apples on that fateful day in 1992, but Li Haiyu, who spent most of her life chasing him all over China, thought his attitude in front of the Court was arrogant. “I felt that he was judging us, not the court judging him,” she told reporters, adding that she hoped Mouqing would get the death penalty for his crime. Se now plans to bring her brother’s remains back to her hometown, so he can finally rest in peace.
