Studied Thousands of Murder Cases and Found Some Problems

This article is from the WeChat public account: Liuzhen, Author: Pao Ge

Last weekend, I stumbled upon a question on Zhihu: do professional hitmen actually exist?

At first glance, the answer seems obvious. We've watched so many movies and TV shows over the years that constantly portray these cool, highly skilled professionals—give them money, and they'll kill and rob for you, cleanly and without a trace. Once the job is done, they vanish, hiding their merits and fame.

And we instinctively feel that in reality, there must be wealthy people with such needs, which would naturally spawn this kind of industry.

I suddenly had a brainstorm: nowadays, the vast majority of cases are public, especially in countries like China, the US, Europe, Japan, and South Korea. If someone has three lives on their hands, unless the cases involve national security, they can be looked up. Some cases have even been made into movies.

So, using a weekend, I went through all the cases in China over the past twenty years where the perpetrator had three or more victims, and did the same for similar cases in the US. Indeed, there are none.

People's first reaction might be that there should be many, but actually, there aren't. And most of them don't even need a second look. In reality, the vast majority of murder cases involve debts or crimes of passion. They are generally very impulsive—often someone gets stabbed in a moment of rage, or beaten to death in a group brawl, and the perpetrator quickly turns themselves in. Just reading the summary tells you the whole story. Because of this, I was able to skim through over a thousand cases very quickly.

Based on current realities, the kind of professional hitman seen in movies—who independently takes orders, works long-term and stably like a freelancer making a living off killing—simply does not exist from the perspective of real-world evidence. Truly high-IQ crimes, with the complex designs similar to those in movies, are almost never seen.

You might argue: what if some master has been doing this business all along but just hasn't been caught?

That's entirely possible. But given the current level of law enforcement in China and the US, the fact that not a single case has emerged over so many years is very telling. Even if they do exist, they are extremely sporadic—so sporadic that the massive police forces of both China and the US can't catch them. Especially these days, with surveillance cameras and the Skynet system everywhere, trying to hide after committing multiple murders is as hard as scaling the heavens.

There is, however, a profession quite close to that of a hitman: gang enforcers. This role has always existed. For instance, drug cartels in the US—like the Mafia or the Mexican cartels—all keep a group of grassroots enforcers to do their dirty work.

In China, the organized crime groups busted in recent years, such as the notorious Liu Han syndicate, generally had a few people who were nominally security guards but privately acted as enforcers, specifically doing the dirty work.

However, these people generally have no professionalism to speak of. They are mainly bold, obedient, reckless, and prone to violence, living the marginal life of fighting and killing, which doesn't interfere with their daily work and study.

For example, in the notorious Liu Han organization, there was a security captain named Tang Xianbing. He used to be unemployed; later, much like Lao Mo in the TV show "The Knockout," he followed the boss Liu Han and did his dirty work, taking out three people for him successively. He also made a lot of money, living a high-end life of luxury for a few years.

And then, he was caught and executed. Perhaps deep down, he felt "it was worth it."

But as those who frequently kill know, killing is easy, but covering your tracks is hard. The "covering tracks" mentioned here doesn't just mean cleaning up the crime scene; it also includes social traces. For instance, who the victim had bad blood with, who they had conflicts with (the police will definitely check where you were at that time), where they worked, their behavioral trajectory before death, their transfer and consumption records—these cannot be destroyed, and the police can easily follow the clues to find you.

What's more outrageous is that many apps have the bad habit of secretly tracking your location. Even if you smash your phone, those apps will still record the phone's trajectory in the cloud, which is hard to anticipate. And even if anticipated, it can't be erased.

Therefore, being a gang enforcer has always been an extremely high-risk profession; often, they get locked up after killing just one person. In China, due to underdeveloped infrastructure in the past, some slipped through the net. But in recent years, things have caught up, and the case-solving rate is very high. Once those enforcers commit a crime, they basically can't hide for long.

What does exist in various countries are "serial killers"—people who kill not for money or anything else, but purely out of psychopathy. For example, the famous American Ted Bundy, who killed over thirty people. In China, the notorious Baiyin serial killer, with 11 lives on his hands, was also a psychopath who was eventually caught through DNA.

There are also those ruthless bandits. One named Cheng Ruilong robbed and killed, murdering 13 people in total, and was executed in 2010. There's also Zhou Kehua, who wasn't hired but mainly killed to rob, and under such high-intensity crime, it didn't take long for him to be caught.

In the past, when DNA technology was underdeveloped and surveillance coverage was poor, these people had some room to survive, but in recent years, their numbers have dropped sharply.

At this point, you might think: this doesn't make sense. You feel like there's a market demand for this, right? Just like drug trafficking—where there's demand, there's supply, right?

That's what I thought at first, but upon careful consideration, I realized that's not true: the demand is too scattered.

Killing and robbing is somewhat similar to drug trafficking; both sound like high-risk, high-reward jobs, but they aren't exactly the same. Drug addicts tend to gather in nightclubs and underground casinos, making the demand quite concentrated. Moreover, addicts have a long-term need for repeated use. This concentration and repeat-purchase nature spawns the drug trafficking industry.

Murder is different. The demand is too dispersed. Apart from gangs and the like, no one has a long-term, stable need for killing. The repeat-purchase rate is too low, which severely hinders industry development.

Furthermore, the cost is ridiculously high, and there's no retirement. After all, if a person disappears for no reason, the case won't just be quietly closed. The police will pursue it for ten or even twenty years, and this is a systemic manhunt. It won't end just because a certain police officer resigns; it's an endless, long-term investigation, just like the Baiyin serial killer case, where the police spent nearly 26 years continuously investigating.

Even more importantly, hiring a hitman is an underground industry with extremely high risks, and there's no good way to ensure the transaction proceeds smoothly.

For example, if you want to hire a hitman, neither you nor the other party dares to reveal your identities. How do you know if they will actually do the job after taking the money? Or if they'll just take the money and run?

There is no refund mechanism, making it hard to trust them. They don't trust you either—what if you get caught and rat them out?

Besides, there's an even more crucial issue: how do you know the other party isn't a cop running a sting operation? In fact, the US has already caught several people trying to hire hitmen through sting operations. Previously, there was a famous hitman website on the US dark web called Besa Mafia. It turned out there were more undercover cops on it than "hitmen," and it never facilitated a single successful transaction, though it did facilitate a few scams.

It's evident that a transaction with limited profit, infinite risk, and an absurdly long execution cycle is inherently very difficult to complete.

Think about it: why is it so convenient and reassuring to buy things on those shopping platforms? Because transactions are protected by law, and the platforms provide credit backing. If a transaction falls through, the worst-case scenario is a refund, with no subsequent liability.

But "hiring a hitman" is the exact opposite: there is no legal protection, only permanent liability, so the transaction cost becomes absurdly high. There was a case before where a boss offered 2 million to hire a hitman. After the contract was subcontracted down through five layers, the final guy only got 100,000. He didn't actually carry out the hit either; he just committed fraud.

This shows that without a trust mechanism, high-cost black-market transactions will inevitably lead to fraud and collapse.

Moreover, after reviewing many cases, I found that real-world violent crimes are almost always quite stupid. They are typically full of chaos, stupidity, impulsiveness, and low-tech methods, making it very easy to leave clues. In an era of underdeveloped technology, they might have escaped, but now it is extremely, extremely difficult. Solving a case doesn't even require forensic masters; it's pure manual labor—carefully screening surveillance footage and interpersonal relationships solves more than half of them.

This also explains why, in the real world, it's very hard for strangers to form agreements. But within gangs, stable, long-term relationships can form because their repeat-purchase rate is high, and there is mutual trust, which is why gangs have those enforcers.

In the awesome American TV series "Breaking Bad," a hugely popular character, Mike, was cleverly introduced. He worked as a cop for decades, was extremely familiar with the policing system and procedures, and understood police investigative methods, so he was good at this kind of work.

But in reality, such people are very, very rare in American gangs and drug cartels. The ones acting as enforcers are mostly brainless, marginal thugs.

So, to sum it up, it's very clear.

A normal country definitely monopolizes violence. If someone can use violence at a low cost, it will cause the state's authority to collapse. Therefore, as long as state authority exists, it will not allow an independent lone-wolf killer organization to exist. Thus, it drives the expected cost of killing to a ridiculously high level—if caught, you're executed. Moreover, it deploys national-level resources to investigate, with a nearly unlimited statute of limitations, making this business almost impossible to profit from in the long run.

Unless you buy off the entire judicial system. In the era of Liu Han, it was still possible to maneuver a bit, like bribing a few key figures, but now it's almost impossible.

Do you know the Baiyin case? A villain killed 11 women and left some DNA. The police hunted him for 26 years until a distant relative of the killer was detained for drunk driving, and the public security system found that his Y-DNA matched the previous sample. They then checked all the males in his family and fished out the killer. Relying on this technology, several other major cases were subsequently solved.

The funny thing is, after that Baiyin guy was arrested, he said he stopped committing crimes after his child was born, to avoid affecting the child's chances of passing civil service background checks in the future. This can be considered a kind of cost constraint. If there were professional hitmen, they might also worry about their children's future careers being affected by political background checks.

Of course, there is an exception. Some violent organizations similar to hitman groups do legally exist, but they are essentially appendages of the state's apparatus of violence, such as the mercenary organizations like Blackwater and Wagner, or intelligence agencies like Mossad. Mossad frequently carries out overseas assassination missions and is relatively more professional. But even they often can't keep it a secret; Mossad's major operations can all be found online.

Conversely, in countries with unsound legal systems—like Mexico, Colombia, or those in Africa—the state's investigative and punitive capabilities are insufficient. When the benefits of killing outweigh the costs, it naturally spawns this industry. The famous movie "Sicario"—the English title is actually the Spanish word for "hitman"—is a reality in the lawless zones of Mexico.

Ultimately, whether professional hitmen exist or not is really not just some sensational topic. It's more like a society's "health code"—if killing someone can be ordered and paid for as easily as ordering takeout, it means that society is deeply sick.

Moreover, once a human life can be explicitly priced, no one is safe. Today you think 2 million can buy someone else's life; tomorrow, someone might want to buy yours for 20,000. You might think you haven't offended anyone, but your kidneys and heart might be useful to others. If this situation escalates, no one will end up well.

Fortunately, this kind of thing is basically unworkable. Not because no one has ever thought about it, but because the state has blocked this path too tightly: surveillance cameras are everywhere, DNA checks trace back three generations, transfer records are crystal clear, and even the IP address you use to scroll through short videos in the middle of the night can be located. More importantly, the government really will chase you for decades. This certainty of "you can't escape" is far more effective than any slogan or moral constraint.

Frankly speaking, an ordinary person suspecting the existence of professional hitmen but being unsure of it is the best kind of order. Living in a garbage environment like Mexico, no one would doubt it—just like no one doubts whether the moon is still in the sky—but that kind of society has no hope left.