Chapter 835: Four Legal Illiterates
In the interrogation room, Lu Chuan had already arranged for the four people to be questioned separately.
"We didn’t mean to kill her back then, we just wanted to teach that homewrecker a lesson for seducing my brother‑in‑law."
Li Guifang freely confessed to personally committing the crime.
"How did you find her home?"
"The private detective my brother‑in‑law hired told us."
According to what Li Guifang explained, it wasn’t the first or second time they had gone looking for trouble with Lin Ting.
"My sister found out in March this year that my brother‑in‑law seemed to be seeing someone outside, so she arranged for a private detective to tail him for a period of time."
The first pot of gold that made Zhang Shaoyang rich came from his father‑in‑law, and he himself had married into his wife’s family.
So his status at home was never very high.
Later, after he borrowed a sum of money from his father‑in‑law and made his business flourish, he had his own money, but his wife, Li Guifen, felt that all of this had been obtained thanks to her father’s family.
So she still maintained a lofty attitude and kept a very tight watch on Zhang Shaoyang.
"I didn’t kill her, I just slapped her a few times, it has nothing to do with me."
In another interrogation room, Li Guifeng’s cousin was also being questioned.
"Our family needed to build a house, we just came to borrow some money."
"Cousin said she wanted us to vent some anger for her, to give some woman trouble. We figured it was no big deal, so we went along with her."
This actually wasn’t the first conflict the four of them had had with Lin Ting.
Last month, when Lin Ting went to the hospital for a pregnancy termination, it was because she was forced by Li Guifang to go.
"Why should that bastard be born? To split my son’s inheritance?"
"I didn’t threaten her, she was the one who wanted to abort it herself..."
Chen Jiang was in charge of questioning Li Guifen herself.
"Li Guifen, you still haven’t realized how serious this is. This is no longer about whether your husband was cheating or not, this is about the fact that you all committed murder!"
"We found your fingerprints on the fruit knife in the room where the victim was killed!"
"You, together with your younger sister and your cousins, are suspected of abusing and killing someone."
"According to the statements from those three, they were all acting on your orders, so you are the mastermind behind this homicide as well as a direct participant."
"And before killing the victim, you abused her; after killing her you sinked the body into the river, the circumstances are extremely vile. You’re going to be sentenced to death, do you understand?"
Death penalty?
Li Guifen, who had been arrogant just moments before, was suddenly stunned.
"Death penalty?"
"I don’t want to die!"
"You’re lying to me! I don’t want to die!"
"It was that homewrecker who seduced my husband first, she deserved to die, why should I have to die?"
"I don’t want to die!"
"Officer! Call my husband! Call him, tell him to come save me!"
"Save me!"
Conference room.
The interrogations were already over.
Everyone was reporting to Lu Chuan.
"The one I questioned is called Wang Shengli, he’s Li Guifen’s cousin. He only finished middle school, doesn’t know anything. This time he came with his brother just wanting to borrow some money to go back home and build a house."
"They ran into Li Guifen, found out about her husband’s affair, and under her instigation—or you could say at her demand—the few of them found Lin Ting a month ago and forced her to abort the baby."
"After that, the private detective hired by Li Guifen found out that the apartment Lin Qing was living in was paid for by her husband, so Li Guifen demanded that Lin Ting give the apartment back to their family."
"Four days ago they went to her place intending to teach Lin Ting a lesson, tortured her for over an hour, and ended up killing her."
"Li Guifen used a nylon cord to strangle Lin Ting’s neck, while the other three held her so she couldn’t struggle."
"According to them, they had only meant to scare Lin Ting, but they didn’t expect that Li Guifen used too much force and she died."
"After that, with no other choice, the Wang Shengli brothers bought a large suitcase at the entrance of the complex, stuffed the body into it, and then got a car at the gate and dumped the body into the Fen River."
"Because they were afraid the victim’s identity would be exposed, they stripped all the clothes off her body."
"Everything in the apartment was looted by them. In Li Guifen’s words, all those things were bought by her husband, they belonged to their family, so they had to take them."
Wang Zhaokai roughly went over the results of his interrogation.
Chen Jiang nodded. "They’re consistent with what I got on my end."
"Three months ago, Li Guifen suspected that her husband was having an affair, so she hired a private detective to tail him and ended up discovering what was going on between Lin Ting and her husband."
"But in reality, although the relationship between Lin Ting and Zhang Shaoyang was an affair, it wasn’t Lin Ting who seduced Zhang Shaoyang at the beginning."
"Based on what I’ve learned from a close female friend of Lin Ting’s at the company, Lin Ting and Zhang Shaoyang once went out drinking, she was forced to drink until she blacked out, and they ended up together in a muddled state."
"That was when Zhang Shaoyang bought the apartment for Lin Ting; the two of them got together after that."
"Later on, not long after, Lin Ting resigned."
"The private detective was a local in Haizhou City; I’ve already sent people to arrest him."
Lu Chuan looked at the others. "Any discrepancies?"
Everyone shook their heads.
After the four were arrested, they fully confessed to all their crimes, and the sequence of events they described matched the surveillance footage uncovered in the investigation.
Li Guifen was the instigator and also the primary perpetrator of the killing; the other three were accomplices.
"All right, if there’s no problem, get ready to take the four suspects to the scene for a walkthrough and identification."
"Yes!"
In the apartment where the crime occurred, the four of them reenacted how they killed Lin Ting.
Then they went to the Fen River.
At the spot where Lin Ting’s sneakers had been found, the four pointed out the exact location where they had dumped the body.
Just as everyone had expected.
When they dumped the body, they had actually tied stones to it, but the bindings were loose, so after being washed by the current underwater, the body floated back up.
Thus, the body was discovered three days later.
The motive, the murder weapon, and the entire process were all clear; the Criminal Investigation Team notified all relevant parties.
There were two things that surprised everyone.
The first was that when Lin Ting went to the hospital for the pregnancy termination, the person who went with her wasn’t her mother, but someone she had randomly hired.
The other was that throughout what happened during the epidemic, Zhang Shaoyang had been aware of everything.
Including when the four of them—Li Guifen and the others—went to Lin Qing’s place to threaten her, and when they killed Lin Qing, Zhang Shaoyang actually knew all about it.
"I told them to turn themselves in, but they wouldn’t listen."
"Then why didn’t you call the police?"
"I..."
"Even if you had no feelings for Lin Ting and only wanted her for her looks, she was carrying your child, wasn’t she? You could just stand by while your wife and her relatives killed her and not even call the police?"
"Are you still human?"