9/9/2021- 9:23 p.m.
China – Lao Rongzhi, aged 47, received the death penalty for her involvement in four cases of robbery, kidnap and murder, including killing a three-year-old girl, more than two decades ago, after being tried at a court in Nanchang, Jiangxi province southeast China, late last year.
Lao Rongzhi claims her former boyfriend coerced her into taking part and maintains she is innocent.
The woman, who was caught in 2019, said she would appeal immediately after the Nanchang Intermediate People’s Court pronounced the sentence. A notorious female serial killer who has been on the run for 20 years after killing seven people with her former boyfriend was sentenced to death in southeast China on Thursday.
During the two-day trial in December, she claimed her involvement in the crimes stopped at kidnapping and robbery and blamed her ex-lover, who had been executed.
The woman conspired with her ex-boyfriend, Fa Ziying, to kidnap, rob and murder seven people in four different cities including Nanchang, Wenzhou, Changzhou and Hefei, all in southeast China, between 1996 and 1999, the court said.
In one case in 1996, they murdered a couple and their three-year-old child before robbing their home.
Fa was apprehended in 1999 when collecting a ransom at the home of the last victim and executed later that year.
Lao escaped arrest with aid from Fa who helped cover her tracks by giving misleading information to the police after his arrest.
She then lived under false names and worked odd jobs in nightclubs for the following 20 years, until she was arrested in November 2019 at a shopping centre in Xiamen in the southeastern province of Fujian, where she was selling watches.
“We will make an appeal, as she has requested,” her elder brother Lao Shengqiao was quoted as saying.
During December’s hearing, Lao denied that her involvement in the crimes was intentional.
Instead, she had been abused and forced by Fa to take part in the crimes, she claimed.
