Episode 106:
The Famous Reporter Who Stabbed His Girlfriend in Broad Daylight

June 3, 2011, 11:00 a.m., at a bus stop in Guiyang, China. Twenty-four-year-old reporter Zhao Feifei was waiting for her bus home after an all-night shift when she heard a familiar voice call her name from behind. She turned, and her expression instantly went rigid — standing before her was Yuan Jing, the last man she wanted to see, holding a blade more than a foot long.

Before she could scream, he lunged. She threw her arms up to defend herself, but it wasn't enough, and she collapsed to the ground. He seemed to walk away — then came back, and stabbed her unconscious body again and again, in broad daylight, on a busy street full of screaming bystanders. He slipped away in the chaos as sirens closed in. Zhao Feifei was rushed to the hospital, but her injuries were too severe. She didn't survive.

Middle School to the Same Dream

Their story began in middle school. Yuan Jing was at the top of his class but a complete outcast everyone avoided; Zhao Feifei was calm and deeply considerate, and she was the only one who reached out to him when his temper got him shunned. From then on they were inseparable, becoming a couple in high school and attending the same university, where they discovered they shared the same dream: to become reporters. Both graduated with honors, and both landed newspaper jobs around the same time.

Yuan Jing thrived. Brilliant and instinctive, he broke scoop after scoop and became the youngest chief reporter on staff by twenty-four. But at the height of his success, a darker side began to emerge — fury at juniors who wouldn't do things his way, a growing obsession with clickbait over truth. Zhao Feifei, closest to him, was the first to notice, and tried to rein him in. He saw her concern as nagging.

"You're an Embarrassment Now"

Drunk on his own fame, Yuan Jing grew embarrassed by the woman who'd stood beside him since middle school, picking apart her clothes, her hair, her appearance. He began pursuing a glamorous coworker, Lismond, using work as cover for secret dates. Unable to take it anymore, Zhao Feifei finally broke up with him — and he showed no remorse at all, going public with Lismond as if he'd been waiting for the excuse.

That relationship didn't last either; even while with Lismond, he compared her constantly to Zhao Feifei and tried to control her, and she eventually left him. So he turned back to Zhao Feifei — calling daily, writing letters, showing up in tears. Worn down, and unable to fully let go of someone who'd shared nearly half her life, she gave him another chance.

The Obsession Turns Violent

From the moment they got back together, Yuan Jing changed completely. Terrified she could really leave him, he constantly checked her phone and accused her of cheating over ordinary work contacts — once smashing her computer with a baseball bat over a strictly professional message to a coworker, then blaming her: "You made me like this."

The first time he hit her, he dropped to his knees afterward and begged forgiveness, insisting he'd only done it because he loved her too much and feared losing her. She tried to be patient, hoping he'd return to who he used to be. Instead, one evening while she was having dinner with her sister, he stormed into the restaurant, smashed a bottle, and assaulted her sister when she tried to intervene. That was the moment something in Zhao Feifei finally broke — she realized the man in front of her was no longer the person she thought she knew.

Stalked After the Breakup

In March 2011, Zhao Feifei cut all ties for good. But soon she noticed her belongings had been slightly moved whenever she came home — and one day found Yuan Jing hiding in her bathroom. He'd secretly copied her house key and had been letting himself in while she was out. He began following her home, driving aggressively enough to nearly cause accidents. She got a restraining order, but he simply grew more devious, once using a stranger to lure her to a meeting under the pretense of a news tip, only for him to be the one waiting there instead.

Zhao Feifei stopped being able to live a normal life — jumping at the sound of her own name, terrified of footsteps behind her, unable to sleep, eventually too afraid to go outside. Meanwhile, the one thing Yuan Jing couldn't bear was the idea that she might be happy without him.

A Year on the Run

Zhao Feifei survived the first attack. If Yuan Jing had simply left the scene, she likely would have lived — but as he walked away, rage overtook him at the thought that she'd ignored him, and he turned back to finish what he'd started. He vanished immediately afterward, using a fake ID he'd prepared in advance, and the trail went cold for a full year until investigators noticed his father repeatedly visiting a region with no known family ties. Surveillance led police to a rural supermarket, where they arrested him without resistance — he simply gave them an awkward smile.

The first thing he grabbed at the time of arrest was his diary, filled with a year's worth of entries about his feelings for Zhao Feifei, many of them letters beginning "To my Feifei in Heaven." Not one showed remorse. Every page was self-pity, casting himself as a tragic hero rather than her killer.

Final Thoughts

Yuan Jing confessed to a baffling motive: he killed Zhao Feifei simply because she wouldn't come back to him. At trial, he openly admitted to the crime but never showed real remorse, framing what he'd done as a tragedy born of love rather than the murder of a woman he treated as his own possession until the very end. The court condemned his excuses and sentenced him to death; the fact that a reporter whose job was to expose injustice had committed something this brutal only deepened the public's outrage. His appeal was rejected, and he was executed on June 24, 2014 — weeping and claiming repentance in his final moments, far too late to matter.