Episode 109:
The Pregnant Wife Who Hunted Innocent Girl for Husband

July 24, 2013, 3:00 p.m. Seventeen-year-old A, living in China's Heilongjiang province, had spent the day cleaning her house ahead of a visit from her friend Yixuan Hu, a fellow vocational high schooler she hadn't seen in a while. Both girls were interning at hospitals — Yixuan in the OB-GYN department — and had finally carved out a free Wednesday afternoon to meet up.

Just as A finished cleaning, she got a text: "I'm on my way, but I just ran into a pregnant woman out here. She's not feeling good so I'll come after I drop her home." It sounded reasonable enough — Yixuan lived only ten minutes away. But an hour passed, then more, with no sign of her and no answer to any calls. A went out looking, found nothing, and alerted Yixuan's family. They searched all night. The seventeen-year-old had simply vanished.

The Woman Who Collapsed Twice

Police pulled every security camera between the girls' homes and found Yixuan's last movements: at 3:15 p.m., in a floral shirt and shorts, carrying a blue umbrella, she turned into an alley — where a heavily pregnant woman stood at the far end. The moment the woman spotted Yixuan, she stumbled, grabbed her for support, and the two walked off together into a nearby apartment complex. It matched Yixuan's text perfectly. Until an officer reviewing the footage stopped the tape and rewound it — before Yixuan appeared, the pregnant woman had been pacing the alley for a while, scanning it like she was searching for someone. Her collapse hadn't been an accident. It had been staged.

A Suitcase Leaving the Building

Three hours later, at 6:18 p.m. — while Yixuan's family searched the same alley in a panic — the same woman reappeared, this time with a man, hauling a large suitcase into a car trunk before driving off. Investigators went door to door with stills from the footage and quickly identified the pair: twenty-eight-year-old Beibei Tan and thirty-seven-year-old Yunjian Bai, a legally married couple. After tracing their background, police found them hiding in Yunjian's hometown.

Beibei was caught first, on the evening of July 28, and confessed to the murder without hesitation — but insisted she'd acted alone and claimed not to know where her husband was. Police doubted that; his wife was nine months pregnant and could go into labor any day, so he couldn't have gone far. Searching vacant houses nearby, they found Yunjian at dawn the next morning. Unlike his wife, he fought his arrest violently, screaming the entire way to the station that Beibei alone was responsible and that he'd had nothing to do with it.

The Yogurt and the Bedroom

The contradiction — Beibei's full confession against Yunjian's insistence she'd framed him — gave police an opening. When they mentioned to Beibei what her husband was claiming, something in her broke; hands shaking with what looked like genuine betrayal, she finally told the whole story.

Beibei had spotted Yixuan in the alley and recognized her as exactly her husband's type — young, tall, slender. She staged her collapse, begged for help getting home, and Yixuan — trained in obstetric care and sympathetic to her apparent distress — agreed without a second thought, texting her friend an update before walking Beibei to her apartment, unit 501. Beibei insisted she come in for a drink first. Yixuan accepted, drank a yogurt drink Beibei handed her, and within ten minutes collapsed — dosed with a massive amount of Clonazepam, an anti-anxiety medication. Beibei watched her go down with a chilling smile before calling into the bedroom: "Honey, you can come out now." Yunjian emerged, and Beibei told him, "Here's your present, honey. A virgin, just like you asked for."

Not the First Attempt

Yunjian tied the unconscious girl to the bed and tore off her clothes, only to discover she was on her period — and flew into a rage at his wife over the failure. With no assault to hide and a witness they couldn't release, the couple smothered Yixuan with a pillow while she was still drugged and unable to resist. They packed her body into a travel bag, drove roughly twenty kilometers to a dense cornfield tall enough to hide in, and dumped her there before fleeing to Yunjian's hometown, betting that in a country as vast as China, neither the body nor they themselves would ever be found. They were arrested four days later.

The disposal was too smooth, and Beibei's calm, unemotional account of a supposedly unplanned killing didn't sit right with investigators, who began digging into the couple's past. What they found was disturbing: Yixuan wasn't the first target. A month after Yunjian learned — from old coworkers taunting him during a drinking session — that Beibei wasn't a virgin when they married, he beat his then seven-months-pregnant wife in a rage over feeling he'd been given "used goods." Desperate to appease him, Beibei proposed finding and bringing him a virgin as atonement, and he agreed. Starting June 25, the couple made repeated attempts: drugging his own ten-year-old daughter's elementary school friend, Su, in a failed assault; trying to lure his friend Kang and Kang's girlfriend into a robbery-and-assault scheme that collapsed when Kang sensed something was wrong and left early; then shifting to strangers, with the visibly pregnant Beibei approaching young women on the street to lower their guard. Two earlier targets — a thirteen-year-old and a twenty-year-old — declined the drinks offered to them and got away safely. Yixuan didn't.

Final Thoughts

The couple initially claimed the killing was an impulsive act to silence Yixuan after a failed assault — but police rejected that framing outright, pointing to four prior attempts, purchased burlap sacks, and premeditated drugging as proof this had been planned from the start. At trial in June 2014, Beibei admitted everything; Yunjian maintained to the end that the entire scheme had been his wife's idea alone, despite having actively hunted victims alongside her.

The case sparked national outrage across China, with backlash extending even to the couple's families — Beibei's twin sister had her engagement broken off, and Yunjian's brother's business was driven toward bankruptcy. In a final grim twist, Beibei gave birth the following month, in June 2013, at the very hospital where Yixuan had interned. Neither set of grandparents would raise the child, who was adopted out at two months old with all record of her biological parents erased. Beibei and Yunjian were sentenced to death, and after their appeal was denied, executed by firing squad on January 30, 2015. What makes the case especially bitter is how deliberately it exploited kindness itself — a young woman trained to help people in medical distress, killed for showing exactly the compassion her training had taught her.