Episode 147:
A Mother-in-Law’s Twisted Love Ended in Murder
One day in November 2010, a woman in her sixties walked into a police station in China. Officers assumed she was lost or trying to get out of the cold. Instead, she calmly told a detective that she had killed someone and had come to turn herself in. She was 65-year-old Xiuying Liu. Skeptical, police went to her apartment and found the walls, furniture, and floor covered in blood. In the middle of the living room lay the body of a young woman with deep wounds concentrated on her neck, and the strong smell of gasoline coming from her body.
The victim was 31-year-old Yili Xu, a university professor and Liu's daughter-in-law. Liu laid out her story without hesitation, and from beginning to end it revolved around one person: her son.
A Mother Who Would Not Let Go
Liu had been divorced three times, and her son, Gangbiao Dong, was all she had left. Even while living hand-to-mouth in the countryside, she made sure he ate well and attended good academies. He got into a prestigious university, went on to graduate school, and in 2003 became a professor. Rather than step back, Liu moved into his faculty housing, and the two shared a single room. Two years later he began dating Yili Xu, a young professor at the same university who was well liked by her students and had a mind of her own. Liu wanted a daughter-in-law who would be obedient to her, and she fiercely opposed the relationship. Her son married Xu in secret and moved into Xu's home. Furious but unable to undo it, Liu showed up at the newlyweds' home saying she would help with housework, and stayed. Xu gave her a room of her own, but Liu said she had always slept beside her son and couldn't sleep without him, so for months all three shared one bed, with Liu nudging Xu toward the edge to lie next to him. To the police, she claimed that from that moment on she had been the one abused: made to sleep on a cot in the living room, treated like a maid, and ignored even on her birthday, until she finally snapped.
What Everyone Else Described
Relatives, neighbors, and colleagues told police the opposite. The living-room bed Liu complained about existed only because Xu had finally pleaded with her husband that a married couple couldn't go on sleeping beside his mother. Xu did all the housework, and when she once asked her husband to wash the dishes while she was sick, Liu flew into a rage and phoned Xu's mother to ask what she had taught her daughter. Liu hoarded boxes and cans from the neighborhood until the home smelled of garbage, refused to flush the toilet to save money, and left a faucet dripping into a bucket all night, which gave Xu insomnia. After Xu gave birth to a son in April 2008, her parents spent their retirement savings on a larger apartment for the couple and even paid for Liu's gallstone surgery. Liu moved into the new apartment too, and things got worse. She left Xu locked outside for over an hour, cut the power at the breaker past midnight so Xu lost a lecture she had spent hours preparing, threw out documents from her desk, and spilled food on clothes Xu had ironed for a conference. When Liu began scolding the crying baby, Xu sent her son to live with her parents and started sleeping at friends' homes, hotels, and on her office floor. Each time she told her husband, he answered that she had no idea what his mother had sacrificed for him.
Gasoline and a Knife
A month before the killing, Xu arrived late to Liu's birthday dinner because of an emergency. Liu made a scene in front of the whole family and stormed out, and Xu's husband slapped his wife in front of their relatives. Xu said she wanted a divorce. To Liu, a divorce would stain her son's life, and it would also cost him the apartment and car, which had been paid for by Xu's parents and were in Xu's name. If Xu were simply gone, everything would go to her son. On November 11, 2010, a gas station attendant refused to sell gasoline to Liu because something about it felt wrong, so she had a passerby buy it for her. Her first attempt failed because Xu had gone to her parents' house. On November 26, Xu stayed home to prepare for an exam and a conference. Liu hid a basin of gasoline among tubs of water and turned the TV up to full volume. When Xu came out and reached for the remote, Liu dumped the gasoline over her head. It ran into her eyes and onto her contact lenses, leaving her unable to see, and Liu stabbed her repeatedly in the neck. Afterward Liu showered, changed clothes, ate lunch at a restaurant, and walked to the police station.
Final Thoughts
At her trial in December 2011, Liu kept blaming her daughter-in-law to the end. She was given a death sentence with a two-year reprieve, which in practice meant life in prison if she behaved. Two years later she was diagnosed with cancer and released on medical parole, and she went straight to the home of her son and grandson. She was not seen publicly again. Gangbiao Dong inherited the apartment and the rest of his wife's assets, soon started a new family with a younger woman, and reportedly still works as a university professor. That outcome has fueled speculation that he wanted his wife's property all along and pushed his mother toward the murder, but it remains speculation. What is not in doubt is that Yili Xu asked the one person who could have protected her for help, over and over, and he told her to endure it.
Yili Xu told her husband again and again what his mother was doing to her, and each time he told her to put up with it because of everything his mother had sacrificed for him. How much responsibility do you think he bears for what happened, even if he never laid a hand on his wife's killer's weapon?
WE DOCUMENT.
YOU DECIDE.
Our interpretation is only one possible perspective.
