Episode 131:
Her Rich Husband Bought Her a Porsche Every Time He Beat Her Until He Kills Her
At a morgue in Nanjing, China, a man in his fifties collapsed to the floor the moment he saw his daughter's body lying on a cold slab, uncovered, her eyes still open. The medical examiner told him she had been stabbed more than seventy times. His daughter was 21-year-old Qi Kexin — a young woman whose glamorous life, filled with designer bags and a Porsche gifted by her wealthy husband, had made her the envy of her social media followers right up until the day she was murdered.
At 5 a.m. on April 25, 2013, an elderly couple was jolted awake by their daughter-in-law's screams. They rushed to her bedroom door, but it was locked from the inside. By the time they broke through, they found Kexin on the floor, naked and covered in stab wounds, gasping for breath, while their own son stood over her holding a bloody knife.
A Golden Opportunity, or a Cage?
Kexin grew up the only child of parents who worked for a state company, attending an elite private school reserved for the children of China's wealthiest families. At a school reunion just before she turned 20, she met Xingpeng Ji, the sole heir to his father's steel and real estate fortune. He pursued her aggressively, and within a month they were a couple. Her mother had reservations from the start — at the time, Xingpeng had no real career of his own — but Kexin was swept up in his devotion, and soon moved into the penthouse he shared with his parents on the promise of marriage. In 2012 she became pregnant; they registered their marriage and had their daughter in January 2013. Kexin quit college to raise the baby herself.
A Porsche for Every Beating
Behind the wealth, Xingpeng harbored a crippling insecurity about his looks and worried constantly that Kexin, who had always been popular, secretly wanted someone more attractive. His friends' offhand comments only fed the obsession, and he began checking her phone nightly, accusing her of affairs over things as ordinary as a promotional text message. He once pressured her into tattooing his name on her back as proof of loyalty. In 2012, after a drunken fight, he smashed a plate and cut her wrist so badly she needed emergency treatment — and when her furious parents found out, Xingpeng's parents responded not with an apology, but with the offer of a new Porsche to smooth things over. Kexin stayed.
The violence never really improved from there — if anything, marriage and a newborn daughter only gave him something new to accuse her of. He obsessively tracked her phone and spending, once devastated to discover a hotel record under her name with a stranger he was certain was a lover. He even pulled the hotel's security footage himself and confirmed with his own eyes that the woman in it wasn't his wife — Kexin had lent an old ID card to a friend who'd used it to check into hotels — but the proof of her innocence changed nothing. He kept using the accusation as leverage anyway, started sleeping with other women himself, and contracted an STD he then exposed her to. It was the final straw: Kexin decided to divorce him, and her parents began quietly preparing her exit, selling property to fund a lawyer and lease her a small business of her own.
The Final Attack
Before Kexin ever got the chance to leave, Xingpeng came home drunk on the night of April 25 and started the same argument over infidelity that had defined their relationship for years. When his parents managed to briefly pull him away and ran outside to call police, he went to the kitchen, grabbed four separate knives — reaching for the next only after each one broke — and stabbed Kexin more than seventy times until she stopped breathing. He then went looking for their 100-day-old daughter, only to be blocked by his own parents, who threw themselves in front of her door until police arrived to arrest him. As officers led him away, he screamed that his wife had been the one wronging him.
Final Thoughts
At trial in April 2014, Xingpeng's lawyers tried nearly everything: a mental illness claim disproven by evaluation, a self-defense argument undermined by his total lack of injuries, and an attempt to blame his own friends for provoking his jealousy. They even offered the victim's family a settlement. He was ultimately handed a suspended death sentence — a uniquely Chinese arrangement in which an inmate's execution is deferred two years, typically commuted to life imprisonment if they cause no serious trouble in custody. Xingpeng couldn't manage even that: he got into repeated violent altercations in prison, including pouring boiling water on another inmate, and the resulting disciplinary case during his reprieve period led the court to finalize his death sentence after all.
Perhaps the most quietly devastating part of the case was what happened to Kexin and Xingpeng's daughter, left with a dead mother and a father on death row. Both families fought for custody, but the outcome was never made public to protect the child's privacy — leaving the hope that she ended up somewhere far from the home that raised the man who killed her mother.
Xingpeng Ji's parents responded to his history of violence by gifting Kexin a Porsche instead of holding him accountable, and minutes after stabbing her more than seventy times, he tried to attack their newborn daughter too. What do you think it says about how the family enabled him that their response to years of escalating abuse was never intervention, only compensation?
WE DOCUMENT.
YOU DECIDE.
Our interpretation is only one possible perspective.
