It's never easy to hunt down criminals on the run, but the story of a woman from a small village in Henan Province who spent 17 years hunting down four of the five suspects who murdered her husband, called the efficiency of her hometown's public security bureau and even the legal system into question.

Li Guiying visits the Intermediate People's Court of Zhoukou, Henan Province, to inquire about the progress of her case on November 18, 2015. Photo: CFP

Developing stringers, dressing up in disguises and studying criminology are just a few methods Henan woman Li Guiying used to hunt her husband's murderers.

After the 1998 killing, the 59-year-old villager from Qipo village, Xiangcheng city spent 17 years tracking down four of the five men suspected of murdering her husband, who were on the run from the night of the murder.

After the media reported on Li's story, local police established a special team and caught the last suspect after only 17 days, leaving many wondering: If it was that easy, why did it take so long?

Li is now known as the "farmer detective," but she is not satisfied. Although all the suspects are now behind bars, she hasn't stopped her quest and is now accusing her hometown PSB of dereliction of duty. "There is a Chinese saying that goes, for a nobleman to take revenge, 10 years is not too long. Mine has taken too long and I feel sorry for my husband," she said.

Waste of time



In 1998, Li's husband Qi Yuande, a middle school teacher at Qipo village, Xiangcheng, Central China's Henan Province, was caught up in a fight and killed by five fellow villagers. Li herself was stabbed in the fight and hospitalized for two weeks.

It wasn't after she returned home that her relatives told her that her husband had died. After grieving for several days, Li rode a bicycle to Xiangcheng's PSB, eager to hear how the investigation was progressing. She was expecting it to be like how it is in television dramas, in which the police start to hunt down murderers immediately after their crime.

The police, however, gave her the cold shoulder, and she visited the PSB five times before the lead investigator was willing to meet her. He told her that the five suspects had run away on the night of the murder, and finding them was like "searching for a needle in the sea." She recalls the policeman saying "Do you have any clues? If you have clues about their whereabouts, we'll go get them. If not, we don't want to waste our time."

Li, disheartened, decided to hunt down the killers herself. The case was far from an unsolvable mystery - all the suspects have deep ties to the village, and Li thought there had to be a way.

The first thing she did was to set up a network of "stringers" who would send her any information they saw or heard about the suspects. Qipo is a close-knit community with most villagers sharing the same surname and many sharing distant relatives. There are few secrets here. Since all the suspects were born and bred in Qipo, Li believed the villagers were the key to finding the clues she needed.

Bringing her kids with her, she visited almost every household in the village, asking them to tell her if they heard anything useful. And since many villagers have family members working as migrant workers in big cities, Li asked them to keep an eye out for the suspects. A neighbor told China Newsweek, "Li never was a social person, but after the incident, she often called on us, asking us to help her find clues. And she never visited us empty-handed."

Fearing the families of the suspects would seek to stop her from getting justice, she moved to nearby Nandun town with her in-laws and five children. She installed four video cameras in her house and bought a guard dog. Her oldest son was 10 years old, and the youngest daughter had just turned 3.

No dignity at all



The first useful clue came not long after she started her hunt, when a villager working in Beijing said he spotted one suspect, Qi Xueshan, in the city.

Disappointed with Xiangcheng's police, Li took a train to Beijing on her own. Following the villager's clue, she saw Qi working on a construction site. She turned her clues in to Beijing's local PSB and on March 2, 1998, Qi Xueshan was arrested. Using the same method, Qi Baoshan, a second suspect, was arrested in September in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province by a local PSB the same year.

Arresting two suspects in one year motivated Li greatly, but her luck didn't last. Few clues proved to be as useful in the search for the remaining three suspects. Over the following 10 years or so, Li went to over 10 provinces following tips provided by Qipo villagers, including Hainan, Shandong, Shanxi and Guangdong. During a trip to Urumqi, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, her purse was stolen on the train and she had to collect plastic bottles for a living while in the region. "I was like a beggar, living under other people's roofs and hoping others will offer me free food. I had no dignity at all," she said.

She also studied criminology to help her investigation. Her desk at home is piled with books on criminology, criminal investigation, and criminal and civil law, many of which are worn and full of notes and dog-ears. Pei Wenkui, her lawyer from 2000 onwards, told China Newsweek that he felt he "was more like her legal advisor," rather than her lawyer. "She self-studied the law and was able to obtain evidence herself," he said.

In 2010, Qi Xueshan was released from jail. Li, using the methods she learned from the books, obtained his phone records and noticed that he often called a number in Xinjiang late at night. Li suspected that the number belonged to his brother Qi Jinshan, another suspect. In March 2011, Qi Jinshan was arrested in Xinjiang.

10 carriages of bitterness



In April 2015, another villager told Li that Qi Haiying, a fourth suspect, returned to the village in 2011 and legally changed his name to Qi Haoji. Li later verified this through other villagers.

Li obtained Qi Haiying's mobile number and he was arrested in November. But she was baffled - how could a murder suspect be able to return to his hometown and change his name without being arrested? According to Xiangcheng PSB's later investigation, Qi Haiying's father, the village Party chief, used his connections to change his son's name. But Li was not satisfied. She said the PSB didn't even input the suspects' name into the online criminal network, making the change of name easier.

Li also found out that the fifth suspect Qi Kuojun had a son in June 1999, 18 months after the murder happened. This means he must have returned to the village at some point. She questioned why the local police didn't look into this when the boy was born and registered, which would require parents to present their IDs at local police stations.

Li decided to petition upper level authorities, the practice through which people who feel mistreated by local governments in China seek justice. When she was petitioning in Beijing, someone advised her to seek help from the media, and later a Henan television station broadcast her story. The story, featuring criminal and detective elements, soon grabbed the public imagination and journalists and video teams from national media soon swarmed into tiny Qipo.

To appease Li, in a special meeting, Xiangcheng's officials from the political and legal affairs commission, PSB, education commission and publicity department met her in person and promised her that they would make all possible efforts to hunt down Qi Kuojun, the last suspect at large. Some even visited her home and brought her gifts. Li met for the first time the police officers and officials who she had been so eager to meet for the past 17 years.

Seventeen days later, Qi Kuojun was arrested in Xinjiang.

Li said her feelings are mixed. "I'm happy because my efforts in the past 17 years finally paid off. But I'm not happy when I think of what the police achieved 17 days after the media exposed the case, and yet it took me 17 years. Would it have taken me 17 years if the police had put all their efforts into this case from the beginning?" she told the Global Times.

While Li accused Xiangcheng's PSB of dereliction of duty in her interviews, officials from the PSB denied the charge. "It's not that we didn't look into this case all these years. We did it continuously," Zhang Yafei, administrative director of Xiangcheng's PSB, told China Newsweek.

Zhang's words infuriated Li, who couldn't remember just how many times policemen working on the case hung up on her, how many text messages she sent that got no response, and how many times she was locked out of legal departments.

"Ten horse carriages won't be able to carry the grievances and bitterness I experienced all these years," she said.

Li's fame has attracted people from neighboring villages who have unsolved cases or have been unfairly treated. Sometimes, dozens of people who hope they can replicate Li's success visit her home on the same day, seeking her advice on their cases. "I ask them to learn the law and protect themselves with the law, and ask them to be persistent," Li told the Global Times.

Despite her frustrating encounters with China's legal system, Li still believes in the law. During the interview, Li repeatedly said sorry to her children, since she had little time to accompany them as they grew up. Now, four of her five children have enrolled in or graduated from universities, and they all chose law as their majors, upon the request of their mother.