A serial killer in China, who has been nicknamed “Jack the Ripper” by the Chinese media, was one of the most notorious serial killers of the world. The man, who was earlier sentenced to death for raping, murdering, and mutilating several of his 11 victims, was executed on Thursday morning in Baiyin.

Gao Chengyong (53) killed 11 women between May 1988 and February 2002 in the Gansu Province and the neighboring Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Gao apparently targeted young women clad in red clothes, followed them home, robbed, raped, and murdered them, while he also mutilated several of their corpses. The reproductive organs of many of his victims were found missing when their bodies were discovered. His youngest victim was an 8-year-old child. “To satisfy his perverted desire to dishonour and sully corpses, many of his female victims’ corpses were damaged and violated. The motives of the defendant’s crimes were despicable, his methods extremely cruel, the nature of the acts vile and the details of the crimes serious,” the court said when he was convicted.

The police had been hunting Gao for nearly 28 years before they finally got their break when one of his uncles was arrested for a minor crime, whose DNA sample indicated the involvement of a relative in the crimes. Gao, who eventually confessed to his felonies, was sentenced to death in March last year. “The suspect has a sexual perversion and hates women,” said one of the police officials after Gao’s arrest.

The original Jack the Ripper was a serial killer active in and around the Whitechapel District of London in the late Victorian era, who is widely believed to have murdered five women, and mutilating several of them. However, those murders have never been solved.

Gao Chengyong, a serial killer and rapist known as China’s “Jack the Ripper,” was executed on Thursday after the Supreme People's Court approved his death sentence. Gao raped and murdered 11 women in northwest China between 1988 and 2002 and was arrested in 2016. pic.twitter.com/EufudHpkDz

— People's Daily, China (@PDChina) January 3, 2019