Murder At the Drum Tower

Wenjun didn't seem interested in hard work either. In May 2007, he and a few friends visited a bathhouse in northern Hangzhou—the kind of place where you can eat, drink and enjoy the services of female attendants. Wenjun spent the night, according to a Hangzhou police source familiar with the case. In the morning, the young man tried to duck out without paying. Authorities detained him for 10 days on accusations of fraud and then let him go with a warning. "The bill wasn't huge," the police source says—less than $150.

That wasn't the end of Wenjun's legal scrapes. This March, he helped himself to several hundred dollars belonging to a roommate. He was convicted of theft and sentenced to six months behind bars, but the sentence was suspended. "He wasn't violent, and he claimed he intended to pay his roommate back," the police source says. Acquaintances say Wenjun kept asking his father for cash.

Tang fell into a deep gloom. "He complained that peasants have money and prestige today," a neighbor recalls. "He kept saying, 'It's unfair, it's unfair'." "His hopes were too high, his disappointments too great," says Wang. In April, Tang paid off his room and told people he was off to become a migrant worker. Why? "In a single word: because of face," says an acquaintance who works in the bustling commercial heart of Hangzhou. "If someday I lose everything and go bankrupt, I can be a beggar anywhere except in my hometown." For reasons known only to himself, though, Tang went looking for work in Sichuan—the country's No. 1 provincial exporter of laborers. His futile quest ended on May 12, when a devastating earthquake hit, killing 69,000 and rendering tens of millions of local residents jobless and homeless overnight.

Tang returned to his rented room. Even as his world fell apart, he tried to keep up appearances. By now he was so poor that he owned just a single set of clothing. Fellow tenants would see him in the evenings, washing his clothes by hand in an outdoor sink beneath a faded patio umbrella. On Aug. 1 he had his daily 75-cent meal of noodles and a smoke at his usual restaurant. He paid off his $45 rent; he was always punctual that way, his landlord recalls. He packed his belongings. The landlord says they didn't half fill a paper bag. Around 5 that afternoon, Tang phoned Wenjun to say he was leaving town to seek work. If he succeeded, he'd bring home his earnings. "If I don't come back, don't bother looking for me," Tang said. Those were his last words to his son, police say. Then he boarded an evening train to Beijing.

After the Drum Tower deaths, police hauled in Wenjun for questioning. They told him his father had stabbed an American visitor to death in Beijing and then killed himself. "He had no visible reaction," the police source tells NEWSWEEK. "He was completely expressionless."

© 2008