In the office of the Yuhua District People's Court in Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province, in mid-July 2020, even if the sun was shining outside the window, it could not warm the faces of colleagues like frost. They couldn't have imagined that Zhao Zhiyong, a deputy director who had worked together for many years and handled the case decisively and meticulously, would have something to do with the sensational cash truck robbery case 23 years ago.
The colleague who provided material for the 2013 Hebei Legal Daily publication commending Zhao Zhiyong's "Zhao Dana in the Executive Bureau" and "Relying on Conscience to Work, Relying on Faith to Execute" was even more puzzled, and in order to complete this reporting task, he deliberately carefully and carefully read Zhao Zhiyong's personal diary many times.
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Among them, many of Zhao Zhiyong's experiences, such as "unconditional dedication, dedication at no cost", have been copied down by himself as a motto when enforcing the law. Therefore, when Zhao Zhiyong was knocked on the door by the police in the office to announce the arrest news, there were ten thousand doubts surging into his heart in an instant, and he couldn't help but stare closely at Zhao Zhiyong's face, hoping that after listening to the original commission, he would quip with his usual easy-going and humorous remarks: "Comrade, you are afraid that you have found the wrong person." ”
But Zhao Zhiyong only listened to the police's general mention of the 1997 cash truck robbery, so he silently extended his hands and was calmly taken out of the court gate as a criminal. Colleagues who have been through hundreds of cases know that no matter what kind of verdict the police will eventually give Zhao Zhiyong, the moment he acquiesced to the crime and was taken away, his 23 years of hard-working righteous image and political career had come to an end.
So why did Zhao Zhiyong commit such a cruel robbery and murder? And how did he "gorgeously" transform himself from a lawbreaker to a law enforcement officer? We have to start from the beginning and the end of everything.
First, Zhao Zhiyong, who is honest and reliable in the eyes of others
Zhao Zhiyong is the second oldest in the family, with the eldest sister on the top, a brother and two younger sisters on the bottom. His father, Zhao Jinhai, joined the army at a young age, and after retiring from the army, he was assigned to work at a supply and marketing cooperative in Xinle City, about 25 kilometers away from their old residence, Chen Village, Dongwang Town. Before Zhao Zhiyong was six years old, he lived here with his mother and brother and sister.
Although the villagers of Chen Village should all be surnamed Chen if they look at the place name, more than 3,000 permanent residents have the surname Zhao, and they have a relationship with Zhao Jinhai. It is said that the neighbors are all relatives, and the friendship should be good, but the Zhao Jinhai family is living a very lonely life. Perennially impoverished by a mother with a few children, Zhao Jinhai only rides a bicycle during the New Year's Festival, pulling wheat noodles, corn and peanuts home in the back seat to visit relatives.
Zhao Zhiyong's mother was a taciturn, ordinary woman who was responsible for farming and taking care of children every day, and even her niece Zhao Zhanying had a very shallow impression of their family, except for a polite greeting in the village, there was almost no contact.
Even when Zhao Zhiyong's family moved to Xinle City, Zhao Zhanying couldn't remember whether his cousin was five or six years old at that time. After the Zhao Zhiyong family moved away, it seems that they have completely severed their ties with their hometown, whether it is Zhao Jinhai or their children, they have not returned to their hometowns for several years to visit their relatives.
Zhao Jinhai was very well managed in both popularity and business at the Supply and Marketing Association, and soon he was promoted to the chief of the business section. Family conditions rose with his father's promotion, and Zhao Zhiyong went to school in Xinle City step by step, and grew up to the age of 18.
When he was a teenager, Zhao Zhiyong was not the same as his peers, he rarely had exciting moments of eyebrow flying and dancing, always looked silent, and his inner ideas were very determined.
Zhao Zhiyong graduated from junior high school and went to a technical school, just after graduating, he messed with his classmates to pass the time, and Zhao Jinhai estimated that he was not accustomed to his son's idle appearance, so he persuaded him to join the army as a soldier. Zhao Zhiyong was not very happy when he heard it, he was not willing to take the hard and unprofitable road of joining the army, and there was a strong idea in his heart that he wanted to make a lot of money and get ahead.
Zhao Jinhai did not laugh angrily after listening to his son's ideas, the experience of the head of the business section for many years was in front of him, it was never a simple thing to want to make a lot of money, and it was easy to be deceived and suffer a big loss without a provocative skill, but he also knew that his son was not afraid of tigers when he first came out, and the advice of the light fluttering was definitely not used, so he used a roundabout way to let his son come to the supply and marketing cooperative first.
Zhao Jinhai took a personal relationship, and arranged Zhao Zhiyong to be a temporary worker in the fertilizer department of the Qiaodong Supply and Marketing Cooperative in the northeast of Xinle City, Zhao Zhiyong did not take the shelf when he went, humbly consulted with colleagues on the work process, and did a very sophisticated job in a few days.
——Because Zhao Zhiyong's personality belongs to the type that is very reliable and stable at first glance, the residents who buy fertilizer nearby trust him, and the benefits are very good, resulting in Zhao Zhiyong Although he does not have too many personal relations with colleagues, everyone has a good impression of him.
2. Participated in the robbery and murder of cash trucks during the period of joining the army
But on the surface, it seems that Zhao Zhiyong's first job of selling fertilizer was done like a fish, but he was particularly dissatisfied with this hard and meager job. Zhao Zhiyong worked hard for half a year, feeling that instead of dealing with chemical fertilizers all day long, it was better to enlist in the army, so he agreed to his father's arrangement and became a soldier in Beijing after joining the army.
After Zhao Zhiyong became a soldier, he no longer contacted his colleagues in the supply and marketing cooperative, and in addition to striving for a good performance in the army for several years, his spare time was to think about how he would go in the future. He knew that he could assign jobs after he was discharged from the army, but if he did not have professional skills, he would most likely be randomly assigned to a less promising unit like a supply and marketing cooperative.
He pondered for a long time, and finally decided to take the national higher education self-study examination and chose a law major. Because when Zhao Zhiyong reviewed legal professional books, from the beginning of brushing up questions for academic qualifications, to looking into it and being fascinated from the bottom of his heart, he felt that law was a profound and high-ceiling discipline, and there were many corresponding positions learned.
Zhao Zhiyong is a person who has determined that if he wants to do one thing, he will invest a hundred points of effort, and he successfully obtained a bachelor's degree in addition to daily training with great tenacity. Fast forward to January 1997, because he was going to be discharged from the army the following year, so he applied to go home to visit his relatives for the New Year. It was this period of visiting relatives that led Zhao Zhiyong to enter the darkest moment of his life.
At that time, when I was chatting with a friend, I don't know who took the lead in talking, talking about at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in the cash truck, but only three or five people escorting the money truck. As soon as the idea came out, five people, including Zhao Zhiyong, all thought that this was a quick way to make money, and Xin Yiheng decided to do so.
Zhao Zhiyong and his gang looked for opportunities in the vicinity early in the morning, first robbing a taxi as a cover, and then when the cash truck gradually drove near the business site, they shot and strafed all three staff members and snatched away 790,000 yuan in cash in the car.
After Zhao Zhiyong and the five people drove the stolen taxi to a remote and unoccupied place, they scattered 790,000 square meters according to the standard of sharing the loot agreed in advance. He put the stolen money in a separate passbook prepared for him, and immediately packed his bags and returned to the troops, in order to escape the police investigation.
Zhao Zhiyong and his party robbed 790,000 yuan on the cash truck, which eventually caused three staff members to die and be injured twice, and the police could not grasp the suspect's DNA and other effective information due to the technical level at that time.
Zhao Zhiyong returned to the army, still training and living as usual. In 1998, he retired from the army, because he had a university diploma in law, so he was assigned to work in the Yuhua District Court of Shijiazhuang City.
Zhao Zhiyong has a high starting point, coupled with his original personality is very stable, and he has many years of experience in the army, so as soon as he joined the company, he performed exceptionally brightly, the case he handled was clear, and he could always find a breakthrough at the first time.
Third, "gorgeous" after entering the judicial system was exposed
As his work in the court progressed more and more handily, after the introduction of acquaintances, he met the English teacher of a key middle school in Shijiazhuang City, and the woman's family believed that Zhao Zhiyong was capable, old and steady, and soon the two married and gave birth to a son, and the family was very happy.
In 2004, Zhao Zhiyong's first promotion opportunity came, because the Yuhua District Court set up an executive bureau, he became the executive officer of the bureau, with a new platform to show his skills, Zhao Zhiyong became more and more of his own style in handling cases.
——In 2009, there was a trivial case in which Li, Huang and Lin rented the warehouse built in the south of Dongcheng Village by Zhang, Su and Dong to store goods, and the lighting line in the warehouse was short-circuited, causing a fire to cause the loss of goods of the three people.
The three people who rented the warehouse were distressed by the huge financial losses caused by the disaster, and a paper complaint sued all three people in the warehouse, when the Shijiazhuang Intermediate Court gave the defendant a judgment to compensate for different amounts of losses and return the rent, but the result was that the defendant had no enforceable property under his name, and the case went to an impasse.
The case turned over to Zhao Zhiyong's hands, he took the file and did a lot of stripping away the cocoon, from the details found that the three defendants are not without property, but before they feel that they will be judged to compensate for huge losses, they have successively transferred the property through the accounts of relatives and friends, and the plaintiff did not expect to apply for property preservation because of his inexperience, so that the defendant took advantage of the loophole.
Zhao Zhiyong first contacted the three plaintiffs after finding a breakthrough, but it was unfavorable for the plaintiff, and the plaintiff was very distrustful of the court because of the delay in getting the compensation, and he coldly squeezed Zhao Zhiyong away with three words and two words. Ordinary people will get stuck when things progress here, but Zhao Zhiyong first understands the plaintiff's distrust, does not continue to stubbornly take this line, but turns around and studies the defendant's psychology.
He carefully studied the experiences of the three defendants and found that they had similar life characteristics, that is, they were in their forties, which was a career transition period, and time was even more difficult for them to delay.
Therefore, Zhao Zhiyong communicated with the three people with a heart, pointing out that it was not cost-effective for them to use their precious energy for several years to transfer property, and if they made decisive compensation and then developed their careers with a mind, perhaps the compensation money would have been doubled long ago.
Zhao Zhiyong keenly found that the three people were shaken, so he took out the provisions on the enforcement of untrustworthy people promulgated by the Supreme Court to explain to them, and opened the interests one by one on the table, and the three executors immediately accepted and actively expressed their intention to prepare compensation to the plaintiff.
The development of the case has been very clear here, but Zhao Zhiyong is still not at ease, even if he is sick and hospitalized, he does not forget to call to "care" about the defendant's compensation collection, and finally the defendant has come up with a total of more than one million compensation to make the dispute case end perfectly.
Zhao Zhiyong's case-handling style is like this, so he was rated as an excellent party member of Yuhua District in 2009 with his excellent professional quality, and in 2011, he was rated as "Top Ten Executive Experts" by the Shijiazhuang Intermediate Court, and in 2012 and 2013, he was recorded by the Intermediate People's Court as "Personal Third Class Merit". With cho's smooth sailing, he was promoted to deputy director of the Coordination Office around 2013, and only two years later, he became deputy director of the Yuhua District Court's executive bureau.
However, there are also lawyers who have worked with him who have different views on this, although Zhao Zhiyong handled 1,076 cases from 2013 to 2018, with a completion rate of 95%, but the lawyer believes that many cases were not really executed because the defendants did not have enforceable property.
Lawyer Lu Tingge said that Zhao Zhiyong is very good at doing reassuring work, and every time he is asked to follow up on the implementation of the case, he is either followed up by Zhao Zhiyong and perfunctory, or he emphasizes the difficulty of the case in detail and makes him wait patiently.
Zhao Zhiyong's ability is a double-edged sword, and exerting force to break through the case will make the defendant powerless, but on the contrary, it should be used to delay the lawyer, and it can also have the effect of calming the storm.
Therefore, in mid-July 2020, as the police took Zhao Zhiyong away from the office to investigate, the case-handling personnel believed that Zhao Zhiyong may have been involved not only in the 1997 cash truck robbery, but also in other cases.
Later, in order to better understand the situation of Zhao Zhiyong, the reporter first found his wife, and the unexpected result was that Zhao Zhiyong's wife Liu Liwan was completely unaware of her specific crime.
On August 5, the reporter came to Zhao Zhiyong's residence and knocked on the door, Liu Liwan wore a mask wrapped in a turban and carefully opened a door slit, after asking the identity of the visitor, she only said plainly: "I am also waiting for the results of the investigation." For the reporter to ask the details of the cash truck robbery and murder case more than 20 years ago, Liu Liwan said that she did not know half a minute.
Although whether Zhao Zhiyong was involved in other cases is still under investigation, the 1997 cash truck robbery case is nailed down, and it has to be said that he hid it really well. But in fact, even if he did not hide it, everyone could not associate him with such a plainly dressed, square-faced, and seemingly thick and stable person with the robber.
But the truth is that committing a crime is committing a crime, and no matter who you are, you must be punished by the law. The reason why he was not caught at that time and is only punished now is because of the development of science and technology.
At that time, the police extracted a suspect's smoking cigarette butt at the scene of the crime, but at that time, because the DNA technology was not developed enough, this evidence could not be used. Now, with the maturity of technology, the police have successfully extracted the DNA of a suspect from cigarette butts, and after the suspect is arrested, he gradually confesses other accomplices.
Among these criminal accomplices, in addition to the accidental death of suspect Zhang Moulin in 2014, the other three suspects have also been slowly arrested. And through the confessions of these criminals, it does show that Zhao Zhiyong really participated in this robbery and murder case with them that year.
Fourth, the subtlety of human nature
It is only in the process of investigation that the diary left by Zhao Zhiyong once again confused the police, especially the sentence "Only after experiencing the torture of love and hate, pain and regret, gain and loss, can we complete the leap in personality and regenerate like a phoenix nirvana" is even more incomprehensible.
He once committed a serious crime of robbery and murder, but he was transformed into a "righteous" deputy director of the court's executive bureau, and I don't know if he was trying to find a breakthrough point in the process of handling the case with the mentality of atonement, or because he had a case, he understood the psychological trend of the defendant very well?
But no matter how Zhao Zhiyong, who is moody and angry, views crime and law enforcement, he can indeed see the subtle side of human nature in him, with complex emotions entangled with several emotions.
For example, in addition to the "two-sided life", his attitude towards his family is also elusive, colleagues who have worked together for many years and nieces in his hometown agree that he is a great filial piety, and when his father was ill and hospitalized in Beijing, Zhao Zhiyong deliberately took leave to take care of him in January.
But usually Zhao Zhiyong is absent in the family, a trivial matter in the family and his parents who are not in good health are handled by his wife Liu Liwan after work, which leads to his wife having to handle the family's housework while completing heavy teaching tasks, and then gradually falling ill, before Zhao Zhiyong was taken away, his wife has been diagnosed with cancer.
In addition, Zhao Zhiyong's approach to his hometown Chen Village for several years has completely cut off contact, and even Zhao Jinhai has not informed his relatives of his death. However, when my uncle died of illness, I returned to worship twice, which was really a bit elusive.
However, "seeing the big with the small", it is precisely because of its contradictory and complex psychological structure that even if he has obtained a university diploma majoring in law through self-examination, he is very clear about the results of robbing the cash truck and killing people, but he still poisoned the 790,000 yuan as usual.