In the middle of the night in a mountain village in Sichuan, in front of a farmhouse surrounded by bamboos on three sides, a pair of cloudy eyes vigilantly peeked out of the door through the crack in the door.
The door then slowly opened, and a hunched old lady tiptoed out of the threshold, holding a dying child in her arms.
The neighbor's dog barked so violently that she trotted into the back hill, through a bamboo forest and wasteland, and up the hill, where the barking gradually stopped, replaced by the old lady's heavy gasps.
The old lady did not stop, walked through the dense bushes to a deserted cave, put down the child, and left alone.
The cold stone face made the child slightly conscious, and the moonlight could not extend in, and he curled up in the darkness waiting for death.
Why did the old lady leave the child in the cave? What happened to the child? Was he saved?
It starts with a few hours before the child is abandoned.
1. Disappeared children
On February 7, 2019, the third day of the Lunar New Year, Zhou Huan took his son and second wife Chen Yue back to the countryside to reunite with relatives.
After the lunch party, the adults gathered together, played mahjong, chatted, and the children played together.
At around 4:20 in the afternoon, when relatives distributed snacks to the children, they found that Zhou Huan's 7-year-old son Zhou Yang was missing.
Zhou Hui came back to his senses from the idle talk with his relatives, and hurriedly called his wife Chen Yue, twenty minutes ago, she rode an electric car out to breathe, and maybe also brought her son.
The phone was connected, and Zhou Huan's conjecture was denied.
So where did the disappeared child Zhou Yang go?
At seven o'clock in the afternoon, Chen Yue was the first to call the police to say that the child was missing.
The local Yongxing Town Police Station immediately sent people to look for it, Chen Yue was very worried, and participated in the search and rescue work throughout the process.
However, everyone searched all over the front and back of the house, the vegetable field pond, and there was no trace of the child, so they had to expand the search scope to the neighboring town of Jixiang Town.
The Jixiang Town Police Station contracted to participate in the search for work, and things quickly took a turn for the better.
Road surveillance has been installed on many rural roads in Jixiang Township, and they have screened the surveillance footage by person and time period, and finally found valuable clues.
At 4:20 p.m. that day, a woman rode an electric car through a certain section of the road, and Zhou Yang stood in front of the electric car windshield.
At half past five, the surveillance screen captured her and Zhou Yang again, this time the electric car stopped on the side of the road, and Zhou Yang vomited after drinking a bottle of water.
The woman threw away the mineral water bottle and left the scene with the boy.
And this woman is Zhou Yang's stepmother Chen Yue!
Where did she take the baby? Why did she pretend she hadn't seen the child?
The police immediately interrogated Chen Yue, but Chen Yue remained silent, no matter how her husband begged her, she was still unmoved.
When everyone was anxious, someone remembered that Jixiang Town happened to be the town where Chen Yue's grandmother Yan Zuhua was located, and Zhou Yang was likely to be placed in Yan Zuhua's house.
At ten o'clock that night, the police station searched Yan Zuhua's house, but to no avail.
Yan Zuhua denied that the child was at home at first, but after the village cadres and the police knew that she was reasonable, she finally told the truth.
Second, the children in the cave
At around 4 o'clock in the afternoon of the same day, Chen Yue rode an electric car to take Zhou Yang home.
Yan Zuhua thought at first that her granddaughter had given her a New Year's greeting, but Chen Yue only asked her if she had any pesticides, and left with Zhou Yang after hearing that there were none.
An hour later, Chen Yue returned with Zhou Yang again, Zhou Yang next to him vomited non-stop, the vomit also smelled of pesticides, she immediately wanted to detoxify him with soap and water and then send him to the hospital, but was stopped by Chen Yue.
Yan Zuhua subconsciously understood what was happening, and looked at Chen Yue in shock and horror, not believing that his granddaughter would do such a thing.
Chen Yue's face did not change color, nor did she give any explanation, and told her to hide Zhou Yang and not let anyone see it.
At 7 o'clock in the evening, Yan Zuhua received a call from Chen Yue and asked her to bury Zhou Yang quietly.
Chen Yue is her granddaughter, the wood has been completed, Yan Zuhua didn't want Chen Yue to be arrested, and in the dead of night, she carried Zhou Yang up the back mountain and abandoned it in the abandoned cave.
At 0:40 a.m., she led the police to identify the cave.
The cave is hidden by bushes and weeds, making it difficult to see, and even if the police pick the right hill to search the mountain, it will take a lot of time to find it.
When they enter it, the scene is harrowing.
Under the light of the flashlight, the child's face was white and blue, his arms around him, curled up on the ground, and there were fresh blood marks on his forearms, but his chest was no longer undulating.
Zhou Yang's father hugged him and cried heartbreakingly, and the police pulled him away and asked the accompanying village doctor to check the child's physical condition.
Zhou Yang is dead!
After forensic examination, the cause of death was the pesticide dichlorvos poisoning.
The police immediately arrested Yan Zuhua and Chen Yue, and the human and material evidence were all there, Chen Yue sighed and explained all the ins and outs.
3. Young lovers reunite
The story begins with the breakdown of two families.
From 2017 to 2018, Zhou Harmony and Chen Yue divorced one after another.
Zhou Hui and his ex-wife have a son and a daughter, the son Zhou Yang was awarded to Zhou Hui, and the daughter was also handed over to him to take care of, Chen Yue and her ex-husband had two sons, and the eldest son was awarded to Chen Yue after the divorce.
Zhou Harmony and Chen Yue are junior high school classmates, as early as junior high school, the two had a good impression of each other, but unfortunately this young and subtle relationship failed to achieve positive results.
In February 2018, Zhou Huo contacted Chen Yue through QQ, and the two happened to be divorced and single, so they hit it off and tied the knot.
The throbbing of youth picks up again in adulthood, giving each other warmth to the wounded, which sounds so beautiful, but the reality is often not so simple.
After Zhou Hui and Chen Yue got married, they went to work during the day, and Chen Yue's eldest son and Zhou Huan's son and daughter were taken care of by Zhou Huan's parents.
Both elderly people are over 60 years old, and it is a little difficult to take care of three children.
It is the rarest thing for a restructured family to treat children equally, but unfortunately the Zhou family did not do it, and they discussed with Chen Yue to give her eldest son to her ex-husband to take care of.
Chen Yue had already lost the custody of his youngest son, and he was very tormented when he thought that his eldest son was going to leave him.
For the sake of family harmony, she finally agreed to give in and separate from her flesh and blood.
Chen Yue began to devote himself to the reorganized family with Zhou Harmony, and took care of the daily life of the whole family in an orderly manner.
It's just that no matter how hard she tries, every time she watches the heartwarming interaction of their family, she feels like an alien who doesn't fit in, they are all relatives of each other, while her biological son is abandoned by herself.
In order to resolve her psychological irritability, Chen Yue could only comfort herself: she still has Zhou Harmony's love. It can be said that her spiritual sustenance is Zhou Harmony.
As time passed, she gradually felt that even Zhou Harmony was unreliable.
Just like she misses her son, Zhou Huan's ex-wife also misses her son and often comes to visit her at home, Zhou Huo thinks that after all, in front of the child, the child's mother is still warm, and can't be too cold.
This attitude fell in Chen Yue's eyes, and it became Zhou Huan's old love for his ex-wife unforgettable, but Chen Yue was a stuffy gourd and didn't think about communicating with Zhou Huan.
Chen Yue felt that Zhou Huo had failed her, and the resentment in her heart was getting deeper and deeper day after day.
Fourth, feed the poison
On February 7, 2019, the third day of the first lunar month, Zhou Huan took the whole family back to his hometown to have a reunion dinner with relatives.
At the dining table, Zhou Hui and his relatives pushed the glasses and changed the glasses, and talked happily about the wine, without noticing his wife's lonely mood. The more lively and cheerful the scene, the more depressed Chen Yue felt in it.
At around 4 o'clock in the afternoon, Chen Yue couldn't stand it anymore and rode an electric car out to breathe.
I met Zhou Yang just a few minutes after I went out, he was playing alone on the side of the road, and when he saw her, he yelled to play with her.
She was so defenseless and powerless, and an evil thought suddenly emerged from the bottom of Chen Yue's heart.
She lovingly beckoned to her stepson to stand on the pedal of the electric car.
Along the way, the wind blew across the faces of one big and one small, Zhou Yang's hair brushed lightly on Chen Yue's chin, she was a little entangled in her heart, and when she thought of her husband betraying her and breaking the connection with his ex-wife, she made up her mind.
Her initial plan was to go to her grandmother's house to get pesticides, but she didn't think that her grandmother's house would have one, and then she went to the pesticide store in the town to buy a bottle of dichlorvos, snacks and water.
Then, she rode the electric car to the side of the road and stopped, and while Zhou Yang was eating snacks, she quietly poured dichlorvos into a mineral water bottle and handed it to him.
After Zhou Yang took a few sips, his pupils began to constrict, and he couldn't stop crying, vomiting and diarrhea.
Seeing this, Chen Yue did not give up, sent him to his grandmother's house, and prevented his grandmother from detoxifying him with soap and water.
Subsequently, she lied to her husband that she had not seen the child in the afternoon and pretended to organize a job search.
At 7 o'clock in the afternoon, seeing that things were getting bigger, Chen Yue was afraid that the child would be discovered, so she called her grandmother to bury the child.
Afterwards, the police found the bottle of mineral water that had been discarded, and after inspection, the pesticide content in the mineral water was consistent with the pesticide component in Zhou Yang's stomach.
On November 4, 2019, the Suining Intermediate People's Court openly tried the case, and the cruelty of the defendant Chen Yue was terrifying, which caused a thousand waves in society for a while.
In the end, Chen Yue was sentenced to death for intentional homicide and deprived of political rights for life.
Chen Yue's grandmother, Yan Zuhua, was sentenced to 11 years in prison and deprived of political rights for three years for intentional homicide.
In the courtroom, Chen Yue's ex-husband and family, and Zhou Huan were all present, and Chen Yue didn't even look at them, perhaps out of guilt or despair.
A lost and regained youthful relationship ended with the death of his own son and the execution of his own son.
Zhou Huan experienced the pain of losing his son, and in retrospect, he should regret taking the initiative to contact Chen Yue in the first place.
Chen Yue is inherently pitiful, but it is too extreme.
If you still have feelings for Zhou Huo, you should open your heart to communicate and solve it, and there is no big deal about divorce.
She directly poisoned her eyes and asked her mother's child to take revenge, and she also killed her grandmother at an age.
The most pitiful is 7-year-old Zhou Yang, who is afraid of waiting for death alone in a cave, even adults can't bear it.