When Chen Xiang of the Northern Song Dynasty represented Pucheng County, one day, a local family lost something, and after the case was reported to the government, several suspects were arrested, but none of them admitted to stealing other people's things. Chen Xiang then said to them, "Listen, there is a big bell in a certain temple in this county that can identify the thief, and if the person who steals something touches it, it will make a sound, otherwise, there will be no sound." After saying this, he ordered his subordinates to take the thieves away first. Then he personally led his staff to the temple, first sacrificed and prayed, secretly asked people to paint the bell with ink, and then cover it with a curtain. Finally, the thieves were ordered to take turns to go in and touch the bell one by one. After a while, he called them over and asked them to stretch out their hands one by one, only to see that one of them did not have ink on his hands, and immediately interrogated him, and it was indeed a thief. It turned out that he really believed that when he touched the big bell, the big bell would make a sound, so he did not dare to touch the clock, which proved that he was a real thief.
When Youdu Yushi Yangwu was serving as the county commander of Zichuan County, he made good use of strange tricks to solve the case. Once, a man in a hurry fell asleep on the pillow stone beside the road, and when he woke up, he saw that the thousand yuan in his pocket had been stolen by someone. Yang Wu ordered the messenger to carry the stone into the courtyard, and then he whipped it dozens of times and deliberately allowed people to come in and visit. At the same time, he arranged for several servants to lurk outside the door, and if he saw someone peeping and did not dare to come in, he was immediately arrested. After a while, such a person was caught, and after interrogation, he was the one who stole the money. It turned out that he was very curious when he heard about Yang Wu's whipping of the stone, and he couldn't help but come and see it. But the people came, and because they were pregnant with ghosts, they did not dare to go in. The money he stole, except for the ten pennies that had been spent, was returned to the stolen.
When Zhang Sheng of the Northern Song Dynasty was the governor of Runzhou, he once dealt with such a case: at that time, there was a woman whose husband had been out for several days and did not return home. One day, when someone suddenly told her that a dead body was found in the well of the vegetable garden, the woman ran to see it in panic and cried, "This is my husband!" He immediately reported the case to the government. Zhang Sheng asked his subordinates to gather the woman's neighbors to the well to see if the dead bodies in the well were the woman's husbands. Everyone said that the well was too deep to be recognized, so please fish out the body and examine it. Zhang Sheng said: "Everyone can't recognize it, why can't she see at a glance that it is her husband?" So he ordered the woman to be imprisoned and interrogated, and sure enough, she conspired with her adulterer and killed her own husband.
During the reign of Emperor Shenzong of the Northern Song Dynasty, one day, a recorder named Song Dannian in Hezhong Province suddenly died after attending a banquet. Fan Chunren, who was the prefect of HaChu Province at the time, heard the news and sent his disciples to help take care of the funeral and told them to pay attention to observation. When they were at the funeral, they found that the deceased's mouth and nose had been bleeding. After Fan Chunren received the report, he suspected that he had been poisoned and died, so he sent people to inquire in many ways, and finally found out that Song Dannian's little filial piety had been committing adultery with a small official for a long time, and there was a suspicion of murder. When they were summoned for interrogation, they confessed: "We put poison in the turtles at the banquet. "The case seems clear. Fan Chunren pondered repeatedly, and felt that there were still many doubts in it, so he asked: "When are the turtles on the banquet?" They replied, "Halfway through." Fan Chunren asked again: "After eating poisonous turtles in the middle of the way, can you persist until the end of the feast without having a seizure?" Therefore, after repeated investigation and interrogation, the real situation was finally obtained: Song Dannian did not eat turtles at all, and the reason why he died was because he drank the poisonous wine that his little wife persuaded to drink after returning to his room. So why did the murderer make a false confession and poison the turtle? Obviously, this is to prepare for the reversal of the case in the future and the escape of capital crimes. Fan Chunren saw the flaws in it through careful analysis, which was not deceived, so the adulterers and adulterers were all punished as they deserved.
When Liu Zonggui was guarding Hainan, he once solved such a strange case: One day, when the son of a rich merchant was in his youth, he suddenly saw a young woman at the door of a large household, and the girl saw the teenager without shyness and did not shy away. The rich merchant's son deliberately teased her: "Little lady, at dusk, Xiaosheng comes to visit, okay?" The girl smiled slightly, with affection, and did not reply. That night, the girl did wait with the door open, but before the teenager could arrive, a thief saw that the door was not closed, so he sneaked into the house to steal. The girl did not know that it was a thief, so she rushed forward, and the thief mistakenly thought that the other party had come to catch him, but stabbed him hard with a knife, and then dropped the knife and fled. After a while, the young man came in, and without paying attention, his feet were covered with blood, and he slipped to the ground, and when he reached out and touched it, he found that it was a corpse, so he hurried out, rushed back to his boat, untied the cable, and sailed away all night. The next day, the girl's family found that someone had been killed, and they followed the blood on the ground all the way to the shore. The man on the shore said: "There used to be a merchant ship parked here, but last night somehow suddenly left." Her family hurriedly reported the case to the government, and the government sent someone to track down the teenager, escort him back, and impose various punishments on him. Liu Zonggui carefully inspected the killing knife, which seemed to be a butcher knife used by a butcher. Therefore, he ordered: "Prepare to treat all the generals of the army, and on a certain day of competition, invite all the cooks in the territory to assemble." On that day, when the chefs came, Liu Zonggui ordered again: "It is too late today, wait for tomorrow to come again!" In this way, the chefs all left their knives behind and went home. Liu Zonggui secretly mixed the murderous butcher knife in it, and replaced it with another knife. The next day, the men all came and took their knives, and only one butcher arrived late, and he refused to take the remaining knife. Liu Zonggui asked him why, and he replied, "This is not my own knife, but someone else's." Liu Zonggui ordered to capture the butcher, but the butcher had already fled to other places. Liu Zonggui decided to replace the teenager with another death row prisoner, and when it was almost dark, he was dragged to the market to be executed. The murderer who fled to the field heard the news that the wronged teenager had been executed, thought that he was safe and sound, and returned to Hainan a day or two later, and the government immediately arrested him and brought him to justice. As for the young man, he was beaten up on the charge of adultery.
In ancient times, a person had just returned home from an accident and found that his wife had been brutally killed, and strangely enough, he saw only the corpse, but the head was missing. He hurried to inform his father-in-law and mother-in-law. The father-in-law and mother-in-law believed that the daughter had been killed by the son-in-law, so they accused him from the county government. After being severely tortured, the man had to plead guilty and the case seemed to be closed. However, one of the people in the county government was suspicious of this, and he said to Taishou: "This is a major matter of human life, and I hope to slow down and thoroughly investigate." Besides, as a husband, who would bear to kill his wife? Even if you want to harm her because of the discord between the husband and wife, you must find some excuse to be able to escape responsibility in the future, or prevaricate that you will die of illness, or pretend to die by accident. Now that he had killed his wife and left the body behind and thrown away his head, the unconscionability of which was self-evident. I therefore request that the case be reopened. "As soon as Taishou heard that it was reasonable, he approved it."
After taking over the case, he conducted a general survey of the people engaged in the funeral industry in the city, asked them to provide written materials on the situation of undertaking funerals and relocating graves for others in the recent period, and asked one by one in person: "When you are doing funerals for others, do you see anything suspicious?" One of them replied, "Not long ago, when I went to a funeral for a rich family, they told me that a wet nurse had died in the family. When I carried the coffin out, it felt so light that it didn't seem to contain anyone inside. Now the coffin is buried somewhere. "Immediately he sent someone to follow the man, digging open the grave, and looking at the coffin, there was only one woman's head inside. He asked the murder suspect to come and identify him, and the suspect replied that it was not his wife's head. The rich man was arrested and interrogated, and he had to confess to the crime of adultery and murder. It turned out that the rich man and the woman had committed adultery, and in order to achieve the goal of forever mutual protection, the rich man did not hesitate to kill a wet nurse, but only buried her head in a coffin, and put the woman's clothes on the body of the wet nurse, carried it to the home of the suspect murderer, and hid the woman in his own home. The rich man thought he had a plan, but he didn't expect to be smart and mistaken, and this case was finally solved for this person.
A judicial officer who is responsible to the people should not be satisfied with the so-called "personal evidence" and "physical evidence" that have been obtained, especially in homicides where human lives are at stake. Because, if you are not careful, an unjust case may be caused. The conscientious spirit of handling cases, which "people's lives are paramount, and they must be done slowly and poorly," is not only worthy of emulation by those in power in ancient times, but also worthy of study and reference by judicial personnel even today.