A fugitive wanted over a 2002 kidnapping and robbery in eastern China lived for nearly 19 years as his dead twin brother, until the brother's former girlfriend told police who had really died in a 2007 car crash.
Police in Yuhuan, a coastal city in Zhejiang Province, caught him in Zhuhai, in southern Guangdong Province, on June 4, according to the police account of the case carried by Red Star News.
The man, identified by the pseudonym Chen Er, was one of seven suspects who abducted a victim in Yuhuan in September 2002 and took cash from the victim's bank cards, along with household appliances and other property.
The other six were caught and later sentenced, but Chen fled, and an extensive search failed to find him.
In 2007, Yuhuan police received notice from neighboring Anhui Province that Chen had died in a traffic accident and that his household registration had been canceled, which ended the hunt.
Identity swap unraveled
In April, a routine review of leads turned up a tip that a man in Anhui had for years been living under the identity of his late twin brother.
Criminal investigator Long Yuwen pulled the 2002 case file and found that the man's identity, place of origin and family ties closely matched Chen's. Police set up a task force to reopen the case.
In Anhui, household registration records and villagers' accounts both said the dead man was Chen. But officers could not obtain the original accident file from the traffic police, forensic examiners or the funeral home, and the inquiry stalled.
Archived ID photos gave police their first break: the twins looked strikingly alike, but their pictures from before 2007 could still be told apart.
Nine days after Chen was registered as dead, a name change was filed under his older brother's identity, and the photo submitted with it looked like a different man from the brother's earlier pictures.
Questioned by police, Chen's family gave evasive answers. Tracing the older twin's life around 2007, officers learned that he and his girlfriend, a woman surnamed Deng, had agreed to marry before the crash, but the relationship ended abruptly afterward and the two had no further contact.
Police found Deng in Hefei, Anhui's capital. After officers explained the relevant policies to her, she told them what she had kept to herself for 19 years: the man killed in the crash was her boyfriend, the older twin.
The older twin had crashed while driving home after picking someone up in Nanjing. Investigators mapped every route he could have taken and found the original file with traffic police in Langya district of Chuzhou city, Anhui, an area earlier searches had missed.
It showed that on Dec. 8, 2007, the older twin was driving through the district when he crashed, in an accident that killed two people and injured three. Items recovered at the scene and statements from the injured confirmed he was the one who died.
According to police, Chen took advantage of the twins' resemblance when the death was registered, deliberately handing over his own driver's license so that the dead man was recorded as him.
Officially dead, he lived on under his brother's identity and a changed name, evading several routine police checks while he started a family and settled down.
After he was caught in Zhuhai, biological samples taken from Chen matched those kept from the 2002 case. Yuhuan police have completed their investigation and handed the case to prosecutors to review for prosecution.
Chen faces three to 10 years in prison under China's Criminal Law, the South China Morning Post reported, adding that one online commenter said the former girlfriend had suffered most, while another asked whether Chen's mother and sister had also committed the crime of harboring a fugitive.