Fan Favorite - "The Red Sandals"

0:00Today's episode is a fan favorite. The audio and the story has been remastered for today's episode. In 1984, in a small city in northeastern China, a security guard stood outside of a warehouse working an overnight shift. The guard heard a noise coming from some bushes nearby, but he didn't think much of it, because this was a safe town, and usually the hardest part of his job was just staying awake. But suddenly, two thieves in ski masks emerged from those bushes, and they rushed the guard. They grabbed him and they slammed his head against the outside wall of the warehouse, and the guard fell to the ground in a daze.

0:35One of the thieves quickly gagged the guard, bound his hands and feet, and then told him he would need to keep his mouth shut if he wanted to stay alive. Terrified, the guard laid there and watched as these two thieves opened up the warehouse door and ran inside. This robbery would shake the local community, but it was nothing in comparison to the horrific crimes it would set off, and the gruesome discovery the police would soon make on the outskirts of town. But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious delivered in story format, then you come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.

1:12So if that's of interest to you, please replace the cream inside the Follow Buttons Oreos with toothpaste. Okay, let's get into today's story.

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2:50On July 25, 1984, a 35-year-old woman named Zhao Xiao Lian stood in her doorway talking to an agitated man in Liao Yuan City in northeastern China. The man was a friend of Zhao's husband, Li, and he kept pacing back and forth and he was loud and very animated when he spoke. Zhao glanced over her shoulder and saw her seven-year-old daughter drawing a picture at a small table in the front room, and Zhao turned and asked her husband's friend to please keep his voice down. The man nodded and then did lower his voice and then told Zhao everything was going to be okay. By the end of the night, she wouldn't have to worry or keep the secret she was hiding anymore.

3:29She just needed to follow the instructions he had given her. The man then said goodbye and wished her luck. Zhao closed the door and just stood there in silence for a second. Then she forced a smile onto her face and turned and walked over to her daughter. Zhao was about five foot three inches tall, with black hair and dark brown eyes. And her daughter looked a lot like her. Zhao told her daughter she could finish her drawing later, because for now, she was going to go stay with her uncle for a while. And right away, Zhao's daughter's face lit up and she ran to the door. Zhao followed her and slipped on her favorite pair of shoes.

4:04They were red sandals with a low heel. Then she took her daughter's hand and they both walked outside. The pair made their way through the neighborhood that lay on the outskirts of the city, not far from the surrounding mountains. Streets were lined with small gray wooden houses, and Zhao basically knew everybody who lived in these houses. This was a neighborhood where multiple generations of families had grown up right alongside each other. Usually, that was something Zhao loved about this place, that sense of community. But now, all she could imagine were her neighbors staring out at her from their windows, trying to figure out the secret that she was hiding from everyone.

4:42After walking for a few more minutes, Zhao's daughter let go of her mother's hand and ran down the street to her uncle's house and then knocked on the door. As this happened, Zhao prayed her brother was actually home. In 1984, nobody where Zhao lived had a car. In fact, even bicycles were seen as a luxury. If people needed to travel for work, they could catch a bus or a train from the city center, but typically, they just walked everywhere. The people in this area at the time also did not have telephones, so if they wanted to get in touch with somebody out of town, they wrote letters. And if they needed to talk to someone close by, they simply walked over to their house to see them.

5:21So it was not uncommon to show up at somebody's house unannounced and to find that nobody was home. But luckily, Zhao saw her brother open up his door, and he hugged Zhao's daughter, and as this happened, Zhao felt like a huge weight had been lifted. She got to the house, and before her brother could say anything, she told him that she needed him to watch her daughter, while she walked to the clinic in town to see a doctor. He said, of course, he'd love to watch his niece. But he asked Zhao, was she okay? Zhao said it was no big deal, she just had a little stomach ache and wanted to get some medicine for it.

5:55Zhao then thanked her brother, hugged her daughter tight, and said she loved her. Once her brother closed the door behind them, Zhao turned and started walking. But she did not head to the clinic. Instead, she rushed back home. When Zhao got there, she immediately walked to the back of her house and found her bicycle leaning up against a wall on the small back patio. Zhao's husband, Li, had a good job at a supply company, and Zhao had a well-paying job at a government textile factory. So together, as a two-income family, they were able to afford certain things, like bicycles, that many of their neighbors could not.

6:30Zhao rolled the bike to the street in front of her house. She saw the sun beginning to disappear behind the mountains, and she knew it was going to be dark soon. So she put her red sandals on the pedals and rode off as fast as she could.

6:47The following day, around noontime, an old farmer wiped the sweat dripping down his forehead. He'd spent hours doing back-breaking work, and he needed a rest. He walked south and could hear the running water of the Wei Jin River nearby. by. The farmer made his way to the edge of his land, and the river came into view. But suddenly, the farmer stopped. Part of the riverbank, about 10 feet from the water, was overgrown with trees and bushes. But through the weeds, the farmer saw something strange laying near one of the trees. He tried to block the sunlight to get a better view, but he still couldn't quite tell what he was looking at.

7:23He walked closer and stared at the ground right near the tree, and suddenly a look of pure horror crossed his face. He took off running across a shallow part of the river and headed toward the city center that was over 12 miles away. He left the river and farmland behind, running faster than he had in years, and he kept on running for the entire 12 miles, until he got to the city center and arrived at the local police station. The farmer walked through the door and tried to catch his breath, and as he did, two officers quickly walked over to him and asked what was wrong. He told them they needed to come with him to the river right away, but the officers told the farmer to just rest for a minute and explain what was going on here.

8:04However, the story the farmer told them was so shocking, they thought the old man must be confused. But the farmer insisted he knew what he was talking about and begged them to follow him. So eventually, the officers called over a few other cops and told the farmer to lead the way. The farmer, still exhausted from his run, led the police out of the station, and then they all walked 12 miles back to the river. When they finally got there, the two officers followed the farmer to a tree on the riverbank, and right away they could see the old man had been telling the truth. But they still didn't want to believe what their eyes were seeing.

8:41Because laying on the ground, the officers saw a naked, charred corpse. They could tell it was a woman who was maybe a little over 5 feet tall, and she had severe burns all over her body The burns were so bad that it was impossible to make out her facial features, let alone see any identifying marks The officers tried to stay calm, but they had never seen anything like this before They spent most of their shifts breaking up fights in town or occasionally investigating robberies, that was it The two officers walked away from the body and joined the other cops, who also had no experience in a case like this.

9:18But they did know they had to search the area for potential clues. So they split into teams, with one group searching the riverbank and the other searching the nearby farmland. On the riverbank, about 20 feet from the body, something caught one of the cops' attention. It was a woman's burned blouse and pants and a pair of red sandals. Just then, another officer called out, and the cops staring at the clothes and the sandals snapped to attention. Then he joined the other group and saw them looking at a single set of footprints on the riverbank, and it didn't take them long to match those prints to the red sandals.

9:53The police continued to search the area, but they didn't find anything else that stood out, and since they had a body and only one pair of footprints that matched the red sandals they'd found, they thought they'd figured it out. This woman had come to the river alone, set herself on fire on the riverbank, and taken her own life.

10:15The following day, July 27th, a detective named Soon Eugene sat at the back of a small, brightly lit meeting room at the local police station. Detective Soon was in his early 30s and had black hair and dark eyes. He listened to a group of officers talking to the police chief about the autopsy report they had received for the body they had discovered by the river. Soon had not been a part of the group at the river, but he needed to speak to the chief, so he sat there and waited. The officer said that the autopsy report did not identify the woman, but it gave a pretty clear picture of how she died.

10:49The body had not been burned after death. She had black carbon foam in her lungs and blood vessels, and that indicated she had been breathing while she was burning. This meant the fire and related smoke inhalation had killed her. And so these officers were saying they felt like that confirmed their theory, that this woman had basically lit herself on fire to commit suicide. And at this, Detective Soon, who had been quiet to this point, sat up in his chair and shouted, I disagree. The officers immediately turned and just glared at him. Some people in town said Detective Soon was smarter than everybody else, but a few of his colleagues thought he was just plain arrogant.

11:28One of the officers pointed out that Soon had not been at the river, so he couldn't possibly know what had happened. But the police chief chimed in and asked Soon why he disagreed. Soon nodded and walked to the front of the room. Then, with the captive audience in front of him, he said, First, self-immolation, setting yourself on fire, was a rare way for somebody to kill themselves. And often when self-immolation occurred, the person doing it was doing it to make a political statement of some kind. And so Soon did not think this woman, who was found in the middle of nowhere and didn't leave a message behind, was making some sort of statement.

12:04Before the other officers could argue, Soon said there was actually an easier way to prove this woman didn't kill herself. He said the officers had searched the entire area near the river, but they hadn't found a gas can or any other container that could have held the fuel that burned her. So either this woman doused herself in gasoline and then walked for miles before lighting herself on fire, or, and soon said this was way more likely, someone else doused her in some sort of fuel, murdered her by setting her on fire, and then ran off with the gas can. The officers just stared at Soon. Even if he was arrogant, most of them admitted he had made a good point.

12:43But an officer asked him, well, okay, if somebody else killed her, why was there only one set of footprints, which appeared to be the dead woman's footprints. Detective Soon said that was a great question, and they would need to look into that. But it was hardly a reason to chalk this whole thing up to suicide. Soon told the police chief he was sure they had a murder case on their hands, and he knew he could solve it. And the chief didn't hesitate. He said, okay, they would treat the woman found at the river as a homicide victim, and Detective Soon would lead the investigation.

13:17Later that day, Sun walked to the river with several other officers. He held a file folder of photographs that had been taken at the scene the day before. Sun knew that some of his colleagues wished he had kept his mouth shut. It would have been a lot easier if they deemed this a suicide, closed the case, and simply moved on. But Sun was sure he had made the right call. He refused to believe that a woman could just set herself on fire and not leave any trace of how she'd done it or why. And when Soon stared down at the footprints that were still on the riverbank, he knew he was right. He crouched down and took out a photograph of the red sandals the police had found there the day before.

13:54He glanced between the footprints and the photo, and he knew the officers had been right. The prints matched the sandals. But Soon caught something else the others had missed. He gently pressed his hand down into the ground not far from the footprints, and he was able to make a handprint. However, the ground was so wet that the moment he removed his hand, that print quickly vanished. It was like the ground kind of ate it back up, like water had washed it away. Soon looked at the photo again and fixated on the heels of the red sandals. They weren't high heels, but they were thick and solid. Definitely heavy enough to leave a deeper footprint, whereas a lighter, flatter shoe might not have left a mark at all, and they would have just vanished like his handprint.

14:38Soon still did not have a clear picture of what had happened here, but he knew things would become a whole lot clearer as soon as he identified the victim, the dead woman who had worn those red sandals.

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17:43The following morning, Detective Soon was sitting at his desk studying the crime scene photos when he heard somebody call his name. Soon looked up and saw an officer standing next to a man who looked like he had not slept in a long time. Soon asked if this man needed his help, and the man told him he was really worried. His older sister, Zhao, had been missing for days. Soon looked around and saw there was an empty office in the corner, so he scooped up the file folder with the crime scene photos inside and then led Zhao's brother into the office and closed the door behind them. Once they sat down at the small table inside the office, Soon asked the man when was the last time he had seen his sister.

18:22He said Zhao had dropped off his niece a couple of days ago before going to the clinic, but she never came back. So he'd brought his niece to his other sister's house and then spent a whole day walking everywhere and talking to everyone to see if they had heard from Zhao, but nobody had. Soon looked at the man with pity in his eyes. The man was already so upset and soon hated that he was about to cause him a whole lot more pain. Soon opened the file folder. and pulled out photos of the woman's blouse and the red sandals that had been found at the river. He asked Zhao's brother if he recognized the clothing.

18:57Zhao's brother stared at the photos and started shaking his head like he didn't want to accept what he was seeing. But eventually, he looked up and said, yes, those are definitely Zhao's clothes. Sun told the man he was very sorry to say this, but they had recently found a sister's body near the river, and he believed someone had murdered her. Zhao's brother immediately broke down sobbing. Sun gave the man a couple of minutes to compose himself, and then he apologized for pressing him at a time like this, but he wanted to know why Zhao's husband had not already reported his wife missing. Zhao's brother wiped the tears away from his face.

19:34Then he said that Zhao's husband, Lee, was on a business trip hours away, so he wouldn't have had any idea about what was going on. Detective Sun promised he would find whoever had done this, and then he asked Zhao's brother to please not speak publicly about his sister's death. Sun believed holding back information could be crucial in identifying the killer. Zhao's brother nodded and said that he and his other sister would not say a word. Later that day, Detective Sun walked through Zhao's house to her and her husband's bedroom. Now, this was not a crime scene, but Sun hoped something there might point him in the right direction.

20:12He searched the dresser and bedside tables, but didn't find anything that stood out. He crossed the room and opened up the drawer of a wooden desk that was pressed against the wall. Inside, he found playing cards, photos, and a blue hardcover notebook. He opened up the notebook and looked at the first page, and quickly realized this was Zhao's diary. Sun flipped through the diary and found the last entry. It was dated just a few days before her death. He read the entry, and it really took him by surprise. Because basically, it was one complaint after another about her husband, Li. And all these complaints basically boiled down to the same thing.

20:51Zhao clearly believed that Li cared more about money than about his family. Detective Soon bagged the diary as evidence. Now, he just needed to track down Zhao's husband.

21:09A few hours later, Detective Soon and members of his team met with Lee's boss at the supply company where he worked, and Soon got right to the point and said the police needed to find Lee right away. They knew he was traveling for business, so Soon asked where Lee had gone and where he was staying. But the boss got this confused look on his face. He said Lee was not on a business trip. Lee had been away from work, but because he had said he had this family issue that he needed to attend to. Soon didn't say anything in response to this, but this seemed like a major revelation. It meant Lee had very likely lied about where he was, at least to his boss and to his brother-in-law.

21:48Soon asked to see where Lee worked, and the boss led the police to an office filled with several desks. He then pointed them to Lee's desk and then left the cops on their own. Soon began rifling through Lee's desk, and under a stack of papers, he found a photograph of a woman, and it was not Zhao. Then, Detective Soon caught a break that could only happen in a small, tight-knit community where basically everybody knew each other. One of the other officers who was with Soon looked at the photo of this woman and said he recognized her. He couldn't remember her name, but he was sure she had been Lee's girlfriend when they were younger.

22:24Detective Sun felt like he was on to something big. He already suspected Lee in this murder, and now this piece of evidence helped him come up with a theory. Maybe Lee murdered his wife and then went on the run to be with his old girlfriend. And lying about the business trip would have given Lee cover to be out of town for a couple of days before anybody thought something suspicious was going on. For the rest of the day, investigators spoke to Lee's friends. And finally, they found a man who could identify the woman in the photo. The man told them that the woman was definitely Li's ex-girlfriend, but she had gotten married years ago and moved to a city that was about a three-hour train ride away.