Chapter 512: Criminal Anthropology (1/2)

Xiaotao tugged my sleeve and whispered, ”Don't say anything!”

”The bastard you mentioned is my grandfather!” I stood up and replied unabashedly.

There was an uproar in the conference room, where dozens of officers cursed at Grandpa, voicing their suspicions that the special team had come here to clean up after Grandpa.

”You say that my grandfather was bribed. Do you have any evidence?” I retorted.

”It’s just a guess. Why would he cover up for the murderer otherwise?” argued the officer.

Everyone was staring at me, and I knew that as soon as I announced my identity, anything I say would be misconstrued as whitewashing Grandpa. Fortunately, the fat officer stood up and calmed the room, urging us to focus on solving the case first.

Then, an officer walked in and said he had found some files regarding Ma Sanyou. In the 1980s, Ma Sanyou ran a music shop in the county town, and his business was booming. Ma Sanyou was both honest and straightforward, but he was extremely ugly. Up until the age of twenty-seven, he had never been in a relationship. Later on, he met a pretty girl who was a migrant worker. Her friends claimed Ma Sanyou had a lot of money. The relationship quickly developed to the point of marriage, but he never imagined she would disappear with 150,000 yuan of his savings. It turned out she was a swindler.

Affected by this, Ma Sanyou was devastated. According to a friend of his, Ma Sanyou often visited prostitutes and eventually contracted an unspeakable disease.

At the age of thirty-five, Ma Sanyou was introduced to his wife. Because it was a blind marriage, life after the wedding wasn’t smooth, with small quarrels every three days and major arguments every five days. After a few years of living this way, his wife left their two children behind, ran away with another man, and gave birth to a child outside the marriage. A few years later, she officially divorced Ma Sanyou.

After experiencing all sorts of storms, Ma Sanyou became taciturn, drank all day long, and could barely manage the store. His two children would often go hungry.

Apparently, Ma Sanyou had a bad habit of throwing garbage secretly in the middle of the night. Once, driven by curiosity, his neighbor opened his garbage and found a cat tortured to death. It seemed it wasn’t the first time he had done such a thing.

But there was another voice in my heart that said otherwise. Only if everyone assumed he was a criminal would his previous life seem to foreshadow the crimes.

“What do you think, Consultant Song?” asked the fat officer.

”I’ve not formed an opinion. I’d like to see him with my own eyes before I draw any conclusions,” I replied.

The fat officer shook his head, ”After the ninth murder, Ma Sanyou disappeared, and there has never been a similar case in the county.”

”Let me see his picture!”

The officer handed me the file. When I saw the photo of Ma Sanyou, I paused. Why did I feel a sense of déjà vu? That was one ugly face–his chin so wide it could cover the sky. In the 19th century, criminologists put forward criminal anthropology. Through the statistics of a large number of criminals' bones, it was found that people with a wide chin, sharp head, prominent eyes, and thick body hair were more likely to become criminals.

According to the theory of criminal anthropology, civilization and order were born only after human beings evolved to a certain extent, and people with such atavism possessed anti-social and inhuman genes, so they were more likely to commit crimes.

However, criminal anthropology remained a hypothesis which wasn’t scientifically proven yet.