In China's official records, Chen was dead. But he continued to wake up early to go to work, pay bills, and enjoy a quiet family life. He had adopted the identity of his twin brother, who had been buried for almost two decades. No one suspected that this respectable citizen was actually a fugitive wanted for kidnapping. Until an old girlfriend of his brother and a determined police officer unraveled one of the most bizarre criminal deceptions remembered in the Asian country.
The story begins in September 2002 in the city of Yuhuan, in eastern China. Seven men kidnapped a woman and forced her to hand over money from her bank cards. The police quickly managed to arrest six of those involved, who were tried and sentenced to prison. The seventh, identified only by his last name, Chen, managed to escape without a trace.
While his six accomplices served their sentences, he started a new clandestine life. For five years, investigators followed leads that led to dead ends. Until in 2007, news arrived that seemed to definitively close the case: Chen had died in a car accident. The authorities issued the corresponding death certificate. The kidnapper was officially dead, and the pursuit was considered over.
But there was a small detail that no one noticed: the buried body was not that of the fugitive, but of his twin brother.
Chen took advantage of the extraordinary physical resemblance between them to carry out a maneuver worthy of a thriller. When his brother died in December 2007, he presented his own driver's license during the funeral procedures and managed to have the authorities register the deceased under the fugitive's name. Then, he took on his twin's identity.
For almost two decades, Chen enjoyed an apparently normal life under his new identity. He started a family, worked, and integrated into society without arousing suspicions. However, there was someone he found it much harder to deceive: the woman who had almost married the real brother.
Before the accident, the deceased twin was engaged to a woman named Deng. Wedding preparations were already underway when the tragedy occurred. But shortly after his death, family records showed a romantic separation. That documentary anomaly would end up becoming an important piece of the puzzle.
Last April, during a review of old files, a police officer from Yuhuan named Long Yuwen found a clue about a man who had been using his deceased twin brother's identity for years. He retrieved the documents from the 2002 kidnapping and began cross-referencing names, photographs, places of origin, and family ties.
The investigator examined old images of the two brothers. Although their faces were practically identical, there were small differences that allowed them to be distinguished. He also discovered that just nine days after Chen's death was registered, his supposedly living brother had requested a name change. The photo attached to that procedure did not match the previous images. The man in the new documentation suspiciously resembled the brother who, according to the official certificate, had been buried for days.
Long then located Deng, the former fiancée, who confirmed that the man who died in the car accident was her boyfriend. Her testimony helped solve the mystery of the twins and reconstruct the identity swap.
Last summer, Chen was finally arrested. Biological evidence obtained after his arrest matched samples preserved from the 2002 kidnapping investigation. The man who had managed to deceive official records for almost 19 years could not deceive his own DNA.
The story of the twins is not the only one in China that seems taken from a movie script. In 2011, the police captured another fugitive who had managed to live for 11 years under a false identity after murdering his own brother in a real estate dispute. For over a decade, he managed to stay out of reach of investigators.
Another case, uncovered in 2012, even added a wedding to the catalog. A thief named Li, convicted of a knife robbery, spent almost a decade hiding under the identity of a man named Wang, whose ID he had stumbled upon by chance.
The fugitive managed to renew that document by incorporating his own photo and even got married using the stolen name. When the deception was discovered, the real Wang had to go to court to request the annulment of a marriage that officially bore his name. He had ended up married without going through the altar.
Even more unusual was the ordeal of a fugitive named Wen. After escaping from prison, he copied the personal data of a hotel roommate who bore a certain physical resemblance to him. Under that identity, he committed new crimes and was even sentenced by the courts again without anyone discovering who he really was. Justice had caught him again, but still didn't know who they had in front of them.