Bach Paulsen stole three guns, shot dead 15 people, and injured dozens more.
Over a year, from March 1996 to September 1997, the robber Bach Paulsen caused a series of shocking incidents in China, including attacking police, shooting dead guards, stealing guns, and killing robbery victims across Beijing, Hebei, and Tianjin.
This case was considered the most serious by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security from 1996 to 1997. Bach Paulsen was also considered the most dangerous robber since 1949.
Bach Paulsen lost his father to illness when he was three years old. Facing difficulties, Bach Paulsen was sent to live with his grandparents by his mother, she then remarried. At the age of 14, Bach Paulsen was brought back to Beijing by his mother and started attending first grade. Discriminated against for being too old, he dropped out after two years to work as a laborer. At the age of 19, he was employed as a coal-carrying worker at the Shi Jingshan coal mine.
Here, Bach Paulsen witnessed shooting competitions and developed a special passion for firearms. Almost regularly, after work, he would borrow a gun and go to the nearby forest to shoot birds, and after a few months, he became an excellent marksman.
In August 1982, he successfully carried out his first theft with an accomplice, stealing a 12-inch black and white TV. That same year, Bach Paulsen continued to commit petty thefts such as stealing a Phoenix bicycle, corn, watches, leather jackets, blankets, curtains, and more. In March 1983, he was sentenced to four years in prison for theft. Halfway through his prison term, he had to receive an additional 10 years in prison because an accomplice accused him of having conspired with him to rob.
In 1991, Bach Paulsen was transferred from a prison in Beijing to the Xinjiang re-education farm to continue serving his sentence. In the vast Gobi desert, this male convict filled with resentment began to contemplate evil thoughts. “At that time, I thought that when I got out of prison, I wouldn’t be young anymore. If I wanted to kill someone, I couldn’t use bricks or sticks, so I thought about using guns for revenge,” Bach Paulsen later confessed about that period.
In 1993, a herd of stray goats wandered onto the farm, and he captured them. When villagers came to retrieve them, knowing they had ammunition, he demanded more than 120 rounds in exchange. With ammunition, Bach Paulsen then planned to steal the guards’ guns after his release from prison. He pretended to actively reform himself, working hard, making every guard he came into contact with feel that he was sincerely repentant.
In March 1996, he was granted early parole, leaving the farm and boarding a train back to Beijing with 75 rifle rounds and 50 pistol rounds.
For more than a decade, feeling unfairly treated by the authorities and denied household registration, even being humiliated as a street vendor, Bach Paulsen finally executed his revenge plan with violence.
In the middle of the night in March 1996, Bach Paulsen sneaked into a power plant in Shi Jingshan, attacked a guard who had just changed shifts and stole a K56 semi-automatic rifle.
A few days later, near a crucial checkpoint in Shi Jingshan, gunshots suddenly rang out. A guard was injured by a bullet, and the attacker fled. Over an hour later, a patrol team from the Shi Jingshan police department stopped a white passenger car nearby for inspection when a male passenger suddenly rushed out, firing a rifle wrapped in a blanket and injuring several police officers. The shooter was Bach Paulsen.
On the night of April 22, 1996, a guard station in a shooting range in Fengtai district was attacked again, and the guard was shot dead. As the victim only carried a gun bag without a gun, Bach Paulsen couldn’t steal anything.
On December 16 of the same year, Bach Paulsen took the life of a cigarette vendor and injured three others in the Deshengmen area, robbing over 60,000 yuan. Fleeing from Beijing to Tushui County, Hebei Province, he used a gun to attack a guard station, killing one person, injuring another, and stealing a K81 automatic rifle.
In February 1997, Bach Paulsen and his lover Pan Dadong entered Beijing Railway Station. He carried an automatic rifle on his shoulder and wore a thick coat. Upon reaching Tianzhu, he found his former prison mate named Wu Tuming, and discussed plans to kill people and rob property.
In July 1997, he went to Farm 149 killed two people, and stole a pistol. That August, Bach Paulsen and Wu Tuming went to a shopping area in Urumqi city, shooting and killing several people and robbing over one million yuan. Two Tan Cuong University students discovered the shooter, and bravely intervened despite the danger, but were killed.
To monopolize the stolen money, on August 26, 1997, Bach Paulsen tricked Wu Tuming to Lake Tianzhi in Tan Cuong and shot him dead. Early the next morning, he and his lover Pan Dadong went to the hiding place, and dug up the money, totaling over 1.2 million yuan. After buying train tickets back to Beijing, Pan Dadong said she had to return to her hometown in Sichuan. Bach Paulsen gave her 110,000 yuan.
At the scene where Wu Tuming was killed, Xinjiang police found some bullet heads, which, after examination, confirmed they were fired from a K54 police gun stolen from Farm 149. During the investigation, a cousin of Wu Tuming revealed that Wu Tuming had gone to Tianzhi with Bach Paulsen. Before leaving, Wu Tuming told his cousin that his cellmate was a ruthless criminal who had committed major crimes in Beijing and possessed a gun. If he didn’t return by October, it meant he had been killed by Bach Paulsen.
Upon receiving reports from Xinjiang, the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau quickly mobilized investigative forces. On the evening of September 5, 1997, a local police officer and three criminal police officers went to Bach Paulsen’s house and said, “Your household registration is done. Please come with us to the police station for some related procedures.”
Bach Paulsen calmly said he needed to go inside to get his coat, intending to get his gun and resist to the end. But his mother suddenly came out and asked what was happening, causing him to quickly abandon his resistance plan and follow the police.
As Bach Paulsen stepped out of the door, plainclothes police officers surrounding him rushed in to arrest him. Later, he said, “I intended to take the gun and shoot you all, but I couldn’t bear to kill in front of my mother.”
In March 1998, Bach Paulsen and Pan Dadong were tried in the Urumqi People’s Court, and sentenced to death for intentional homicide, robbery of guns, and robbery of citizens’ property, with particularly serious circumstances and significant harm to society. Pan Dadong was sentenced to 12 years in prison for robbery and concealing criminals.
At the end of the trial, Bach Paulsen said, “I had to commit such a big crime to be able to say a few sentences here. I apologize to the innocent people who died… With a bad example like me, I hope no one else becomes a menace to society.“
A month later, Bach Paulsen was executed by firing squad.
