Killer Testifies: ‘I Was So Evil At The Time’ Stabbings Of UI Exchange Students Motivated By Love And Rage, Wenkai Li Says

For months, Wenkai Li dealt with rumors among the University of Idaho’s Chinese community that his girlfriend, Xiaohui Pan, was less than virtuous.

She would challenge him to prove he didn’t believe the rumors, that he really loved her.

In response, he testified in his double-murder sentencing hearing Thursday, he jumped off a bridge into the Clearwater River, nearly drowning.

And when a fellow UI graduate student insulted Li’s girlfriend and deceased mother last Memorial Day, Li pulled a knife.

Asked if he remembered stabbing Ning Li - no relation - at least 25 times as reported in an autopsy, the 25-year-old defendant said: “I couldn’t understand, I was so evil at the time. I don’t know how I could stab him so many times.”

Li’s tormented testimony, which will resume this morning, was yet another emotional moment in a case that has drawn members of the victims’ families from China to ask that he receive the death penalty, the customary sentence in his homeland.

In exchange for escaping the death penalty, Li has pleaded guilty to murdering Ning Li and his wife, Xia Ge.

Li put their bodies in sleeping bags and dumped them beside a rural road in Wyoming before investigators tracked him down.

He faces 10 years to life for first-degree and second-degree murder, plus 15 years for the use of a knife. Second District Judge John Bengtson can order the sentences be served consecutively or concurrently, or he can reject the plea agreement.

While Prosecutor Bill Thompson declined to say so, defense attorney Michael Henegen said prosecutors plan to show Li planned the murders for money.

But in testimony Thursday from Li and his girlfriend Pan, it seemed the metallurgy graduate student was motivated chiefly by love and rage.

Because she came from Shenchen, China, near Hong Kong, Pan said she was tagged with a reputation that she had less traditional attitudes about sex and marriage than northern Chinese.

Her difficulty with English bogged down much of her testimony. When Thompson asked Pan if she said an acquaintance of Wenkai Li’s had called her “hot,” a spectator spontaneously corrected him by shouting “whore.”

Rumors about Pan plagued her relationship with Li, leading to almost daily spats.

“I said, ‘If you really love me, you’d jump into river for me,” she said. In April, he did.

The rumors surfaced again when Li visited Ning Li on May 29 to talk about changing his major to computer science. After a 20-minute conversation, Ning Li, 36, began needling him about Pan, who had gone to a cousin’s home in Maryland for the summer.

“‘Maybe she’s already got someone over there, because I know those girls very well,”’ Li recalled Ning Li saying.

Angry, Li said “she’s not like you,” and threatened to tell Xia Ge about a reported affair Ning Li had before his wife came to America from China.

Ning Li slapped him, disgracing him, and said a profanity about Li’s mother, according to testimony.

Li said he took from his coat one of two Buck hunting knifes he bought after Pan told him he needed protection for a planned move to Los Angeles.

The two men scuffled.

“I think I stabbed him,” Li said in a subdued voice between long pauses. “We were very close and I think his hand was on my hands and my hands just went around to his back, because we were very close.”

“How many times did you stab him?” Henegen asked.

“I don’t know,” Li said.

Evidence introduced in the first day of testimony Wednesday showed Ning Li and his wife died from severed spinal columns.

The sentencing hearing is expected to conclude today.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo