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From Chengdu Commercial Daily:

With the the birthday of his girlfriend of one year quickly approaching, he wanted to give his beloved a special birthday present.

Roses? Too ordinary. Jewelry? Too expensive. He needed something unique, something stunning, something nobody else would be able to give her.

So Zhang Dawei, 22, came up with a plan: steal a taxi.

For over a month, he investigated online, and sketched out a very detailed plan for how to commit his intended crime. And on the afternoon of October 13, he hid a knife in his coat and set off toward Wenjiachang, a suburb just west of Chengdu.

After hailing a cab, he instructed the driver to continue west toward the town of Yongning in Wenjiang. Somewhere along the way he assaulted the driver, decapitating him. He searched the now dead driver's pockets and removed 370 yuan, and then took the driver's seat to head back to Longquan, where he tossed the body out of the car and prepared his return to Jianyang.

Shortly after midnight, two night watchmen on a chicken farm in the Dafo village of Longquan town heard an engine revving. Their ears perked up at the sound coming from a road that sees little traffic. Believing it to be a thief so audacious as to drive a car to steal chickens, the watchmen grabbed hoes and approached the sound, ready to ward off the would-be thief. They saw a young man bent over a car at the same moment he spotted them.

The man took off on foot, with the hoe-wielding watchmen pursuing him. After a few kilometers, they gave up the chase and returned to the vehicle, whereupon they realized it was full of blood stains and notified police.

But the cab, it turned out, was a "black taxi" engaged in illegal transportation of passengers. The murdered driver of the cab was a 46-year-old Wenjiachang resident surnamed Chen. His partner in crime confirmed that around 9:30 that evening a young man dressed in sports clothes had gotten in his cab and they had set off toward Wenjiang's Yongning Industrial Park.

A cell phone left on the car's dashboard led directly to its owner, Zhang Dawei of Bishan County in Chongqing.

By 6 p.m. on October 15, police had tracked him and his girlfriend down in their rented room and arrested them. Zhang confessed to the crime, admitting that he did not expect he'd run into a dead-end road and did not know how to drive in reverse.