Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / The Hwaseong Murders | The Serial Killer Case That Haunted South Korea for 30 Years

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The Hwaseong Murders | The Serial Killer Case That Haunted South Korea for 30 Years · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: Picture this with me for a second. Just put yourself
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in rural farming community in South Korea. The year is
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nineteen eighty six, right, and the place is huasiong. Now,
0:10
if you know anything about modern South Korea, you probably
0:13
immediately picture this bustling, high tech industrial powerhouse.
0:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, gleaming skyscrapers, incredibly efficient transit, that sort of thing exactly.
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Speaker 1: But the Wah Songs of nineteen eighty six is, well,
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it's absolutely nothing like that. It's this close knit, quiet,
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predominantly agricultural town that's just starting to feel the friction
0:35
of a major transition.
0:37
Speaker 2: It's caught between two worlds.
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Speaker 1: Really. You've got these ancient narrow dirt paths winding through
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huge rice paddies and deep irrigation ditches. But right alongside
0:46
them you have these new small factories pressing in, representing.
0:49
Speaker 2: That massive new wave of industrialization sweeping the country.
0:52
Speaker 1: Right. And because of that, in the evenings, you have
0:55
this new workforce, mostly young women, walking home alone from
0:58
late factory shifts. They have to navigate these unlit, isolated
1:01
dirt paths just to get back to their traditional farming villages.
1:05
Speaker 2: And it's a very specific kind of geography which creates
1:10
a very specific kind of vulnerability. The infrastructure simply hasn't
1:13
caught up with the societal shift yet.
1:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. But here is the really crucial thing. Despite
1:19
all that darkness on those paths, the people living there
1:22
feel completely safe.
1:24
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, everyone knows everyone, right.
1:26
Speaker 1: It is the kind of place where violent crime is just,
1:30
you know, an abstract concept, like something you might hear
1:33
about happening in a distant, dirty city. It's a place
1:36
that expects peace, not horror.
1:39
Speaker 2: But over the next few years that illusion would be frankly,
1:42
brutally and permanently shattered.
1:44
Speaker 1: It really would so welcome. Today we are doing a
1:47
deep dive into the source material behind South Korea's most
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infamous unsolved mystery, the HASCA on serial murders.
1:53
Speaker 2: It's a heavy one today, it is.
1:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I wanted to be really clear right off
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the bat to you listening. Our mission today isn't just
1:59
a gawk at the psychology the monster who terrorized this
2:02
nation for.
2:03
Speaker 2: Years, right, There's a much bigger picture here.
2:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, we are going to unpack the catastrophic systemic collapse
2:08
of the institutions that we're supposed to catch him. We're
2:11
looking at a system that buckled under unimaginable pressure.
2:14
Speaker 2: It's about what happens when the people paid to protect
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you start operating out of sheer, blinding panic.
2:19
Speaker 1: Well said, so, what exactly are we looking at in
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the sources today?
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Speaker 2: So the sources we're pulling from today detail a truly
2:26
harrowing timeline. We are covering an arc that begins with
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the very first murder in September nineteen eighty six, and
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it winds its way through literally decades of dead ends,
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false assumptions, and just tragic miscarriages of justice.
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Speaker 1: Before finally hitting that DNA breakthrough in twenty nineteen.
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Speaker 2: Exactly a miraculous, frankly unbelievable DNA breakthrough. And for you listening,
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I really want to emphasize that this is not just
2:51
a true crime narrative, No, not at all. What we
2:53
have in these sources is an absolute masterclass in the
2:56
dangers of anchoring bias. It's this glaring, uncomfortable look at
3:00
the human cost of institutional desperation.
3:02
Speaker 1: And honestly, the terrifying reality that evil often hides right
3:06
out in the open, right.
3:07
Speaker 2: In the most unremarkable place, is just blending into the background.
3:11
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this, I think. To really understand how
3:14
this entire investigation derailed so spectacularly, we have to start
3:19
at the beginning.
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Speaker 2: We have to look at the physical environment.
3:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, how the geography itself was practically weaponized. So it's
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September fifteenth, nineteen eighty six. A seventy one year old
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woman named Lee Wanham is walking home.
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Speaker 2: She had just visited her daughter in a neighboring village.
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Speaker 1: Right, and she simply disappears. Four days later, her body
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is found dumped in a pasture. And what really stood
3:40
out to me in our sources is the immediate reaction
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from the local police.
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Speaker 2: Oh, it's mind blowing.
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Speaker 1: They get to the scene, they take one look and
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they assume it's just a tragic hit and run accident. Yeah,
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which feels crazy in hindsight. I mean, why would they
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jump to that conclusion.
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Speaker 2: Well, it's a fundamental misread. But you can kind of
3:57
understand the psychological comfort of that assumption. Comforting how because
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they see an elderly woman, her clothing is somewhat in disarray,
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and she isn't found too far from a roadway. The
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immediate comforting narrative is a traffic accident.
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Speaker 1: Like a car swerved hit her and the driver panicked
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and fled.
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Speaker 2: Exactly because she's an elderly woman, the investigators do not
4:20
immediately suspect sexual violence. Their cultural framework at the time
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simply didn't account for that kind of predatory behavior against
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someone her age.
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Speaker 1: Wow, so they just totally miss the reality of the
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scene they do.
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Speaker 2: It isn't until the actual autopsy is conducted that this
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comforting illusion is just completely shattered.
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Speaker 1: Right, because the autopsy reveals absolutely no impact trauma, no
4:43
broken bones from a bumper, no road rash. Instead, the
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medical examiner finds that she was strangled.
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Speaker 2: To death, and not just strangled.
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Speaker 1: Right, strangled using her own clothing. Plus there are signs
4:53
consistent with attempted sexual assault. It is an incredibly intimate,
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violent and intentional way to kill someone. Terrific. But even
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with that terrifying autopsy report in hand, the police response
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is shockingly minimal. They only assigned three detectives to this case,
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just three, just three. And reading through the notes, the
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context for why that happened is fascinating because it has
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everything to do with what else was happening in South
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Korea at that exact moment.
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Speaker 2: Context is absolutely everything here. In the fall of nineteen
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eighty six, South Korea is gearing up to host the
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Asian Games, right, which was huge massive. It's this huge
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international event, and it's actually a precursor to them hosting
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the nineteen eighty eight Summer Olympics. The entire geopolitical apparatus
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of the state, which at this time is an authoritarian
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military government, is hyper focused on.
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Speaker 1: Public image under shundu Wan, right.
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Speaker 2: Exactly, they are desperate to project stability, modernity, and absolute
5:49
security to the international community. They want to show the
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West that they are a safe, developed.
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Speaker 1: Nation, so they basically drain the rural areas of resources.
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Speaker 2: Exactly that the vast majority of law enforcement resources, including
6:01
thousands of rural officers, are funneled directly into Seoul just.
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Speaker 1: To secure the games and what suppressed protests.
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Speaker 2: Yes, specifically student pro democracy protests, so Wassong is left
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practically bear. Furthermore, you have to understand the investigative landscape
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of nineteen eighty six South Korea. That was pretty basic,
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wasn't it incredibly rudimentary. There's no national DNA database, there
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is no centralized forensic system communicating between different provinces.
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Speaker 1: So no high tech crime fighting at all. None.
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Speaker 2: Evidence collection relies entirely on basic physical examination and well
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canvassing for witnesses, and out in these open rural fields
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separated by massive tracts of agricultural.
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Speaker 1: Land, there are no witnesses exactly.
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Speaker 2: There are no reports of a scream, so the.
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Speaker 1: Local police essentially write it off. They think, Okay, this
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is a terrible isolated crime, probably a robbery gone wrong,
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or you know, a drifter passing through. But it wasn't no,
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because almost immediately the escalation happens, and the pace of
7:01
it is staggering. Four weeks later, October twentieth, a twenty
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five year old woman named Park Hunsuk steps off a
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bus around ten pm.
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Speaker 2: And just three days later her body is found near
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a canal.
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Speaker 1: Then, December twelfth, a twenty five year old factory worker
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Kwan Jumbon is attacked. Two days after that, December fourteenth,
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twenty three year old Lee Kaisuk steps off a bus
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after blind date.
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Speaker 2: And she's found dead five days later on a ridge
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between rice fields.
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Speaker 1: So within three months, four women are dead and a terrifying,
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highly specific modus operandi is solidifying.
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Speaker 2: The pattern is undeniable at this point The victims are
7:39
entirely women walking alone at night, right. They're caught in
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that specific transition between the isolated rural bus stops and
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their homes, and the signature of the killer is brutally consistent.
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Speaker 1: It's the binding, isn't it.
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Speaker 2: Yes, he's binding and gagging them, but he isn't bringing
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rope or weapons with him to the scenes. He's using
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what the victims.
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Speaker 1: Are already wearing, which is just chilling.
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Speaker 2: It is stockings, socks, pennyhose twisted and possibly tied around
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the neck to strangle them, underwear forced into the mouth
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as a gag. It's highly controlled, deeply intimate, and unfortunately
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repeated ritual of violence.
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Speaker 1: I was trying to wrap my head around the police
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response as these bodies are piling up, and the analogy
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I keep coming back to is this.
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Speaker 2: Let's hear it.
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Speaker 1: Imagine you're trying to put out a forest fire, right,
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but all you have is a watering can, and worse,
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you don't even realize it's a forest fire yet.
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Speaker 2: You think it's just isolated brushfire exactly.
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Speaker 1: You think it's just four separate, unrelated burning bushes. They're
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treating these as completely isolated.
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Speaker 2: Events because they lacked the framework, right, But the geography
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is what I really want to dig into here.
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Speaker 1: The sources keep mentioning these bus stops and dirt paths
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as predictable choke points.
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Speaker 2: Yes, that's a key phrase.
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Speaker 1: So how exactly did the physical environment act as a
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weapon for the killer?
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Speaker 2: Well, this brings us to a really fascinating concept called
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geographical profiling. The killer possessed an intimate, almost native understanding
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of this specific terrain.
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Speaker 1: He knew the land.
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Speaker 2: He essentially weaponized the transition of the town itself. Think
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about those factory workers we mentioned earlier.
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Speaker 1: The ones doing the light shifts, right, They.
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Speaker 2: Are part of this newly industrializing workforce commuting from factories.
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But to get home they still have to navigate an
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ancient agricultural landscape.
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Speaker 1: But the infrastructure was just terrible.
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Speaker 2: Exactly, these bus stops weren't well lit concrete shelters. They
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were often just a physical signpost stuck in the dirt
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along a narrow road that cuts straight through a vast
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rice paddy.
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Speaker 1: Oh wow.
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Speaker 2: Once you step off that bus, you are enveloped in
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long stretches of absolute pitch black darkness.
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Speaker 1: So it's a literal trap. There's only one way home.
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Speaker 2: Precisely from a distance, those footpaths are invisible. Someone waiting
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along them, crouching in a dry irrigation ditch could remain
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completely concealed until the absolute last second, and.
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Speaker 1: He knew exactly where they'd be walking.
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Speaker 2: He recognized that these women had no choice but to
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wor walk these specific paths at specific times. He understood
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the vulnerability of the geography way better than the police did.
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Speaker 1: What the real tragedy is that the police lacked the
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psychological framework to even understand what they were looking at, right.
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Speaker 2: That's the core issue. The very concept of serial murder
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was virtually unknown in nineteen eighty South Korea. They didn't
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have the precedent, so.
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Speaker 1: They couldn't see it even when it was happening.
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Speaker 2: Right, So the first victim was just a murder, the
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second was another murder. They lacked the vocabulary to see
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the pattern forming right in front of.
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Speaker 1: Them, which perfectly explains why they fumbled the initial response
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so badly. But what happens next is even more frustrating.
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Speaker 2: Because of how they overcorrected.
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Speaker 1: Exactly once they finally realized they have a localized predator
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on their hands, they try to catch him using a
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strategy that the sources describe as casting a massive fishing net.
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Speaker 2: And this hinges entirely on a few early, very shaky
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forensic clues.
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Speaker 1: Yes, and this is the turning point that will completely
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doom the investigationation for literally decades. At the scene of
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the second murder, investigators recover semen.
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Speaker 2: Now we have to pause and talk about the reality
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of forensics in the mid nineteen eighties.
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Speaker 1: It was pretty primitive, right.
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Speaker 2: Very They do not have DNA technology. The only thing
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the local forensic labs can test for at that time
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is blood type, and they do this by looking for
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andigens in the bodily fluids. Okay, the test comes back
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indicating that the biological material belongs to a male with
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type B blood.
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Speaker 1: Okay, wait, back up, how exactly does that work? How
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do you get a blood type from semen? And is
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it reliable because obviously spoiler alert, it wasn't.
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Speaker 2: It's a great question, and it's where the science totally
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fails them. In forensic urology at the time, they relied
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on what's called secret status.
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Speaker 1: Secret status.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, about eighty percent of the population are secrets, meaning
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their blood type andigens are secreted into other bodily fluids
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like saliva, sweat, or semen. Oh I see, so if
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a man is type B and a secret his semen
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will theoretically show Type B antigens. But there are massive
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gaping holes in this process, especially in underfunded nineteen eighties labs.
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Speaker 1: Like contamination exactly.
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Speaker 2: Contamination is the biggest risk when you are swabbing biological
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material from a crime scene, especially a brutal, violent crime
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scene out in a dirty field. You are often mixing
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the perpetrator's fluids with the victim's blood or fluids.
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Speaker 1: Right, because it's a messy scene.
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Speaker 2: Yes, So if the victim is Type B and the
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killer is an O nonserker, the test is going to
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pick up the victim's type the antigens, and.
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Speaker 1: The lab just wrongly attributes that.
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Speaker 2: To the killer bingo. Or it could just be sheer
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scientific incompetence, improper storage, or degradation of the sample due
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to weather.
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Speaker 1: But the police don't question the science. They take it
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as absolute gospel.
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Speaker 2: It becomes an unshakable doctrine. The phrase type B male
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begins circulating internally, and it transforms from a single, highly
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debatable forensic note into a hard fact.
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Speaker 1: And then they find another clue the hair. Right, recover
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a hair sample from one of the crime scenes, and
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when they run it through elemental analysis, the testing detects
13:06
traces of titanium in the hair. Titanium, okay, So instantly
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the police think who works with heavy metals and they
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start focusing entirely on welders, manual laborers, factory.
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Speaker 2: Workers, which is such a leap.
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Speaker 1: It seems like a massive leap of logic. I mean,
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titanium isn't just used in welding, right, it could be
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in dust, it could be environmental.
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Speaker 2: It's an astronomical leap. Hairs porous, it absorbs minerals from
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the environment, from water, from dust.
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Speaker 1: In the air, so it could have come from anywhere
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in an industrializing town exactly.
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Speaker 2: But the investigators needed a profile. They were desperate for
13:36
a tangible target. And because of these two incredibly fragile
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assumptions type B blood and manual labor, the scale of
13:45
the investigation explodes.
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Speaker 1: But in completely the wrong direction.
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Speaker 2: Completely. The numbers detailed in the sources are almost hard
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to comprehend. They end up spending over two million man
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hours on this case.
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Speaker 1: Two million.
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Speaker 2: They deploy thousands of ours from across the entire province.
14:02
They question over twenty thousand men, twenty thousand men, twenty
14:05
thousand they manually collect in catalog hundreds of hair samples
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and tens of thousands of fingerprints.
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Speaker 1: Manual collection that must have taken forever it did.
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Speaker 2: They describe their own strategy as casting a massive fishing
14:17
net over the entire region and just hoping they catch something.
14:20
Speaker 1: I kept yelling at the notes while reading this. It's like,
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if you only ever look for a blue car, you'll
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never see the red one.
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Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is how perfectly that illustrates cognitive bias.
14:30
Speaker 1: It is so incredibly dangerous to take early forensic clues
14:34
as absolute fact, especially when the science is that primitive.
14:38
I mean, how does an incredibly wide net questioning twenty
14:41
thousand men catch absolutely nothing?
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Speaker 2: Well? It raises a profound question about how human beings
14:47
and massive institutions process information under pressure. What we are
14:51
looking at is a textbook tragic example of anchoring bias.
14:55
Anchoring bias, yes, ankling bias is a cognitive flaw where
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an end of or a group depends far too heavily
15:02
on an initial piece of information. The anchor when making decisions.
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Speaker 1: And the anchors here were the blood type and the
15:08
hair exactly.
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Speaker 2: The investigators anchored themselves so deeply to the type B
15:13
blood and the titanium hair that anyone who didn't fit
15:16
that highly specific, deeply flawed mold was essentially invisible to them.
15:21
Speaker 1: Throwing a massive net paradoxically made the investigation less focused.
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Speaker 2: Right, when you question twenty thousand people based on a
15:27
false premise you are investigating, you are essentially just generating
15:30
a massive amount of noise that drowns out the actual signal.
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Speaker 1: And the most tragic part of this, the detail that
15:35
honestly made my stomach drop, is what the sources note
15:39
about those actual biological samples.
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Speaker 2: Years later, when DNA testing finally catches.
15:44
Speaker 1: Up right, the killer's blood type wasn't Type B at all,
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it was Type O. The initial nineteen eighties testing was
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completely entirely.
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Speaker 2: Wrong, a total failure.
15:55
Speaker 1: So they literally built an army to look for a ghost.
15:59
And while the police are they're manually cataloging hair and
16:02
generating noise, the community is absolutely falling apart.
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Speaker 2: They're terrified.
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Speaker 1: The terror in Wasawang reaches a boiling point, and the
16:11
behavior of the entire town fundamentally changes.
16:14
Speaker 2: When an unseen predator is hunting in your backyard and
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the authorities who are supposed to protect you are demonstrably
16:20
powerless to stop it. The psychological strain on a community
16:23
is profound.
16:24
Speaker 1: People can't just live in that state.
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Speaker 2: They cannot live in a state of constant, randomized terror.
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They start desperately looking for patterns to explain the inexplicable.
16:32
Speaker 1: To give themselves a rule book for survival.
16:34
Speaker 2: Exactly, and in Huessegong, a very specific, pervasive rumor takes hold.
16:39
The rumor spreads like wildfire that the killer is only
16:42
targeting women wearing red clothing, and that he only strikes
16:45
on rainy days, which.
16:47
Speaker 1: The sources are quick to point out wasn't even true.
16:50
There was no actual statistical evidence of that at all.
16:52
Speaker 2: None.
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Speaker 1: But you can completely understand the psychology there. Terror makes
16:57
people invent rules to feel a full sense of control.
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Speaker 2: It's totally understandable.
17:01
Speaker 1: If the rule is he kills women in red on
17:03
rainy days, then the solution is simple. If I don't
17:06
wear red and I stay inside when it rains, I
17:09
won't be killed. It is a psychological defense mechanism.
17:12
Speaker 2: That's exactly what it is. It is an attempt to
17:14
impose order on chaos. And the behavioral shifts were dramatic.
17:19
Women stopped wearing red completely.
17:21
Speaker 1: Just phase it out of their wardrobes entirely.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, some refuse to wear any bright colors at all,
17:25
dressing only in drab, dark clothing just to blend in.
17:28
Factory workers began coordinating their shifts meticulously so they could
17:32
walk home in large groups.
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Speaker 1: And the men in the town stepped in.
17:35
Speaker 2: Two fathers, brothers, and husbands started escorting the women in
17:39
their families directly to and from the bus stops every
17:43
single night.
17:43
Speaker 1: Wow.
17:44
Speaker 2: Men formed volunteer vigilante patrol groups, walking the dirt paths
17:49
with flashlights and wooden sticks. The paranoia seeped so deeply
17:53
into the culture of the town that some locals even
17:56
erected a scarecrow in.
17:57
Speaker 1: The fields wait, a scarecrow like to scare off the.
18:02
Speaker 2: Killer, Yes, dressing it up and meaning for it to
18:04
act as a talisman, a magical ward against the.
18:07
Speaker 1: Evil that is wild. And it wasn't just the citizens
18:09
losing their grip, The police were losing their minds too.
18:12
Speaker 2: Yes.
18:12
Speaker 1: The sources note that the police were so desperate, so
18:16
entirely out of ideas, that they actually started consulting clairvoyance.
18:20
Speaker 2: Yes, psychics.
18:20
Speaker 1: Psychics are coming in telling the police to look for
18:22
a man missing a finger, which leads them on these
18:24
absurd wild goose chases.
18:26
Speaker 2: It shows a regression of an institution.
18:28
Speaker 1: They even had female police officers dress up in red
18:31
clothes and walk the dirt paths at night as decoys,
18:34
actively trying to lure the killer out into the open.
18:36
Speaker 2: When science and procedure failure, you turn to mysticism and
18:40
desperate gambles. But amidst all this panic and wasted effort,
18:44
the police do actually get some critical breakthroughs from survivors.
18:47
Speaker 1: Because he didn't kill everyone he attacked.
18:49
Speaker 2: Right In November nineteen eighty six, a woman is attacked
18:52
on one of these paths. She is grabbed from behind,
18:55
dragged off the path into the darkness, and the attacker
18:58
begins binding her with her own stockings. Oh my, but
19:02
in a moment of incredible clear headed survival instinct, when
19:06
the attacker demands money, she lies. She says her money
19:09
is in her bag, which she dropped back on the path.
19:12
Speaker 1: It is so smart, it.
19:13
Speaker 2: Saved her life. When he goes to look for it
19:15
in the dark, she breaks free, runs and screams until
19:18
someone hears her.
19:19
Speaker 1: She survives, and because she survives, she gives the police
19:22
their first real look at the monster. She describes a
19:25
man in his mid twenties, average build, about one hundred
19:28
and sixty five to one hundred and seventy centimeters tall,
19:31
with a short sports cut hairstyle and very sharp, distinct eyes.
19:35
Speaker 2: And the wild thing is this isn't an isolated sighting.
19:38
Speaker 1: No, it's heavily corroborated. Around the time of another murder,
19:42
a local bus driver picks up a frantic, mud covered
19:46
man at the area late at night and gives a
19:48
remarkably similar description to the police.
19:50
Speaker 2: And then there's the incident at the public toilet.
19:52
Speaker 1: Right later, another woman has a terrifying encounter at an
19:56
outdoor public toilet. The door opens and a man fitting
20:00
the exact same description advances on her, but she screams
20:04
loud enough that he panics and flees.
20:06
Speaker 2: And she adds a very crucial, very tactile detail.
20:09
Speaker 1: She noted that when he grabbed her, his hands were soft,
20:12
soft hands, soft hands which completely one hundred percent flies
20:16
in the face of the police's titanium wilder theory. A
20:20
manual laborer who spends all day welding heavy machinery is
20:23
not going to have soft hands.
20:25
Speaker 2: No, they would be calloused and rough.
20:26
Speaker 1: But the police are so completely locked into their anchor,
20:29
the type bee blood, the manual labor profile, they can't pivot.
20:32
They just ignore the survivor.
20:34
Speaker 2: It's confirmation bias at its absolute worst.
20:37
Speaker 1: And because the police can't pivot, the killer realizes he
20:39
has free rain, and then he escalates. We hit September
20:44
nineteen eighty eight, and the entire dynamic of the case shatters.
20:47
Speaker 2: Up until this point, the prevailing fear was centered on
20:49
the outside world, the dirt paths, the isolated bus stops,
20:53
the deep canals.
20:54
Speaker 1: There was a grim logic to it, right.
20:56
Speaker 2: There was a grim, terrified logic. You are out in
20:58
the open, you are alone, you are exposed. Therefore you
21:01
are vulnerable. But on September seventh, nineteen eighty eight, the
21:05
killer changes the rules entirely.
21:08
Speaker 1: He goes inside.
21:09
Speaker 2: He enters a home in the village of Jananri. He
21:12
quietly bypasses the traditional paper sliding doors, showing a distinct
21:17
familiarity with the local architecture by the way, and he
21:20
murders a thirteen year old girl named Park, saying he
21:23
while she is sleeping in her own bedroom.
21:25
Speaker 1: That is just it's devastating, the total loss of the
21:29
illusion of safety inside your own home. You can avoid
21:32
the dirt paths, you can stop wearing red, you can
21:34
walk in groups, but you can't stop sleeping in your
21:37
own bed.
21:38
Speaker 2: You can't. And if we look at the sociological impact,
21:40
this home invasion is a massive national ticking point. The
21:44
vulnerability shifted from the exposed path to the supposed absolute
21:48
sanctuary of the home.
21:49
Speaker 1: And crucially, the victim was a child this time.
21:51
Speaker 2: Yes, the public outrage is immediate and it is explosive.
21:56
The media frenzy reaches a fever pitch. The phrase the
22:00
serial murder finally hits the national press in South.
22:03
Speaker 1: Korea, so everyone knows now it is no.
22:05
Speaker 2: Longer just a rural anomaly happening in the dark. It
22:08
is a national emergency.
22:09
Speaker 1: And when a case becomes a national emergency, especially under
22:12
an authoritarian government that is obsessed with public order, the
22:16
pressure on the investigators goes from intense to existential.
22:20
Speaker 2: Their jobs, the reputations, everything.
22:22
Speaker 1: Is on the line. The public has realized they aren't
22:24
safe in their own beds. The media is screaming for blood.
22:28
When a police department is backed into a corner like that,
22:30
they stop looking for the truth and they start looking
22:32
for a scapegoat.
22:34
Speaker 2: Enter a Yunsung Yo.
22:35
Speaker 1: Yes, this brings us to honestly one of the most
22:37
enraging parts of this entire story, the wrongful conviction and
22:41
the true cost of sheer institutional desperation.
22:44
Speaker 2: The institutional desperation reaches its absolute zenith here. The police
22:49
need an arrest, and they need it immediately.
22:51
Speaker 1: So in July nineteen eighty nine, police arrest a twenty
22:54
two year old man named Yun Sung. Yeo Yun is
22:57
a local farming machine repair man, and if.
22:59
Speaker 2: We look closely at why the police targeted him, it
23:02
is a staggering example of confirmation bias replacing actual logical investigation.
23:08
Speaker 1: Let's look at why they picked him, because the logic
23:10
is so twisted it almost gives you whiplash. He lived locally,
23:14
he had.
23:14
Speaker 2: Type B blood, the dreaded type B blood anchor right.
23:18
Speaker 1: He worked at a repair shop, which they vaguely tangentially
23:21
connected to their titanium welding theory, and most importantly to
23:25
the police, he fit this very crude psychological profile they
23:30
had drafted of a loaner who harbored a resentment against women.
23:33
Speaker 2: But the reality of Yune's life was far more tragic
23:36
and vulnerable than the police profile suggested. He didn't just
23:39
choose to be a hostile loaner. He had a really
23:41
hard life, extremely hard. He had suffered from childhood polio,
23:45
which left him with a severe highly pronounced limp oh wow.
23:49
He was orphaned young. His mother died in a car
23:51
crash and his father abandoned him shortly after. He had
23:54
been forced to beg outside restaurants as a child just
23:58
to survive, before finally finding work repairing agricultural machinery. That
24:02
is heartbreaking, and he later told the police he had
24:04
never been in a romantic relationship simply because he believed
24:08
no one would ever want a disabled, impoverished person like him.
24:12
Speaker 1: The police didn't look at him and see a vulnerable,
24:15
disabled orphan. They saw a convenient, defenseless target. It's like
24:20
writing the target around the arrow after you've already shot
24:22
it into the wall.
24:23
Speaker 2: It really is.
24:24
Speaker 1: But I have to push back on the investigator's logic here,
24:26
because it makes zero sense. How on earth does a
24:29
man with childhood polio, who has a pronounced limp and
24:33
visibly struggles to walk fit the profile of a phantom
24:37
killer who is snatching women in the dark, dragging them
24:40
across muney fields, and consistently outrunning community patrols.
24:44
Speaker 2: Logically he doesn't. Physically he couldn't, But logic had abandoned
24:48
this investigation long ago. Clearly, we have to understand the
24:51
hierarchy of the South Korean police at this time. It
24:53
was a top down, militarized structure. Orders came from the
24:57
top to close the case, period.
24:59
Speaker 1: So they didn't care about the true anymore.
25:00
Speaker 2: The institution didn't need a perfectly logical suspect. They needed
25:04
a monster to parade before a terrified public to restore order.
25:09
And Yun was marginalized enough, poor enough, and disconnected from
25:13
any social power structures that society would accept him as
25:17
that monster without asking too many difficult questions.
25:20
Speaker 1: So they bring him in and what happens in that
25:23
interrogation room is an absolute nightmare. They interrogate this disabled
25:27
twenty two year old for three days straight.
25:29
Speaker 2: Three whole days.
25:30
Speaker 1: They deprive him of sleep, They beat him, they coerce him,
25:34
feeding him details of the crime, until he finally breaks
25:37
and signs a confession to the murder of the thirteen
25:39
year old girl.
25:40
Speaker 2: And then, to completely seal the deal, the police actually
25:44
falsify a forensic report on a hair sample from the
25:47
crime scene to explicitly claim it matches Yun. Falsified evidence,
25:51
he is convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
25:54
Speaker 1: This is where we see the absolute collapse of institutional integrity.
25:58
Confirmation bias may have initially blocked them to Yun's physical impossibilities,
26:02
but it was active malice and corruption that put him
26:04
in a cell.
26:05
Speaker 2: They knew what they were doing, They needed the intense
26:07
public pressure to stop, and they willfully sacrificed an innocent,
26:11
disabled young man to achieve it.
26:14
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the darkest consequence of that sacrifice,
26:17
because once the police convicted Yun, they had to protect
26:20
their narrative at absolutely all costs.
26:23
Speaker 2: Right they were locked in.
26:24
Speaker 1: If the police say Yun is the killer, and Yun
26:27
is in prison, then the murderers have to stop. But
26:31
they didn't stop.
26:32
Speaker 2: No, they didn't. The real killer was still out there,
26:34
and now he was completely emboldened because he knew someone
26:37
else was taking the fall.
26:38
Speaker 1: Because in November nineteen ninety a fourteen year old girl
26:42
named Kim Mijung is brutally murdered. Then in April nineteen
26:47
ninety one, a sixty nine year old woman named Kwan
26:50
Sum Saying is murdered.
26:51
Speaker 2: In both of these cases bear the exact, undeniable, highly
26:55
specific signatures of the hascion killer.
26:57
Speaker 1: They're bound with their own clothes using the exact same
27:00
methods of strangulation and gagging.
27:02
Speaker 2: So what do the police do? They are trapped in
27:04
their own lie. They can't at meet Un as innocent
27:06
because that would expose the torture and the falsified evidence, so.
27:09
Speaker 1: They invent the copycat excuse. They tell the public that
27:12
Yun was a copycat who only killed the thirteen year old,
27:15
and the real serial killer is responsible for these new ones.
27:18
It is such a blatant, disgusting manipulation of logic just
27:21
to keep an innocent man locked in a cage, and.
27:24
Speaker 2: The collateral damage of protecting this false narrative stretches far Beyondhissang.
27:29
The sources detail other victims who were completely ignored or
27:32
whose cases were botched because they didn't fit the established
27:35
timeline or geography like the Suan case exactly. For instance,
27:39
there was a murder in December nineteen eighty seven in
27:41
nearby Suan. The police there, feeling the same immense pressure
27:45
to find a suspect, tortured a sixteen year old boy
27:48
into confessing, oh, that makes me sick. They suspended the
27:51
child upside down and beat him until he fell into
27:54
a brain dead state and died in the hospital.
27:56
Speaker 1: A sixteen year old boy, Yea tortured to death by
27:59
the police to extract a confession.
28:01
Speaker 2: Yes, And later in early nineteen ninety one, two women
28:04
are murdered in Chiangju the exact same mo the exact
28:07
same signatures, but because Changju is in a different province
28:10
across jurisdictional lines, the police absolutely refused to connect it
28:14
to the mo Song.
28:15
Speaker 1: Cases, just burying their heads in the sand.
28:17
Speaker 2: Part of this was the lack of a centralized database, yes,
28:21
but there was also a profound wilful blindness. They had
28:24
their narrative, they had their scapegoat, and they did not
28:27
want anything disrupting the fragile piece they had constructed.
28:30
Speaker 1: But the darkest cover up. The one that truly made
28:32
me sick to read is what happened in July nineteen
28:35
eighty nine. While Yun is literally in police custody being
28:39
interrogated and beaten, an eight year old girl named Kim
28:42
Hung Jung goes missing in Hassan, and.
28:45
Speaker 2: This is where the incompetence crosses the line into something
28:48
deeply systematically sinister. At the time, the police classify it
28:52
simply as a missing child case, a tragic disappearance.
28:56
Speaker 1: But decades later the truth finally comes out. Months after
29:00
she vanished. The police actually found her belongings, her backpack,
29:04
her shoes, and very likely her body out in the area.
29:07
Speaker 2: But they hit it.
29:08
Speaker 1: They found a dead child, and they actively conceal the evidence.
29:11
Why because if they admit another murder happened right in
29:14
the middle of Wa Soong while they had their prime suspect,
29:17
Yunjen locked in an interrogation room, their entire case against
29:21
him instantly falls apart.
29:22
Speaker 2: It's horrifying.
29:24
Speaker 1: It reminds me of massive corporate malfeasance, but with human lives,
29:29
protecting the brand, protecting the institution of the police force
29:33
superseded the life of an eight year old girl in
29:35
the closure of her grieving family.
29:37
Speaker 2: The courts years later explicitly called this organizational concealment, and
29:42
if we connect this to the bigger picture, it provides
29:45
a profound insight into the psychology of systemic cover ups.
29:49
Speaker 1: How does an entire organization agree to do that?
29:51
Speaker 2: When an institution is under extreme existential scrutiny, Admitting a
29:55
catastrophic error, especially one regarding the murder of a child,
29:59
feels like organizational suicide. They chose to bury a child's
30:03
memory to save their own careers and reputations. Believable, And
30:06
as we look at this era, we must also note
30:08
the vast, silent collateral damage of this panicked justice system.
30:12
Beyond Jung and the sixteen year old boy who was killed,
30:16
four other suspects took their own lives due to the
30:18
sheer trauma and terror of police torture during this massive investigation.
30:22
Speaker 1: The human cost of the police work is almost as
30:25
staggering as the killer himself. Uh which, speaking of the killer,
30:30
while the police are busy framing a disabled man, burying evidence,
30:33
and torturing teenagers, the real monster is living right under
30:37
their noses.
30:38
Speaker 2: He was there the whole time.
30:39
Speaker 1: His name is Lee Chunjay.
30:41
Speaker 2: Lee Chunja was born in nineteen sixty three, right there
30:44
in Hassion. He grew up walking those exact dirt paths,
30:47
playing near those irrigation canals.
30:49
Speaker 1: So he knew the area perfectly.
30:51
Speaker 2: He was intimately natively familiar with the geography, and on
30:55
the surface he was entirely unremarkable. He was quiet, reserved,
31:00
not particularly social, but not an outcast either. He was
31:03
just a face in the crowd.
31:05
Speaker 1: But the sources give us some vital clues about his psychology.
31:08
When he was young, his sibiling tragically drowned and he
31:11
became incredibly withdrawn after.
31:13
Speaker 2: That, a significant childhood.
31:14
Speaker 1: Trauma, right. But the real shift, the crystallization of his
31:18
violent tendencies, seems to happen during his mandatory military service.
31:23
He is assigned to a tank unit.
31:24
Speaker 2: Yes, and psychological assessments conducted much later noted how crucial
31:28
this military environment was for his development. So well. He
31:31
derived a profound, intoxicating sense of control from the structured
31:35
power of the military, from the rigid hierarchy, the absolute command,
31:40
the required obedience, and the sheer physical domination of a
31:43
tank unit.
31:44
Speaker 1: Ah.
31:44
Speaker 2: I see when he is discharged in early nineteen eighty six,
31:47
He returns to a quiet rural community where he no
31:51
longer has that structured power. He is nobody again, and
31:54
almost immediately after his return, the violence begins.
31:58
Speaker 1: We consume so much true media that conditions us to
32:01
believe serial killers are these evil calculating geniuses playing three
32:06
D chess with the police. Was Lee Chunjay a criminal mastermind?
32:10
Or was he just a guy who got incredibly lucky
32:12
because he had typo blood and the police were obsessively
32:14
looking for type B.
32:15
Speaker 2: The myth of the evil genius is precisely that, a
32:18
myth perpetuated by Hollywood. Lee was not a mastermind at all. No,
32:22
he was a highly opportunistic predator who fed on the specific,
32:26
localized vulnerabilities of his environment. He was actually questioned by
32:29
the police at least three times during their massive sweeps.
32:32
Three times they brought him in, they took his blood,
32:34
they logged his name, and they let him walk right
32:36
out the front door because his blood was typo.
32:39
Speaker 1: He actually mocked them later when he finally confessed, he
32:43
said the cops spent more time asking him about other
32:46
men in the village than they did actually investigating him.
32:49
Speaker 2: And you have to realize how that realization emboldened him.
32:52
He realized the system was entirely blind to him. He
32:55
watched the police panic. He watched the composite sketches which
32:59
actually looked mamarkably like him, circulating the newspapers.
33:02
Speaker 1: He must have felt invincible. He did.
33:04
Speaker 2: He adapted. When patrols increased heavily in one specific village,
33:08
he just shifted his hunting grounds to the next village over.
33:12
He didn't outsmart the police with brilliance. The police outsmarted
33:15
themselves by anchoring to false data.
33:18
Speaker 1: And the timeline of when the murderer stop is equally
33:21
disturbing the official Hawsong murders and around April nineteen ninety one.
33:26
And this perfectly aligns with Lee getting married.
33:28
Speaker 2: But he doesn't stop being a monster. The violence doesn't
33:31
just evaporate exactly.
33:33
Speaker 1: He doesn't stop. He really transfers his need for domination
33:36
from strangers on dark dirt paths to his own family
33:39
behind closed doors. He becomes a severe, terrifying domestic abuser.
33:44
Speaker 2: He brings the terror inside.
33:45
Speaker 1: He locks his wife in her room for days at
33:47
a time, viciously beating her over any perceived disrespect or
33:51
loss of control. He extends this violence to his young son.
33:55
He derives the exact same twisted psychological reward, that sense
33:59
of absolute power and control from domestic terror, that he
34:03
did from serial murder.
34:04
Speaker 2: Until late nineteen ninety three, when his wife finally reaches
34:07
her breaking point and she flees the house.
34:10
Speaker 1: He finally escapes.
34:11
Speaker 2: Yes, Lee is absolutely furious his ultimate source of control
34:15
has escaped. He threatens her repeatedly over the phone, and
34:17
then in January nineteen ninety four, he pivots his rage
34:21
in a horrifying way the sister in law. Yes, he
34:24
invites his wife's eighteen year old sister over to his
34:26
house in chiangzhuw ostensibly just to pick up some of
34:28
her sister's belongings. When she arrives, he gives her a
34:31
glass of orange juice that he has secretly spiked with
34:33
roughly forty sleeping bills.
34:35
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness.
34:36
Speaker 2: Once she is incapacitated, he rapes her, murders her, wraps
34:40
her body in bin bags, and dumps it in a
34:42
hardware store garage.
34:44
Speaker 1: But this time he is caught, and the mechanism of
34:47
his capture is fascinating because he violates his own established pattern.
34:51
He targeted someone deeply personally connected to him, not a random,
34:55
anonymous stranger in a dark field.
34:57
Speaker 2: Changes everything for the investigation because.
35:00
Speaker 1: Of that connection. When the young woman goes missing, the
35:02
police inevitably bring him in for questioning, and the lead
35:06
detective suspects him almost immediately.
35:09
Speaker 2: Do you remember why?
35:10
Speaker 1: Because while the rest of the family is weeping, panicking
35:13
and grieving in the station, Lee shows absolutely zero emotion.
35:18
He is completely chillingly detached.
35:20
Speaker 2: He literally sits in the police station, looks at the
35:22
detectives and asks how many years would I get for
35:25
rape and murder?
35:26
Speaker 1: Like he's asking about the price of a used car.
35:29
It's chilling. It's the ultimate mask slipping, it really is.
35:32
The police searches house, they find the victim's blood under
35:35
his washing machine. They get a confession, which he later recants,
35:39
claiming police torture, and to be fair, given the massive
35:42
history of police torture in this story, it isn't an
35:45
entirely crazy claim.
35:46
Speaker 2: No, But this time they don't just have a coerced confession.
35:49
Early DNA evidence, which is just starting to be used
35:52
in the mid nineties, definitively ties him.
35:55
Speaker 1: To the crime, so he is convicted and sentenced to
35:58
life in prison, and he.
35:59
Speaker 2: Is transferred to Usan prison where he ironically becomes a
36:02
model inmate. He is quiet controlled, perfectly detached from the
36:06
other prisoners.
36:07
Speaker 1: For twenty five years.
36:09
Speaker 2: For twenty five long years, he sits quietly in that
36:11
cell while the town of huasiong bears the horrific, enduring
36:15
stigma of his crimes, and Yun Zungyeo sits in a
36:19
totally different prison, serving hard time for a murder that
36:21
Lee committed.
36:22
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the final act of this incredible saga.
36:25
For two and a half decades, the Haasion serial murders
36:28
are the ultimate cold case. The police have moved on,
36:31
the public has moved on.
36:32
Speaker 2: But science marches on.
36:33
Speaker 1: Yes. In twenty nineteen, the National Forensic Service decides to
36:37
take another look at the evidence and the technological leap
36:40
between nineteen eighty six and twenty nineteen is the only
36:43
reason this case was solved.
36:44
Speaker 2: It's incredible.
36:45
Speaker 1: They use highly advanced DNA amplification technology to test deeply
36:49
degraded biological samples preserved from the fifth, seventh, and ninth murders.
36:54
Speaker 2: To understand how miraculous this is, you have to realize
36:56
that these samples had been sitting in storage for over
36:59
thirty years.
37:00
Speaker 1: They must have been totally degraded completely.
37:02
Speaker 2: In the nineteen eighties, DNA profiling required a massive amount
37:06
of genetic material, but by twenty nineteen, forensic scientists could
37:10
use techniques like PCR polymerized chain reaction to take incredibly tiny,
37:15
degraded fragments of DNA and multiply them until they have
37:18
a readable profile.
37:19
Speaker 1: Science is amazing.
37:20
Speaker 2: They extract this microscopic truth from the physical evidence, They
37:23
run it through the modern national database, and against all odds,
37:26
they get a match. The DNA points directly, definitively to
37:30
Lee Chunjay, who is already sitting in a prison cell.
37:33
Speaker 1: When the detectives go to the prison to confront him,
37:36
his reaction is just, well, it defies belief. They lay
37:40
out the irrefutable DNA evidence, and he doesn't panic, he
37:43
doesn't deny it. He just casually looks at them and says, so,
37:46
you finally confirmed it.
37:47
Speaker 2: Over the next thirteen days of intensive interviews, Lee nonchalantly
37:51
confesses to everything. And he doesn't just confess to the
37:54
ten known HUISSIONG murders. No, it's way more He admits
37:57
to fourteen murders and over thirty d sexual assaults. He
38:02
provides unnervingly precise, tactile details about the crime scenes that
38:06
were never made public by the police.
38:08
Speaker 1: He actually drew maps, didn't he.
38:10
Speaker 2: He draws detailed maps and sketches of the areas as
38:13
they looked in the nineteen eighties. He calmly corrects minor
38:15
inaccuracies in the media reports. He shows absolutely zero remorse.
38:19
Speaker 1: For the victims, just totally cold.
38:21
Speaker 2: He simply speaks of his urges and the intense feeling
38:23
of control he experienced.
38:25
Speaker 1: Once Lee's confession is thoroughly verified, the dominoes finally mercifully
38:30
start to fall for Yun's Sounyeo. In late twenty nineteen,
38:34
Jun files for a retrial.
38:36
Speaker 2: And this trial is wild.
38:37
Speaker 1: It really is, because Lee Chunjay actually takes the stand.
38:40
He leaves his prison cell, goes to court and testifies
38:44
under oath that he committed the murder that Yun was
38:47
locked up for. Unprecedented In December twenty twenty, after serving
38:51
twenty years in a brutal prison system for a crime
38:53
he didn't commit, Un is completely exonerated.
38:56
Speaker 2: It is a profound moment in South Korean legal history.
39:00
The presiding judge actually bows and apologizes on behalf of
39:05
the entire judiciary for the trauma inflicted upon him.
39:08
Speaker 1: I'm glad he finally got that acknowledgement.
39:10
Speaker 2: Yun later files a civil suit and receives roughly three
39:13
point five million dollars in compensation from the state. But
39:17
while Yun gets his name cleared, the legal resolution regarding
39:20
Lee Chunja himself is deeply, deeply frustrating for many people.
39:24
Speaker 1: Right because of the statute of limitations in South Korea
39:27
at the time, the crime of murder had a fifteen
39:29
year statute of limitations that clock expired for the final
39:33
Hassong murder in two thousand and six.
39:35
Speaker 2: So legally, Lee Chunja cannot be charged with any of
39:38
these fourteen murders.
39:39
Speaker 1: And similarly, the corrupt police officers who tortured suspects, falsified
39:44
evidence and actively hid the body of the eight year
39:46
old girl, their statute of limitations expired, too, nobody faces
39:51
new punishment.
39:52
Speaker 2: It is a bitter pill to swallow, but this case
39:54
served as a brutal, entirely necessary audit of entire era
39:59
of South Korean in history.
40:00
Speaker 1: It forced change, massive change.
40:02
Speaker 2: The public outcry over these monumental failures forced systemic changes
40:07
in the justice system because of the abuses revealed here.
40:11
Interrogations in serious cases must now be mandatorily recorded to
40:15
prevent coercion.
40:16
Speaker 1: Which is huge.
40:17
Speaker 2: Investment in national DNA technology and centralized databases expanded dramatically
40:21
and clusially, fueled largely by the outrage over this specific case,
40:25
the statute of limitations for murder was completely abolished in
40:28
South Korea. Finally, the town of Wassong also officially petitioned
40:32
the government to rename the case the Lee Chunjay serial
40:36
murder case, officially stripping the geographic stigma from their home.
40:39
Speaker 1: But it still leaves you with this incredibly heavy feeling.
40:42
How do you process a victory where the bad guy
40:45
is finally named, the innocent guy is finally freed, but
40:47
literally no one faces legal punishment for fourteen murdered women,
40:51
a dead child, and decades of massive institutional police corruption.
40:56
Speaker 2: Justice in this case wasn't a neat cinematic bow where
40:59
the bad guys go to jail and everyone cheers. It
41:01
was a dusty file finally stamped closed. Yeah, but we
41:05
absolutely cannot underestimate the power of the restoration of truth.
41:09
While legal punishment for the specific crimes was impossible, clearing
41:12
Yune's name and ripping the mask off Lee Chunja holds
41:16
immense healing societal value.
41:18
Speaker 1: It's better than living with a lie.
41:19
Speaker 2: It forced a rapidly modernizing nation to stop, turn around
41:22
and look at its own dark shadow. It forced them
41:24
to see exactly what their institutions were capable of when
41:28
blinded by panic and authoritarian pressure.
41:30
Speaker 1: Well, we've covered an incredible amount of ground today, from
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the dark, quiet dirt paths of nineteen eighty six Wision,
41:37
where women were hunted simply for walking home, to the
41:39
brightly lit courtrooms of twenty twenty, where an innocent man,
41:43
finally after twenty years, heard the words not guilty.
41:46
Speaker 2: It's quite a journey.
41:47
Speaker 1: We've seen how the desperate need for answers can mutate
41:50
into a willingness to destroy innocent lives, and how a
41:53
monster can hide in plain sight just by being remarkably
41:57
horrifyingly average.
41:59
Speaker 2: And as we close this deep dive, I want to
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leave you with a thought tam all over. We spent
42:03
a lot of time today dissecting how the police anchored
42:06
themselves to a false narrative the typeie blood, the titanium, hair,
42:10
the lone manual laborer, until it became their absolute reality,
42:15
leading to unspeakable tragedy. Right it makes you wonder, you know,
42:19
in our own lives, in the snap judgments we make
42:22
about people or the facts, we absolutely refuse to double
42:25
check what false narratives are we currently treating as absolute truth?
42:28
And what might we be missing right in front of us,
42:30
simply because we're too busy looking for the things we've
42:32
already decided?
42:33
Speaker 1: Are there a terrifying but necessary thought to leave on?
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Thank you so much for joining us on this deep
42:39
dive into the source material. Stay curious, question your anchors,
42:43
and we will catch you next time.