Shows / Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
The crimes and mysteries Korea won't talk about — deeply researched and respectfully told. Each episode reconstructs a Korean true-crime case, unsolved disappearance, cult, or disaster: what happened, how, and why.
Episodes
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Dark Files: Made to Confess — four cases the confession decided
For a long stretch of South Korean criminal justice, a confession was the end of the argument. Once a man said he had done it, everything he said afterwards…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 55: Incheon Inhyeon-dong Fire Disaster (인천 인현동 화재 참사)
A Saturday evening in Incheon. Midterms were over. School festivals had wrapped up. And in a four-storey building on a narrow commercial street, more than a…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 54: Namyoung-ho Ferry Sinking (남영호 침몰 사고)
Just after one in the morning, in the cold water between Jeju and the mainland, a passenger ferry rolled onto her side in about ten minutes and was under the…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 53: Panmunjom Axe Murder Incident (판문점 도끼 만행 사건)
A tree. That's what it was about. A single poplar growing inside the most heavily guarded eight hundred metres on earth, its branches thickening every summer…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 52: Rangoon Aung San Mausoleum Bombing (아웅산 묘소 폭탄 테러)
On the morning of the ninth of October, 1983, a bugle sounded in a cemetery in Rangoon. It was a rehearsal. Just a rehearsal. The South Korean president was…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 51: Nakdong River Murder Case Wrongful Conviction (낙동강변 살인사건)
On a freezing January night in 1990, a woman was killed in the reed beds beside the Nakdong River in Busan. There were no fingerprints. No usable forensics…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 49: Iksan Yakchon Intersection Taxi Driver Murder (익산 약촌오거리 택시기사 살인사건)
At two in the morning, a fifteen-year-old boy on a delivery motorbike came around a five-way junction in a small city in North Jeolla Province and found a taxi…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 50: Samrye Nara Supermarket Robbery-Homicide (삼례 나라슈퍼 강도치사 사건)
Three men broke into a small supermarket in a country town in North Jeolla Province at four in the morning. They taped the mouths of the family sleeping in the…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Dark Files: Public Authority — Four cases where the weapon, the paperwork and the building all belonged to the state
There's a word Korean officials now use about cases like these — 공권력. Public authority. State power. It's the word you reach for when the harm didn't come from…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 48: Anyang Schoolgirls Kidnapping and Murder (안양 초등학생 납치 살해 사건)
On Christmas Day, 2007, two little girls finished a church service in the city of Anyang and went out to play. One was ten. One was eight. They went to a…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 47: Park Jong-chul Torture Death (박종철 고문치사 사건)
On the fourteenth of January, 1987, a doctor was called into a building in Seoul that had no visible front door. A detective spoke into a radio, and a section…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 46: Odaeyang Mass Deaths (오대양 집단변사 사건)
On the twenty-eighth of August, 1987, police searched a craft factory in Yongin, south of Seoul. They were looking for a missing businesswoman and around…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 45: Wau Citizen Apartment Collapse (와우아파트 붕괴 참사)
Nineteen days before the building fell, the people living inside it told the city it was cracking. They had found splits in the concrete columns holding up two…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 44: Song Hye-hee Disappearance (송혜희 실종 사건)
If you have ever driven a Korean motorway, you have probably seen him. Not him — his banner. White cloth, black letters, a girl's school photograph, and one…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 43: Gapyeong Valley Murder (가평 계곡 살인 사건 / 이은해·조현수)
A man drowns in a mountain stream on a summer evening. His wife is standing right there. The police write it up as an accident, the prosecutors close the file…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Dark Files: Small Sparks — Four Korean fires where everything around the flame was the real danger
A propane cylinder carried in from the cold. A candle set down on a box of dynamite. A mosquito coil smoldering beside sleeping children. A few liters of…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 42: On Bo-hyun Taxi Serial Murders (온보현 연쇄살인 사건)
On the evening of the 27th of September, 1994, a man walked up to the gate of Seocho Police Station in Seoul and said four words to the conscript on duty: I've…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 41: Makgapa Gang Murder (막가파 사건)
In September 1996, a twenty-one-year-old with eight convictions and no job sat down with two other young men and wrote a set of rules. Kill anyone who betrays…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 40: Silmido Incident (Unit 684)
In 1968, South Korea took thirty-one civilians, put them on an uninhabited island in the Yellow Sea, and trained them to kill the leader of North Korea. Then…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 39: Iri Station Explosion
Thirty tons of explosives sat in a freight car in the middle of a Korean city for a day and a half. It should never have stopped there at all — the rulebook…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 38: Korean Air Flight 801 Guam Crash
It is twenty minutes past one in the morning, over the Pacific. A Boeing 747 is coming down through the rain toward an island runway, and the man flying it…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 37: West Sea Ferry Disaster (Seohae Ferry Sinking)
October 10th, 1993. A gray Sunday morning on Korea's west coast. A small white ferry pulls away from a fishing island, packed with weekend anglers heading home…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 36: Daeyeonggak Hotel Fire (대연각호텔 화재)
Christmas morning, 1971. Seoul's Daeyeonggak Hotel is full — more than three hundred guests and staff inside a gleaming twenty-two-storey tower in the heart of…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Dark Files: When the Clock Ran Out — Cases Korea's Law Can No Longer Touch
For most of modern South Korean history, murder came with a deadline. Fifteen years, and prosecution became impossible — no matter what was found, no matter…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 35: Sealand Youth Training Center Fire (씨랜드 청소년수련원 화재 참사)
On the last night of June 1999, more than five hundred people were asleep inside a summer camp on Korea's west coast. Most of them were children. Many were…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 34: Daegu Child Acid Attack (대구 어린이 황산 테러 사건) — the Kim Tae-wan Case and Taewan's Law
On a spring morning in 1999, a six-year-old boy left his house in Daegu to walk to his after-school lesson. It was around eleven o'clock. Broad daylight. In an…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 33: Kim Gil-tae Case (김길태 사건) — Busan Deokpo-dong Schoolgirl Abduction and Murder
In February 2010, a thirteen-year-old girl in Busan was home alone, a week away from starting middle school. When her brother got back that night, she was…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 32: Incheon Elementary Student Murder (인천 초등학생 살해 사건)
On a Wednesday lunchtime in March 2017, an eight-year-old girl near her school in Incheon needed to phone her mother. So she asked a teenager standing nearby…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 31: Lee Young-hak "Molar Dad" Case (어금니 아빠 사건)
For more than ten years, South Korea knew him as the best father in the country. A man with a rare disease that had eaten away his jaw, who had lost every…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 30: Jinju Apartment Arson-Stabbing (진주 아파트 방화·흉기난동 살인 사건)
At twenty-five past four in the morning, in a public housing block in the city of Jinju, a forty-one-year-old man poured petrol around his own fourth-floor…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 29: Jung Yu-jeong Murder Case (부산 또래 여성 살인 사건)
At around ten to six in the evening on May 26th, 2023, a young woman in a school uniform knocked on an apartment door in Busan. The woman who opened it was a…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Dark Files: The 2010s — Six cases from the decade Korea couldn't look away from
Six cases. One decade. We've done the eighties, the nineties and the two-thousands — this time we stay inside the 2010s, the years when almost every Korean was…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 23: Korean Air Flight 858 Bombing (대한항공 858편 폭파 사건)
In November 1987, a Japanese father and daughter boarded a Korean Air jet in Baghdad. He was seventy. She was twenty-five. They were not Japanese, they were…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 24: Oh Won-chun Suwon Murder (수원 토막 살인 사건)
On the first of April, 2012, a twenty-eight-year-old woman locked herself in a stranger's house in Suwon and called the police. She stayed on that line for…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 25: Naju Child Abduction Case (나주 초등학생 성폭행 사건)
At half past one in the morning on the thirtieth of August, 2012, a man walked through an unlocked door in a small city in the south of Korea, picked up a…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 26: Sinan Salt Farm Slavery Case (2014년 신안군 염전 섬노예 사건)
In January 2014, a man who could barely see walked into a barbershop on a small Korean island, and then, on the way back, he did the only free thing he had…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 28: Go Yu-jeong Murder Case (고유정 전 남편 살해 사건)
On May 9th, 2019, a Korean family court finally gave a father what he had been asking for. Two visits a month with his own son. He hadn't been allowed to see…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 22: Seongsu Bridge Collapse (성수대교 붕괴 사고)
At thirty-eight minutes past seven on a Friday morning in October 1994, a forty-eight-metre section of a Seoul bridge stopped existing. There was no warning…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 21: Lee Hyung-ho Kidnapping and Murder (이형호 유괴 살해 사건)
For sixteen days in the winter of 1991, a man in Seoul phoned a father some fifty times and told him what to do next. Where to drive. Which bakery. Which lamp…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 20: Gwangju Inhwa School Abuse Case (광주인화학교 성폭력 사건 / "Dogani")
In 2005, staff at a school for deaf children in Gwangju reported that their own colleagues had been sexually abusing the students. At least eight children were…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 19: Jang Ja-yeon Case (장자연 사건)
On the seventh of March, 2009, a twenty-nine-year-old actress died in her home south of Seoul. She had been on national television nine weeks earlier, in one…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Dark Files: Serial Killers — Four Predators and the Sentences Never Carried Out
Some case files never really close. In this Dark Files compilation, we've put four of them side by side — four men who killed again and again in South Korea…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 18: Gangnam Station Murder (2016 Seocho-dong Public Toilet Murder)
A little after midnight on the seventeenth of May, 2016, a man walked into a shared toilet in a small building near Gangnam Station in Seoul and locked himself…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 17: Miryang Middle School Case (Miryang Gang Rape Case)
In 2004, in a small city in the south of Korea, a group of high school boys attacked the same middle school girl over and over for the better part of a year…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 16: Cho Doo-soon Case (Na-young Case)
On a December morning in 2008, an eight-year-old girl in Ansan set off for school and never arrived. What happened to her in the next few minutes left injuries…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 15: Itaewon Hamburger Shop Murder (Itaewon Homicide Case)
A twenty-two-year-old student walked into a fast-food bathroom in Seoul. He never walked out. He was stabbed nine times in the neck and chest by someone he had…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 14: Uiryeong Massacre (Woo Bum-kon Incident)
It started with a fly. A police officer was asleep on a spring afternoon in a farming village in the south of Korea, and the woman he lived with saw a fly on…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 13: Chijon Family (Jijon-pa) Kidnap-Murders
From the road it looked like somebody's grandmother's house. Pink walls. A mint-green fence. A farmhouse in the rice country of South Jeolla, with a barbecue…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 12: Jeong Nam-gyu Serial Murders (Seoul Southwestern Serial Murder Case)
For two years, people in the poorer districts of southwestern Seoul told each other a story about rainy Thursday nights. Don't walk home alone. Not in the…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Dark Files: Man-Made Disasters — When the Warnings Went Unheard
There's a phrase South Koreans use for tragedies like the ones in this collection: man-made disasters. Not acts of God. Not freak accidents. Catastrophes that…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 11: Kang Ho-sun Serial Murders
He was the man who stopped to help. A clean car, a polite voice, family photos on the passenger seat — on a freezing night at an empty bus stop in Gyeonggi…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 10: Yoo Young-chul Serial Murders
Thirteen days. That's how long Yoo Young-chul was out of prison before he killed for the first time. Over the next ten months, he murdered twenty people in…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 9: Hwaseong Elementary School Girl Case (Kim Hyeon-jeong)
An eight-year-old girl walked home from school on a summer afternoon in 1989, and she never made it through the door. For thirty years, her family called it a…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 8: Nth Room Case
It didn't happen in a dark alley. It happened on a phone, in an app millions of people use every day. Somewhere out there, tens of thousands of…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 7: Daegu Subway Fire
On the morning of February 18th, 2003, a man carried a container of gasoline onto a crowded subway train in Daegu, South Korea. He wasn't angry at anyone on…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 6: Yoo Byung-eun and the Sewol Ferry
On the morning of April 16th, 2014, a ferry called the Sewol rolled onto its side off the southwest coast of South Korea. Three hundred and four people died…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 5: JMS / Jeong Myeong-seok (Christian Gospel Mission)
He told them he was the messiah. Not a metaphor — the literal returned Christ, sent to finish the work Jesus left unfinished. For more than forty years…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 4: Sampoong Department Store Collapse
It was one of the busiest shopping districts in Seoul. A gleaming pink department store, five floors of luxury, packed with customers on a warm summer evening…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 2: Frog Boys (Seongseo) Disappearance
On a spring holiday in 1991, five little boys walked up a hill behind their homes to look for salamander eggs. They never came back. For eleven and a half…
- Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
Episode 3: Itaewon Halloween Crowd Crush
It was supposed to be the happiest night in three years. The first Halloween without masks, without distancing rules, without a pandemic hanging over…