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South Korea’s Most Infamous Serial Killer
He would gag and rape his victims before strangling them with their own clothes.
Between September 15, 1986, and April 3, 1991, a serial rapist and murderer terrorized Hwaseong, a rural city in South Korea. Despite the two million police officers deployed over the years to track down the culprit, the killer remained elusive, fueling the public’s collective fear and even inspiring the 2003 hit film Memories of Murder.
The killer’s identity remained a mystery for 40 years. But detectives never gave up on this cold case. With the help of advances in DNA technology, police identified 56-year-old Lee Chun-jae as a suspect in 2019. Lee eventually confessed to raping and murdering 14 women and admitted to 30 other rapes or attempted rapes.
Background
The first victim was an elderly woman, Lee Wan-im, who disappeared on September 15, 1986. She had just returned home from visiting her daughter. Her body was found four days later in a pasture. The killer struck again a month later, on October 20, 1986, this time, the victim was 25-year-old Park Hyun-sook. Her body was found three days later in a canal.
Over the next four years and seven months, the killer would strike eight more times. The victims were all women who ranged in age from 14 to 71. After raping them, the killer stuffed their mouths with their stockings, bras, or socks before strangling them to death.
Police struggle to find the killer
This case was the first in Korean history where there was a series of murders with the same modus operandi. Police had a dizzying number of suspects (totaling 21,280) and mountains of fingerprints and DNA samples. However, with no prior experience in dealing with serial killers and with sophisticated DNA technology years away, police were stumped.
What police knew for sure was that the first five murders took place within a 4-mile radius in Hwaseong. Police saturated the city and stationed themselves every few hundred feet. But this was to no…
