Between September 1986 and April 1991, ten women and girls were raped and killed in the farming villages of Hwaseong, south of Seoul. The youngest was 13 and the oldest 71. Most were attacked at night on paths through rice paddies and low hills, within a few kilometers of one another, and most were bound or strangled with their own clothing. South Korean police put more than two million personnel into the case, questioned more than 21,000 people and compared tens of thousands of fingerprints. They never charged the man responsible. They did convict another man, Yoon Seong-yeo, for one of the ten, and he spent twenty years in prison for it.
In September 2019 police announced that DNA from the old evidence matched a 56-year-old man who had been in prison since January 1994 for murdering his sister-in-law. His name was Lee Choon-jae. Within weeks he confessed to all ten Hwaseong cases and four other killings, and in July 2020 the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency formally attributed fourteen killings to him. He has never been tried for any of them, and he never can be. The statute of limitations ran out in 2006.
This page separates what a court decided (one murder, in 1994), what Lee confessed and police concluded (fourteen killings and a series of rapes), and what remains uncertain. Because the Hwaseong cases were never tried, the page describes him as having confessed to those killings rather than as having been convicted of them.
Lee was born and raised in Jinan-ri (now Jinan-dong), in Taean-eup, Hwaseong, according to Kyeonggi Ilbo and Asia Business Daily. At the time it was a district of rice paddies and fields; today high-rise apartments stand there. His mother lived in the area, and relatives still lived in Jinan-dong when police announced their findings in 2020. He was 56 when he was identified in September 2019.
He served in the army and was discharged in January 1986, at 23, according to the Korea Herald and the Korea Times. In summarizing their 2020 findings, police described him as introverted and passive. They said he first felt a sense of accomplishment and control in the military, and that after his discharge the boredom of ordinary life built frustration that he released through sadistic crimes. The Korea Herald reported that neighbors remembered him as quiet, nice and introverted, and that he claimed a woman in his neighborhood had raped him when he was a child. That claim has not been tested.
He worked as a subcontracted employee of a construction company, where he met his future wife, who worked in the office, according to her 2025 account in the Seoul Shinmun. The dates of the marriage differ by source: the Korea Herald says July 1991, after the last Hwaseong case; the Seoul Shinmun, drawing on the ex-wife's interview, says April 1992. They had a son. She said that he drank, that he beat her and their two-year-old son, and that she left in December 1993. He lived in Hwaseong until 1993, when he moved to Cheongju, in North Chungcheong Province, where his wife's family lived.
South Korean reporting identifies most of the Hwaseong victims only by surname and age, following the country's privacy practice, and their families have rarely spoken publicly. The list below follows the case numbering the police used for three decades and the details reported by NewDaily, Newsis, Kyeonggi Ilbo, the Korea Herald and CNN. Ages vary by a year between outlets, which may reflect the traditional Korean way of counting age; both are noted where they differ. CNN described the victims as including housewives, schoolgirls and a department store worker.
The first, Ms. Lee, was 71. She had spent the night at her daughter's home and was walking back at dawn when she was attacked. She was found on September 15, 1986, in a pasture in Annyeong-ri, Taean-eup. (NewDaily gives September 16; the Korea Herald gives her age as 72.) The pasture is now a six-lane road and an apartment complex near the Annyeong interchange.
The second, Ms. Park, was 26, according to NewDaily. She was killed on the night of October 20, 1986, in Jinan-ri after a blind date and was found in an irrigation ditch.
The third, Ms. Kwon, 26 by NewDaily's list, was killed on the night of December 12, 1986, near her home in Annyeong-ri. Her hands had been bound with stockings.
The fourth, Ms. Lee, 23, was killed two nights later, on December 14, 1986, in Gwanhang-ri, Jeongnam-myeon, after getting off a bus on her way home from a blind date. Her hands too were bound with stockings. Four bodies had now been found within a radius of about five kilometers in four months, and the case had become a national story.
The fifth, Ms. Hong, was an 18-year-old high school student, the first minor among the victims. She was killed on the evening of January 10, 1987, in Hwanggye-ri, Taean-eup.
The sixth, Ms. Park, was 29 (30 in NewDaily's list). On the rainy night of May 2, 1987, she went out to meet her husband at a bus stop in Jinan-ri. She was missing for ten days before she was found in woods, her body covered with pine branches. Local people knew the spot as Wonbari-gogae. The next day police took more than thirty workers from a nearby heavy-equipment parts factory to the station for identity checks; one of them, Park Won-kyo, told Kyeonggi Ilbo in 2020 that he never used that road again.
The seventh, Ms. An, was 52. She was killed on the night of September 7, 1988, in Gajae-ri, Paltan-myeon. Her hands had been tied with her blouse and she had been gagged.
The eighth was a 13-year-old middle school student, Ms. Park. On September 16, 1988, she was found raped and strangled in her bed at home in Jinan-ri. CNN reported in 2020 that little is publicly known about her and that her family has never spoken to the media. From the start police treated her death as different: it happened indoors, while the others had happened outdoors, and they classified it as a copycat crime. That classification led to the wrongful conviction described below.
The ninth, Ms. Kim, was a 14-year-old middle school student. She was killed on the evening of November 15, 1990, in Byeongjeom-ri, Taean-eup. Her hands and feet had been bound and she had been gagged. After her death, investigators sent evidence to Japan for DNA analysis; it matched none of their suspects, according to Aju Business Daily.
The tenth, Ms. Kwon, was 69. She was found on a hill in Bansong-ri, Dongtan-myeon, after she was killed on the night of April 3, 1991. Investigators found two footprints, too damaged to analyze. It was the last case in the series.
Six of the cases took place within three kilometers of Lee's family home, the Korea Times reported in 2019, and four of them, including the eighth, lay along the Hwanggu Stream between Suwon and Hwaseong.
In its July 2020 findings, as reported by Etoday, the police added four killings that had never been part of the Hwaseong numbering:
a high school girl in Suwon, December 1987;
an elementary school student in Hwaseong, July 1989, who had been recorded as a missing child;
a high school girl in Cheongju, January 1991;
a housewife in Cheongju, March 1991.
The Korea JoongAng Daily summarized the total as eleven killings in Hwaseong (the ten numbered cases and the missing child) and three elsewhere. Police have not released the names of the three women in Suwon and Cheongju, and no outlet consulted for this page gave more about them.
The Hwaseong child has a name, because her family went to court. Kim Hyun-jeong was eight, a second grader in Taean-eup. On the afternoon of July 7, 1989, she disappeared on her way home from school. Police searched and found nothing, and the next year they closed the file as a simple missing-person case. Her family kept the same home telephone number for thirty years in case she called.
Lee told investigators in 2019 that he had raped her, bound her with a jump rope, killed her and left her body on a hillside. The reinvestigation then found that in December 1989, about five months after she vanished, detectives had found her school bag, her shoe bag and clothing in nearby hills, along with the bones of a child's two hands still tied with a jump rope. They did not tell the family, made no record and wrote the case up as a disappearance. When her father later asked for a new investigation, he was refused. Police booked the former investigators in 2020 for concealing a body and destroying evidence, but the statute of limitations had expired, and none was punished. Her remains have never been recovered.
The original investigation was the largest South Korea had mounted for a single case. Figures published by Newsis in 2019 give more than two million personnel deployed, 21,280 suspects and witnesses questioned, fingerprints compared for 40,116 people and hair analysis for 180. Along the way 1,495 people the investigators looked at were arrested for unrelated crimes.
What the investigators had was limited by the science of the time. They had an eyewitness, fingerprints, hair and semen samples, according to the Korea Herald. Their profile was a slim man about 25 years old, 168 to 170 centimeters tall, with blood type B. Lee's blood type is O, and the Herald reported that the B finding, probably the result of faulty analysis or a contaminated sample, is the likely reason he dropped off the suspect list. Ha Seung-gyun, who led the investigation at the time, has denied that police settled on type B, and the police record does not explain why Lee was cleared. In his 2020 testimony Lee said police had questioned him during the years of the killings while he was carrying one of the victims' watches, CNN reported.
Under public pressure, the investigation also did serious harm to innocent people. Police in 2020 apologized not only to Yoon Seong-yeo but to everyone harmed by what Bae Yong-ju, the provincial police chief, called the "excessive investigation." The record that has come out includes:
Hong Seong-rok, taken in without a warrant on May 10, 1987, and held in isolation for about a week. Over 152 hours of illegal detention he was allowed about 19 hours of sleep in total and was coerced into false confessions to the third, fifth and sixth cases, Asia Business Daily reported in 2026. Newspapers published his face. He lost his job, could not afford treatment for liver disease and died in March 2002, never having been cleared in his lifetime.
A 19-year-old surnamed Yoon (not Yoon Seong-yeo) who in December 1990 confessed to one killing and retracted it at the reenactment. The Korea Herald reported he had been threatened and tortured, including with electric shocks. His brother said he never lived a normal life afterward; he died of cancer at 27.
A factory worker in his thirties who threw himself in front of a train after officers beat him during questioning, according to the Korea Times.
At least four people investigated as suspects who later took their own lives, according to AFP.
Lee's wife left him in December 1993. He later told police that he killed her younger sister out of "revenge" for that, the Korea Times reported.
On January 13, 1994, he invited his sister-in-law, who was 20 (21 by Korean count, as the Seoul Shinmun gives it), to his home in Cheongju, saying she could pick up a toaster. He gave her a drink laced with sleeping pills. When she said she was going to church with a friend and tried to leave, he assaulted her, raped her and killed her with a blunt object, according to the court findings summarized by Asia Business Daily and the Seoul Shinmun. He moved her body about a kilometer to the yard of a hardware store. The next day, a detective told SBS in 2025, he went to his father-in-law, a rice farmer, and asked whether there was anything he could do to help, and he went with the family to report her missing. He cleaned the house overnight; investigators proved the case through traces of blood on a bathroom doorknob and under the flooring near the washing machine.
He was arrested later that month. In 2025, the ex-wife told SBS that police had told her he had probably let her live because she was his son's mother. A detective also said that after the arrest Lee's mother told him to hire a lawyer quickly and to burn everything left at home, which the detective now believes was an attempt to hide evidence of the Hwaseong crimes.
Prosecutors charged Lee with murder, rape and illegal disposal of a body. He denied everything. He argued that no blood had been found in his house, that nothing directly tied him to the weapon or to buying or keeping the sleeping pills, and that his confession had been forced by police torture. The trial court rejected his denial and sentenced him to death. The appeals court upheld that sentence, finding that he had probably washed the house with water and that the amount of sleeping drug found in the victim's blood could not be explained by ordinary use. In 1995 the Supreme Court reversed the death sentence and sent the case back, saying the lower court had to decide whether the killing was premeditated or done in sudden passion. On remand he was sentenced to life imprisonment, according to Asia Business Daily's 2019 summary of the rulings. A former cellmate told JTBC in 2019 that Lee had admitted the killing to him in prison while insisting in court that he was innocent and vowing to fight to the Supreme Court. In a recorded statement aired in 2025, Lee claimed that he had not raped her and that he had first denied the killing because South Korea still had the death penalty.
While the Cheongju case was being built, police there took Lee back to his family home in Hwaseong to search for evidence. Hwaseong detectives came by, saw the similarities with their unsolved cases and asked to take him to their station for questioning. The Cheongju police refused and told them to come to Cheongju if they wanted to question him. The Korea Times reported in 2019 that, for reasons never explained, there was no follow-up. The Hwaseong cases stopped in April 1991; Lee was in custody from January 1994.
Lee served his sentence at Busan Prison. His mouth was swabbed for the national DNA database of convicted offenders, which was created in 2010, the Korea Times reported.
In July 2019 a cold-case team at the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency sent part of the Hwaseong evidence to the National Forensic Service for fresh testing, using DNA amplification and recovery methods that had not existed when the samples were taken. The result matched Lee's profile in the database. Police announced the match on September 18 and 19, 2019. DNA taken from the underwear of one victim matched him, Yonhap reported via Asia Times, and Ban Ki-soo, head of the investigation team, told reporters that DNA from three crime scenes matched the same man. Police did not name him at first. Korean media identified him as Lee Chun-jae within a day. Later work found his DNA in evidence from five of the fourteen killings, the Korea Herald reported in 2023; police said some of it was on victims' belongings.
Questioned in prison, Lee at first denied everything. Investigators met him nine times in the first two weeks. When shown the DNA results, Ban said, Lee replied, "I knew someday this day would come and what I did would be disclosed." He then confessed, describing the crimes voluntarily and drawing sketches of some of the scenes. His memory of dates and places was imprecise and varied between interviews, police said, and they checked his account against the old case files. Over nearly seven months, police profilers interviewed him 52 times, CNN reported.
On October 2, 2019, police announced that Lee had confessed to the Hwaseong cases and to five killings beyond the nine already associated with him, and to about thirty rapes and attempted rapes. In that first briefing, NewDaily reported, he admitted nine of the ten numbered cases. The eighth had already been "solved." Days later Yonhap reported that Lee also claimed the eighth case, which rattled the police. An investigator said they had classified it as a copycat from the beginning because the location and method differed, and that they were now checking whether the confession could be true. Some speculated at the time that Lee was trying to discredit the police. Prosecutors reexamined the eighth case and concluded in November 2019 that Lee was the real perpetrator, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported.
The police reinvestigation ended on July 2, 2020. Its conclusions, as reported by the Korea JoongAng Daily, Etoday, AFP and Asia Business Daily:
Lee killed fourteen women and girls, most of them after raping them: the ten Hwaseong cases and the four others listed above.
He raped nine other women who survived. He had admitted 34 rapes and attempted rapes, but police found sufficient evidence for only nine.
A psychopathy assessment found "clear psychopathic tendencies," including a complete lack of empathy for the victims, and the crimes grew more cruel over time. Bae Yong-ju, the provincial police chief, said Lee had "continuously showed off his crimes."
Police had assaulted Yoon Seong-yeo and coerced his false confession in 1989.
Bae bowed and apologized "to the victims of Lee Chun-jae's crimes, the surviving families and everyone who suffered damage due to the police investigation, including Mr Yoon." Police said the full record of the investigation and its failures would be kept as a lesson. CNN later reported plans for a white paper.
Counting his sister-in-law, AFP put his victims at fifteen.
When the Hwaseong killings took place, South Korean law set a fifteen-year statute of limitations for murder. The limit for the last numbered case, from April 3, 1991, expired on April 2, 2006. The law was amended in 2007 to extend the period to 25 years and in 2015 to abolish it for murder, but neither change reached back to crimes whose period had already run, the Korea JoongAng Daily explained. The latest of the fourteen killings Lee confessed to happened in March 1991. Every case was barred before Lee's DNA was matched, so no charge could be brought, and the police findings cannot add to his sentence. The same rule protected the officers accused of abusing suspects. Eight to ten former officers and a prosecutor were booked for abuse of power and illegal detention (the numbers vary by report), and the cases went to prosecutors without a recommendation to indict.
Yoon Seong-yeo had childhood polio, which left him with a limp in his left leg and exempted him from military service. His mother died in a car accident when he was in his third year of school, his father disappeared, and he left school to work. He begged outside a fried chicken restaurant in Hwaseong for about a year; at about eleven he began working at a farm machinery repair shop. By 22 he was training there to qualify as a technician. His employer, Hong Seong-jae, remembered him as often sad and "excellent at repairing machines," CNN reported in 2020. He had trouble reading and writing.
Police came to his home in July 1989, as he sat down to dinner. "It won't take long," they told him. Detention records later put the start of his custody at July 25, 1989. He said he was handcuffed in an interrogation room for three days, barely fed, woken whenever he tried to sleep and made to do squat jumps over and over. "When you don't get sleep for three days, you don't know what you said," he told CNN. His lawyers said he was deprived of sleep for more than 75 hours and beaten. Police dictated his statement for him to write out. The National Forensic Service reported that pubic hair from the scene was consistent with his.
He told the trial court he was innocent and that police had forced the confession, though at one point he admitted the killing in the hope of avoiding a death sentence, CNN reported. The Suwon District Court sentenced him to life in October 1989, and the Supreme Court upheld the sentence in May 1990. His sentence was later commuted, and he was paroled on August 14, 2009, having served 7,326 days. He has said it took about three years to adjust to life outside. His employer closed the business after his arrest. "I lost my business, but he lost his life," Hong told CNN. Five officers involved in arresting him were promoted, Asia Business Daily reported.
Yoon filed for a retrial at the Suwon District Court in November 2019, and prosecutors, after their own review, agreed one was needed. The court granted it in January 2020. At a preparatory hearing on February 6, 2020, Judge Kim Byeong-chan apologized to him on behalf of the judiciary, saying Yoon "was imprisoned for a long period due to an unfair trial that he was iniquitously subjected to," and that "it is very likely that he will be declared innocent."
On November 2, 2020, Lee Choon-jae appeared in public for the first time in decades, as a witness at Yoon's retrial. Wearing a prison uniform, he answered Yoon's lawyer briefly: he was the real culprit in the eighth case and in all fourteen killings. "I sincerely apologize to Mr. Yoon, who was falsely charged with the killing I committed and served prison time," he said, according to Yonhap, and "I wish for the eternal rest of the victims." He said he had never expected the crimes to stay buried, had not really hidden his traces, and still did not understand why he had not been a suspect. Asked why he had done it, he said he had not yet found the answer; the crimes had been impulsive and unplanned. He said his family had cut off contact after he confessed. Yoon watched from the defendant's seat without speaking.
On December 17, 2020, Judge Park Jeong-je ruled: "The defendant is innocent." The court found that Yoon's confession had been extracted through harsh treatment while he was illegally arrested and held, including sleep deprivation. It found the statement inconsistent with the scene: it had him climbing a wall because the gate was locked, but the on-site report recorded no lock, and the court doubted he could have scaled the wall with his disability. It called the 1989 forensic hair finding unclear in its basis and full of errors. It found Lee's confession, by contrast, consistent with the physical evidence and highly credible. Park apologized for the "immense physical and mental pain" the wrong verdict had caused. The gallery applauded. "I hope no one ever has to go through what I went through and that all cases receive fair trials," Yoon told reporters.
On February 19, 2021, the Suwon District Court awarded Yoon about 2.517 billion won in criminal compensation, the legal maximum: the daily cap of 343,600 won multiplied by 7,326 days of confinement, Newsis reported.
He and his family then sued the state for damages. On November 16, 2022, the Seoul Central District Court found that the police had acted unlawfully, including in arresting and detaining him, though it found the evidence insufficient against the prosecutors. It set Yoon's damages for emotional distress at 4 billion won, plus about 130 million won in lost income, less the criminal compensation already paid, and awarded his late father 200 million won and his two siblings 50 million won each, according to Newsis. Newstomato and Asia Business Daily give the total payable to Yoon and his family as 2.17 billion won. On December 1, 2022, the Justice Ministry said it would not appeal. Justice Minister Han Dong-hoon apologized on behalf of the state to Yoon and to the family of Kim Hyun-jeong.
Kim Hyun-jeong's family had sued in March 2020 over the police concealment of her remains. After a trial of two years and eight months, the court found that police had located what was probably her body, concealed it and closed the case as a runaway while aware she might have been killed, and ordered the state to pay 220 million won; the ministry did not appeal that ruling either. Her parents did not live to see it. Her brother carried on the suit. He told Money Today in 2026 that the family no longer wants an apology, only the truth about what the police did.
On May 15, 2026, the Seoul Central District Court ordered the state to pay about 77 million won to the two children of Hong Seong-rok, about 16 percent of what they had claimed. The family's lawyer, Park Jun-young, who also represented Yoon, said they planned to appeal.
On the day police announced their findings in July 2020, residents of Jinan-dong gathered near the apartment complex where Lee's mother had lived to demand that he apologize to the families, Asia Business Daily reported. Some said an apology mattered most; others said his family should also answer for him. Choi Mi-jin, who was ten in 1988, told Kyeonggi Ilbo that girls at her school had heard that wearing red clothes or skirts made them targets. Her mother said she had feared losing a daughter she had waited more than ten years to have.
Bong Joon-ho's 2003 film Memories of Murder, based on the unsolved case and on the police methods used to break suspects, made it known well beyond Korea. The case also pushed the country toward the forensic and profiling capacity that solved it. By 2021 South Korean police reported clearing 96.7 percent of homicides, the Korea Herald noted.
Lee is serving life imprisonment at Busan Prison for the 1994 murder, the only crime for which he has been convicted. As of the November 3, 2025 Seoul Shinmun report, he was still serving that sentence. No later source was found in this research, and his status in October 2026 was not checked. He cannot be prosecuted for the fourteen killings he confessed to or for the rapes police attributed to him.
Yoon Seong-yeo's acquittal of December 17, 2020, stands, and the state's compensation judgments in his favor became final when the Justice Ministry declined to appeal in December 2022. The Hong Seong-rok family's appeal of the May 2026 ruling was planned as of the May 15, 2026 Asia Business Daily report. Kim Hyun-jeong's remains have not been found, as of the July 7, 2026 Money Today report.
Proven in court: Lee raped and murdered his sister-in-law in Cheongju on January 13, 1994. Yoon Seong-yeo did not commit the eighth Hwaseong killing; a court so found on retrial in 2020, holding Lee's confession credible.
Confessed and concluded by police, never tried: the ten Hwaseong cases of 1986 to 1991 and four other killings from December 1987 to March 1991, plus nine rapes of women who survived. Police found Lee's DNA in five of the fourteen killings; for the others they relied on details of his confession that they said only the perpetrator could know.
Claimed by Lee and not substantiated: about 25 further rapes and attempted rapes, which police could not confirm.
Unresolved: why Lee was dropped from the suspect list in the 1980s (the blood-type explanation is disputed by the lead detective); the names and circumstances of the three women killed in Suwon and Cheongju; the exact dates of his marriage; and the ages of several Hwaseong victims, which differ by a year between outlets. Lee's account of his own childhood and his 2025 claim that he did not rape his sister-in-law, which a court found he did, are his statements only.
January 1986: Lee is discharged from the army, aged 23.
September 15, 1986: first Hwaseong case, a 71-year-old woman, Annyeong-ri.
October to December 1986: second, third and fourth cases.
January 10, 1987: fifth case, an 18-year-old high school student.
May 2, 1987: sixth case. May 10: Hong Seong-rok detained without a warrant.
December 1987: high school girl killed in Suwon (later confessed by Lee).
September 7 and 16, 1988: seventh and eighth cases.
July 7, 1989: Kim Hyun-jeong, 8, disappears. July 1989: Yoon Seong-yeo arrested. October 1989: Yoon sentenced to life. December 1989: police find Kim Hyun-jeong's belongings and remains and conceal them.
May 1990: Supreme Court upholds Yoon's sentence.
November 15, 1990: ninth case.
January and March 1991: two killings in Cheongju (later confessed by Lee).
April 3, 1991: tenth and last Hwaseong case.
1993: Lee moves from Hwaseong to Cheongju. December 1993: his wife leaves.
January 13, 1994: Lee murders his sister-in-law; arrested that month. Sentenced to death.
1995: Supreme Court reverses the death sentence; life imprisonment on remand.
April 2, 2006: statute of limitations expires on the last Hwaseong case.
August 14, 2009: Yoon paroled after 20 years.
July 2019: evidence sent for new DNA testing.
September 18 and 19, 2019: police announce the DNA match.
October 2, 2019: police announce Lee's confession to 14 killings.
November 2019: Yoon files for retrial; prosecutors conclude Lee committed the eighth case.
July 2, 2020: police close the reinvestigation and apologize.
November 2, 2020: Lee testifies at Yoon's retrial.
December 17, 2020: Yoon acquitted.
February 19, 2021: Yoon awarded 2.517 billion won in criminal compensation.
November 16, 2022: state ordered to pay Yoon and family damages; the Kim Hyun-jeong family also wins damages. December 1, 2022: Justice Ministry declines to appeal.
November 2025: Lee's ex-wife speaks on SBS; Lee still serving life (latest status source).
May 15, 2026: Hong Seong-rok's children awarded about 77 million won.