Kang Ho-sun was convicted in 2009 of murdering ten women in South Korea. Two of them were his fourth wife and her mother, who died when the house they were sleeping in burned in Ansan in October 2005. The other eight were women he did not know, killed between September 2006 and December 2008 in Jeongseon County in Gangwon Province and in the cities of southwestern Gyeonggi Province, south of Seoul. He admitted the eight killings after his arrest in January 2009 but denied to the end that he had set the fire. The Ansan Branch of the Suwon District Court found him guilty of all ten murders and sentenced him to death on April 22, 2009, and the sentence became final that summer.
Media monitors found that the main evening newscasts gave the case more weight than they had given the Yoo Young-chul killings of 2004. It renewed arguments over whether police should show the faces of suspects, over road cameras and a national DNA database, and over the death penalty, which the country keeps on its books but has not carried out since December 1997. In October 2026 he was still on death row at the Seoul Detention Center.
Kang was born in 1970 in a small farming village in Seocheon County, South Chungcheong Province, according to a cover story by Jeong Won-sik in the weekly magazine Weekly Kyunghyang in February 2009. He was the second of five children. His father grew rice and died several years before the arrest, after long complications from a motorcycle accident; his mother sold vegetables at a market. The village head told the magazine that the family was not poor by local standards and that the parents rarely quarreled. A childhood classmate remembered a bright boy with a strict father, an ordinary village child. Later he came home a few times a year for holidays and for his father's memorial rites, but kept away from the neighbors.
Weekly Kyunghyang noted that his early life showed none of the childhood abuse, poverty or social exclusion reported in the lives of men such as Yoo Young-chul and Jeong Nam-gyu.
He finished high school in 1988. The Korea JoongAng Daily, citing police, reported that he moved from the Seocheon area to Ansan, an industrial city in Gyeonggi Province, in 1989; Weekly Kyunghyang dated his settling in Ansan to 1992, when he worked as a truck driver. His mother still lived in Seocheon County at the time of his arrest. Over the following years he tried a series of trades. He ran a restaurant, owned a small massage shop, and was working as a masseur at a sauna when he was caught; the Associated Press described him as a former sports massage therapist. From 2006 he kept about 20 Hanwoo cattle and 10 pigs on a farm in Suwon that he ran with his brother, of which he was the real owner, according to Weekly Kyunghyang. Coworkers and customers spoke well of him and described a man who kept strict hours.
Between November 2003 and February 2006 he also ran a dog farm with dozens of Siberian huskies, according to a 2025 retrospective in the Korea JoongAng Daily by Lee Soo-jung. The paper reported that he left many of the dogs to die over the winter and killed others himself. The paper reported Kang as saying that because he had killed so many dogs, killing a person had felt like nothing.
By the time of his arrest police said he had a criminal record of nine earlier offenses, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported in January 2009. The details of those cases have not been reported.
Kang married four times and divorced three times before 2005. He had two sons with his first wife and a third child with his second wife, Weekly Kyunghyang reported. The magazine contrasted this with earlier Korean serial killers, most of whom had little or no history of relationships. A neighbor in Ansan, speaking as crowds gathered at the crime scenes in 2009, asked that people think of his two children.
Money from insurance ran through his life in these years. Police told the Korea JoongAng Daily in January 2009 that he had collected 180 million won from insurers since 1999 for incidents including a car fire. Weekly Kyunghyang reported that his fourth wife's family had been through eight fires and accidents for which he received payouts totaling about 660 million won, and that investigators were examining whether one of those fires had been set.
On October 30, 2005, fire broke out at the house of his mother-in-law in Ansan while she and Kang's fourth wife were asleep. Both women died. Kang got out with his son. "My fourth wife died in a fire on Oct. 30, 2005 and I was devastated," he told police after his arrest, according to the Korea JoongAng Daily.
At the time the fire was not treated as a crime. Weeks before it, Kang had taken out several life insurance policies on his wife, and in 2007 he received 480 million won in compensation, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported. Prosecutors later said they had obtained a recording of an automated telephone call he made to four insurance companies on November 4, 2005 to file claims, the Kyunghyang Shinmun reported.
Kang's explanation was that the fire started from mosquito coils he had lit in the living room. Prosecutors at the Suwon District Prosecutors' Office rejected that account. They said that mosquito coils were not needed at the end of October, when the temperature can fall to 3.7 degrees Celsius, and that no one slept in the living room. Fire experts concluded that flammable material, not the coils, caused the fire. Prosecutors also said that a plastic container they believed had held flammable liquid appeared in police photographs taken when the fire was reported, but was gone from photographs taken days later by the National Institute of Scientific Investigation. Kang denied setting the fire but admitted that he had gone back into the burned house after police had closed the scene, according to Park Jong-ki, the prosecutor in charge.
After the fire, he told police, "I wandered around the nation for a year, and then I began feeling the urge to kill whenever I saw a woman." In 2006 he spent time in Jeongseon and Taebaek, in the mountains of Gangwon Province, for beekeeping work, prosecutors said; they found that he had searched online for "Gangwon", "beekeeping" and "honey".
The eight women are on record only by surname and age, and some only by age. Two of them were university students. Six of the seven women in Gyeonggi had been reported missing before his arrest.
The first was a 23-year-old woman surnamed Yoon (Yun in some English spellings), of Jeongseon County in Gangwon Province. She disappeared on September 7, 2006. Her family handed out flyers for years. "I had hoped my daughter was alive, even though we haven't heard from her for a long time," her mother told the JoongAng Ilbo in February 2009. Yoo Chang-sik, the governor of Jeongseon County, said he had believed she was alive somewhere. Her case lay unsolved for more than two years because the Gangwon Provincial Police Agency could not find her. Her older brother joined the police in 2010, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported in 2025.
The other seven women died in southwestern Gyeonggi Province. On December 13, 2006, a 45-year-old woman was killed. On December 24, 2006, a 36-year-old woman was killed. Three more women died between January 3 and January 7, 2007: a 52-year-old woman surnamed Park, a 37-year-old woman surnamed Kim, and a 20-year-old university student. One of the seven Gyeonggi victims was an ethnic Korean from China.
Then came a gap of 22 months. In November 2008 a 48-year-old woman surnamed Kim disappeared. On December 19, 2008, a 21-year-old university student disappeared in Gunpo. Her disappearance led to his arrest.
All eight women were strangled or suffocated, according to police and the Korea JoongAng Daily. He later withdrew cash with some of the women's bank cards, the paper reported.
Investigators were puzzled by the long pause between January 2007 and November 2008. Kang told police he had stopped because of news reports and because the police inquiry had tightened. His neighbors told investigators that he went often to Gangwon Province in that period for his beekeeping. Criminologists interviewed by Weekly Kyunghyang called the gap unusually long. Heo Kyung-mi, a professor at Keimyung University, said it was too long to be explained by fatigue and urged police to reexamine unsolved cases from those months. Jang Seok-heon, president of the Korean Association of Criminal Psychology, said that serial offenders use such periods to look back on what they have done and plan, and that Kang appeared to have changed his methods. During the gap he also replaced the sport utility vehicle he had driven with a new black Equus sedan, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported.
Before December 2008 the police had not connected the disappearances. After the first Gyeonggi killings they had searched missing-person records covering December 12, 2006 to April 25, 2007 without finding a link. Police later said that the area where Kang lived overlapped closely with the area where the women had vanished. "The suspect's area of residence largely overlapped with the series of mysterious disappearances of the women," they told the Korea JoongAng Daily.
The disappearance of the Gunpo student in December 2008 brought the cases together. On January 22, 2009, police identified Kang after road surveillance cameras recorded the student in his Equus, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported in 2025. Two days later police found that both of his cars, the Equus and his older Musso sport utility vehicle, had been burned. Prosecutors later said he set fire to them to destroy evidence. He was arrested, at first on suspicion of tampering with evidence. At first he asked police whether they had proof that the man in the footage was him.
On January 25, 2009 he admitted killing the Gunpo student. He denied everything else at first. Investigators had another lead: an unsolved killing of a woman whose body had been found in May 2007, which resembled the Gunpo case. Her mobile phone had been used while she was missing, and police learned that Kang had been working in that area at the time. They seized a delivery truck he used and found a bloodstain on a jacket inside it. The National Institute of Scientific Investigation matched the DNA in the stain to the 48-year-old woman reported missing in November 2008. Weekly Kyunghyang reported that police also found long hairs and other bloodstains in a truck at his livestock shed.
Faced with the DNA result, Kang asked for a particular detective with whom he felt at ease. When that detective arrived, he confessed to killing seven women in southwestern Gyeonggi Province between December 2006 and December 2008. Park Hak-geun, the senior Gyeonggi police official who led the inquiry, said police would question him about his motive and would look again at the fire that had killed his wife and her mother.
With his help, by February 3, 2009 police had accounted for every Gyeonggi victim except the ethnic Korean woman from China, The Korea Times reported.
After ten days of questioning, police said, he also admitted an attempt to kill another woman on December 31, 2008, after the Gunpo killing. She survived. A Gyeonggi police officer told The Korea Times that he let her go because he feared capture. On February 3, 2009 police sent the case to prosecutors. A search of his house in Ansan turned up items that led police to widen the inquiry to other possible attempts.
On February 16, 2009 prosecutors at the Suwon District Prosecutors' Office announced that he had confessed to an eighth killing: Yoon, the young woman from Jeongseon County who had vanished in September 2006. Prosecutors confirmed that he had often visited Gangwon at the time for his beekeeping business and said they were looking at whether he was linked to other unsolved disappearances there; Kang denied any other crimes in the province.
Police in several provinces asked whether Kang could be linked to their own unsolved cases. The South Chungcheong Provincial Police Agency sought a joint inquiry with Gyeonggi police into a May 2004 fire at an auto repair shop in Seocheon County, where Kang had grown up, that killed four people, and into the January 2008 disappearance of a 75-year-old shop owner there. In Gangwon Province, police had two unsolved disappearances of women in Wonju, from 2004 and 2006, under examination. Lee Myeong-gyun, the Gyeonggi detective in charge, said police would start "an additional investigation into four other unresolved disappearances and murders." No further charges against Kang over these cases were reported.
On January 31, 2009 police took Kang to the crime scenes in Gunpo, Suwon and Hwaseong to re-enact the killings. He wore a baseball cap and a hooded jacket that hid most of his face. Crowds gathered, shouting curses, demanding that he take off his cap and calling for his death, and police formed a human chain around the scene. When reporters asked him to speak to the families, he mumbled an apology.
The question of whether to show his face became a national argument. Korean media had once published the names and faces of suspects freely, but after the 2004 Milyang (Miryang) case, in which the identities of teenage suspects were made public, and a 2005 recommendation by the National Human Rights Commission, police had adopted guidelines that kept suspects' faces out of the news. Song Kang-ho, head of the investigation bureau of the National Police Agency, said that the law gave police no grounds to publish a suspect's face. On Saturday, January 31, the JoongAng Ilbo and the Chosun Ilbo printed Kang's photograph, and the broadcasters KBS and SBS showed his face.
Opponents were not persuaded. Kang Deok-ji, head of the criminal psychology division at the National Institute of Scientific Investigation, told Weekly Kyunghyang that publishing faces only fed public curiosity. Kim Bora-mi, a lawyer, said that no law forbade it, but that a consensus had formed against showing faces before a verdict, and called the demand a wish for revenge.
In 2010 a clause was added to South Korea's law on specific violent crimes that allows police and prosecutors to disclose a suspect's identity when the crime was brutal, the evidence is sufficient, the public's right to know requires it and the suspect is not a minor. The Korea Times, writing in 2016, linked the clause to the Kang case. The Korea Herald wrote in 2024 that the decision of two major newspapers to publish his face in 2009 had led to the present system, under which a special committee reviews each disclosure.
On February 3, 2009 police announced that profilers had classified Kang as a typical psychopath on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. A criminologist told The Korea Times that he seemed not to know how to express sorrow and, asked about the victims' families, had wondered whether he was supposed to feel sad. She described him as a master of show, apparently remorseful during the re-enactments but joking once he was back at the police station. He worried, officers said, that his sons would be labeled the sons of a serial murderer, and he said he planned to write a book about the crimes so that they could earn the royalties.
Experts quoted by Weekly Kyunghyang saw him as a new type of offender in South Korea. Pyo Chang-won of the Korean National Police University said that unlike Yoo Young-chul or Jeong Nam-gyu, Kang showed no anger at society. The police profiler Kwon Il-yong said his self-control and coldness resembled those of serial killers abroad. Kim Ji-young of the Korean Institute of Criminology called his case a new model of serial killing, driven by what he wanted rather than by grievance.
The coverage itself became an issue. Monitors from the media movement of Korea Womenlink who watched the main evening news on KBS1, MBC and SBS from January 25 to February 8, 2009 found that the Kang case took between 27 and 30 percent of coverage, against 5 to 8 percent for the Yongsan eviction tragedy, in which people had died that January, the Kyunghyang Shinmun reported. The group noted that the volume came after reports of an email from a presidential office official urging that the Gunpo case be used to draw attention from Yongsan, and it criticized the coverage as sensational.
In February 2009 prosecutors said they had determined that Kang set the 2005 fire. They charged him with murdering his wife and her mother, and by February 22 he had been indicted for the murders of nine women and for arson, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported. Prosecutors planned a further indictment for Yoon's killing. In the indictment they set out his background and personality, saying his account of the fire made his motive and method impossible to understand without them. They said he held a distorted view of women. Prosecutors also reported that DNA from two unidentified women had been found on a tool seized from his farm and did not match any of the eight known victims.
His trial began on March 6, 2009 before the First Criminal Division of the Ansan Branch of the Suwon District Court. Kang appeared in a prison uniform and listened to the prosecution with his head bowed and his eyes closed, the Kyunghyang Shinmun reported. His court-appointed lawyer, Kim Ki-il, said Kang admitted the seven murder charges in Gyeonggi but denied the arson murders. The lawyer asked the court to strike the parts of the indictment about Kang's personality and record, argued that the arson charge did not say precisely when and how the crime was committed, and said the defense had not been allowed full access to the files. Prosecutors answered that they had been unable to share the arson files because that inquiry continued after the indictment. The next hearing was set for March 11.
On April 16, 2009 a civil court in the same Ansan Branch ordered Kang to pay 1.3 billion won in damages to the families of six of the victims.
Judge Lee Tae-soo sentenced Kang to death on April 22, 2009. The court found him guilty of all charges, including the fire. Although Kang denied setting it, the judge said the court believed he had planned it, relying on testimony, the flammable material found at the scene and his conduct before and after the fire. Kang sighed deeply during the 20-minute explanation of that finding, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported. The court said he had killed "these innocent people only to fulfill his greed or sexual desire," according to the Associated Press, and that he was highly likely to commit more crimes. It was "unavoidable to permanently isolate Kang from society," the judge said, adding that Kang "has also not shown any sign of remorse for his ruthless crimes." The Associated Press called the case the worst serial killing in the country since Yoo Young-chul was sentenced to death in 2004.
On April 23, 2009, the day after the sentence, Kang filed an appeal with the high court. Court officials told The Korea Times that he wrote and filed it himself, without consulting his lawyer, and that it appeared to concern the counts over his wife and her mother. The Seoul High Court rejected his denial of the arson and upheld the death sentence on July 23, 2009. He then missed the deadline for appealing to the Supreme Court, and The Korea Times reported on August 5, 2009 that the sentence had become final. With it, the number of people on death row in South Korea passed 60.
South Korea's courts still impose death sentences, but the country carried out its last executions on December 30, 1997, when 23 people were put to death. Amnesty International classes it as abolitionist in practice. In 2022 the Ministry of Justice counted 59 people on death row, Kang among them, the Munhwa Ilbo reported. In October 2026, as the ministry released new death row figures, Weekly Kyunghyang reported that Kang was serving his sentence at the Seoul Detention Center in Uiwang, Gyeonggi Province.
His case has been cited repeatedly in the argument over executions. In November 2009, after Jeong Nam-gyu took his own life on death row at the Seoul Detention Center, The Korea Times wrote that Kang's killings had added to public pressure on the government to resume executions.
The road cameras that placed the Gunpo student in his car became an argument for more cameras. Police said surveillance cameras had played a decisive role in the arrest, and Song Kang-ho of the National Police Agency said that spending on cameras would focus on southwestern Gyeonggi, where the killings had taken place. Local governments raced to install them, and human rights groups questioned whether cameras prevented crime and warned of a surveillance society, Weekly Kyunghyang reported. Police also planned to bring back a bill for a DNA database of convicted offenders, first filed in 2006, which had lapsed when the 17th National Assembly ended. Critics said such a database would treat former prisoners as potential criminals.
The fire. Kang admitted the eight killings of women he did not know but denied setting the 2005 fire, saying it was accidental and that he had barely escaped. Two courts rejected that account. He did not take the case to the Supreme Court.
Other possible victims. DNA from two unidentified women found on a tool from his farm matched none of the eight known victims, and police in Gyeonggi, Gangwon and South Chungcheong examined other unsolved disappearances and the 2004 Seocheon fire. No charges in those cases were reported, and they are not attributed to him by any court.
His birth year. Weekly Kyunghyang gave his birth year as 1970. Reports in 2009 gave his age as 38 or 39, depending on the outlet and the date.
The day of the arrest. The Korea JoongAng Daily's 2025 account places his arrest two days after police identified him on January 22, 2009; its January 30, 2009 report described the arrest as taking place on a Monday. Reports agree that it was in late January 2009.
1970: Born in Seocheon County, South Chungcheong Province (Weekly Kyunghyang).
1988: Finishes high school.
1989 or 1992: Moves to Ansan, Gyeonggi Province (reports differ).
October 30, 2005: Fire at his mother-in-law's house in Ansan kills his fourth wife and her mother.
September 7, 2006: Yoon, 23, a Jeongseon County Office employee, disappears in Gangwon Province.
December 13, 2006: A 45-year-old woman is killed in Gyeonggi Province.
December 24, 2006: A 36-year-old woman is killed.
January 3 to 7, 2007: Three more women are killed.
2007: Receives 480 million won in insurance on his wife.
November 2008: A 48-year-old homemaker disappears.
December 19, 2008: A 21-year-old university student disappears in Gunpo.
January 22, 2009: Police identify him from road camera footage.
Late January 2009: Arrested; admits the Gunpo killing on January 25, then confesses to seven killings in Gyeonggi.
January 31, 2009: Re-enactments in Gunpo, Suwon and Hwaseong; newspapers publish his photograph.
February 16, 2009: Prosecutors announce his confession to killing Yoon.
February 22, 2009: Indicted for nine murders and arson; a further count for Yoon follows.
March 6, 2009: Trial opens in the Ansan Branch of the Suwon District Court.
April 16, 2009: Civil court orders 1.3 billion won in damages to six families.
April 22, 2009: Sentenced to death for ten murders.
July 23, 2009: Seoul High Court upholds the sentence.
August 2009: Sentence becomes final (reported August 5).
2010: Law amended to allow disclosure of suspects' identities in brutal crimes.
October 2026: Held on death row at the Seoul Detention Center, Uiwang.