The last woman Kang Ho-sun killed was a university student named Ahn, nineteen, who was waiting for a bus in Gunpo on the night of December 19, 2008. He offered her a ride, tried to sexually assault her in his car and, when she fought him, strangled her with stockings. Then he took her bank card to a cash machine, and the camera over the machine recorded his face. That picture ended a series of killings that the police of Gyeonggi Province had not known was a series.
He was thirty-nine, born on October 10, 1969, in Seocheon, and living in Ansan, the industrial city south of Seoul. He had been married four times. On October 30, 2005, his house in Ansan caught fire while his fourth wife and her mother were asleep; both died, and he got out with his son. The fire was treated as an accident and he collected the insurance, reported at several hundred million won. That it had been set for the money came out only after his arrest.
Eleven months after the fire he took his first stranger. On September 7, 2006, a twenty-three-year-old woman surnamed Yoon, who worked at the Jeongseon County Office in Gangwon Province, was picked up on her way to work, strangled and left on a wooded hillside. In December 2006 a forty-five-year-old woman surnamed Bae, who worked at a karaoke bar in Gunpo, disappeared the same way. Three more followed early in 2007, among them a housewife of forty-eight and a twenty-one-year-old student from Suwon, and their bodies were buried or dumped in the hills around the province. Accounts of the order of the killings do not all agree. What they share is the method: a woman alone, late at night or early in the morning, a friendly man with a car, and a body left in the woods.
Then, for close to two years, nothing. He went on living quietly in Ansan. The killings resumed on November 9, 2008, and a month later Ahn was dead. Several of the women had been reported missing before his arrest, and the fact that nobody had connected the reports became a point of bitter public argument in South Korea once his name was known.
He was arrested in late January 2009; the date is given as January 24 in some reports and January 27 in others. Within two days of questioning he had confessed to killing ten women,. Remains recovered afterward were identified by DNA.
The confession did not hold together in court. At hearings in the Ansan branch of the Suwon District Court on March 6 and 11, 2009, he admitted the seven murders of women he did not know but denied to the end that he had set the fire that killed his wife and her mother. The court convicted him of murder, rape and arson and sentenced him to death on April 22, 2009. The sentence became final on August 4, 2009. The families of several victims also sued him for damages.
In prison he was reported to be arrogant with other inmates and to show no remorse, until the suicide in November 2009 of Jeong Nam-gyu, another serial killer held under sentence of death at the Seoul Detention Center, where Kang is also held. South Korea still has the death penalty on its books but has carried out no execution since December 1997, so the sentence means indefinite imprisonment.