Jae-chan Kwon was born in Incheon in 1969. Court reporting records convictions for trespass and theft as a teenager and for rape and robbery in the early 1990s, with imprisonment until 2002; accounts of those sentences differ in detail.
In 2003 he beat the owner of an Incheon pawnshop to death and took 320,000 won. He left the country illegally by boat for Japan and was arrested some time afterward. He was indicted on five counts including robbery-murder and breaching the emigration control law, and the court of first instance sentenced him to life imprisonment. The appellate court reduced it to fifteen years. He was released in 2018.
Out of prison and short of money, with debts that prosecutors put at more than a hundred million won, gambling among them, he got to know a woman in her fifties at a gambling den in Incheon in 2021. Investigators found he had approached her on purpose after hearing that she had money. On the morning of December 4, 2021, in the underground car park of a commercial building in Michuhol-gu, he gave her a drink laced with sleeping pills, beat her until she gave him the PIN for her bank card, and strangled her. He put her body in the trunk of a car. Prosecutors put what he took from her at 11.3 million won; other reports describe it as four and a half million withdrawn on her card and possessions worth about eleven million.
He then killed the man who had helped him dispose of the body, a former workmate in his forties. On a hillside near Eulwang-ri in Jung-gu he beat him with a blunt weapon he had brought for the purpose and buried him nearby. Prosecutors said the second killing was to conceal the first. He was arrested on December 7, his name and face were made public, and on December 14 he was sent from the Michuhol police station to the prosecutors.
On June 23, 2022, the fifteenth criminal division of the Incheon District Court sentenced him to death, a sentence South Korean courts rarely impose, and ordered thirty years of electronic monitoring. The court found that he had planned the crimes in detail, that nothing in his motive called for leniency, and that he was not sincerely remorseful. It weighed his long record and the petition of the first victim's family for the heaviest sentence, and said that rehabilitation and the recovery of his humanity appeared impossible and that he needed to be isolated from society permanently. Because Korean law provides no absolute life sentence excluding parole or pardon, it added, life imprisonment could not fully replace death as a protection of life and public safety.
On appeal Kwon asked the court to keep the death sentence. "I feel I cannot be forgiven even in death," he said in his final statement, "and even breathing is hard for the guilt." The appellate court took a different view of the same facts. It held that it could not be established that he had planned and prepared the killings in advance, so the sentencing guideline's aggravating factor of a cruel method did not apply. It read his request to have the death sentence upheld as a sign of remorse. He deserved severe punishment, it said, but it doubted there were circumstances special enough that anyone would accept death as the just outcome, and it substituted life imprisonment.
The prosecution appealed. On September 21, 2023, the first division of the Supreme Court, with Justice Kim Seon-su presiding, confirmed the life sentence and kept the thirty-year monitoring order. It accepted the lower court's finding that the robbery-murder charge over the second victim had no grounds, and it dismissed the prosecution's appeal on the sentence, holding that under article 383, item 4, of the Criminal Procedure Act a prosecutor cannot appeal a sentence of death, life or ten years or more on the ground that it is too light. South Korea has carried out no execution since 1998. Three killings, eighteen years apart at the ends, all of them for money.