Jeong Nam-gyu was born on April 17, 1969. Korean accounts of his childhood describe a father who beat him without end, and a man in the neighbourhood who had been kind to him and who sexually assaulted and raped him. Commentators on the case connect that to the form the first attack took.
It came on January 14, 2004, at about half past nine in the evening, at a playground in Bucheon in Gyeonggi province. He threatened two boys, aged thirteen and twelve, with a knife, took them to a hillside nearby, sexually assaulted them and strangled them with a scarf and other means.
Over the twenty-seven months that followed he attacked people in the southwestern districts of Seoul, in Gwanak, Guro, Dongjak, Yeongdeungpo and Geumcheon, and in Gyeonggi. He broke into houses and flats and beat those he found there with blunt objects, and in some cases set fires. Thirteen people died. Twenty more were seriously injured. The police counted thirty-three separate attacks.
The motive is the part this entry had wrong. He was not robbing them. Investigators concluded that he acted from no grudge and for no gain, and that he took pleasure in the act itself; police profilers classified him as a pleasure killer. He said after his arrest that he had felt satisfaction afterwards and no guilt at all.
What he did calculate was where. He told investigators that rich districts such as Gangnam had too many cameras, so he chose neighbourhoods of low-income and working people where the security arrangements were poor and there were none.
On April 22, 2006 he broke into a multi-unit house in Singil-dong and attacked a man in his twenties who was asleep there, intending to kill him with a blunt weapon. The man and the man's father fought him and held him until police arrived. He then got out of the back of the patrol car while handcuffed, and was at large for two hours before a resident of the neighbourhood reported him and he was taken again.
Questioning established something the police had not expected. The murder at Imun-dong, which had been attributed to Yoo Young-chul, was his. He also volunteered accounts of crimes nobody had asked him about, and told the court he was addicted to killing and should be executed as soon as possible. The remark of his that is still quoted in Korea is that a man can give up cigarettes but not murder.
He was indicted on June 7, 2006 and sentenced to death on September 21 by the Seoul Southern District Court, which said he had shown no remorse whatever and that the risk of his offending again made the extreme penalty unavoidable. After sentence he told the court that if the state and society had helped him the tragedy would not have happened, and that harsh and cruel violence had made him what he was. The Supreme Court confirmed the sentence on April 12, 2007.
He hanged himself in his cell at the Seoul Detention Centre on the morning of November 21, 2009, was found by staff and taken to hospital, and died early the following morning. Korean profilers have suggested that what moved him was not fear of execution, which he had asked for, but that there was nobody left for him to kill.
Four corrections to this entry as it stood. It said the killings were committed in the course of burglaries and that the sums taken were small; the Korean record is that gain was not the motive. It described the victims as women; the first two were schoolboys. It gave the arrest as April 24 and the sentence as September 20, where the Korean sources give April 22 and September 21. And it said he hanged himself shortly after sentence, when in fact three years passed, and the sentence had been confirmed by the Supreme Court in between.
One point of arithmetic. Many Korean accounts give fourteen dead and nineteen injured. The difference is the attack on three sisters at Bongcheon-dong: early reporting had two of them dead and one surviving, and the third died later of her injuries and was included in the murder charges, which is why the confirmed figure is thirteen.