On April 22, 2006 a man broke into a multi-unit house in Singil-dong, in southwest Seoul, and went for a man in his twenties who was asleep there, meaning to beat him to death. The sleeper woke, and he and his father fought the intruder and held him until the police came. He was booked as a burglar who had injured someone in a robbery, the kind of case that ends in a few years in prison. Then, handcuffed in the back of the patrol car, he got out and ran. A neighborhood resident spotted him two hours later and he was taken again.
His name was Jeong Nam-gyu, and he was thirty-seven. The profiler Kwon Il-yong, who had been following an unsolved series of night attacks across the southwest of the city for years, questioned him and got the rest. Over twenty-seven months Jeong had killed thirteen people and seriously injured twenty more in thirty-three separate attacks, most of them in the districts of Gwanak, Guro, Dongjak, Yeongdeungpo and Geumcheon and in the neighboring cities of Gyeonggi province. One murder already attributed to Yoo Young-chul, at Imun-dong, turned out to be his.
The first was at Bucheon in Gyeonggi on January 14, 2004. At about half past nine that evening he threatened two boys, thirteen and twelve, at a playground with a knife, took them up a hillside nearby, sexually assaulted them and killed them. Kwon connected him to that case through a single remark. Jeong mentioned that as a child he had been molested on a hillside with his fingers tied by a shoelace, and the Bucheon boys' hands had been tied with shoelaces. Pressed on it, he confessed.
After Bucheon the victims were mostly women, some attacked on the street as they walked home late at night, more of them in their own homes. He broke into houses and basement apartments and beat the people he found with blunt weapons, and in some cases set the place on fire. On October 19, 2005 he went into a half-basement home, strangled a young woman and struck her younger brother on the head in another room, and set a fire. He told investigators that when he entered a house and a grown man woke up, he left at once; if the man stayed asleep, he considered him under control and went ahead. The court record shows two adult men among the victims besides the last.
He had started with a knife and changed to blunt weapons, he said, because he wanted to watch people die for longer. He chose the neighborhoods deliberately. Rich districts such as Gangnam had too many cameras, he told investigators, so he went where working people and the poor lived and security was thin. Investigators concluded that he had no grudge against anyone he attacked and nothing to gain. Profilers classified him as a pleasure killer, and he described feeling satisfied afterwards and no guilt.
He was born on April 17, 1969 in Jangsu County, North Jeolla province, the eldest of seven children of a farming family. After middle school he lived alone in Namwon to attend a commercial high school, and transferred to Yeongjin Commercial High School in Incheon when the family moved there. He was an unremarkable student. He lasted four months at a drinks factory after graduating, then delivered for a rice-cake mill and worked on building sites, served in the army and was discharged as a sergeant in 1992, and after that lived without steady work, largely by theft.
Korean accounts of his early life describe a father, who died in 1999, who beat him constantly, and a man in the neighborhood who had been kind to him and who molested and raped him. He was bullied at school, raped twice as a teenager by a man who lived next to his rented room, and beaten and raped again by a senior soldier in the army. Commentators have connected that history to the Bucheon killings. None of it, as the same accounts say plainly, explains why he killed strangers.
The record before the killings was long. In April 1989 he received two and a half years, suspended for four, for aggravated robbery. A theft conviction in 1994 brought eight months, suspended, and a fine of 200,000 won. He served two and a half years for a sexual offense from 1996, two more years for theft and rape from 1999, and ten months for theft in 2002. In his thirties he lived with his mother and an older sister in an old house in his mother's name; nobody in the family had a job, and the household lived on welfare and 550,000 won a month in rent from a room they let out.
He did not behave like a man trying to save himself. He volunteered crimes nobody had asked him about. At the crime-scene reenactment he glared at the crowd and smiled for the cameras. He wrote to the court that he was not sorry, that killing had been enjoyable, and that he could give up cigarettes but not murder, a line still quoted in Korea, and he said he should be executed as soon as possible.
He was indicted on June 7, 2006, and on September 21 the eleventh criminal division of the Seoul Southern District Court sentenced him to death. The court pointed to the vulnerability of the victims, killings committed for pleasure alone, and a complete absence of remorse. 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.
South Korea has carried out no execution since December 1997, and he was held at the Seoul Detention Center under a sentence that was never going to be carried out. On the morning of November 21, 2009 staff found that he had hanged himself in his solitary cell. He was taken to the hospital and died early the next morning, November 22. He was forty. Korean profilers have suggested that what moved him was not fear of the sentence he had asked for, but that there was nobody left for him to kill.
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; the third died later of her injuries and was included in the murder charges, and the confirmed figure is thirteen killed and twenty injured.