Kang Chang-gu was convicted of killing six women in and around Gongju, a small city in South Chungcheong Province, between July 1983 and April 1987. The women ranged in age from 21 to 57. Several of the deaths had been put down to causes other than homicide, and the pattern came into view only after two of the women died within weeks of each other in the spring of 1987. A police task force formed that April traced the deaths to a local man who had lived in the area since early childhood. Kang confessed, was sentenced to death, and was executed on April 17, 1990, one of nine prisoners put to death on the same day.
Kang was born in Anseong, in Gyeonggi Province, the youngest of four children, with two older brothers and a sister among them. When he was two the family moved south to Gongju, and his mother died when he was four. He left school after the second grade.
He grew up with a squint in his left eye and a limp. As an adult he worked as a cement plasterer and lived with the second of his elder brothers in Gongju. He had no settled relationship with a woman.
Before the killings began he had spent about two and a half years in prison for offenses that included theft, violence and obstruction, among others. He was 33 when he was executed in 1990.
Gongju lies in South Chungcheong Province, close to the Gyeryong Mountain range. The six women who died lived in or traveled through two of its districts, Useong-myeon and Banpo-myeon, and the villages close to the city. They were older women for the most part, in their forties and fifties, with one 21-year-old visitor among them.
The first was a woman surnamed Hong, aged 50, who died on July 31, 1983, in Useong-myeon. Her death was not investigated as a homicide at the time. Only after Kang's arrest, nearly four years later, did it join the series.
The second was a woman surnamed Lee, aged 51, who died on February 21, 1984, in Banpo-myeon.
In August 1984 a 21-year-old woman survived an attempted assault by Kang, which he later admitted.
The third woman to die was also surnamed Lee. She was 21, a visitor from Ganghwa, and she died in Banpo-myeon on July 26, 1985.
The fourth was a woman surnamed Kim, aged 47, who died on January 29, 1987.
The fifth was a woman surnamed Seo, aged 57, who died on February 28, 1987, in a village in Gongju.
The sixth was a woman surnamed Lee, in her late forties, who died on April 1, 1987, near Gongju. Three deaths in little more than two months turned a scattering of unexplained cases into a single investigation.
In early April 1987 police concluded that one man was responsible and that the deaths were a series. They judged that the man was a local resident and that money was not his motive. A dedicated task force was set up.
Detectives took statements from residents of the villages around the area and carried out a household-by-household survey across Banpo-myeon. That survey brought them to Kang, who was living in Gongju. They arrested him in 1987. He did not resist.
In questioning he confessed not only to the 1987 deaths but also to the earlier ones that had not been treated as homicides. His admissions covered six killings between July 1983 and April 1987 and the attempted assault on the young woman who escaped in 1984.
Kang told investigators that women had avoided him because of his appearance and his health, and that he had acted out of resentment toward them. That explanation is his own; it was not a finding of any court.
Kang was charged with murder, robbery and rape, among other offenses, and was sentenced to death. When he was executed in 1990 the offenses for which he was put to death were listed as rape causing injury, murder and other offenses, committed in Gongju against six women.
The court that tried him, the date of the first-instance verdict, and the course of his appeals are not on record. Under the rules of the time every death sentence was reviewed by a higher court, and a defendant could not waive that appeal; in practice most capital cases passed through a district court, a high court and the Supreme Court before the sentence became final.
On April 17, 1990, the Ministry of Justice executed nine prisoners under sentence of death. Seven were executed in Seoul and two in Busan and Daegu. Kang was one of the nine. The place of his own execution is not on record.
The ministry said the executions were intended to apply the law strictly and restore public order in the face of family-destroying crimes, robbery-murders and organized violence. The nine men had been convicted of crimes that included robbery-murder, the killing of families and the killing of women; the youngest was 24 and the oldest 57. Kang was one of five of the nine who had expressed repentance before they died.
The April round was the first since August 4, 1989, when seven prisoners had been executed. After it, 17 people remained under sentence of death in South Korea.
Kang's case belongs to a period when South Korea was using the death penalty more often, not less. Between 1980 and April 1990 there were eight rounds of executions, in which 86 people were put to death; the last of those rounds was the one that included Kang.
The death penalty could be imposed for a wide range of criminal and political offenses under the Criminal Code and other laws. In practice most death sentences of the late 1980s were for murder, or for murder or rape committed during a robbery. The last known executions for political offenses had taken place in 1982. A death sentence was to be suspended if the prisoner was of unsound mind, and defense counsel had to be present in trials for capital offenses.
The procedure after a sentence became final was laid down in time limits. The Prosecutor General was expected to request an execution order within four months of the final judgment; the Minister of Justice was to issue the order within six months; and the execution was to follow within five days. Those limits were advisory rather than binding, and executions were often delayed well beyond them.
Executions had paused after July 1987. Seven people were executed in 1989, the first since then. In 1990, fourteen people are known to have been executed: the nine of April 17 and five more men, convicted of offenses involving murder or rape, in December. Those December executions were presented as part of the government's declared war on crime, and a Ministry of Justice spokesman said they were a warning that the government was willing to go all the way in that campaign. At least 16 people were on death row in early 1991.
Opposition to the penalty was organizing at the same time. The South Korea Council for the Abolition of the Death Penalty was founded in May 1989, and in the same year a petition was filed with the Constitutional Court arguing that capital punishment violated the Constitution. Those who opposed the April 1990 executions argued that executions were not the best deterrent and that the effort should go into making arrest certain. Those who defended them argued that crimes against women and the killing of families had grown more brutal and called for a firm answer.
Nine more convicted murderers were executed in December 1991, and nine in December 1992. By the start of 1993 about 50 prisoners were under sentence of death. The Constitutional Court upheld the death penalty by a vote of seven to two in 1996 and again, by five to four, in February 2010; in the second ruling the court held that capital punishment could not be seen as a measure that profoundly infringed the dignity of human life. Since 1948, 920 people had been executed in South Korea by 2010.
The last executions took place on December 30, 1997, when 23 prisoners were put to death. No one has been executed since Kim Dae-jung took office as president in February 1998. Amnesty International has classed South Korea as abolitionist in practice since 2007. In October 2026, 52 people remained on death row, with an average age of 58.7.
Born in Anseong, Gyeonggi Province; the family moves to Gongju when he is two.
July 31, 1983: A woman surnamed Hong, 50, dies in Useong-myeon, Gongju.
February 21, 1984: A woman surnamed Lee, 51, dies in Banpo-myeon, Gongju.
August 1984: A 21-year-old woman survives an assault by Kang.
July 26, 1985: A woman surnamed Lee, 21, of Ganghwa, dies in Banpo-myeon.
January 29, 1987: A woman surnamed Kim, 47, dies.
February 28, 1987: A woman surnamed Seo, 57, dies in Gongju.
April 1, 1987: A woman surnamed Lee, in her late forties, dies near Gongju.
April 1987: Police link the deaths and set up a task force.
1987: Kang is arrested in Gongju and confesses to six killings and the 1984 attempt.
Sentenced to death on charges including murder, robbery and rape.
August 4, 1989: Seven prisoners are executed, the first round since 1987.
April 17, 1990: Kang is executed with eight other prisoners.