On the morning of December 25, 2022, a woman called the police from an apartment in Paju, a city in Gyeonggi Province just northwest of Seoul. Her boyfriend's cats had run out of food. Looking for more, she had opened a closet whose doors were tied shut with string, and under the things piled inside she found a man's body.
The dead man was a taxi driver who had been missing since the night of December 20. His family had reported him missing a few hours earlier, at about 3 a.m. the same day, because the text messages coming from his phone did not sound like him and he would not take calls. The apartment's occupant was a thirty-one-year-old man named Lee Ki-young. Within days the police would learn that the apartment was not his, that the woman who owned it had not been seen since early August, and that he had killed her too.
Lee Ki-young was thirty-one when he was arrested and thirty-two by the time he was sentenced. The press reports say little about his childhood. What they record is a series of drunk-driving cases and a habit of lying about money.
In 2013, while he was serving in the army as a junior officer or noncommissioned officer, he was caught driving drunk twice: on May 30 in Mapo, Seoul, and on August 9 in Incheon, according to Insight, citing JTBC. The first case cost him his license. During the second, he tried to escape a checkpoint and drove about two kilometers with a police officer hanging on to the car, and he bit the hand of the officer who reached for the keys, injuring him. On October 18, 2013, a military court sentenced him to eighteen months for drunk and unlicensed driving and obstructing an officer, and he served the term in a military prison.
On December 9, 2018, drunk again, he crashed into a taxi on a road in Paju. In April 2019 a court gave him eight months, suspended for two years, taking into account that he had settled with the taxi driver. On November 20, 2019, while that suspended sentence was still running, he drove drunk about thirty kilometers from Gwangju to Jangseong County in South Jeolla Province. He was sentenced to one year in prison. The court in that case cut the sentence to the legal minimum, Kukmin Ilbo reported, on the ground that a long detention could leave his family unable to support itself. His driver's license had been revoked in January 2019, according to Money Today. He was released from prison in 2021, though reports differ on the exact date.
He married in 2018 and later divorced. To friends and acquaintances he described himself as the grandson of a man who owned several buildings, and said he ran an engineering office and bicycle shops. A former coworker told MBC that Lee had been married once before and had a son. Police found that neither was true: there had been no earlier marriage, and the boy he called his son was a friend's child. In fact, Kukmin Ilbo reported, he had no steady job and had earned money as a designated driver until his drunk-driving record ended that, and his former wife told police they had struggled to pay their bills. Later reporting by News1, summarized by Dailian, said his grandfather had in fact been a landowner in the Paju area. Whatever the family's property, the investigators found that Lee himself had no real income or assets and was behind on debts, card payments and taxes.
The first victim has never been publicly named. Korean reports call her A or B, and one retrospective, in the outlet Sidae, refers to her only by the surname Woo. She was fifty, or in her fifties, about eighteen years older than Lee by Money Today's count, and she owned the apartment in Paju where they lived. Sidae reported that she had grown up as an orphan, was out of touch with the family that raised her, and had few friends, so that when she disappeared there was no one to report her missing.
Accounts of how they met differ in detail. Sidae says Lee met her in 2017, when she worked at a bar; Edaily describes her as a karaoke bar worker he had known before his marriage. The accounts agree that the relationship continued while he was married, including after his release from prison, and that when his wife found out, around December 2021, he moved into the woman's apartment. He divorced in February 2022, according to The Sisa Law.
The investigators described a relationship in which Lee depended on her for money. He had told her he was wealthy. He had her take out card loans, about 34 million won by Sidae's and Edaily's accounts, and used the money himself. Police found a contract showing he had borrowed 300 million won from her, Korea JoongAng Daily reported. Over time, the later accounts say, he began to hit her. In April 2022 he fought with one of her acquaintances at the apartment and bit the woman's finger badly enough to draw blood, Newsis reported, and The Sisa Law says the acquaintance needed hospital treatment.
By the summer of 2022, Sidae reported, he was under pressure from about 3.6 million won in unpaid taxes, levied after he issued false invoices to claim COVID-19 relief for small businesses, and about 2.3 million won owed on a department store card. Prosecutors later charged that between March and May 2022 he had set up a sham business and collected 10 million won in pandemic relief payments.
Prosecutors said that shortly before the killing, Lee searched the internet for phrases including "pesticide that kills if eaten," weed killer, and how to unlock a mobile phone. He never bought poison. On the afternoon of August 3, 2022, in the main bedroom of the apartment, he struck the woman on the head more than ten times with a blunt object. Later accounts identify it as an L-shaped metal wrench he used to repair bicycles. Prosecutors said the purpose was to take her phone and credit cards. After the killing, the first-instance court found, he washed the body with hot water to keep the blood from clotting.
The next day he put her body and the wrench in a car rooftop bag, drove to the bank of the Gongneung Stream in Paju, and disposed of them. The court found that he chose a day of heavy rain. Afterward he searched online for "Paju body found" and for which way the Gongneung Stream flows.
Then he went on living in her apartment, with her clothes and cosmetics where she had left them. He moved the SIM card from her phone into his own to get past the lock and emptied her account at an ATM. From August 3 to October 26 he moved or spent about 39.3 million won through her online banking and credit card, and from August 12 to September 22 he spent about 41.9 million won on her debit card. To keep anyone from looking for her, he logged into her messenger account and sent her friends 92 messages through November 13, telling them, among other things, not to contact her, and twice changed her profile picture. When her money ran out, he forged a sale contract for her apartment and used it to borrow 10 million won from his father, telling him the apartment was really his and only registered in her name. Prosecutors put the total taken from her at about 81 million won.
An acquaintance who saw him in September told Money Today that Lee said his parents had died, that he stood to inherit a fortune, and that he was buying an apartment in Mapo or Gongdeok in Seoul. "He said he had lost his parents, but he seemed excited," the acquaintance said. By then, a new girlfriend was spending time at the apartment.
On the evening of December 20, Lee had dinner with his girlfriend and her parents and drank two bottles of kaoliang liquor, by the later accounts in Money Today and Edaily. Over his girlfriend's objections, he drove home in his SUV. At about 10:05 p.m., at an intersection in Goyang, he hit a taxi that was going straight through on a green light. His blood alcohol level was 0.109 percent, Edaily reported. He was still within the repeat-offense period from his last conviction, so a police report would likely have sent him back to prison.
The driver wanted to call his insurer. Lee asked him not to call the police or the insurance company and promised to pay a large cash settlement and the repair costs if he came to the apartment in Paju. Lee had about 170,000 won in his account at the time, according to The Sisa Law's account of the case record. The driver arrived at the apartment sometime between 10:48 and 11:14 p.m.
When Lee did not produce the money, the driver said he would call the police. They struggled over the driver's phone. Lee hit him, knocked him down and pressed on his neck, then struck him twice on the forehead with a five-kilogram dumbbell. The first-instance court found that he killed the man within about twenty minutes of his arrival. Lee tied the body with a belt, put it in a closet in the small bedroom, covered it with cardboard boxes and tied the closet handles shut. He moved the taxi about a kilometer from the apartment, and police found evidence that he had tried to erase its dashcam footage, Sidae reported.
From December 21 to 24, using the driver's phone, Lee moved about 47.9 million won from the driver's bank account to his own in six transfers, including loans taken out in the driver's name. He spent about 7.7 million won on the driver's credit card. Part of that bought a pair of luxury couple rings, priced at about 6.36 million won, which he shared with his girlfriend; part paid for bars and hotel stays. Investigators put the total taken from the driver at about 55.6 million won.
From December 22 to 25 he also sent 132 messages to the driver's family from the driver's phone, posing as him: he was dealing with a traffic accident; they should not contact him. The driver's daughter later wrote that the messages claimed he had caused an accident in which someone died and was handling the aftermath. When she checked with the police, there was no record of any accident. She said Lee had also labeled one of the transfers out of her father's account with a memo reading "father's funeral."
The family filed a missing-person report in the early hours of December 25. At about 11:21 that morning, Lee's girlfriend called the police from the apartment.
Police identified Lee as the suspect from the girlfriend's account and arrested him that day at a university hospital in Goyang, where he was being treated. He told them the driver's death was unplanned, the result of an argument over the settlement.
Investigators then noticed that the apartment, and the phone he was using, were registered to a woman in her fifties who had not been seen since early August, although her cards and accounts had been in constant use. Lee first said she had left suddenly and that he did not know where she was. Police pointed out that she had no reason to walk away from an apartment she owned, that no one had reported her missing, and that he had moved a new girlfriend in soon after she vanished. He then confessed that he had killed her in August and left her body by a river in Paju. In that first account he said they had argued over money and he had thrown a bicycle repair tool at her in anger. Prosecutors later called that account false.
On December 28 he appeared at the Goyang Branch of the Uijeongbu District Court for a hearing on his arrest warrant, his hood pulled down over his face. The court issued the warrant.
On December 29, 2022, at 1 p.m., the Gyeonggi Bukbu Provincial Police Agency convened its committee on disclosing suspects' personal information: three police members and four outside members, including lawyers and journalists. All seven voted to release his name, age and photograph under the Special Act on the Punishment of Specific Violent Crimes, citing the brutality of the crimes, the evidence seized from his home, and the public's right to know and the prevention of further crimes. He was identified as Lee Ki-young, thirty-one. It was four days after his arrest.
The photograph was the problem. Lee refused to let police take and release a new mugshot, and under the rules then in force they could not force him. Police instead released, at his choice, the photo from his driver's license. It was years old, and people who knew him said it looked little like him. An inspector who visited his apartment regularly told Yonhap the picture seemed to show a much younger man. JoongAng Ilbo noted that the same complaint had followed the release of a photo of Jeon Joo-hwan, the man who killed a subway worker he had stalked at Sindang Station in Seoul a few months before.
On January 4, 2023, when police sent Lee to prosecutors, he walked out of the Ilsan Dongbu Police Station in a mask with his hood up. "I'm sorry," he told reporters. Asked what for, he said, "I am sorry for the murders I committed." Asked whether there were other victims, he said there were none. He ignored requests to remove the mask. A police officer said they had asked him to take it off and he had refused, and that he was worried his family would find out.
The Dong-A Ilbo counted forty-four suspects whose identities had been disclosed since the system began in April 2010, and found that only one, Lee Seok-jun, who killed the family of a woman under police protection in Songpa, Seoul, in 2021, had had a current mugshot released. After Ko Yu-jeong hid her face behind her hair in 2019, police had asked the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior and Safety whether they could release mugshots, and were told they needed the suspect's consent. Experts split. Lim Jun-tae of Dongguk University argued that police had to take and release mugshots for the system to work, while Han Sang-hee of Konkuk University said doing so before trial would brand suspects as criminals and violate the presumption of innocence. Rep. Lee Sung-man of the Democratic Party had introduced a bill on December 7, 2022, to set a standard for the photographs, noting that even passport photos must be no more than six months old.
Lee first said he had thrown the woman's body into the Gongneung Stream. On January 3, 2023, about a week into the search, he changed his account: he had buried her on the bank, at a spot about three kilometers from the first site, according to Dailian, and less than ten kilometers from the apartment. He called the information his "last gift to the police." Police brought in excavators, search dogs and officers, but the ground was frozen. About 220 millimeters of rain had fallen around the time he said he disposed of the body, which raised the possibility that it had been washed away.
On the afternoon of January 6, prosecutors took him to the site in prison clothes and restraints for about twenty minutes. Channel A reported that he pointed out the spot with his cuffed hands and described digging into the side of a steep bank because of the grass roots on top. When an investigator dug, he told him, "Give me the shovel," and that he should turn the shovel over to dig. Nothing was found. Lee Woong-hyuk, a police studies professor at Konkuk University, said on YTN that Lee might be pointing to the wrong places on purpose, since a murder charge is harder to prove without a body. Police searched for about two months, KBS reported later. Her body has not been found.
The National Forensic Service reported on January 3 that blood and hair in the apartment carried the DNA of four people, one man and three women, which raised fears of more victims. Police compared samples from six women who had visited. By January 6 they had matched the hair to an acquaintance who had stayed for a week and one bloodstain to the acquaintance whose finger Lee had bitten. The remaining blood, spatter in the main bedroom where he said the killing took place, was presumed to be the woman's. Police could not reach her parents for a comparison sample, but later matched it to tissue she had given during a health checkup at a local hospital, Dailian reported, and prosecutors said the spatter confirmed the blows.
Police also checked about 380 people who had been in contact with Lee or the woman during the previous year and found no other victims. Prosecutors reported that his DNA matched no unsolved case held by the National Forensic Service, and that a review of unsolved missing-person cases since his release from prison found no link.
Police profilers gave Lee the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, on which a score above 25 is classed as psychopathic in Korea. On January 6 they reported that they could not reach a diagnosis. "We've concluded that we are lacking materials with regards to some evaluation methods," an Ilsan Dongbu Police Station official told The Korea Herald; another official said his lying meant the facts could still change. The Supreme Prosecutors' Office's integrated psychological analysis reached a firmer view. It described him as self-centered and antisocial, often acting on impulse for his own gain, with poor control over his emotions and impulses, and said it observed psychopathic tendencies. It rated his risk of violent reoffending as high.
On January 19, 2023, a six-member team at the Goyang branch of the Uijeongbu District Prosecutors' Office, led by Jeong Bo-young, head of its second criminal division, indicted Lee and announced its findings. Police had already added a robbery-murder charge for the driver's killing. Prosecutors extended it to the woman's killing, on the strength of the internet searches and the money he took afterward. For the driver they added a charge of retaliatory murder, finding that he had killed the man to stop a police report that would have sent him back to prison. Robbery-murder in Korea carries only two possible sentences, death or life imprisonment. Prosecutors also asked the court to order electronic monitoring. Lee admitted disposing of the woman's body but at that point still denied that he had planned to kill her.
Commentators asked whether a court would convict on the woman's killing without a body. Yonhap set out the precedents: a 2012 Seoul Central District Court conviction resting on circumstantial evidence, and a 2008 Supreme Court ruling that overturned a murder conviction because the victim's death had not been proved beyond reasonable doubt.
The question went away when Lee pleaded guilty. At his first hearing he told the court he admitted all of the charges without objection, Asia Economy reported. The court closed arguments at the second hearing, on April 12, 2023.
Prosecutors asked for the death penalty. "Lee admits his wrongdoing, but his crime, which involves enjoying an extravagant life off of the victims' money, is unforgivable," they said. They spoke of the grief of "the victim whose body has still not been found" and of the family that had lost "a beloved husband and father" in a moment. Lee said he had no excuse. "I want to apologize to the victims," he said. "Please give me a heavy sentence so that there is no further public outcry." His lawyer asked for time to compensate the families. Before the verdict, Lee deposited 30 million won with the court for them. The driver's family said they had refused every offer of settlement and payment. YTN reported that he had not filed a single letter of remorse.
On May 19, 2023, the First Criminal Division of the Goyang Branch of the Uijeongbu District Court, presided over by Judge Choi Jong-won, convicted Lee on all nine charges, including the killing of the woman whose body was never found. It sentenced him to life in prison and ordered him to wear an electronic tracking device for thirty years after release.
The court found that he had "meticulously planned the murder and subsequent crimes" and carried them out "without any hesitation," the Korea Herald reported. It noted that he had washed the woman's body and dumped it on a rainy day, and that after crashing into the taxi he killed the driver within twenty minutes to avoid paying a settlement. It said he had gone on with daily life, spending the victims' money without remorse. "Only if the law were possible, a life sentence without parole would have been ordered that would allow him to be isolated from society permanently," the court said. Korean law did not provide that sentence; a life prisoner can be considered for parole after twenty years.
On death, the court said it was a punishment reserved for the most exceptional cases. "It is difficult to conclude that there is an objective reason to sentence death," Judge Choi said, according to Korea JoongAng Daily. The court took into account that Lee had pleaded guilty and deposited money for the victims' family. Lee heard the sentence with his head down and said nothing, YTN reported. A member of the victims' families told YTN, "We think of him as a serial killer. For people who cannot live in human society and do so much harm, there should of course be the death penalty."
The next day, May 20, a woman who identified herself as the taxi driver's daughter posted on an online community. "Our family is now in grief and in fury," she wrote. She described the false messages, the visit to the police station that found no accident, and the funeral director who told her not to look at her father's face. Her younger brother, she said, was the only one who did, and had been traumatized. She said she had filed a petition with the court, arguing that a deposit her family had refused should not have counted in Lee's favor and that a forced apology "is like another assault on the victim." She said she was gathering a national petition to revive and carry out the death penalty, or for an alternative law, "so that killers like Lee Ki-young can no longer come back into society."
On May 24, 2023, prosecutors appealed, asking again for death. Lee had killed two people according to plan and spent the money on entertainment, showing contempt for human life, they said, and the integrated psychological analysis put his risk of reoffending high. The suffering of the families, the public's anxiety and the need to prevent similar crimes all called for the maximum sentence, they argued.
On October 19, 2023, the Third Criminal Division of the Seoul High Court, Judges Lee Chang-hyung, Lee Jae-chan and Nam Ki-jung, rejected the appeal and upheld the life sentence and the thirty-year monitoring order. "Considering the motive, the results and his record, it could be fitting to sentence him to death so that he can never commit such crimes again, and the court agonized over the sentence," it said, according to KBS and Kukmin Ilbo. But death "is the ultimate punishment that takes away human life," allowed only where special circumstances justify it. "Taking everything into account, rather than taking the defendant's life, it is necessary to have him live in repentance through life imprisonment." The Chosun Ilbo reported that the court also remarked, unusually, that although a life prisoner can seek parole after twenty years, strict review could limit parole and keep him isolated from society. The driver's family said after the ruling: "He is young. If he is paroled, won't there be another victim?"
Retrospectives in Money Today, on December 29, 2025, and Edaily, on January 1, 2026, both say the sentence became final as the appeals court left it, and Edaily describes Lee as serving a life sentence. No Supreme Court ruling in the case has been reported, and the reports do not say whether either side filed a further appeal and later withdrew it. As of the January 1, 2026 Edaily report, Lee Ki-young was serving life imprisonment, with eligibility for parole review after twenty years under Korean law. The woman's body had still not been found.
Lee's case was one of several in which a disclosed suspect's released photo looked little like him; Financial News cited it in January 2023 in reporting calls for a law making mugshots mandatory, and a later dispute over Choi Won-jong, the Seohyeon Station attacker, raised the same complaint. The law then changed. Under the Act on the Disclosure of Personal Information of Suspects of Specific Serious Crimes, which took effect in January 2024, a disclosed suspect's face must as a rule show how the suspect looked within thirty days of the disclosure decision, and suspects cannot refuse to be photographed, the Segye Ilbo reported. The Segye report on the new law does not mention Lee.
The two courts' remarks about life without parole put Lee's case among several from 2023 cited in the debate over that sentence. The Chosun Ilbo, writing in February 2024 about a string of cases in which courts refused prosecutors' requests for death, noted the appeals court's comment on limiting his parole and reported that the government was backing a revision of the Criminal Act to allow life sentences without parole.
Lee's four pets, three cats and a dog left at the apartment, were taken to an animal rescue center, where unadopted animals are normally put down after about twenty days. After the press covered the story, all four were adopted. A video of Lee laughing while he put a cat into a swimming pool had circulated earlier, and commentators cited it as evidence of cruelty.
Planning. Lee told police both killings were unplanned, the woman's death the result of a tool thrown in anger and the driver's the result of an argument. The prosecutors' charges of robbery-murder and retaliatory murder rest on the internet searches, his debts, and the money he took. He pleaded guilty to those charges, and the trial court found the killings planned.
The woman's body. Lee gave two accounts of where he left her, and both searches failed. Some commentators suggested he was misleading investigators deliberately. That is speculation; it has not been established where her body is.
Other victims. Early fears of more victims, based on the DNA found in the apartment, were resolved: the samples were traced to two acquaintances and, presumably, the woman. Police and prosecutors found no other victims.
Psychopathy. The police assessment could not reach a diagnosis; the prosecutors' analysis reported psychopathic tendencies. Neither finding was part of the verdict, and a Korean judge told The Korea Herald such diagnoses carry little weight in sentencing.
Labels. Some Korean outlets call him a serial killer, and a victim's relative used that phrase after the verdict. The courts convicted him of two murders committed in separate events four months apart.
2013: Caught twice for drunk driving while serving in the army; on October 18, sentenced by a military court to 18 months.
December 9, 2018: Hits a taxi while drunk in Paju; in April 2019 given 8 months, suspended for two years.
November 20, 2019: Drives drunk about 30 km in South Jeolla Province while on a suspended sentence; sentenced to one year in prison.
About December 2021: Moves into the Paju apartment of the woman he had been seeing.
February 2022: Divorces his wife.
March to May 2022: Collects 10 million won in COVID-19 relief through a sham business.
August 3, 2022: Kills the woman in the apartment; on August 4 disposes of her body by the Gongneung Stream.
August to November 2022: Spends about 81 million won of her money and sends her friends 92 messages posing as her.
December 20, 2022: Crashes into a taxi in Goyang while drunk, takes the driver home and kills him.
December 21 to 25, 2022: Takes about 55.6 million won from the driver's accounts and sends his family 132 messages.
December 25, 2022: The family reports the driver missing; Lee's girlfriend finds the body; Lee is arrested; he confesses to killing the woman.
December 28, 2022: Arrest warrant hearing in Goyang.
December 29, 2022: Police committee votes 7 to 0 to disclose his name, age and photo; the driver's license photo is released.
January 3, 2023: Lee changes his account and says he buried the woman.
January 4, 2023: Sent to prosecutors; tells reporters he is sorry for the murders.
January 6, 2023: Police psychopathy test inconclusive; Lee taken to the Gongneung Stream with prosecutors.
January 19, 2023: Indicted on nine charges, including robbery-murder and retaliatory murder.
April 12, 2023: Prosecutors seek death.
May 19, 2023: Sentenced to life and 30 years of electronic monitoring.
May 24, 2023: Prosecutors appeal.
October 19, 2023: Seoul High Court upholds the life sentence.
January 2024: New law requires recent mugshots of disclosed suspects.
January 1, 2026: Edaily reports he is serving life; the sentence was final after the appeal, per Money Today (December 2025) and Edaily.