Kwon Jae-chan 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; the accounts of those sentences differ in detail and are not reconciled here.
In 2003 he beat the proprietor 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 afterwards. 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.
On the morning of December 4, 2021 he strangled a woman in her fifties in the underground car park of a commercial building in Michuhol-gu, Incheon, and put her body in the boot of a car. He had met her through a social gathering and had built up a relationship with her; prosecutors said he had accumulated debts of more than a hundred million won, gambling among them. He withdrew four and a half million won on her bank card and took 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.
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 said that rehabilitation and the recovery of his humanity appeared impossible and that he needed to be isolated from society permanently.
The appellate court took a different view of the same facts. It held that it could not be established that Kwon had planned and prepared the killings in advance, and that the sentencing guideline’s aggravating factor of a cruel method did not therefore apply; weighed against the standards for imposing death and the sentences given in other grave cases, it found no circumstances special enough that anyone would accept death as the just outcome. The same court noted the difficulty in the other direction: because Korean law provides no absolute life sentence excluding parole or pardon, life imprisonment is not a complete substitute for death when the question is the protection of life and public safety. It substituted life imprisonment.
The prosecution appealed. On September 21, 2023 the first division of the Supreme Court confirmed the life sentence, finding no error in the reasoning below, and kept the thirty-year monitoring order. Three killings, eighteen years apart at the ends, all of them for money.