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Lee Ki-young Is Sentenced to Life for Killing a Taxi Driver and the Woman Whose Body Was Never Found

A court northwest of Seoul refused prosecutors' call for death, citing his guilty plea, and ordered 30 years of GPS tracking for the man who hid a taxi driver's body in a closet.

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Illustration: concrete highway bridge over a wide river

A South Korean court sentenced Lee Ki-young to life in prison on Friday, May 19, 2023, for murdering two people in 2022: the woman whose apartment he had been living in, whose body has never been found, and a taxi driver he lured home after a drunken collision and hid in a closet. Prosecutors had asked for his death. The Goyang Branch of the Uijeongbu District Court, northwest of Seoul, declined, and ordered him to wear a GPS-tracking device for 30 years after he serves his time. He was 32.

The court did not spare him its judgment. Lee had "meticulously planned the murder and subsequent crimes," it said in its ruling, as reported by The Korea Herald, and had gone ahead "without any hesitation," profiting from his victims' money without remorse. The court said a life sentence without parole would have been ordered had the law allowed it. Under Korean law, a prisoner serving life may be considered for parole after more than 20 years with good behavior.

What kept him from a death sentence, the court said, was that he had pleaded guilty to every charge and deposited 30 million won, about $22,500, for the victims' family. The presiding judge, Choi Jong-won, said it was difficult to find an objective reason to take the defendant's life. Prosecutors had sought the death penalty at the final hearing of the trial on April 12.

The charges, nine in all according to the Herald, ran from robbery-homicide and concealment of bodies to computer-related fraud, fraud and forgery of administrative documents.

Two killings, four months apart

The first victim was a woman in her 50s, 50 according to Korea JoongAng Daily, who had been Lee's girlfriend and was also his landlady; the apartment they lived in was hers. In August 2022, the JoongAng Daily reported, Lee struck her in the head ten times with a blunt instrument in order to use her credit card, and dumped her body by a nearby river the next day. Yonhap reported that the killing was aimed at stealing her mobile phone and credit cards. Police found a contract showing that Lee had borrowed 300 million won from her. He later confessed, and led investigators to the stream in Paju where he said he had left her, but the search found nothing.

The second killing came on December 20. Driving drunk, Lee hit a taxi, and, investigators said, talked the driver into coming to his apartment with a promise of cash compensation for the damage. There, Lee later admitted, he beat the man to death and hid the body in a closet. Posing as the driver, he sent messages to the man's family, and he used the driver's credit card, taking out loans, until his new girlfriend opened the closet six days later while looking for cat food and found the body. The taxi was found about a kilometer from the apartment. It was while police questioned him about the driver that he confessed to the woman's killing.

Neither victim has been publicly named. Lee had been caught driving drunk four times between 2013 and 2019. In September 2013, while serving in the military, he drove two kilometers with a police officer hanging onto his car, and he was held in a military prison for 18 months for obstruction and driving without a license; in 2019 he was sentenced to a year in prison.

Reports on verdict day differed on some details. The taxi driver was 60 according to The Korea Herald and Korea JoongAng Daily's indictment coverage, and in his late 50s according to Yonhap. The JoongAng Daily verdict story gives Lee's age as 31 in its opening summary and 32 in its text; the other reports say 32. Accounts of where the woman's body was left vary between a riverside and a stream bank in Paju, and it had not been found when the sentence was handed down. Prosecutors could appeal the life sentence; how the case ended on appeal is not covered here.

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