Yoo Young-chul was convicted of 20 murders committed in Seoul over about ten months in 2003 and 2004, at the time the largest number of victims attributed by a South Korean court to a single killer. He began with elderly and well-off residents in large houses in quiet districts, and then turned to young women who worked for outcall massage and "phone room" businesses, whom he lured to his rented room in western Seoul. He was caught in July 2004 not by detectives working the case but by the operators of the businesses whose workers had disappeared. On December 13, 2004, the Seoul Central District Court sentenced him to death. He did not appeal. He remains on death row, because South Korea has carried out no execution since December 30, 1997.
He confessed to more killings than he was convicted of, and his count changed repeatedly in custody. One killing he confessed to, the stabbing of a young woman in Imun-dong in February 2004, ended in an acquittal that was upheld by South Korea's Supreme Court in 2005. Others he claimed were never charged.
Yoo was born on April 18, 1970, according to CBS NoCutNews. A profile in Weekly Kyunghyang in July 2004 said he was born in Seoul to parents who did manual labor, the third of four children. His father died of an illness when he was 14, and his mother raised the family. He and a brother were reported to have a seizure disorder, and he was treated for epilepsy in the 1990s.
He left a technical high school after a theft case and was sent to a juvenile facility. By the time of his arrest in 2004, the profile said, he had been involved in at least 14 criminal cases, among them aggravated theft and sexual offenses, and had spent about 11 years of his adult life in prison. Reporters were told he had claimed IQ scores of 140 and 148 in middle school, and the Seoul Shinmun put his IQ at 142. In prison he learned to use computers and word processing. He was caught forging a police identity card in 1997.
According to Pressian, he married a woman who worked as a masseuse in 1991, and they had a son. His wife divorced him while he was in prison; Pressian dated the divorce to 2000, and Weekly Kyunghyang said she filed in 2002. In 2000 he was sentenced to three years and six months in prison for a sexual assault on a minor, whom he had approached by posing as a police officer, according to the Seoul Shinmun. Accounts differ on when he was released. Weekly Kyunghyang said June 2003, and the Seoul Shinmun, in 2026, said September 2003, after he had served his full term.
After his release he used the computer skills he had learned in prison to make a fake police identity card. Police said he used it, together with handcuffs he had bought, to extort money from women who worked in the massage trade by threatening them with arrest.
Police and prosecutors later tied his crimes to two personal losses. His wife had divorced him while he was in prison, and Yonhap reported that he had considered killing her but gave up the plan for the sake of their child. After his release he began a relationship with a woman who worked at a phone room; police said she ended it when she learned of his criminal record, his epilepsy and his divorce. Police said his hostility toward wealthy people and toward women grew from these events and from a childhood in poverty. Yoo himself gave shifting accounts. Pressian reported in July 2004 that he denied hating the rich or women, but at his trial he told the court that the end of the relationship had made him hate women.
The first killings came on September 24, 2003, in Sinsa-dong, in Seoul's Gangnam district. Yoo entered a two-story house and killed a retired university professor emeritus, 73, and his wife, 68, with a blunt instrument, according to police as reported by Yonhap. The Seoul Shinmun reported in 2026 that he had first picked out a different house but moved on after seeing construction workers and a large dog there. Reporting at the time said he left a knife behind, went back for it, and later mocked police for missing a hair he had dropped at the scene.
On October 9, 2003, he entered a house in Gugi-dong, in Seodaemun-gu, belonging to a 61-year-old man who worked as a parking attendant. The man's mother, 85, his wife, 60, and a 35-year-old member of the family were killed with a blunt instrument. Yonhap described the youngest victim as the man's son, while the Seoul Shinmun described a 35-year-old woman with the family's surname.
In November 2003 he entered the home of a wealthy 71-year-old man in Samseong-dong, also in Gangnam, and killed the man's wife, 69.
On November 18, 2003, he entered a large two-story house in Hyehwa-dong, in Jongno-gu, and killed the 87-year-old owner and a 53-year-old woman who worked there as a housekeeper. He set fire to the house afterward. The Seoul Shinmun reported that he tried to force open a safe to make the crime look like a robbery and set the fire because he feared he had left blood evidence. Weekly Kyunghyang reported that he left an infant in the house unharmed, and that he said he had spared the child because he had a child of his own.
Police reports at the time of his arrest put the toll from these four houses at eight people. Yonhap reported that he left cash and valuables untouched, which made the cases hard to read as robberies, and police said they had treated them as separate crimes. He told reporters later that he had targeted the rich. In court in October 2004 he said he had left more than 100 million won in cash at wealthy victims' homes and that he never killed for money.
After the Hyehwa-dong case, police obtained security camera footage and footprints, and Yoo stopped attacking households, according to Yonhap. About four months passed before the next killings. Police linked that pause to his relationship with the phone room worker, and the change in his targets to its end. Pressian reported a different explanation from Yoo himself: that he had stopped targeting the wealthy after the family of his first victims made a donation to a university.
On January 21, 2004, police caught Yoo stealing from a customer's locker at a bathhouse in the Sinchon area, Pressian reported, but released him two days later for lack of evidence. Prosecutors had questioned the case, noting that no fingerprints were found on the locker key. While in custody he tried to escape and was hurt. In December 2004 the court acquitted him of that theft, finding the witness testimony unreliable.
From March 2004 Yoo's method changed. He no longer went to the victims' homes. Instead he called businesses that sent women out to customers, mainly outcall massage services and phone rooms, and had women come to the one-room apartment he rented in Mapo-gu, in western Seoul. Police said he posed as a police officer carrying out a vice crackdown, showing his forged identity card and the handcuffs. He killed the women in the apartment and buried their bodies on hillsides near his home. Police said 11 women were killed this way between March and July 2004.
Weekly Kyunghyang reported that his notebooks showed careful planning, and that he chose small women who resembled his former wife. Police told reporters that he took steps to defeat forensic identification, and that he avoided sexual contact with the women he killed so as not to leave DNA evidence. At his second court hearing he said he had turned some women away because they did not fit what he was looking for, including two on the day he was caught.
Few details were reported about most of these women, and Korean reporting at the time used surnames only. Among those described:
A woman surnamed Kwon, 24, whom he met through a phone room. A friend reported her missing in March 2004. Police found she had worked at a skin care salon, not in the massage trade, according to the Seoul Shinmun.
A woman surnamed Han, 34, a divorced mother of two who worked part-time at a phone room. She had been reported missing to police in Seodaemun the month before the Seoul Shinmun's July 21, 2004, report.
A woman surnamed Kim, 25, the only one of the 11 whose age Yonhap gave in its first report.
Police found in July 2004 that at least two of the women did not work in massage at all: one was a homemaker who worked part-time, and one worked at a skin care salon. Pressian reported that three of the women had been reported missing to police, in March, June and late June 2004, and that the reports were handled as ordinary missing-person cases, with no link drawn to one another or to Yoo.
In April 2004, Yoo told police, he used his forged police identity card to approach a street vendor in Hwanghak-dong, in central Seoul, handcuffed him, and killed him in a vehicle. The vehicle was later found burned at Wolmido, an island district of Incheon, west of Seoul. The Seoul Shinmun reported that he set the car on fire but failed to remove its license plates. Police considered this the most credible of the extra killings he confessed to after his arrest. Court reports do not list the 20 convicted counts one by one, so whether this killing was among them is unclear.
Yoo's undoing was that he kept calling the same businesses. Operators of outcall massage and phone-room services noticed that women sent to one customer were not coming back. On July 14, 2004, according to Yonhap, police received a tip from one operator that workers had disappeared after a call from a man in his 30s. The Seoul Shinmun reported in 2026 that a phone number written in one business's ledger matched a customer number linked to the missing women.
The official account and the operators' account of what happened next differ. Pressian reported on July 20, 2004, that the operators themselves caught him: they arranged a meeting at a spot in Sinchon in the early hours of July 15, struggled with him, and held him before police took him to a local police box. Police later announced that they had arrested him on a tip, a version Pressian disputed. One operator who was present told Pressian that officers from different units argued for more than an hour over who would take custody of him, and that the dispute ended only when a senior unit chief arrived and the units agreed to share the credit.
Police took him into emergency custody early on July 15 on suspicion of confining and assaulting a woman from a massage business earlier in July. Under questioning he denied that accusation but told officers, according to Yonhap, that he was the person behind the serial killings.
The same day, Yoo escaped. Yonhap reported that he had an epileptic seizure during questioning, that officers removed his handcuffs and briefly left the interrogation room, and that he fled. He had three seizures in custody in all. After escaping he bought sleeping pills; Yonhap reported he was carrying 360 when he was caught and had said he planned to take them on Yeongjong Island, while a prosecutor later quoted by CBS NoCutNews said his plan was to kill himself at Wolmido. Police stopped him for questioning at Yeongdeungpo Station on the morning of July 16, about 12 hours after the escape, and arrested him again. CBS NoCutNews, in a 2009 account, said officers identified him from a single photograph and put the time at about five hours.
Back in custody, a senior Seoul police official questioned him personally after noticing that his build from behind resembled a figure in security camera footage from one of the 2003 killings. After about eight hours of questioning, Yonhap reported, he confessed. He described details of the Gugi-dong scene that had not been made public, including an aquarium in the living room and a fireplace in a bedroom, although his accounts of the Gugi-dong and Hyehwa-dong scenes were not consistent in every point.
Police first obtained a warrant on charges of impersonating a police officer and theft, and planned separate warrants for murder and concealing bodies. On July 18, 2004, Seoul's police chief, Heo Jun-young, announced the arrest and said Yoo had confessed to at least 19 killings: eight people in four houses in 2003 and 11 women in 2004. The same day, investigators recovered the bodies of women buried on hillsides near a Buddhist temple in northern Seoul and behind Sogang University, close to his apartment. Pressian reported that seven bodies were found at one site. Police said they believed he acted alone.
The police had limited physical evidence. A Seoul police official told the Seoul Shinmun that the strongest evidence was Yoo's own confession and statements, which included details only the killer would know. Police found a hammer near his home, but not the other tools he said he had thrown away. A hair found at one 2003 scene did not match his blood type, and hair from another scene came from the victims or their families.
Yoo's account of how many people he had killed shifted throughout the investigation and trial. On July 18 police announced 19. Within days he told police he had also killed the street vendor, then gave a total of 26, including two killings in Busan. The Japan Times reported that he told investigators there were "too many" to count exactly. On July 20 he nodded when reporters asked whether there was a 21st victim, and police began checking his statement that in mid-April he had killed a woman in her 20s he met through a phone room in Sinchon; search dogs did not find a body.
Police did not accept most of the additional claims. Pressian reported on July 20 that they considered most of them likely false, apart from the street vendor's killing, while not ruling out unreported victims, partly because of messages from women who said they had been taken to Busan and partly because he had disposed of bodies so thoroughly. At his second court hearing, in September 2004, Yoo claimed five more victims beyond 26, including a pregnant woman and a minor, and later put the figure at 31 besides the Imun-dong case. The police officer who led the investigation called the new claims absurd.
On May 22, 2004, a 65-year-old woman was found stabbed to death in her fifth-floor home in Wonnam-dong, in Jongno-gu. Police first treated the case as a robbery and found no clear leads. In July, the Seoul Shinmun reported, Yoo confessed to it informally during questioning, describing the building's layout and how he had entered in a way police said only the killer would know. He later retracted the confession and dared police to find evidence. A footprint and a missing wristwatch were examined. Police suggested at the time that he might be admitting crimes slowly to delay any execution, since an execution would be postponed while new charges were investigated. He was never charged with this killing. In 2016 CBS NoCutNews reported that police had looked at him because the victim's missing phone last connected near his home, and a former police official said Yoo had included Wonnam-dong in a handwritten list of killings. The case remains unsolved.
In February 2004 a 24-year-old woman who worked in a clothing store was stabbed to death in an alley in Imun-dong, in Dongdaemun-gu. After his arrest Yoo first denied the killing and then, late in the investigation, confessed, describing an attempt to extort money by posing as a police officer and an attack on a woman who swore at him. Police included it among his crimes and it became the 21st death in the indictment.
At his second hearing, on September 21, 2004, Yoo retracted that confession. He said a senior police officer had promised that his son's university education would be paid for through a third party if he confessed using the police version of events, and that he had agreed because he expected to die anyway. He said the account of the wounds had changed during the investigation, and at a later hearing he argued that the wounds did not match his serrated knife. The police officers denied making any promise and said his account had included details only the killer could know.
The case had a painful moment for the victim's family. When Yoo was brought to a police station in July, the victim's mother rushed at him and was kicked by an escorting officer. Police later apologized.
Prosecutors indicted Yoo in August 2004 on murder charges covering 21 deaths, along with offenses involving the treatment and disposal of bodies, impersonating a police officer and theft. The case was heard by Criminal Division 21 of the Seoul Central District Court, presided over by Judge Hwang Chan-hyeon.
The hearings were disrupted more than once. At the end of the second hearing, on September 21, Yoo said he would not attend any more sessions because he had already confessed everything. When the judge urged him to come back, he climbed onto the stenographer's desk and lunged toward the bench before guards dragged him out. At the same hearing he claimed responsibility for a series of arsons in Seoul, complained that he had written a letter of remorse that prosecutors had filed away instead of delivering, and said police and prosecutors had uncovered little on their own.
At the October 25 hearing, family members of victims testified. Yoo apologized to the families, and some relatives asked for the harshest penalty. An exchange with one relative led to an outburst in which he broke his chair and was restrained by guards. He returned after his lawyer promised there would be no further disruption. He refused a psychiatric evaluation his defense had requested.
At the closing hearing, prosecutors asked for the death penalty. In his final statement Yoo said he would keep repenting until the day he died.
On December 13, 2004, the court sentenced Yoo to death for killing 20 people, most of them elderly people and women. It acquitted him of two charges for lack of evidence. On the Imun-dong murder, the court found his confession doubtful because it conflicted with the physical evidence and had changed as the investigation went on. On a theft at a Sinchon bathhouse in January 2004, it found the witness testimony unreliable. In court, Yoo said that after the theft investigation his girlfriend had learned of his record and his divorce and ended the relationship, and that this had led him to hate women. His lawyer told UPI that he would not appeal.
He did not appeal within the seven days allowed, so his death sentence became final at first instance. Prosecutors appealed the Imun-dong acquittal, which was upheld on appeal, and took it to the Supreme Court.
On June 9, 2005, the First Division of the Supreme Court, with Justice Kang Shin-wook as the presiding justice, rejected the prosecution's appeal. According to Yonhap, the court found that Yoo's confessions, the main evidence, did not match the victim's wounds, and that the circumstances and motive of the confession were questionable. There was no proof that he had committed the crime, and the Imun-dong killing stayed unsolved in law. The ruling ended the case about ten months after his arrest. Yonhap reported that his sentence raised the number of people on death row in South Korea from 59 to 60, and that he was one of three of them convicted of killing ten or more people.
Years later another man, Jeong Nam-gyu, who was sentenced to death in 2007 for a separate series of attacks in Seoul and died in custody in 2009, told police that he had committed the Imun-dong killing and was angry that Yoo had claimed it, according to a 2026 Seoul Shinmun account. No court ruling on that claim has been reported.
South Korea's last executions took place on December 30, 1997, when 23 people were executed. The death penalty remains in law; the Constitutional Court upheld it in 1996 and 2010, and a third challenge filed in 2019 was still pending in October 2026, Yonhap reported. Amnesty International has classed South Korea as abolitionist in practice since 2007.
Yoo has been held in more than one facility. He was held for a time at a prison in Daegu. In September 2023 the Ministry of Justice moved him to the Seoul Detention Center in Uiwang, south of Seoul, which is reported to have the country's only serviceable execution chamber. A ministry official called the transfer a necessary measure for correctional administration. The move, ordered under Justice Minister Han Dong-hoon, led to speculation that executions might resume, but lawmakers of both main parties said it was too early to draw that conclusion, and a ministry official described facility inspections as routine. No execution followed.
Reports on his conduct in prison have been consistent. A 2019 episode of the SBS program "Unanswered Questions," as described by the Korea Herald, reported that he remained hostile and aggressive and uncooperative with guards. Sisa Journal reported in February 2026 that he frequently caused trouble in the detention center and was among its most troublesome inmates.
As of October 6, 2026, Yonhap reported that he was one of 52 people on death row in South Korea, held at the Seoul Detention Center in Uiwang with his execution suspended.
The case set off a public argument about the death penalty in South Korea, at a time when a bill to abolish it had been submitted to the National Assembly and the National Human Rights Commission had recommended abolition. Justice Minister Kim Seung-kyu argued for keeping it. A lawyer writing in the Maeil Shinmun in December 2004 said that coverage of the case had focused on the brutality of the crimes and had fed a public mood in favor of retribution. When Yoo was moved to Seoul in 2023, the politician Hong Jun-pyo said that if serial killers were being moved, they should all be executed.
The families of victims spoke about their loss in the first days after the arrest. The husband of the 53-year-old housekeeper killed in Hyehwa-dong told the Seoul Shinmun he had waited eight months for news of the case. He said his wife had gone to work for about 40,000 won a day, that she did not live to enjoy what they had saved for, and that Yoo's difficult childhood was no excuse. Police said Yoo expressed regret for killing her; her husband broke down when he heard it.
The criminologist Lee Soo-jung of Kyonggi University said the case was the reason she first used the word "psychopath" in public, and the Korea Herald described him in 2023 as the country's first publicly identified psychopath. The 2008 film "The Chaser," directed by Na Hong-jin, drew on the case, and in 2021 a documentary series, "The Raincoat Killer: Chasing a Predator in Korea," revisited it.
Proven by final judgment: 20 murders, Seoul Central District Court, December 13, 2004.
Acquitted: the Imun-dong murder of February 2004 (first instance, appeal and Supreme Court, June 9, 2005) and a January 2004 bathhouse theft.
Confessed and never charged: the additional killings he claimed in custody and in court, which took his own count to 26 and then above 30, including two in Busan. Police considered most of these claims false.
Confessed, retracted and never charged: the May 2004 killing of a 65-year-old woman in Wonnam-dong, which remains unsolved.
Points on which accounts differ: his birthplace (Seoul in a 2004 profile; Gochang County in other accounts); the month of his release in 2003 (June or September); the year of his divorce (2000 or 2002); whether the 35-year-old killed in Gugi-dong was a son or a woman of the family; the ages of the first victims (73 and 68 in Yonhap's 2004 report; a 72-year-old professor in the Korea Herald's 2023 retrospective, which also dated the first killings to January 2003, against September 24, 2003, in every contemporary report); the Imun-dong victim's age (24 or 25); how long he was at large after escaping (about 12 hours, or about five); and whether police or the business operators made the capture.
April 18, 1970: Yoo Young-chul is born.
1991: marries; the couple have a son.
1997: caught forging a police identity card.
2000: sentenced to three years and six months for a sexual assault on a minor; his wife divorces him while he is in prison (2000 or 2002, by different accounts).
2003: released from prison (June or September, by different accounts).
September 24, 2003: a retired professor and his wife are killed in Sinsa-dong, Gangnam.
October 9, 2003: three people are killed in a house in Gugi-dong, Seodaemun-gu.
November 2003: a woman of 69 is killed in Samseong-dong, Gangnam.
November 18, 2003: an 87-year-old homeowner and his housekeeper are killed in Hyehwa-dong, Jongno-gu; the house is set on fire.
January 21, 2004: arrested for a bathhouse theft in Sinchon; released two days later.
February 2004: a 24-year-old woman is stabbed to death in Imun-dong; he later confesses and retracts, and is acquitted.
March to July 2004: 11 women are killed in his apartment in Mapo-gu, by police account.
April 2004: a street vendor from Hwanghak-dong is killed; the vehicle is found burned at Wolmido, Incheon.
May 22, 2004: a 65-year-old woman is killed in Wonnam-dong; he confesses informally and retracts; never charged.
July 14, 2004: police receive a tip from a business operator.
July 15, 2004: caught in Sinchon by business operators and taken into custody; escapes from a police station.
July 16, 2004: recaptured at Yeongdeungpo Station; confesses after hours of questioning.
July 18, 2004: police announce the arrest and at least 19 killings; bodies are recovered from hillsides near his apartment.
August 2004: indicted on murder charges covering 21 deaths.
September 21, 2004: retracts the Imun-dong confession at his second hearing and lunges at the bench.
October 25, 2004: victims' families testify; another outburst.
December 13, 2004: convicted of 20 murders and sentenced to death; acquitted on the Imun-dong count and a theft count.
June 9, 2005: Supreme Court rejects the prosecution's appeal on the Imun-dong acquittal; the case ends.
2008: "The Chaser" is released.
2021: documentary series "The Raincoat Killer: Chasing a Predator in Korea."
September 2023: moved from Daegu to the Seoul Detention Center in Uiwang.
October 6, 2026: on death row at the Seoul Detention Center, execution suspended (Yonhap).