Korean true crime fan murdered "out of curiosity"
The hype surrounding podcasts and series in which true crimes are retold is huge. In South Korea, this has now culminated in a brutal crime: A woman takes the cases as her model - and stabs a 20-year-old to death. The murder shocks the whole country. Now the judges pronounce their verdict.
A 23-year-old South Korean woman has been sentenced to life imprisonment for murder out of sheer fascination. A district court in Busan, the second largest city in South Korea, was convinced that J. had murdered her victim "out of curiosity". She was driven by the idea of "trying out a murder", the verdict said. The BBC reported that J. was obsessed with crime dramas and true-crime formats. She "acted for her own perverse reasons", the South Korean news portal "Korea JoongAng Daily" quoted the presiding judge Kim Tae-eob as saying, adding that J. therefore deserved a "severe sentence". The 20-year-old victim, a woman from the city of Busan, did not know her before the crime.
The investigation revealed that J. had been preparing for the murder for months: she watched numerous true crime programs, borrowed books about crime from the library and researched how to dispose of a corpse on the Internet. According to the local police, she found her victim via a tutoring app that connects parents with teachers. She contacted more than 50 people, preferably women, the investigators reported. She pretended to be the mother of a student who needed tutoring in English.
When she found her victim in May of this year, she bought a school uniform online and drove to the 20-year-old's house. J. pretended to be a pupil, the public prosecutor later explained in court. This apparently went unnoticed due to her height. After the tutor had let her in, J. stabbed her more than 100 times, according to the prosecution. She then dismembered the body and took a cab to a nearby park, where she disposed of some of the body parts near a river. As the cab driver noticed his customer's behavior, he contacted the police. The perpetrator was arrested a short time later.
Public prosecutor demanded the death penalty
The investigators were quickly able to prove that J. had committed the crime. In addition to online search histories and library records, there was video from a surveillance camera showing her entering her victim's apartment. The perpetrator changed her statement to the police several times, as the prosecution explained in court, according to the BBC. She initially claimed that the woman was already dead when she entered the apartment. Later it was said that the murder was the result of an argument. In June of this year, she finally confessed that her desire to murder a person had been aroused by true-crime formats.
The brutal act shocked South Korea. According to "Korea JoongAng Daily", Judge Kim Tae-eob said at the sentencing that the crime had "spread fear in society that anyone can become a victim for no reason" and caused "general mistrust". The public prosecutor demanded the death penalty. Although this still exists in South Korea, it has not been carried out since 1997.
J., who is described as a recluse and lives with her grandfather, pleaded for a lenient sentence. She had suffered from hallucinations and other mental disorders at the time of the crime. However, the court did not agree, as the crime had been "carefully planned and executed".
The international community has expressed concern over South Korea's handling of this case, with manycriminal justice experts questioning the fairness of a life sentence for a crime driven by fascination with crime dramas and true-crime formats. Despite requests for clemency based on mental health issues, the South Korean justice system has maintained its stance on the seriousness of this international crime, which involves premeditated murder and manslaughter.
Source: www.ntv.de
