A South Korean court has given a life sentence to a true crime fan who told police she murdered a stranger “out of curiosity”.
Jung Yoo-jung, 23, had been obsessed with crime shows and novels and scored highly on psychopath tests, police said.
Fixated with the idea of “trying out a murder”, she used an app to meet an English-language teacher, stabbing her to death at her home in May.
The brutal killing shocked South Korea.
Prosecutors had asked for the death penalty - a request typically reserved for the gravest of offences.
They told the court that Jung, an unemployed loner who lived with her grandfather, had looked for victims for months, using an online tutoring app to find a target.
She contacted more than 50 people and favoured women, asking them if they conducted their lessons at home.
In May, posing as the mother of a high school student who needed English lessons, she contacted the 26-year-old victim, who lived in the south-eastern city of Busan. Her identity has not been disclosed by police.
Jung then showed up at the tutor’s house dressed in a school uniform she had bought online, prosecutors said.
After the teacher let her in, she attacked the woman, stabbing her more than 100 times - continuing the frenzied attack even after the victim had died.
She then dismembered the woman’s body and took a taxi ride to dump some of the remains in remote parkland near a river, north of Busan.
She was arrested after the taxi driver tipped off police about a customer who had dumped a blood-soaked suitcase in the woods.
Police said Jung’s online browsing history showed she had researched for months on how to kill, and how to get rid of a body.
But she was also careless, police said, and took no effort to avoid CCTV cameras, which captured her entering and leaving the tutor’s home several times.
On Friday, a sentencing judge in the Busan District Court said the killing had “spread fear in society that one can become a victim for no reason” and “incited a general distrust” among the community.
Jung, who confessed to the crime in June, pleaded for a more lenient sentence, saying she had suffered hallucinations and other mental disorders at the time.
But the court rejected her argument as the crime had been “carefully planned and carried out, and it is difficult to accept her claim of mental and physical disorder”.
They noted that her statements to police had frequently changed. Initially Jung said she had only moved the body after someone else killed the woman, then later claimed that the killing had occurred as a result of an argument.
In the end, she confessed that her interest in committing a murder had been piqued by crime shows and TV programmes. While South Korea retains the death penalty, it has not carried out an execution since 1997.
She was arrested after the taxi driver tipped off police about a customer who had dumped a blood-soaked suitcase in the woods.
Imagine being that taxidriver though
Did she tip well? If so probablynot the worst customer of the day.
Police said Jung’s online browsing history showed she had researched for months on how to kill, and how to get rid of a body.
But she was also careless, police said, and took no effort to avoid CCTV cameras, which captured her entering and leaving the tutor’s home several times
She was arrested after the taxi driver tipped off police about a customer who had dumped a blood-soaked suitcase in the woods.
I like that true crime simultaneously builds obsession in something they see as secret knowledge and doesn’t make them any good at it. Surely none of us would take a blood-soaked suitcase in a taxi to the forest.
I mean, most true crime stories are about criminals that got caught…
I think if you’re the kind of person who will spend months searching for an innocent victim and then go to their house and stab them 100 times, cut up their body, and then dump it in the woods, it was only a matter of time before you kill somebody regardless. She lied “frequently” according to this information, why should we believe her when says it’s because of TV? She just wanted to kill somebody.
Reminds me a bit of that guy who made an acquaintance drive him out into the middle of nowhere at gunpoint, shot him, and then tried to flee to canada. And then very politely told the cops all that once he was caught. The only difference I see is that this person kept trying to find a way out of it longer than he did.
I agree. True Crime media can’t turn a normal person into a cold-blooded killer like that. It’s also not like these podcasts “invented” the genre, TV has been full of this stuff for decades and it’s not like there’s been a noticeable increase in murder.
I’m not a fan of people obsessing over murder cases for content, but just like video games, TV and that gosh darn rock n’ roll music, it’s not turning our kids into hobbyist murderers. You can get mad at them for disrespecting victims and exploiting tragedies, no need to invent a story where there isn’t one.
It would be stupid to trust Ted Bundy when he said porn mags made him kill and it would definitely be at least naive to take this at face value, particularly when the murderer is trying to tie it to a publicly controversial yet popular thing like true crime.
Jesus Christ this is so disgusting and horrible and the only thing I’ve got on my mind because of this shit is “They will make a true crime story out of this.”
They’re going to make a true crime story and the comments will be a thousand variations of “I could do better” by people who will fail at their own murders.
“How pathetic, I would have killed the taxi driver too!”
I mean who takes a taxi to dump a body
How’s that capitalist alienation working out for you, South Korea?
Reminds me of that Dennis Reynolds’s looking guy who stabbed up a house of students. He was a graduate student in criminal psychology or something adjacent.
