Korean Police Say that After 30 Years, DNA Evidence Has Identified the Hwaseong Serial Killer

The top story in Korea that is headlining all its news outlets is the announcement that the Hwaseong Serial Killer has been identified after all these years:

Police may have solved one of the Korea’s most mysterious cold cases: the serial rapes and murders of nine women in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi, in the late 1980s.  

According to Ban Ki-soo, a chief investigator at the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency on Thursday, newly analyzed DNA evidence from three of the nine cases matched the DNA of a 56-year-old convict surnamed Lee currently serving a life sentence in Busan for a different murder he committed in 1994.  

This discovery could very well bring a resolution to one of the most notorious serial rape and murder sprees in Korean criminal history, which terrified Korea from 1986 to 1991 and remained unsolved for three decades.  

Yet the suspect, who was in his 20s at the time of the killings, can no longer be charged for any of those crimes since the statute of limitations for the last of the murders expired in April 2006. He has denied responsibility for all nine murders, police said.

Lee is serving a life sentence in the Busan Penitentiary for raping and murdering his wife’s sister, aged 20 at his home in Cheongju, North Chungcheong, in January 1994. According to press reports, he is a model prisoner with a taciturn personality who is eligible for parole.

A 10-victim rape and murder spree of the late 1980s and early 1990s terrified the nation — particularly due to the authorities’ inability to find a culprit — and was compared to the so-called Zodiac killings in California in the late 1960s. The killings gave rise to copycat crimes and inspired one of the most iconic blockbusters of Korean cinema, “Memories of Murder.” 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but here is a video report of the announcement from Arirang News:

The suspect could have likely been identified sooner if the investigators back when the crimes happened did not discard so much evidence such as cigarette butts found at the scene that would have much DNA evidence. Instead modern day forensic scientists using new technology were able to extract DNA from the victim’s clothes that were saved as evidence to make this DNA match.

For those that haven’t I highly recommend watching the Korean movie, Memories of Murder which uses a dramatized account of the investigation to show how incompetent it was and the killer’s impact on Korean society back then.

What I have not been able to find out is if the identified killer was even a suspect during the time of the killings? The police back then had many suspects that they were trying to pin the murder on, so it would be interesting to see if this guy was even on the police’s radar back then.