Tag: murder

The audit of children not attending school in South Korea has led to yet another murdered child.  For some reason I am dubious that all the blame for the murder of this child goes on to the mother:

Police arrested Sunday a middle-aged man in Cheongju, North Chungcheong who admitted to secretly burying his four-year-old stepdaughter’s body on a mountain five years ago.

A day before, the girl’s 36-year-old mother asphyxiated herself after being questioned about the girl’s disappearance by police. She left a suicide note admitting to killing the girl but not saying how.

The case was the latest discovery of a child murder by an ongoing government campaign to find missing kids, which was sparked by the escape in December of an 11-year-old girl who had been imprisoned in her own house for two years and almost starved.

In Cheongju, the girl’s biological mother, who has only been identified by the surname Han, was unmarried when she gave birth to the girl. In May 2011 she married the man in the case, who is surnamed Ahn and is now 38 years old.

Eight months after the wedding, the girl died at the age of four.

According to Cheongju police, Ahn puts all the blame on his late wife. At a press briefing on Sunday, they say he claims his wife was angry at the daughter’s slow progress in toilet-training.

Allegedly, the mother shoved the girl’s head in a tub filled with water “several times” because she wouldn’t obey her orders.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link, but I wonder what the results in the US would be if each kid that did not show up for school was investigated like they are doing currently in Korea?

The horrible crime where parents in Bucheon killed and dismembered their 7-year old son led to a nationwide investigation of kids who stopped attending school.  This investigation caused police to uncover another horrible crime:

The mummified body of a girl who stopped attending middle school more than 10 months ago was discovered by police in a room surrounded by air fresheners Wednesday.

The Bucheon Sosa Police Precinct on Wednesday arrested the girl’s parents on suspicions of child abuse and murder. Under questioning, the father, a 47-year-old pastor surnamed Lee, admitted to beating the 13-year-old for five hours with a broomstick on March 17 last year. He and the stepmother, surnamed Baek, later found the daughter dead, covered her in blankets and kept the body inside their house for over 10 months.

Baek’s 39-year-old younger sister was also arrested Wednesday on suspected abuse charges.

The girl did not get along with her stepmother, aged 40, and lived with her step-aunt starting in 2012. She ran away from the step-aunt’s home on March 15 last year and called on a former elementary school teacher. The teacher brought her to her parents.

“I asked her why she had run away from her aunt’s home, hit her with a broomstick and a drying rack to discipline her, and told her to go to sleep,” Lee told police in the first round of questioning. “I took a nap in another room and woke up to find her dead.”

Lee and Baek refused to provide a statement on why they kept the body in a room in the house for nearly a year.

The discovery was the result of an ongoing police investigation of 220 children who have been missing from school for unknown reasons. The investigation was sparked by the case of an 11-year-old girl who had been held captive by her parents and starved for two years in Incheon last December. Police have already discovered another grisly find: the remains of a 7-year-old boy were found in his parents’ freezer years after he had stopped attending school. That incident also occurred in Bucheon, Gyeonggi.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

What a mess this entire Burger King murder case has been over the past 2 decades, but fortunately some justice appears to have finally be served in this case.  Still 20 years in prison still seems too lenient for this guy:

A Seoul court on Friday convicted U.S. citizen Arthur Patterson of murder in the lurid Itaewon murder case and sentenced him to 20 years in prison, almost 19 years after the murder.

The Seoul Central District Court found the 36-year-old guilty of fatally stabbing Hongik University student Cho Jung-pil on April 3, 1997, in a Burger King in the capital’s popular Itaewon district.

Cho was found dead in the restroom of a fast food restaurant, stabbed nine times in the neck and chest.

“There was credibility in confessions by Edward Lee, while Patterson’s comments were inconsistent and contradicted evidence,” the Seoul Central District Court said in the ruling.

Patterson was extradited to Korea in September to face charges in a reopened investigation into the case and maintained his innocence throughout.

Patterson has denied the murder charge, blaming Lee. The two men were both in the restaurant at the time of the murder, and both accused the other of being the killer.

The court said Patterson’s bloodstained clothes and hands pinpointed him as the assailant.   [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link.

This crime is absolutely horrible.  It almost seems like they wanted to get caught though leaving body parts of their son at their friend’s house:

A couple, detained by police on suspicion of killing their seven-year-old son before dismembering and abandoning the severed body parts, have participated in a reenactment of the alleged offenses.

Officers at the Wonmi Police Station in Bucheon, Gyeonggi Province, on Thursday took the father, surnamed Choi, 34, and the mother, surnamed Han, 34, to four places where the murder and mutilation of the corpse allegedly took place ― a public restroom at a community center located in Bucheon, their former and current residences in Bucheon and Incheon, respectively, and the home of Choi’s friend in Incheon.

Handcuffed and wearing masks and baseball caps, Choi and Han did not make any comments to reporters. According to officers they did not show agitation or remorse while taking part in the crime reenactment.

Also according to police, the boy’s remains were found in a bag in the home of a friend of Choi last Friday. The couple initially said that their son was injured after falling in the bathroom while resisting being washed in October 2012. They said they did not take the boy to a hospital and he died about a month later. They also said they mutilated the body and kept the remains in the refrigerator of their home even after they moved to Incheon, and had recently put them in the bag and asked the friend to look after it. But they deny killing the boy.

However, according to police, they told a different story on Wednesday. Choi, who frequently inflicted violence on his son, beat him for about two hours on the night of Nov. 7, 2012, allegedly while under the influence of alcohol.

The next day, Han went to work and Choi realized in the afternoon that the boy had died.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

Here is the latest on the Itaewon Burger King murder trial:

Prosecutors on Friday demanded 20 years in jail for a U.S. citizen charged with slaying a Korean man nearly two decades ago.

Arthur Patterson, who was 17 at the time, is accused of stabbing 22-year-old college student Cho Joong-pil multiple times to his death inside a bathroom at a Burger King in Itaewon, a neighborhood popular with foreigners here, in 1997.

During a hearing at the Seoul Central District Court, prosecutors demanded the maximum term for minors under the age of 18, saying the suspect should in fact be jailed for life.

In demanding the sentence, they cited the brutality of the crime, Patterson’s attitude during the trial, and their judgment based on reenactments of the scene at the time.

Patterson has insisted on his innocence, saying his then-friend Edward Lee committed the crime.

Lee was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1998 but later acquitted by the Supreme Court due to lack of evidence.  [Yonhap]

All the more reason why I have no urge to ever holiday in the Philippines:

Investigators returned from the Philippines on Friday after looking into the recent shooting death of a South Korean man, adding they have found key evidence to narrow down the suspects.

A 57-year-old South Korean, identified only by his surname Cho, was shot to death by four unidentified, armed assailants on Sunday at his house in Batangas, some 100km south of Manila.

The incident raised the number of South Koreans killed in the Southeast Asian country to 11 this year.  [Yonhap]

You can read the rest at the link.

Life sentence sought for senior woman suspected of poisoning soft drink https://t.co/1ATmNzXp9p pic.twitter.com/p96vqCc6Vk

— The Korea Observer (@koreaobserver) December 11, 2015

The Itaewon Burger King murder trial has started with former convict for the murder Edward Lee pointing the finger at Arthur John Patterson as the murderer of Korean student Cho Choong-pil:

During the questioning, Lee found it difficult to recall the situation in which the murder took place in April 1997, but the Korean-American said in the courtroom that he saw Patterson suddenly turning to the victim and stabbing him.

“When the murder took place, I went to the bathroom to wash my hands,” he said. “Patterson suddenly started to stab him. I turned around and I was shocked.

“Cho was trying to hit the accused with his right hand, but Patterson stabbed him and kept stabbing him.”

He admitted that there were only three people including Patterson, Cho and himself at the crime scene. But he continued to accuse Patterson of murdering Cho.

He also took issue with the credibility of the past investigation records and how he was treated during the questioning by the police and prosecutors.

“I have consistently asked for an interpreter, but they didn’t provide me with one,” he said. “I was interrogated without an interpreter, coerced and threated during the first investigation for 17 hours. They didn’t let me go to sleep.”   [Korea Herald]

You can read the rest at the link, but Patterson continues to claim that Lee is the actual murderer.  I feel so bad for the victim’s mother who also testified and had to listen to the details about how her son was killed for no reason and then see these two each deny responsibility.  Even if Lee did not commit the murder he is still culpable for not saying anything after it happened.  If he saw Patterson stabbing someone to death he should of at least immediately alerted people in the restaurant to call the police and paramedics.

Does everyone remember the Itaewon Burger King murder case?  Well it is back for round two of two decade long effort to convict the then dependent of USFK contractor of murdering a Hongik University student back in 1997:

The two original suspects in a high-profile 1997 Itaewon murder case could potentially be brought back together today in a preparatory session before the start of legal proceedings in the trial against 36-year-old American Arthur Patterson.

Patterson and his friend, Edward Lee, were accused of killing Hongik University student Cho Jung-pil at a fast food restaurant on April 3, 1997, in Itaewon, a popular foreigner-friendly district in central Seoul.

Cho was found dead in the bathroom of a Burger King, stabbed nine times in his neck and chest. The two men, then 18, were both in the restaurant at the time of the murder and both pinpointed the other in the killing.

Lee, a Korean-American, was later convicted for the murder but was acquitted of those charges in 1998 by the Supreme Court, which ruled that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that the murder had been carried out by one man.

He will attend as a witness in the trial against Patterson, who was originally charged and convicted for weapons possession and destruction of evidence before fleeing to the United States in 1999.

“We have confirmed that Lee … is currently staying in Korea,” a prosecutor from the Seoul Central Prosecutors’ Office said on Wednesday, adding that it was planning to request Lee as a witness in the preparatory session to be held at the Seoul Central District Court.

The same day, Lee’s father appeared on a radio program to reiterate that his son would testify in the case.

“My son came to Korea about a month ago and he will attend [the preparatory session] as a witness,” he said. “We want the case closed this time so that we can finally be free from it.”  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link and you can read more about this case at this prior posting.  Basically this whole case comes down to incompetence in the Korean judicial system to let these two go free in the first place.  This was a brutal murder that the family deserves justice for.

Another month and more dead Koreans found in the Philippines:

Another Korean couple was shot to death in the Philippines, confirmed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Seoul on Friday, again in the coastal province of Cavite, 21 kilometers (13 miles) south of Manila. A middle-aged man was shot by an unidentified assailant on the road right outside the couple’s residence early Friday morning, according to the Korean Foreign Ministry. His wife was shot inside the house, where she was discovered dead.

The man, reported to be a 54-year-old surnamed Lee, held Korean nationality. However, his wife, a 47-year-old surnamed Park, was an ethnic Korean with Chinese nationality.

Park called the local police at around 1:30 a.m., which is likely around the time the shooting began. Philippine police are still investigating the fatal shootings to confirm details. Cavite is the same province in which a 64-year-old Korean man surnamed Na and his 60-year-old wife Kim were shot to death in their retirement home by an unidentified gunman on Aug. 19.

Police have yet to find a lead on that case, which was suspected to be an armed robbery. This brings the number of Koreans killed in the Philippines this year to 10, including Korean-Chinese Park, raising questions about how to bolster security for Koreans residing in or traveling to the Southeast Asian country.   [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link.