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« Even if I had been released and won the lottery, I would have kept killing people. I would have used the money to build a perfect hiding place and achieve my goal. »
This meaningful and frightening sentence was uttered by YOO YOUNG CHUL, who is none other than the most famous serial killer in contemporary South Korean history. Within ten months, he killed twenty-one people in cold blood with a hammer created by his hands. Dive into this sordid story with KSIS.
Born on 18 April 1970 in Gochang, south of Seoul, YOO YOUNG CHUL first opened his eyes to a family of poor workers. Finding it difficult to find his place among his classmates at school, he quickly became the victim of harassment by his social class. Too poor, his parents did not have the means to regularly buy him new clothes, or suitable school things. Isolating himself, he prefers to draw and paint, hoping one day to enter an art school. But after all, his school results being insufficient, his dream escapes him and he has no choice but to join a technical high school that does not interest him at all. That’s when he first turned to banditry.
In 1988, aged only eighteen, he was first arrested for robberies, which initially were limited only to food and clothing. He started again and was arrested again in 1991, this time serving a ten-month prison sentence. In 1993, when he stole a car, he spent eight months behind bars. However, he meets a young woman, a masseuse, whom he marries on June 23 of the same year, and on October 26, 1994, YOO YOUNG CHUL becomes the father of a little boy whose identity remained secret to the media for his protection. While one might think that the very young father will turn away from violence and crime, it is quite different since his mischief is gaining in intensity.
In 1995, he was arrested for selling pornography and was fined 3 million won to avoid prison, where he ended up for two years in 1998 for theft, fraud and the use of a false identity. It is this year that he begins to pretend to be a policeman in order to coax his victims and steal money from them, police identity that he will sometimes use during his murders. In 2000, he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for raping a 15-year-old minor. Unable to stand his actions, his wife divorces and takes his son as far as possible so that YOO can no longer see him and influence him negatively during his development. In the space of twelve years, it must be emphasized that he had time to build up a particularly important criminal record. When he was released from prison on September 3, 2003, he didn’t wait three weeks for his first sordid murder.
On September 24, YOO YOUNG CHUL broke into a half-opened window in the home of a wealthy elderly couple. After stabbing the 72-year-old man with a knife, he struck him with a hammer until death, and did the same for his 68-year-old wife. After this first murder, the hammer becomes the weapon of choice of the offender, but anxious to be arrested once again, he will try to disguise his act in burglary having gone wrong. Downside: he did not steal anything, not even money, and it is a valuable clue for the police.
On October 9, he broke into a wealthy house and killed the family grandmother with a hammer. Alerted by the noise, her daughter-in-law came to meet without knowing YOO who beats her before killing her. Going up to the floor of the house, he finds the son of the family, disabled, and unable to defend himself. With the same coldness, he will kill the boy with several hammer blows which, like the other victims, were carried almost exclusively to the head. After the bodies were discovered, a forensic officer told the press that the son had been beaten with such violence that his brain had been spread on the ground. With the blood still fresh, the police feared that the killer was lurking in the shadows in the house, ready to attack them. But he did not, and the murders resumed.
October 16, it is the home of a couple of millionaires that he attacks. The husband being absent, only the wife will be massacred after being dragged into the bathroom, her body having been arranged in the bathtub. The police quickly considered the murders to be motivated by money, although the murderer never stole any wealth from his victims. But YOO YOUNG CHUL being the most meticulous, he never leaves any trace that can identify him, except footprints. A month later, his modus operandi changes course during a new crime. Entering a luxurious house, he comes face to face with a governess holding an infant in his arms. Threatening her, he asks her to lead him to the owner of the house, whom he massacred. He did the same to the 87-year-old housekeeper who had tried to run away with the baby. The latter, however, could livee, YOO placing him on a sofa.
He then discovers a safe, and tries to open it with his knife and hammer. Without success, he cuts himself and panics when seeing his blood, his DNA, on the carpet of the home. To clear the tracks, he sets fire to the house, but the baby will be saved by a neighbor alerted by the smoke. Development for the authorities: a surveillance camera filmed YOO, but only from behind. Unidentified, the video is broadcast on television to make the murderer understand that the police are pursuing him. Preferring to be careful, YOO YOUNG CHUL will not commit murder until February, and will spend the winter with an escort girl with whom he began a relationship. Sure of his feelings, he will propose after a few weeks, but when she learned of her criminal record, she decided to break and cut ties. The 33-year-old’s hatred for the rich then turns into rage for escorts and prostitutes.
It was this rage that animated him when he began to kill again, and he even considered assassinating his ex-girlfriend, but changed his mind by thinking that the police would necessarily suspect him. It was on 2 February that he struck again, during an incident considered isolated. It was in the town of Incheon, on the peninsula of Wolmido, that YOO, after faking being a policeman, killed with his hammer a father, a street vendor, in his van. The latter had sold fake viagra pills to the serial killer without knowing that it would cost him his life a few hours later. YOO YOUNG CHUL strangled the poor man, stabbed him repeatedly in the face, making his identification very complicated, amputated his hands and threw them into the sea before setting fire to the van. The first escort murder occurred in March, followed by several more murders leading gradually to the arrest of the murderer.
YOO YOUNG CHUL commits the mistake leading to his arrest on July 15, 2004, ten months after his first murder. While on July 13 he kills an escort, he calls his employer on July 15 with her phone to request the services of a prostitute. Confirming the meeting, the manager of the brothel quickly discovers that the disappearances of his escorts always coincide with their last client: YOO. Not a minute to lose, he contacts the police who decides to ambush the famous serial killer who has been ruling Seoul for months. Caught off guard, YOO YOUNG CHUL refuses the escort who comes to meet him, because too big for his taste. It will therefore be necessary to send another prostitute, shorter, who will allow the arrest of YOO near the university of Hongdae, in the district of Mapo. This manhunt was described by KIM HEE SOOK, a forensic officer, as follows:
« It’s a fight between forensics and criminals ».
The police felt dumbfounded when they discovered the face of the serial killer. No tattoos or piercings, how could a seemingly normal young man commit so many cold-blooded murders? Calculator, YOO pretends to have an epilepsy attack and a few seconds after the police released his handcuffs to help him breathe, he runs away from the police station where he was taken. Fortunately, he was found eleven hours later quite by chance, while crossing a pedestrian crossing in another neighborhood. This time it is for good, the murderer who will eventually be nicknamed «the killer in the rain coat» was put under arrest. In fact, during re-enactments with the police, walks between police offices and courts, or during interviews with the media, YOO always wore a yellow rain coat as well as a black cap and a mask to hide his face.
His trial began on 6 September 2004, one year after his release from prison for rape. It was almost a relief that he admitted that if he had not been arrested, he would probably have continued to kill, up to more than a hundred people he thought. He claimed to have taken revenge on the rich, as he suffered as a child because of his social class, and the escorts who reminded him of his ex-girlfriend who had rejected his proposal. YOO also made a troubling revelation: he reportedly ate certain organs, including the liver, of several of his victims, and forced some of the escorts before dying to do the same with the organs of the previous killed women. He would have kept the body parts of interest in his fridge, and buried the rest in opaque garbage bags in the forest. When he took the taxi to hide the body parts, he always told the drivers that the strong smell emanating from the bags was none other than kimchi fermented for a long time. He even had a map of the forest to record each body location, so as not to fall on it when he brought new bags.
This criminal case is unprecedented, as it allowed the police to evolve intrinsically. For example, the very first profiler was introduced in South Korea to catch YOO YOUNG CHUL. Moreover, the intervention of science policy was not systematic before either. On 13 December 2004, the verdict of the trial fell, and YOO was sentenced to death, a first in six years. Despite the fact that he confessed to twenty-six murders, only twenty-one were detained by the court for lack of evidence, or because of a too different modus operandi putting the perpetrator of the crime in doubt. The police thought he was trying to appropriate murders to boost his record.
« As soon as I saw him, I could clearly see that he was proud of the way the press talked about him.» – KWON IL YOUNG, profiler
At the trial, the prosecutor said that YOO was nothing but a typical killer who had lost the desire to live in society with others, and that his murders were motivated by no particular reason, not knowing the victims. He had also considered killing his ex-wife, but had renounced it for the sake of his son, who seemed to be the only person he cared about. The serial killer considered himself a pious man, who since his thirty years was inhabited only by anger and hatred, and thus had the right to punish people. The number of murders was never clear, because YOO said he had lost count, as he killed in quantity and very closely, but two women were attacked by him, and had survived their injuries. For the police, the many convictions he received between 1988 and 2003 would have simply lead to schizophrenia. When his room was searched, sketches of drawings were discovered, but especially DVDs on murders and killers, such as the movie «Public Enemy» which speaks about a serial killer whose main victims are rich. These films could therefore be his sources of inspiration.
Regarding the hammer he was using, YOO had made it so that the head was long and heavy, and the handle short and fast. To test his weapon, he had started by killing stray dogs, violence on animals being a recurring factor in killers, psychopaths and sociopaths. The profiler analyzed the choice of the killer’s victims as being due to a balance of power. By choosing small and thin people, YOO YOUNG CHUL made sure he could dominate and kill them more easily. Thus, after having spent x-rays of his body in a hospital, the killer with the rain coat cut the bodies of his victims into sixteen to eighteen pieces at the level of the joints, to make the cutting more simple and effective. Despite the fact that he committed the majority of the murders of the escorts in his bathroom, the scientific police found no visible trace of blood as he had cleaned well after each murder. It was the use of Luminol, a product revealing traces of blood in the dark, that revealed the extent of the massacre, the blood staining every corner of the room, especially near the toilet paper holder.
« When I cut off a victim’s head, I tied their hair, and I hung it on the toilet paper holder to let the blood run. Then I buried the heads without removing the elastic » — YOO YOUNG CHUL
At each crime scene, the same shoe print was always found as the only clue, but it was not until the fifth murder that the police and the media considered all the murders to be related to one and the same person, And so, a serial killer. PARK KI RYUN, head of the Gangnam police station at the time, described the Korea of YOO’s childhood as a country facing an unprecedented economic crisis, following the Japanese occupation, war and dictatorships, and as the miracle of the Han River took place, the poor became poorer and the rich richer. The crimes then increased, out of frustration felt by the population, including assaults, kidnappings, robberies, etc. Only money mattered and anyone could commit assaults and murders at that time. The profiler in charge of the investigation, KWON IL YOUNG, had to pull up criminal case files from the last thirty years preceding YOO to see if it was not a former inmate.
Before arresting YOO YOUNG CHUL, a linguistic approach was considered. Police found that the first four murders took place in neighborhoods whose syllables began with the same letter: Gugi (구기), Sinsa (신사), Samseong (삼성) and Hyehwa (혜화). The police station of the district of Suseo (수서) was in a state of total vigilance, but this coincidence ceased when the fifth murder. Seeking by all means to arrest him, some police officers will say they lived for several months in police stations, to work night and day on the case. A mobile unit of 150 police officers was even deployed, but YOO remained elusive and who does not know how many people he would have continued to kill if he had not made this phone call leading to his arrest.
Barely 34 years old at the time of his trial, YOO has always made a point of restoring the truth about each murder, when the media or police speculated on how he killed his victims. Thinking himself overpowering, he hoped to become the most prolific serial killer in history, and this pressure was felt within the police who were experiencing this investigation under the greatest pressure. The victims were difficult to identify, as he always took care to erase their fingerprints in one way or another. Moreover, since prostitution is prohibited in Korea, the escorts did not ask the police for help, fearing of ending up in prison. Then, Seoul being a city divided into several jurisdictions, the police stations did not always transmit information to each other. It was possible that a murder occurred in Gangnam for example without the Hongdae police being aware, which slows down the beginning of the investigation. When he was finally arrested, his mother was brought, hoping that it would generate an emotion in him, in vain.
« I was in shock. The shock made me lose consciousness, when I opened my eyes I was in the hospital. I never thought he would do such horrible things. » – YOO YOUNG CHUL‘s mother
From the outside, the case seemed to have been botched by the police, given the large number of victims. The seals they had put on YOO’s apartment were even overridden by the press who entered the room of the murderer, highlighting his special talent for drawing. In one of his sketches in particular, we will discover a self-portrait with two personalities, an angel, and a demon. In a Netflix documentary called «The raincoat killer», the relatives of the victims and the police officers involved in the capture of YOO share their part of the story. In particular, twenty years after the events, they are deeply moved, highlighting the unprecedented side of this case. In particular, the younger brother of Wolmido’s salesman who was murdered in his van explained that his two other brothers committed suicide as a result of the murder, and that he himself tried to kill himself. At the same time, a stray dog came to meet him, which he took as a sign from his brother, and he decided to adopt him and never again attempt his life.
Another murder was attributed to YOON YOUNG CHUL for a while, that of a lady near the Dongdaemun market, who as she returned home was assaulted with several dozen stab wounds, before dying not far from home. The modus operandi being radically different from YOO who had used his hammer on every occasion, the police thought he had been blackmailed, offering him for example to plead guilty to the murder in exchange for some form of protection for his son. In a way, in the population or in the police, many consider that YOO allowed the justice system to improve and to evolve the justice and societal system in Korea. Now, the police have a criminal case resolution rate of 98.7% and systematically use forensic police. YOO was acquitted for the murder of Dongdaemun and the real killer was arrested in 2006 thanks to the same profiler.
Upon learning of his sentence, death penalty, YOO YOUNG CHUL declared that he was in favor of it, with the words: “It would be unfair for people like me to continue to live. I oppose the abolition of the death penalty.” Yet, several decades after his trial, he is still serving his sentence on death row with sixty-three other detainees, the death penalty having been suspended in Korea until further notice.
Journalist: Pillet Anaïs
Translator: Pillet Anaïs
Sources: KSTATION TV, On the photos
