True crime fan murdered stranger ‘out of curiosity’
Jung Yoo-jung, 23, was given a life sentence by a South Korean court for killing a stranger “out of curiosity.” In May, Jung, a true crime enthusiast with high psychopath test scores, met an English teacher through an app and fatally stabbed her because he was obsessed with “trying out a murder.”
Prosecutors, who were seeking the death penalty for the most serious crimes, revealed that Jung, an unemployed recluse, had been looking for victims for months. She found targets through an online tutoring app and contacted over 50 people, mostly women, asking if they taught at home.
In May, she pretended to be a mother who needed English lessons for her high school student and contacted the 26-year-old victim in the city of Busan. The victim’s identity has not been released by the police.
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After being allowed inside the tutor’s home, Jung viciously attacked the woman, stabbing her more than a hundred times, while wearing an online-purchased school uniform. Even after the victim passed away, the vicious attack persisted.
Jung dismembered the woman’s body and then drove to a remote parkland near a river north of Busan to dispose of some of the remains. After the taxi driver informed the police that one of her customers had dumped a blood-soaked suitcase in the woods, she was arrested.
Jung had spent months researching how to kill and dispose of a body, according to her internet history, but her negligence in not avoiding CCTV cameras meant that her actions were caught on camera.
Jung, who admitted in June, begged for leniency, citing hallucinations and mental disorders, and the sentencing judge noted that the killing had created fear in society.
The court dismissed her argument, stating that it was difficult to accept her claim of a mental and physical disorder because the crime was well planned and executed.
Authorities drew attention to Jung’s inconsistent statements to the police, claiming at first that she moved the body only after the woman was killed by someone else and then modifying her account to say the killing was the consequence of an argument.
In the end, she acknowledged that crime dramas and television shows had influenced her desire to kill people. Even though they still have the death penalty, South Korea has not carried out an execution since 1997.
True crime fan murdered stranger ‘out of curiosity’ first appeared on bbc
