Episode 91:
The tragedy from the fetishization of trans people

On the evening of July 27, 2014, a father in his sixties sat anxiously clutching his phone. He had been unable to reach his daughter the entire day. His daughter, a thirty-year-old we'll refer to as Nara Lee, lived alone in Seoul — friendly, affectionate, and always in touch, even by text if something came up. For her to go completely silent was deeply unusual.

Just as his worry peaked, his phone rang. It was one of Nara's friends. "Sir, is Nara at your house by chance? I can't get ahold of her since yesterday." His heart sank, and he rushed to her apartment in Dongjak District.

At 7:30 p.m., he arrived at the door and rang the bell repeatedly with no answer — but heard a faint thumping sound from inside. Dread rising, he entered the passcode himself, and the metallic smell of blood hit him the moment the door opened. He found his daughter lying in the closet, her body slashed and the floor soaked red. She had been dead for some time; her body was already cold.

Twenty-Three Wounds

Police determined Nara had been stabbed twenty-three times, most wounds concentrated around her neck, chest, and arms, any one of them potentially fatal — one blow alone had penetrated nearly three inches into her heart and lung. Most of the wounds clustered on the left side of her body, indicating she and her attacker had been facing each other with the knife held in the killer's right hand. Deep cuts on both her index fingers and arms were classic defensive wounds, showing she'd fought desperately to grab the blade until the very end.

Nara hadn't been alone that night — beside her body, her father found an unfamiliar man collapsed on the floor, bleeding from his stomach. Paramedics rushed him to the hospital, where his wound turned out to be shallow, and he was released shortly after treatment. He was identified as twenty-seven-year-old Kim, who claimed a stranger had barged into the apartment, stabbed him too, and that his memory of everything afterward was a blank. When police pressed him for any usable detail, he grew defensive, insisting he was a victim too.

An Uneven Fight

Nara, investigators learned, was transgender — assigned male at birth, she'd undergone gender reassignment surgery in 2005 and lived as a woman, supporting herself partly through online sex work under the alias "Bae Sal-gu." Kim was a client she'd met through a site called Kano; he'd paid $110 for a first visit on July 23, then returned for a second paid encounter at 2 a.m. on July 26, the night of the murder.

Several details didn't sit right from the start. In an armed confrontation between a man and a woman, attackers typically neutralize the man first as the greater physical threat — here, the pattern was reversed: Nara suffered twenty-three wounds while Kim had only a single stab wound to the stomach. Kim, at 5'7" and roughly 254 pounds, was not an easy man to overpower, and he made no attempt to flee or call for help despite having hours of opportunity — Nara's body wasn't found until nearly a full day after the murder.

A Story That Kept Changing

The crime scene undercut any theory of an outside intruder: the front door was locked from the inside, window locks were untouched, nothing was missing, and forensic testing found no blood belonging to anyone but Nara and Kim. Faced with the physical evidence, Kim eventually offered a new account — he claimed Nara had demanded more money mid-encounter, mocked his appearance when he objected, blocked his exit when he tried to leave, and cut his wrist with an unspecified weapon before he panicked, believing she was retrieving something from the dressing room to kill him with, and stabbed her once in self-defense with a pocketknife he said he carried for protection.

The story didn't hold up under scrutiny. Kim couldn't initially recall what weapon Nara had supposedly used against him, an odd gap for a moment he described as terrifying enough to fear for his life. His account of a single stab wound didn't square with Nara's twenty-three injuries. And the knife itself — a 4.7-inch blade with its handle deliberately wrapped in blue tape to prevent slipping — suggested preparation rather than spontaneous self-defense. When police pointed out the inconsistencies, Kim revised his story on the spot, suddenly "remembering" a box cutter and multiple wrist injuries he hadn't mentioned before.

Evidence of a Different Story

Kim also pointed to a cut on the inside of his arm as a defensive wound. Experts disagreed — genuine defensive wounds from blocking an attack typically appear on the outside of the limbs, where the body instinctively shields the face, neck, and chest, not the inside. An inside-arm wound, they noted, was more consistent with self-infliction than defense.

Reconstructing the night, investigators concluded Kim entered the bathroom around 2 a.m., an argument broke out, and he produced the prepared knife; Nara, at only 5'6" and about 110 pounds, stood little chance against him physically and fled to the dressing room, where he caught up with her. Afterward, Kim deleted his text exchanges with Nara to hide their paid arrangement — but rather than leaving, he stayed in the apartment for hours. Crime scene technicians found discarded tomato peels and cigarette butts near the kitchen sink, later confirmed through DNA to be his — meaning he had eaten and smoked casually next to her body before anyone found them.

Final Thoughts

In January 2015, the trial court rejected Kim's self-defense claim and convicted him of murder, sentencing him to 18 years in consideration of his clean record and confession. Seven months later, an appeals court reduced that sentence, ruling that Kim's account couldn't be entirely dismissed — specifically citing the absence of "hesitation marks" around his wrist wound, the small preliminary cuts typically found near self-inflicted injuries, as insufficient grounds to rule out Nara having struck first. Applying the principle that doubt must favor the defendant, the court cut his sentence to 17 years, a decision the Supreme Court later upheld when prosecutors appealed. Nara's father, who had stood in that apartment calling out for his daughter as his world fell apart, was left with a case that reduced her, in public memory, to little more than the alias she used for sex work — rather than the daughter he lost.