Episode 119:
Fake Doctor's Secret: Korean BJ Murder Case

Korea was stunned by the unexpected death of beloved streamer BJ Ahyeong. Her body was found cold and lifeless in a ditch in Cambodia. And yet, even after three years, no verdict has been reached. Here's everything — from the clinic she walked into just before vanishing, to the suspicious hours that followed that night.

June 5, 2023. Police in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, received a call from a South Korean woman: "My friend left yesterday afternoon and she's not answering. I waited all night, and I think something's happened." The missing woman was thirty-three-year-old Ahyeong Byeon, a well-known AfreecaTV streamer with 260,000 followers, loved for years for her daily-life content, mukbangs, and international travel logs. In 2016, aiming to go global, she began streaming on a Chinese platform under the name "A-ing," building a loyal following despite imperfect Mandarin.

A Sudden Retirement, Then Silence

Starting in 2021, Ahyeong began making frequent short trips to Cambodia, mostly staying in Phnom Penh — the reason was never made clear, and those around her simply assumed she was taking breaks. Then, three months before her death, she abruptly announced her retirement from streaming: "I'm done with the streamer life. I'm going to live a normal life for now. When I get back to Korea, I'll upload a YouTube video sharing my honest thoughts. I've seen and heard so much, so just watch it and try to understand where I'm coming from." Fans speculated wildly — stalking, marriage, depression — but she never explained, and headed to Cambodia again regardless.

On June 2, 2023, Ahyeong arrived in Phnom Penh with a friend, staying at an acquaintance's apartment. After two quiet days, at around 4:00 p.m. on June 4, she stepped out — and never came back. Her friend waited, called repeatedly, searched the neighborhood, and after a full day went to the police, who responded with striking indifference — no immediate review of security footage, minimal urgency, seemingly treating it as a low priority since it involved foreigners.

A Body in a Rolled-Up Mat

That changed the following day. On the morning of June 6, in Kandal Province just south of Phnom Penh, a construction crew clearing a site found something odd inside a water-filled pit: a red "kantael," a traditional Cambodian sleeping mat, tightly rolled and tied with rope. Assuming it was dumped trash, a heavy equipment operator went to move it — and froze. A pale human foot protruded from the water-soaked bundle. Police pulled the mat out and untied it to find the body of a woman in a black t-shirt. Her face was severely swollen, though it was unclear whether from assault or prolonged submersion. Most disturbing: she wore no bra, and her underwear had been put on backwards and inside out — a detail that immediately pointed investigators toward a sexually motivated homicide. With no belongings on the body, identification became urgent; fingerprint analysis against passport records confirmed a 99% match to Ahyeong Byeon.

Twenty-Five Minutes of Darkness

News of her death spread rapidly in both Cambodia and Korea, fueling speculation — organized crime given Cambodia's rising rate of crimes against Koreans since 2020, or even a connection to Korea's 2019 "Burning Sun" scandal, spurred by her cryptic "I've seen and heard a lot" post. None of this was ever substantiated. What mattered more was retracing her actual movements. Reviewing footage from the apartment, alleys, and nearby shops, investigators found Ahyeong leaving her apartment alone at 3:57 p.m. on June 4, then entering the Bokang Clinic fifteen minutes later — a Chinese-run practice offering pediatrics, internal medicine, surgery, gynecology, and acupuncture.

An hour and forty minutes later, at 5:52 p.m., the clinic's Chinese-run owners stepped outside together, looked around nervously, shut the door, and turned off the sign lights — all while Ahyeong remained inside, unseen. Twenty-five minutes later, the lights came back on. By midnight, she still hadn't emerged. Then, at 12:52 a.m. on June 5, a blue sedan pulled up to the clinic; a woman was placed in the passenger seat, and the car drove off.

The Same Car, Five Times

Investigators recognized that same blue sedan in footage from near the body dump site, making five separate trips there in the early hours of June 5. The visible license plate traced to thirty-year-old Chinese national Lai Wenshao — director of the Bokang Clinic. The woman in the passenger seat was identified as his wife, Cai Huijuan, the clinic's owner. Fingerprints lifted from the mat wrapping the body matched the couple exactly. On June 11, seven days after Ahyeong vanished, Cambodian police arrested them both for murder.

Cai Huijuan came from a family of Chinese doctors and had previously run a clinic with an ex-husband before it failed post-divorce. She met Wenshao, nine years her junior and previously a drifting manual laborer, and after marrying in 2021, brought him into the clinic — despite his having no medical license or training whatsoever. He administered IVs, dispensed medication, and prepared herbal remedies illegally. After Huijuan gave birth in early 2023 and stepped back from daily clinic work, fear of exposure for unlicensed practice in China pushed the couple to relocate to Cambodia, where regulations were looser, opening the Bokang Clinic and continuing the same illegal practice — now entirely under Wenshao's unsupervised hand.

A Story That Kept Changing

Under questioning, Wenshao initially claimed he'd met Ahyeong for the first time that day, describing her as a drug user demanding an illicit injection, which he refused, giving her a "serum IV" — an albumin injection common in China for fatigue — instead. He said he left her hooked to the IV, checked his phone in the break room, and returned an hour later to find her foaming at the mouth and seizing; he administered emergency cardiac medication and CPR, but she died. Panicked about his illegal practice being exposed, he claimed he chose to dispose of her body rather than report it — wrapping her in a mat, and driving to a secluded fishing spot he frequented in Kandal, believing water would speed decomposition. He said he lured his wife along under the pretense of a late-night snack, keeping her unaware that a body was in the trunk, dropping her at a restaurant before disposing of the body alone.

The story fell apart under scrutiny. Security footage showed Ahyeong had actually visited the clinic twice — once the day before, around noon on June 3 — contradicting his claim of a first meeting. Investigators also couldn't square his account of an unaware wife with footage showing both of them stepping outside nervously together before dark hours. Confronted, Wenshao's story shifted: now she'd visited twice, the serum IV belonged to someone else, and her needle-marked arms meant he'd simply let her "sleep it off" the second time rather than get involved with drugs — still with no explanation for her death. He denied any sexual assault outright, insisting an autopsy would clear him. Huijuan maintained total ignorance throughout, and it's widely believed the couple, with a young daughter to consider, structured their conflicting stories so one of them could avoid prosecution entirely.

Final Thoughts

Everything hinged on the autopsy, which the family initially hesitated to authorize — worsened by the fact that delay degrades forensic accuracy — until Korea's embassy intervened. By the time it was completed, forty days after her death, her body was too decomposed to determine a definitive cause, with investigators only able to suggest asphyxiation as a probable cause. Cambodia's limited forensic capacity forced evidence to be sent to a third country, adding further delay, and the results found no drugs in her system — though given the state of decomposition, how reliable that finding actually is remains unclear. Some have theorized Propofol, an anesthetic that can cause fatal asphyxiation if unmonitored and metabolizes quickly enough that it might leave no detectable trace in a decomposed, waterlogged body — though this remains speculation with no direct evidence. No semen or male DNA was found on the body, yet Cambodian authorities still charged the couple with murder involving torture, a legal category that under Cambodian law also encompasses rape, based largely on the state of her underwear.

Three years later, the case remains unresolved, undermined by the same core problem from the start: without a confirmed cause of death, everything else — whether this was medical malpractice or deliberate murder — remains unsettled. The only account of what happened during those eight to nine unwitnessed hours inside the clinic comes from suspects whose stories have repeatedly contradicted themselves, compounded by a justice system already strained by organized crime in the region and, by some accounts, further slowed by the case involving two foreign nationals rather than Cambodian citizens. What actually happened during those twenty-five minutes the clinic's lights went dark, and what happened to Ahyeong Byeon inside that room, remains unanswered.