Episode 86:
A Husband Who Vanished, Leaving Behind a 50-Day-Old Baby

On the morning of May 9, 2016, a housewife in Daegu Suseong-gu, alias Ms. Park, was anxiously pacing her living room. Her husband hadn't come home the night before. He was Mr. Kim, CEO of a construction company, who had left the day before for a golf outing with clients and then cut off all contact.

Her husband had never once stayed out without calling, and since his wife had given birth just fifty days earlier, he'd been strictly going straight from work to home. A husband like that suddenly vanishing without a word made no sense at all.

Unable to reach her husband, Ms. Park called the one person she knew had been with him: forty-four-year-old executive director Mr. Jo, practically a blood brother to Kim and one of the most trusted people in the company. Jo told her he'd dropped Kim off, quite drunk, near a bus stop in Manchon-dong around 9 p.m. after Kim insisted on going for a second round alone. Something about the story didn't sit right with her — her husband wasn't a lightweight drinker, and he'd told her that morning he'd come straight home.

A Bus Stop With No Cameras

Police began investigating, and Jo elaborated: after golf and dinner with clients, Kim had gotten unusually drunk on just two drinks, demanded a second round when Jo refused, and insisted on being dropped off alone. But when detectives checked the security cameras near the Manchon-dong bus stop, most weren't functioning — some were even fake, installed for show. A missing-person campaign with flyers and banners produced nothing over a full week, and Kim's phone, bank accounts, and hospital records showed no activity since he vanished.

When police asked Jo for his car's dashcam footage, he panicked and claimed he'd destroyed it days earlier to hide an affair from his wife. With the story falling apart, detectives pulled parking lot camera footage from the restaurant instead — and found Jo's car arriving at 7 p.m. on May 8, Jo pulling two small bottles from his trunk and handing one to Kim in the backseat, who drank it without hesitation. Ninety minutes later, when the two reappeared on camera, Kim was completely unconscious, unable to control his body, with Jo supporting him into the back seat before calling a substitute driver.

A Search History Full of Warning Signs

The substitute driver's account shattered Jo's story completely: he hadn't dropped Kim at any bus stop — the two of them had gone straight to Jo's house. Confronted with the lie, and with his phone handed over voluntarily, forensic analysis of Jo's search history turned up phrases like "decomposition time for a buried corpse" and "how long do security cameras record." A search of his home computer added more: "Cheongsong," "missing person golden time," "how to delete search history," "phone data recovery."

Cheongsong, one of the most remote, forest-covered regions in North Gyeongsang Province, was where Jo's mother lived — meaning he knew the terrain well. Toll and highway camera footage placed Jo driving there at 4:30 a.m. on May 9, stopping at his mother's house for about 40 minutes before heading home. The trip to Cheongsong took 50 minutes, but the return trip took an hour and a half — nearly double, with an unexplained 40-minute gap easily long enough to bury a body.

The Borrowed Shovel

A gas station near the route confirmed the suspicion: an employee remembered Jo clearly, recalling that he'd borrowed a shovel, claiming he needed it to plant a tree, and returned it later. Police sent the shovel for forensic testing and deployed 1,200 personnel to search the hillside behind the station — all while Jo, unaware he was under suspicion, continued going to work and attending his graduate classes as usual.

Nine days after Kim's disappearance, on May 18, Jo was arrested for murder and abandoning a body. He denied everything, insisting the shovel and the Cheongsong trip were entirely innocent, and later injured his own wrist in custody in an apparent suicide attempt while protesting his innocence. With no body yet found and only circumstantial evidence, investigators tried a new pressure tactic — hinting that Jo's mother and family might be treated as accomplices. It worked immediately: rattled by the threat to his family, Jo confessed.

"You're My Servant"

Jo had joined Kim's construction company in 2011, working relentlessly and entertaining clients on Kim's behalf even on weekends, in exchange for promises that Kim would fund his three children's overseas education and guarantee him a comfortable retirement. According to Jo, Kim belittled him constantly and never raised his pay as promised. Three days before the murder, at a dinner also attended by another manager, Kim promoted that manager and raised his salary on the spot while ignoring Jo entirely — and later that night, when Jo raised his own raise and his children's tuition, Kim snapped at him to take care of his own kids' education himself. Kim apologized the next day, but the resentment stuck.

On the day of the murder, Jo felt Kim was acting arrogant in the car and decided he'd had enough. In the restaurant parking lot, he crushed his own sleeping pills into a hangover drink and handed it to Kim, who drank it and lost consciousness. Jo sent the substitute driver away and, while still drunk himself, drove to the company office, woke Kim, and demanded to know what Kim really thought of him. Barely conscious, Kim mumbled, "You? You're my servant." Enraged, Jo crushed five more sleeping pills into another drink and forced it into him, intending to kill him outright — then, checking for a pulse, felt Kim start to stir and stopped him from crying out by covering his mouth and strangling him with his other hand until he died.

Final Thoughts

Jo drove the body to an orchard, moved it to the trunk, and spent the night deciding what to do before settling on Cheongsong. He stopped at his parents' house to build an alibi, then dug a hole in the mountains — breaking his own shovel partway through and borrowing a replacement from the gas station — before stripping the body to obscure its identity and burying it roughly 40 centimeters deep. In the days that followed, he fielded calls from Kim's worried wife while acting as though he knew nothing, eventually destroying his dashcam and returning to the burial site to pour mothballs and bleach over it to mask any smell.

Investigators found that Jo's account of Kim as an abusive, ungrateful boss didn't hold up — Kim had given him roughly $92,000 on two separate occasions, over the objections of his own family that it was too generous. Evidence also surfaced that Jo had likely tried to drug Kim once before, four days prior to the murder, though it wasn't enough to support an attempted murder charge. Prosecutors sought a conviction for premeditated murder, but the court ultimately accepted the killing as impulsive rather than planned from the start, sentencing Jo to 25 years for murder and concealment of a corpse. Jo maintained his innocence throughout, insisting Kim had treated him like a slave — a claim Kim's family rejected as false to the end.