Episode 161:
The Man Who Stripped His Wife to Smell Her Everyday—Used 5 Tons of Water to Erase Her
At 4 p.m. on April 20, 2007, a woman stood at the entrance of a discount store in Daejeon, South Korea, checking her phone. Her older sister, 46-year-old Mijung Yang, had called about two and a half hours earlier to suggest they go shopping. Mijung never arrived and did not pick up. When the woman phoned her brother-in-law, he said only, "Your sister ran away," told her he didn't know where, and hung up.
Mijung had run away before, and she had always come back for her daughter. This time was different. Three weeks earlier, on March 29, she had filed for divorce, asking for custody and $520,000 in alimony and property. The court had served the papers on her husband the day before she disappeared.
The Third Marriage
Mijung was divorced when a matchmaking agency introduced her to Yoo, a businessman sixteen years her senior who had been divorced twice. He said a former wife had cheated on him. They married after a lavish wedding and moved into a luxury apartment in Yuseong District. He never trusted her. When their daughter was born after difficult IVF treatment, he demanded a paternity test before he would accept the child. Whenever Mijung came home from an outing, he made her undress and smelled her for another man's scent. He slapped her and hit her on the head, and when he was displeased he threatened to kill her. She stayed thirteen years because she did not want her daughter to grow up without a father. After she filed for divorce, she told her sister she was afraid she would be killed.
The Locked Door
After two more days without word, Mijung's sister went to the police and asked them to search the apartment. No one answered the bell, and without a warrant the rescue team could not break in, so they rappelled down from the neighbor's balcony above. The tenth-floor apartment was empty and spotless, with polished floors, but it smelled of rotting fish and chemicals. Mijung's car was still in the lot, and her phone, bank account and cards had not been used since April 20. Elevator footage showed her going up at 1:11 p.m. that day. Yoo went up at 2:06 p.m. The front door then stayed shut for more than two hours and forty minutes. Around 4 p.m. their daughter came home and entered the door code again and again. It would not open, and she stood crying in the hallway until a security guard came. The guard called Yoo, who said he was at his office and asked him to take the girl to a nearby bakery. Once the hallway was empty, Yoo slipped out, collected her, and took her to his younger brother's home, saying the front door was broken.
Five Tons of Water
The next morning Yoo left his daughter with his brother, asking that she be kept out of school. At 9:46 a.m. he began buying official trash bags in several sizes from two other districts of Daejeon, Seo-gu and Jung-gu, bags that could not be used at his own building. He also bought a boning knife and a meat grinder, and returned home at 2:28 p.m. A downstairs neighbor reported a foul smell from the bathroom in the middle of the night and the sound of water running hard. The meter showed five tons of water used in three days. At 5:12 the following morning, cameras recorded Yoo carrying six heavy bags to his car in two trips. The thirty-minute drive to his brother's took him an hour and twenty minutes, and with few street cameras in 2007, police could not trace where he went. With a warrant, they sprayed the apartment with luminol. The entryway walls, floors, utility room and bathroom all glowed. There was dried blood in the crack of the bathroom door, skin tissue on the window, gouges in the marble floor and grind marks on the tub. Inside the drain were pieces of Mijung's flesh and a finger bone. Her blood was on the knees of his trousers. The floors had been wiped with car wax.
Final Thoughts
Police had already barred Yoo from leaving the country. On April 26 at 2:55 p.m. he was stopped at Incheon Airport trying to board a flight to Japan. He said his wife had run away and that the blood came from her cutting herself while cleaning fish in the bathroom. Shown the bone and flesh, he stopped talking, and he has never said how she died or where her remains are. He was indicted in November 2007 for murder and abandoning a corpse. With no body, the defense could point to the chance that she had left on her own or that someone else was involved. The court found that the remains were hers, that she was recorded entering the apartment and never leaving, and that no one but her husband could have killed her. Yoo, then in his sixties, was sentenced to 18 years, and his appeal was dismissed. In the months after Mijung disappeared, messages kept arriving in her inbox from her daughter: "Mommy, why aren't you calling me? I miss you so much so call me."
Mijung Yang's body was never found and her husband never confessed, yet a court convicted him of murder on the blood, tissue and bone left in the apartment and sentenced him to 18 years. When a killer destroys the body and refuses to say where it is, should that silence count against him at sentencing?
WE DOCUMENT.
YOU DECIDE.
Our interpretation is only one possible perspective.
