Episode 117:
Brutal Revenge Against Mother Who Abandoned Him

This case, from 1989, was so shocking at the time that the press was barred from reporting its full details — which is why it remains largely unknown today. Some of what follows is genuinely disturbing.

11:00 p.m., November 25, 1989. In Sangcheon Village, Gyeonggi Province, a piercing scream tore through the quiet night. Villagers, startled awake, rushed outside to find one of the houses on fire and ran to help — but when they opened the gate, they were met with pure horror. Inside a furiously burning wheelbarrow, a middle-aged woman was being burned alive. It was her screams the whole village had heard.

Bound, Stabbed, Burned

Villagers doused the flames, but the victim was already critical — her hands and feet bound behind her back, a melted sweater fused to her head. She'd been stabbed four times in the abdomen, and the fire had burned away parts of her body down to the bone. She died at the scene. The victim was the homeowner, fifty-three-year-old Sun-deok Lee. In this quiet farming village, nothing like this had ever happened before.

The autopsy showed she had been stabbed first, then burned — a method that suggested deliberate, overwhelming intent to make absolutely sure she was dead. Police concluded the killer had to be someone she knew. Neighbors described Sun-deok as gentle, someone who'd never had a conflict with anyone in her life, and the investigation initially stalled. Then a resident came forward, hesitant: "I think I saw her son running away earlier... but it couldn't be her own son, could it?" Several other witnesses said the same. Police identified him as thirty-one-year-old Young-ho Kim.

Left at an Orphanage

Twenty-six years earlier, at twenty-three, Sun-deok married her first husband and had two sons, the elder being Young-ho. Her married life became a nightmare — a mother-in-law who meddled constantly and abused her, a husband who always took his mother's side and blamed Sun-deok instead of defending her. When she finally reached her breaking point and decided to leave, one thing held her back: five-year-old Young-ho and his three-year-old brother. Convinced her mother-in-law would turn all her cruelty onto the boys if she left them behind, and believing their father would never properly care for them either, Sun-deok made an agonizing choice — she left both sons at an orphanage and fled.

She later remarried Han-tae Kim, a businessman fifteen years her senior, and settled into a comfortable life in Gapyeong. Twenty-four years passed. Then, about two years before the murder, Young-ho — the son she'd left behind — tracked her down. It wasn't a reunion. It was an ambush of resentment: "So you've been living well after abandoning me. How shameless. Did you remarry for the money? You abandoned us!" From that point on, he returned constantly to extort money from her, and Sun-deok, consumed by decades of guilt, felt she owed him everything. She and Han-tae sold land to give him roughly $15,000 to start a business — enough, in 1987, to buy an apartment on Seoul's outskirts. It wasn't enough. His demands never stopped, and neither did the abuse.

A Life Built on Rage

Young-ho and his brother had been forced to fight just to survive inside the orphanage, chronically hungry, with fighting the only skill Young-ho ever developed. Aging out at nineteen with no stable path forward, he drifted across the country — Seoul, Busan, Mokpo — shining shoes and taking day labor, burning through every cent on drinking, and eventually accumulating five criminal convictions for theft and violence. He blamed all of it, without exception, on the mother who'd abandoned him.

He had his own family too, and treated them the same way — verbally and physically abusing his wife in front of their children until she finally left him. His response wasn't to raise his kids alone; he abandoned them just as he'd been abandoned, leaving his three-year-old daughter on a street in Dongdaemun and his one-year-old son outside a department store in Cheongnyangni, passing his own pain directly onto the next generation. The only person he never turned on was his younger brother. For four years, the two of them searched obsessively for their birth mother, until Young-ho finally found her remarried and living comfortably in Sangcheon Village — and his rage ignited instantly.

A Murder He Made Her Cover Up

His stepfather, Han-tae, tried to intervene on Sun-deok's behalf, but at seventy-six he was no match for a man in his twenties. On October 26, 1989 — a month before the murder — Young-ho showed up demanding money again and turned on his bedridden stepfather directly, beating him with a soda bottle, then punching and stomping him before crushing his neck and chest until he stopped breathing. Han-tae died from the beating. Afterward, Young-ho simply stared at his mother in silence — an unmistakable order to keep quiet — and told everyone Han-tae had died of illness, even holding a funeral for him. Sun-deok, who had watched her husband murdered in front of her, said nothing. Whether it was guilt over abandoning her son, fear, or years of accumulated helplessness, she chose silence, a choice that placed her directly in the path of what came next.

The Night of November 25

On the night of the murder, Young-ho arrived at the house drunk and enraged, screaming that his ruined life was entirely her fault, his words escalating into open threats: "A bitch like you should just die. Go get stabbed to death right in front of me." He grabbed a kitchen knife and threw it at her feet: "Just kill yourself." Sun-deok, terrified but still unable to see past the fact that he was her son, dropped to her knees sobbing and begging his forgiveness. Instead, he seized her arm, pinned her down, and sexually assaulted her.

Something in her broke completely. Believing death was the only escape left, she picked up the knife he'd thrown and drove it into her own stomach. Young-ho's expression never changed. "That's not going to kill you," he told her coldly. "Don't be so dramatic." He then bound her hands and feet with a cloth, dragged her by the hair into the yard, piled a wheelbarrow with firewood, and lifted her onto it. He went to the kitchen for kerosene, doused her body, stepped back, and threw a lit match at her without hesitation. Neighbors ran out at her screams; Young-ho fled immediately, and was apprehended three days later.

Final Thoughts

The crime was considered so brutal that media coverage was deliberately restricted at the time, and only fragments of the trial were ever made public. Young-ho Kim was sentenced to death in both trials, for murder and for disposing of a corpse, and showed no remorse to the end — continuing to blame his mother for everything right up until his execution. While on death row, he announced he wanted to donate his corneas as atonement. He was executed by hanging on December 29, 1992, and his corneas were given to an anonymous recipient. Whether that final act meant anything is left for each listener to decide — a son who spent his whole life exploiting his mother's guilt, and who ultimately made her final hours as agonizing as anything he had suffered himself.