Episode 108:
The Last 10 Minutes Inside the Truck: The Dashcam Files

On the day of the murder, the truck's dashcam captured fourteen full minutes of a young man's desperate struggle for his life. In that same truck, another body was already growing cold. This is the story of a betrayal by the person the victims should have trusted most — and even in heaven, they must still be desperate to know why they were killed at all.

August 28, 2023. Two nearly identical reports landed with Sancheong County police within moments of each other — a middle school teacher and a high school teacher, both requesting a wellness check on a student who hadn't shown up for class. The students, seventeen-year-old Hyun-joo Kim and sixteen-year-old Nam-ho Kim, were siblings, and their disappearance made police immediately uneasy.

A Family No One Could Reach

The children had been excused from school a week earlier for a family trip and were due back Monday — but no one heard from them, and stranger still, their father and guardian, Mr. Kim, was unreachable too. The school tried the grandmother, who seemed entirely unbothered: "They went on a trip with their dad. Haven't heard from them, but he's their dad — what's there to worry about?" The school didn't share her calm. A father and both children going dark at once, in this day and age, wasn't normal, and they reported it immediately.

Police traced all three phones and found the signal frozen in place since 11:50 p.m. the night before, at a remote mountain in Najeon Village, Gimhae. The isolation of the spot only sharpened the urgency — if something had gone wrong there, help would be almost impossible to find. Officers arrived around 12:20 p.m. and found a single one-ton truck parked alone. From outside, nothing looked wrong.

What Was Inside the Truck

Inside, the cabin was thick with gas. Mr. Kim was collapsed in the driver's seat, bleeding from a wound to his left wrist, still faintly breathing. In the passenger seat sat his daughter, Hyun-joo. In the back seat, his son, Nam-ho. Both were already cold and rigid. Cord marks circled Hyun-joo's neck, pulled tight from behind. Nam-ho's condition was worse still — his whole body bound, a red cord cinched so violently into his neck it had nearly broken it. Both children had died in agony.

Mr. Kim was rushed to the hospital still breathing. Police recovered the truck's dashcam to piece together what had happened, and what they heard back at the station left even hardened detectives speechless.

Fourteen Minutes

At 12:38 a.m., a strange mechanical whirring started on the recording, followed by Nam-ho's screams: "No... I'm gonna die! Let me go! Please, help me!" The struggle went on for fourteen minutes before the sound of bones breaking. Near the end, still fighting to speak, he cried, "Help me, please... I don't want to die... Dad." The person strangling him was his own father, who answered him coldly: "Sleep. You're just tired... Just go to sleep." Then the screaming stopped, and only the whirring remained.

When police learned Mr. Kim had regained consciousness, they arrested him for murder. He confessed to the killings almost immediately — but refused, for days, to explain why.

Five Years of Pressure

Mr. Kim and his ex-wife divorced in 2012, leaving him to raise Hyun-joo and Nam-ho alone while working at a factory — with his elderly parents stepping in to care for the kids day to day. After the children's grandfather died, their grandmother sank into severe anxiety, unable to sleep without pills, and grew increasingly harsh, nagging over the smallest things. Mr. Kim worked all day at the factory, then came home to farm and housework, only to be scolded on top of it. The children, tired of the tension, told him they wished they could live somewhere with just him — no grandmother. He considered moving out, but on a monthly salary of roughly $1,942, he couldn't afford it. When he tried to access a savings account his mother had set up for him, she refused to let him touch it.

One Last Happy Memory

Crushed under his mother's constant hysteria, his children's resentment, and his own financial failure, Mr. Kim decided he would die — and take his children with him. He cashed out savings accounts he'd opened in Hyun-joo and Nam-ho's names to fund the plan, booking luxury hotels across Gimhae, Namhae, and Busan, and even asked his ex-wife to join for one day so the family could be together.

His preparations for the murder itself were just as calculated. He spent days buying roughly two hundred sleeping pills across multiple pharmacies, grinding a hundred and thirty into powder to hide in his truck's console. He also packed steel chains, ten cargo straps, and a power drill in case his children fought back, and loaded an LPG gas tank into the truck bed. Then he told them gently they were going on a trip — just the three of them, no grandmother — and the children, thrilled, turned in their school leave forms without hesitation.

The Last Night

The family spent days together in Namhae, Gimhae, and Busan, with their mother joining for part of it — likely the happiest stretch of the children's short lives. On August 27, the final day, Mr. Kim woke the children and told them he had errands to run, arranging to meet them that night at Sports Park Station. That afternoon, he bought a cooler, ice, and two large juices, mixing half the sleeping powder into each. When he picked the children up at 10:40 p.m., Nam-ho told him, "Dad, thank you so much for taking us on this trip. I'll make it up to you when I grow up." Minutes later, Mr. Kim pulled over and handed them the drugged juice.

He drove them to the mountain near his own father's grave, a place he said felt psychologically safe. At 11:50 p.m., he strangled Hyun-joo first, so sedated she couldn't fight or cry out. Nam-ho, larger and unable to fall as deeply asleep, kept stirring — so his father sat beside him for forty minutes, waiting for the right moment before binding him with chains and tying a cord around his neck to a power drill, which slowly tightened it as it spun. Nam-ho woke from the pain and begged for his life for fourteen minutes before he died. Afterward, Mr. Kim took the remaining seventy pills himself and turned on the LPG gas, waiting to die.

Final Thoughts

His account had a hole in it. Nam-ho's time of death, per the dashcam, was 12:39 a.m. — but police didn't find Mr. Kim until 12:20 the next afternoon, nearly twelve hours later. Despite the sleeping pills and gas exposure, he was found in stable enough condition to recover in the hospital within three hours and be arrested immediately.

At his first trial in December 2023, the court sentenced him to thirty years — under Korean law, killing a parent carries an enhanced charge of parricide, but the reverse, a parent killing a child, is treated as ordinary homicide with no such enhancement. Mr. Kim appealed, calling the sentence too harsh, and in the process revealed himself further: he now blamed his mother's nagging for destroying the family and claimed it left him no choice but to kill his own children. The appeals court saw through it, found no genuine remorse, and overturned the thirty-year sentence for life in prison instead. Hyun-joo and Nam-ho never got the futures they were owed, killed by the one person they trusted most — and Nam-ho's last words to his father, a thank-you for the trip that ended his life, are hard to shake.