Episode 152:
He Didn’t Know His 15-Year-Old Son Was Recording as He Murdered His Family
At 11:27 p.m. on October 25, 2022, a man called police in Gyeonggi Province, sobbing. He had just come home, he said, and his wife and children were covered in blood. Officers and paramedics reached the 15th-floor apartment in Gwangmyeong seven minutes later. In the living room, a woman and a teenage boy lay on the floor with severe head injuries and deep wounds to their necks. In the bathroom was the body of a younger boy. The victims, identified here by aliases, were 42-year-old Na-ra Lee and her sons, 15-year-old Ji-hoon and 10-year-old Hyun-soo. The caller was her husband and their father, 45-year-old Go Gwang-jin, who sat crumpled on the floor, weeping.
One object at the scene stood out: Ji-hoon's cell phone. It had been smashed, but its voice recorder was somehow still running when police arrived. The phone was too damaged to play back, so it was sent to the National Forensic Service for repair.
An Alibi With an Hour Missing
The autopsies found that all three had been struck on the head with a blunt object and then stabbed repeatedly in the neck, the mother about twenty times and each boy more than ten. There was no sign of forced entry. Neighbors described a kind family with no enemies, a couple married for seventeen years who went on outings every weekend. But one neighbor mentioned that the husband had turned irritable in the past month or two, and others said the marriage had been strained for about two years, since a herniated disc had put Go on repeated medical leave and left his wife supporting the family. He had quit his job for good that August. Asked where he had been, Go said he stepped out for a cigarette at 7:51 p.m., decided to go to an internet cafe fifteen minutes away, watched anime for two hours, and came home at 11:25 p.m. The elevator camera and the cafe owner confirmed it. Then an officer checked the cafe's computer logs. Go had not logged in until 9:10 p.m., an hour later than his story allowed. The elevator footage also showed that the clothes he left in were not the clothes he returned in. In the bushes of a nearby park, police found a plastic bag holding the bloodstained outfit from the footage, a rubber mallet, and a 30-centimeter kitchen knife.
The Son Who Pressed Record
The forensic results on Ji-hoon's phone arrived around the same time. The recording captured groans, heavy blows, the front door opening and his mother's screams, more blows, and then, after a long silence, a quiet voice saying, "Adios. Goodbye." It was Go's. The phone also held more than thirty recordings from other days, full of his father's assaults and verbal abuse, some of which were later quoted word for word in the court's ruling. Go had a history of violence going back to high school, when he attacked an older student with a wooden plank, and though he had learned to appear kind to outsiders, he said what he pleased to those closest to him. Ji-hoon had started recording to protect himself and his family. Over the two years he spent at home, absorbed in anime while his wife worked, Go came to believe that his wife and son looked down on him, that his family were his enemies, and that it would be better to kill them.
Twenty Minutes
Go told police he had snapped after his wife asked for a divorce and his son said he didn't want to live with him. The evidence showed a plan. He had hidden a rubber mallet in a toolbox on the balcony, spent days mapping the building's cameras, and found that the emergency stairwell had none. He intended to make the deaths look like suicides. On October 25 he rode the elevator down at 7:51 p.m., making sure the camera saw him, then at 8:10 climbed the stairs back to the 15th floor, timing it for when his younger son would be in the shower. He sent his wife downstairs by telling her he had seen a bag full of cash outside. Then he took the mallet and came up behind Ji-hoon at the computer. Ji-hoon sensed something and hit record. When Na-ra came back and ran to shield her son, Go attacked her as well. He then called Hyun-soo, who had heard everything and was crying behind the bathroom door, to come out. In about twenty minutes all three were unconscious. The recording caught him muttering, "Why won't they die?" before he fetched a knife from the kitchen. Police believe Na-ra was conscious until the end. Go washed in the bathroom, changed into similar clothes, left by the stairs, dumped the bag, and spent two hours at the internet cafe watching anime and laughing.
Final Thoughts
After his arrest, Go confessed, then tried one explanation after another. He wept and apologized, then snapped that it had all been planned, then claimed amnesia and multiple personalities. A psychiatric evaluation found no mental illness and an IQ of 125. Prosecutors asked for the death penalty. In May 2023 the court sentenced him to life in prison, and the sentence was later confirmed. The recording Ji-hoon started that night was the decisive evidence against his father. It exists because a 15-year-old had learned that the safest thing he could do when his father came near was to press record.
Ji-hoon had more than thirty recordings of his father's abuse on his phone because pressing record was the only protection he felt he had. What should a 15-year-old in that position have been able to do with that evidence, and who around a family like this is in a position to notice before it is too late?
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YOU DECIDE.
Our interpretation is only one possible perspective.
