Episode 135:
After Stabbing His Wife 21 Times, He Casually Sat on Her Bleeding Body Waiting for Someone
A woman's scream cut through the air outside a building in Gangnam. A delivery driver passing by stopped in shock — a woman was lying on the ground bleeding while a man sat calmly on top of her, phone tucked between his shoulder and ear. "I just killed someone," he said, before police even arrived.
At 6 p.m. on November 26, 2017, when officers reached the scene, the attacker hadn't fled — he was still there, still attacking her with the knife. Police pulled him off and rushed the woman to the hospital, but she died from massive blood loss. She was 23-year-old Danbi Kim, and her body bore 21 stab wounds, with her heart and lungs pierced. The most heartbreaking injury wasn't even one of the stab wounds: a deep slash across her palm, where she had grabbed the blade bare-handed, fighting to survive. As police began notifying her family, they learned the man who had done this wasn't a stranger. He was her husband — the man she was in the process of divorcing, 25-year-old Nam Taek-gyu.
A Marriage Hiding a Nightmare
Danbi and Nam met at a Seoul club in 2014, married in May 2016, and had a daughter the following year. Online, Danbi ran a growing eyelash-extension business and posted livestreams that Nam often joined, openly affectionate. Behind the camera, a different reality was unfolding. Nam had been diagnosed with depression and intermittent explosive disorder as a teenager, with a history that included assaulting a nurse and paying hush money after sexually assaulting women at hostess bars. Once married, his obsessive jealousy turned into constant surveillance of Danbi's phone and social media, and eventually into violence and sexual assault whenever he suspected — usually baselessly — that she was seeing someone else. Even in summer, Danbi wore long sleeves and a mask to cover the bruises.
Trapped Between Fear and Motherhood
Two months before her death, Danbi briefly left Nam, but returned after three days, unable to bear the thought of her seven-month-old daughter alone with him. The violence didn't stop — Nam once threatened a murder-suicide in front of their crying infant, and later assaulted Danbi in front of a coworker who called police, though Danbi refused to press charges, unwilling to brand her daughter with the stigma of an abusive father. The breaking point came in October 2017, when Nam discovered an old call recording between Danbi and another man on her phone and assaulted her for six hours straight, forcing her to drink his urine before raping her. Once she recovered enough to move, Danbi fled to a friend's, but Nam struck back by logging into her social media and posting that she was the one who'd cheated and abandoned him — successfully recasting himself as the victim. Reading it, Danbi decided to file for divorce, hiding at a friend-arranged apartment. Nam retaliated by filing a false report against her business and threatening suicide, before finally agreeing to the divorce on one condition: she had to keep visiting their daughter at his home weekly — visits he used as repeated opportunities to assault her again.
A Final Call for Help
On the night of November 25, lured over with a lie that their daughter was sick, Danbi was assaulted and raped again by a now-drunk Nam before he passed out. At 5 a.m., she escaped barely dressed, took a taxi to the ER, and reported the sexual assault to police. Standard procedure required officers to notify Nam that a report had been filed — but instead of treating it as urgent, the responding officer spent 24 minutes on the phone letting Nam insist the encounter had been consensual, then coached him: speak calmly to her from now on, don't threaten her since it could be used as evidence, and go ahead and photograph the marks on her neck. After the call, Nam kept drinking and, replaying the situation, concluded that if he couldn't have Danbi, he'd rather kill her. He tracked her hiding address through her package delivery history, waited outside her building with a knife hidden in his clothes, and when she stepped outside that evening, forced her down and stabbed her repeatedly — continuing even after his own 911 call was already connected.
Final Thoughts
At trial in June 2018, Nam argued the killing wasn't premeditated, but the court rejected that claim, pointing to the knife he'd brought in advance and the 21 wounds he'd inflicted. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison, a sentence upheld on appeal. Afterward, his mother publicly defended him, citing a Good Samaritan award he'd once received and effectively blaming her daughter-in-law for what happened — a claim that explains none of the years of documented abuse, sexual assault, and the murder itself.
What's hardest to move past in this case is the police response just hours before Danbi died: a woman who had nearly died the night before, calling in her last real chance to be protected, met with officers who coached her attacker instead of shielding her. Danbi fought to survive to the very end — grabbing the blade with her bare hands — for a daughter who will now grow up without her.
Just hours before her death, Danbi reported a sexual assault to police -- and instead of protecting her, an officer spent 24 minutes coaching her husband on how to manage the evidence against himself, even telling him to photograph the bruises he'd left on her neck. What do you think it would actually take for a system like that to treat a victim's report as urgent instead of something to be managed?
WE DOCUMENT.
YOU DECIDE.
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