Episode 136:
18 Days After Wealthy 40's Woman Disappeared, Someone Found a Blue Tarp in the Mountains in Jeju
In April 2015, a resident foraging for herbs on a hillside in Jeju Island noticed a suspicious blue tarp tucked into the bushes, weighed down with branches and stones as if hiding something. A rotten smell hit her as she approached, and when she lifted a corner, she saw what looked like a human leg. She called police immediately.
When officers arrived and pulled back the tarp, they found the body of a woman, half-naked, her eyes and mouth covered in blue duct tape, her wrists and ankles bearing ligature marks. Flour, soy sauce, and animal feces had been sprinkled over her. She had been stabbed 27 times in the abdomen.
A Crime That Left No Trail
The autopsy found semen on the victim's body, confirming sexual assault, and determined the cause of death as blood loss from the stab wounds, all made with unusually consistent vertical angles — a pattern suggesting she was already unconscious when stabbed, backed up by a fractured thyroid cartilage consistent with forceful strangulation. Overkill like this often points to a personal motive, but identifying the victim turned out to be the easy part: fingerprints matched her to a 50-year-old Jeju resident living under the alias Gyeong-suk. Because she lived alone with little contact with others, no one had ever reported her missing, and investigators had no starting point until they found security footage showing her leaving her house on the night of March 13 — 18 days before the body was found — and never returning.
Two Strangers Who Met Online
Phone records from the night Gyeong-suk vanished led police to 32-year-old Lim, a man with no known connection to her and who didn't even live on Jeju. Under questioning, Lim quickly pointed to 29-year-old Sang-tae Kim, claiming he'd only gone along thinking it was a robbery. A background check revealed Kim had already served three years for sexual assault causing injury and had a history of spreading false sexual assault claims online — a serious lead given the semen evidence. Playing the two accomplices against each other in separate interrogation rooms, investigators got the full story: Kim and Lim had met a year earlier in an online game and grown close swapping stories about crimes, until Kim proposed robbing a woman he'd seen gambling with a wallet full of cash. Lim flew to Jeju on March 10 to meet Kim in person for the first time, and together they scouted locations, mapped security cameras, and bought duct tape, rope, and masks.
The Murder and the Failed Cover-Up
On the night of March 13, the two men picked up Gyeong-suk for a dinner they'd arranged, then used a prearranged signal to ambush her — Kim pulling a hidden knife from the trunk, binding and taping her while Lim helped, before taking her phone, cards, and keys. They drove her into the mountains, assaulted her again until she lost consciousness, and Kim carried her off alone, later returning to casually tell Lim it was "time to take care of the body." When the two men went to move her and she let out a groan — still alive — Kim stomped on her and stabbed her repeatedly, ending any chance of survival. They withdrew roughly $3,700 from an ATM using her cards, then staged an elaborate but misguided disposal, believing flour would block DNA collection and soy sauce and fertilizer would speed decomposition by attracting insects — when in fact covering the body with a tarp and rocks blocked the flies that actually drive decomposition, keeping the body well-preserved until it was found 18 days later. In the end, all they found of value at her home was a piggy bank containing about $150, which they spent on instant noodles and sliced pork; disappointed, the pair went on to burglarize several more unlocked homes on the island before being tracked down and arrested within a day of the body's discovery.
Final Thoughts
Throughout the investigation, Kim denied the sexual assault specifically, knowing Korean law treats rape-murder far more severely than murder alone, at one point falsely claiming he and Gyeong-suk had consensual sex at a motel — a story that collapsed once security footage failed to place them there and Lim's testimony confirmed what actually happened during the thirty minutes in the mountains. In October 2015, the Jeju District Court sentenced Kim to life in prison for rape, murder, and abandoning a body, a sentence upheld on appeal; Lim received ten years, later reduced to eight after his family paid a $15,000 court deposit to the victim's family, and was released in 2023.
Gyeong-suk went missing for more than two weeks without anyone noticing, killed over money she never actually had. The case remains a stark counterpoint to Jeju's reputation as a peaceful island — in 2015 alone, the area saw six murders, and it ranked last in a national public safety survey that same year.
Sang-tae Kim and Lim had never met in person before flying to Jeju to carry out a murder they'd only discussed inside an online game, and in the end all they stole was a piggy bank worth $150. What do you think it says about how casually the two of them escalated from swapping stories about crimes online to actually planning and carrying one out together?
WE DOCUMENT.
YOU DECIDE.
Our interpretation is only one possible perspective.
