Episode 66:
Gangbuk Motel Serial Murderer Kim So-young

The case dominating Korea right now first drew attention for something almost absurd: her bizarre behavior after committing murder. Taking delivery food?

It wasn't even her first time killing someone. With more victims emerging, the preparations she'd been making for four months were coming fully into view.

At 2 p.m. on January 29, 2026, police entered a motel in Suyu-dong, Seoul, to find a 29-year-old man dead on the bed, a can of beer and a bottle of soju on the table, and an empty hangover-cure bottle in the trash.

Two Deaths, Eleven Days Apart

Eleven days later, a nearly identical scene emerged at a motel less than a mile away: a 27-year-old man, also found dead on the bed, also with alcohol in the room. Autopsies revealed at least seven prescription drugs in both men's systems — medications for panic disorder, insomnia, depression, and arrhythmia, individually safe but lethal in combination, especially mixed with alcohol. Toxicology suggested both men lived for six or seven hours after ingesting the drugs, meaning they endured fever and abdominal agony as their bodies fought to process an impossible cocktail — and no trace of the drugs themselves was ever found in either room.

Both victims had been seen with the same woman in her twenties on CCTV, checking in and leaving shortly before the men were found dead alone. She was identified as 20-year-old Kim So-young — and investigators soon discovered a trail of near-identical incidents stretching back four months.

Four Rehearsals

It started in October 2025, when a man she was dining with suddenly collapsed after one glass of wine; she called 911 claiming he simply couldn't hold his liquor, but paramedics found his pupils constricted and speech slurred — textbook signs of drug use. In December, her own boyfriend fell into a coma for two days after drinking an energy drink she'd given him as a "peace offering" during an argument; he survived, suspected the drink, and reported her to police. Two more men collapsed in January before a karaoke bar owner refused to let her leave one of them unconscious and forced her to call for help.

The origin traced back further: after a boyfriend reported her for stealing his wallet, she'd countered by accusing him of sexual assault — a claim police closed for lack of evidence — but the resulting PTSD diagnosis got her a prescription for sleeping pills and tranquilizers. Investigators believe that's when she began deliberately doctor-shopping across multiple clinics, describing panic attacks, insomnia, and arrhythmia she didn't have, then crushing every prescription into a single mixed bag and testing it — first on a stranger from social media, then her boyfriend to see how alcohol changed the effect, then switching her delivery method to hangover drinks, the most natural thing to hand someone on a night out.

A Question for ChatGPT

After the fourth near-miss, in public, taught her that a conscious survivor could identify her, she began taking victims to motels instead. Before her fifth encounter, she reportedly asked ChatGPT twice — on January 25th and 28th — whether combining sleeping pills with alcohol could be fatal, then doubled her dosage before meeting victim five. Eleven days later, for victim six, she added fever reducers and increased the dose again; her crimes were accelerating.

Kim So-young told police the men had tried to touch her against her will, that she only meant to sedate them, citing past trauma. CCTV told a different story: she held their hands walking into the motels, laughed and joked on camera, and it was consistently she who initiated contact on social media and suggested booking the room, ordering food, and settling in.

The Food

With her fifth victim, she stopped at a convenience store, bought alcohol and a hangover drink identical in brand to one she'd pre-spiked, swapped it in without his noticing, and ordered $58 worth of pork belly from her favorite restaurant nine minutes after entering the room. As he collapsed, she poured out the unopened, untampered bottle to plant as evidence, then left the motel carrying the delivered food in a bag.

With victim six, she ordered pork belly on his phone right after drugging him — but the order was canceled, likely as he began losing consciousness, so she switched to her own phone and placed a 22-item, $99 chicken order on his card instead. Investigators believe she was securing her food order while he was dying beside her. Afterward, she left him a long, meticulously worded text implying he'd ordered the food, handed her his card, and told her to take it home — an alibi built line by line to make his death look like something that happened after she'd already gone.

Final Thoughts

A psychopathy assessment scored Kim So-young at 25 — among the highest ever recorded in Korean criminal history, trailing only figures like Yoo Young-chul and Kang Ho-sun. Her school years were marked by chronic, petty theft — stealing classmates' AirPods and makeup, eventually flushing stolen earbuds down a toilet rather than let anyone else have them when she couldn't keep them herself. She grew up with a violently abusive father who left when she was in elementary school, and recent testing found borderline intellectual functioning alongside her psychopathic traits — a combination experts believe left her unable to grasp the consequences of what she was doing, even while leaving an overwhelming trail of evidence: security footage, a boyfriend's police report, 911 calls, and message logs with all six men.

Prosecutors indicted her on two counts of murder, four counts of special assault, and violation of narcotics law, with trial set for April 9th at Seoul Northern District Court. In a detention center interview, Kim So-young said she was afraid she wouldn't be able to go home — and that she wanted to eat her mother's cooking. Even at the end, it came back to food.