Episode 114:
Dead in a motel. He wasn't her husband.

A man carries a woman on his back, her body limp. He takes her into a motel room. Forty minutes later, the phone rings. When police arrive, they find him frantically performing CPR — but in the bathroom, there are signs someone recently washed their clothes. Eight hours are completely unaccounted for. No security cameras. No witnesses. What happened behind that closed door?

2:00 a.m., April 13, 2019, in Namwon. A man in his forties, referred to here as Mr. A, was anxiously waiting for his forty-four-year-old wife, Ms. Shin, to come home. It was well past midnight, and she wasn't answering her phone. Fearing the worst, he finally called emergency services: "Was a woman brought in from an accident earlier this morning? I can't get in touch with my wife." Two hours earlier, he'd had one last call with her — and something about it had felt deeply wrong. Around 12:43 a.m., the call connected after just two rings, but it wasn't his wife's voice that answered. A strange man's voice — then, suddenly, a woman's terrified scream. After that call, she was never heard from again.

Found in a Motel Room

Police searched nearby emergency rooms and found nothing. Then, at 6:50 a.m., a call came in from a motel in Namwon: someone wasn't breathing. Paramedics arrived to find a woman collapsed on the floor while a man performed CPR on her, her face already deathly pale. She was gone. Investigators found small traces of blood in the bathtub and on some clothing, but no visible external injuries on her body. The case was transferred to Namwon Police Station, where the deceased was identified as forty-four-year-old Ms. Shin — the very woman reported missing hours earlier.

The autopsy results were horrifying. An artery deep in her left pelvis had ruptured, killing her through massive blood loss — an injury normally caused only by a severe car crash, a major fall, or a direct stab wound, since the artery sits protected by bone and thick muscle. Worse still were multiple lacerations extending from her vaginal opening all the way to her uterus, along with extensive bruising across her head, arms, and legs. The conclusion was unavoidable: this was sadistic sexual torture that had torn her internally and caused her to bleed to death. It was murder.

The Man in the Room

Investigation turned to the man found with her: fifty-six-year-old Kim, revealed to have been having an affair with Ms. Shin since a chance meeting at a gym a decade earlier, one that had turned intimate about seven years before her death. Questioned, Kim insisted he was the wronged party: "We drank and had sex, that's true, but that was it. She often said it hurt during sex, she'd bleed sometimes — it happened frequently. I just assumed it was that again." No injury from consensual sex could account for what the autopsy had found, and Kim refused to back down even when confronted with the report directly.

Forensics turned up something else: if Ms. Shin had bled to death as described, the motel room should have been soaked in blood. Instead, investigators found only a small amount, confined to the bathtub — meaning the murder almost certainly happened somewhere else entirely, and finding that location was the key to the case.

Eight Hours in an Office

Reviewing security footage and eyewitness accounts, police reconstructed the night. At 10:10 p.m., Ms. Shin was driving home when Kim recognized her car crossing the Namwon Bridge, made a U-turn, and began tailing her aggressively — flashing his high beams, swerving to cut her off, until she finally pulled over. He took her to a nearby convenience store, where a clerk watched them argue tensely over drinks for twenty minutes; Kim screamed at her and threw a cup before a gathering crowd forced them to leave. From there, they went to Kim's business consulting office downtown, arriving at 10:40 p.m. and remaining for nearly eight hours, until 6:10 the following morning — with no cameras inside to record what happened. Employees at the chicken restaurant next door later told police they heard a man shouting profanities and a woman crying without pause.

At 2:54 a.m., exterior camera footage showed Kim moving between his office and the bathroom roughly twenty times over two hours, a towel in hand each time. Around 6:00 a.m., the door opened and Kim emerged carrying Ms. Shin, her arms dangling, completely motionless — at one point he even dropped her while loading her into his car, and she didn't react at all. She was very likely already dead, or at minimum fully unconscious. He drove five minutes to a motel, and forty minutes after checking in, called the front desk for help.

The Video

Police searched the office itself. On the surface it looked spotless — until luminol testing revealed a bloodstain reaction throughout the room. On the sofa sat a bamboo massage stick nearly four feet long and over two inches in diameter, which investigators immediately connected to the internal tearing described in the autopsy. Lab analysis confirmed traces of Ms. Shin's blood and vaginal tissue on it. Then came the most damning discovery: a deleted video recovered from Kim's phone, recorded at 5:00 a.m., showing Ms. Shin naked on the sofa, gasping for breath as blood poured from her wounds, while Kim continued to sexually assault her with his fingers as she whimpered in pain before losing consciousness — all while he filmed it.

The full story, reconstructed by police, began with Kim's own betrayal — a second mistress Ms. Shin discovered in October 2018, prompting her to end things and block his number. After four months of silence, she believed the affair was finally over. Then, on February 27, 2019, Kim sent a chilling message: "So, I can do whatever I want, then?" — with her husband's phone number written beneath it, followed by, "Ignore my calls one more time, and I'm telling your husband everything." Terrified of exposure, Ms. Shin resumed contact to protect her secret. When a mutual acquaintance of her husband's spotted them together, she panicked and, the day before the murder, texted Kim that she was too scared to continue and wanted out. He refused to let her go, calling and texting relentlessly — "Where are you," "There's no point trying to run," "I know exactly where you are" — before tracking her down on the bridge that night.

Final Thoughts

Inside the office, after an hour of Kim hurling abuse at her — "You bitch, you deserve to die," according to testimony from the restaurant next door — he escalated to sexual assault with his hands, then forced her legs apart and violated her repeatedly with the bamboo stick. As she screamed and bled, he casually wiped at it with wet wipes rather than stopping. When her husband called during the assault, it's believed Kim answered deliberately, both to assert ownership over her and to threaten her — by then, she had no strength left to resist. Afterward, he filmed himself continuing to assault her as she lost consciousness, her final words being "It hurts." He cleaned the office, carried her to the motel, scrubbed the blood from both their clothes, then called for help himself rather than police — performing CPR to stage the appearance of a sudden collapse.

At trial on September 26, 2019, Kim remained shameless, denying he'd ever raised his voice or sworn at her, insisting all sexual contact had been consensual and that he'd only brought her to the motel because she said she was cold. When a member of Ms. Shin's family shouted from the courtroom, "Then why didn't you take her to the hospital?!" — Kim had no answer. The judge ruled that while Kim's sadistic acts and neglect had caused her death, it wasn't premeditated murder, but sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison, eighty hours of sex offender treatment, and ten years of public registration, citing his complete lack of remorse. Both of his appeals were rejected. He maintained his innocence to the end — perhaps still believing, even after conviction, that he'd gotten away with the perfect crime. Whatever judgment anyone has for Ms. Shin's affair, it was never a reason for what was done to her — the condemnation belongs with her killer, not with her or the family she left behind.