Episode 88:
Mysterious Rooftop Tragedy in South Korea

Inside a 21st-floor hotel room was a horrific scene. The man insisted that nothing had happened. But moments later, a loud thud shrouded the truth in mystery. The hotel employee remembered a few people coming and going from that room.

What really happened in that room that night?

On the afternoon of April 9, 2024, a missing person report was filed for a woman in her twenties. "She went out yesterday afternoon at five, and I haven't heard from her since. She said she was meeting a friend and would be right back, but I've asked around and no one saw her." The missing person was twenty-two-year-old Cha.

Thirteen Hours Lost

Police response was slow from the start — despite an adult woman being unreachable for over a day, officers didn't head to Cha's apartment in Goyang until around 6 p.m., an hour after taking the case, and then hit an immediate wall: the employee responsible for the security footage had already gone home for the day. Investigators waited until 7 a.m. the next morning, thirteen hours later, to finally review the footage and trace her movements.

It showed Cha leaving home by taxi at 5 p.m. on April 8, heading to a residence hotel in Paju about forty minutes away — the last confirmed sighting of her alive. Her phone and bank cards showed no activity for two days, but oddly, her phone's location briefly surfaced in the city in the early hours of April 9, even as her family called it repeatedly through the night with no answer.

The Door That Wouldn't Open

At the hotel, staff confirmed Cha had gone up to the 21st floor and never came back down — but the guest registered to the room hadn't checked out. When police went up and knocked, the man who answered claimed she'd left that morning to run an errand and shut the door. Without clear evidence of a crime, officers had no legal grounds to force entry and could only wait.

Minutes later, a call came in: a possible fall at the hotel. The same man who had just answered the door had jumped from the 21st floor. He wasn't alone — a second body, belonging to a man in the same age group, was found at the scene as well. The two, referred to here as twenty-three-year-old Yoo and twenty-four-year-old Kim, had been best friends since school and even worked together as adults. One had jumped first; the other followed shortly after.

What Was Behind the Door

When police finally entered the room, they found Cha's body on the bathroom floor, mouth sealed with duct tape, wrists bound behind her back, bruised from a severe beating, and a cable tie cinched around her neck — the eventual cause of death was ruled asphyxiation by strangulation. Her jeans and underwear had been removed, and male semen was found on her thigh, though the autopsy found no evidence of vaginal penetration, pointing investigators toward a non-penetrative assault rather than rape.

Yoo and Kim had a history of violence going back to their school days, and as adults had bonded over illegal gambling and crypto speculation, chasing the fantasy of one big win. Yoo, married with a young child, had racked up nearly $100,000 in debt through illegal poker pubs — venues that skirt Korea's strict casino laws by operating as bars where chips, not cash, change hands on the table. Kim followed the same path into similarly crushing debt. Search history recovered from their phones included "rear naked choke unconscious," "how to make someone pass out," and "suicide," alongside advance purchases of duct tape and cable ties — evidence, investigators concluded, of a premeditated plan targeting whoever seemed easiest to lure and least likely to be missed immediately.

A Second Victim, Lured the Same Way

Cha, a former coworker from their poker pub days who earned over $150 a day as a dealer, fit that profile — someone with savings and an existing personal connection that made the invitation easy to trust. They texted her a casual "big Bitcoin win, come have drinks" message, and she arrived at the hotel an hour later without suspicion.

Because both men died, no one can say exactly what happened once the door closed, but police believe Cha was overpowered almost immediately, extortion escalated into assault, and at some point the two exchanged a text message sitting right next to each other — "Should we kill her?" "Yeah." — a form of distancing experts say people sometimes use to dull the emotional weight of what they're about to do. They strangled her with a cable tie shortly after.

The case took an even darker turn: after killing Cha, the two had already begun hunting for a second victim on Telegram, posting a fake job ad for female poker dealers. A woman in her twenties, referred to as Yang, answered it in good faith, traveling over an hour and a half from Suwon to reach the hotel by the requested 10 p.m. She was strangled shortly after entering the room. Her autopsy revealed a nine-centimeter, three-centimeter-deep cut on her arm with no accompanying bloodstains anywhere in the room — investigators believe the pair had attempted, and failed, to dismember her body using a kitchen knife provided by the hotel itself.

Final Thoughts

Using Cha's phone, the pair impersonated her in a text to one of her contacts, asking for roughly $6,000–$7,000 to cover a "mistake at work." The unnatural tone and an unfamiliar term of address tipped the contact off immediately, and he refused — even after a follow-up call from an unknown number claiming Cha urgently needed the money. The extortion attempt failed completely. Around 5 a.m., the two took one of the phones to a PC café to play games, apparently having sold it for roughly $1,000 — a sum barely equivalent to a week's dealer wages, oddly small in exchange for two murders.

What remains unexplained is why, with a full day between the murders and the police finally forcing the door on April 10, they made no real attempt to dispose of the bodies or flee — despite the room being booked for only two days with an 11 a.m. checkout, on a floor of a residence hotel where other guests would likely have encountered them. With no surviving suspect to answer for any of it, the case was closed for lack of a prosecutable party. Before jumping, Yoo sent a friend a final message: "Hey friend, please take care of my son. Heh heh heh. I killed someone, so I'm going to die too" — a tone investigators found almost too casual to read as genuine remorse.