Episode 82:
The Seoul Trip Nightmare: What Happened That Day?

Two medical examiners were in a heated dispute over the body of a seven-year-old girl. "This is obviously an accident." "What? This is clearly a murder." Autopsy opinions this sharply divided are rare.

After enjoying a cruise on the Han River and returning to their hotel, the father left his daughter alone and spent time outside drinking beer while constantly calling a mysterious figure. What on earth happened inside that room?

At 1:48 a.m. on August 8, 2019, a sharp scream echoed through a hotel in Gangseo District, Seoul. The hotel manager rushed to the room to find a man in his forties holding his soaking wet seven-year-old daughter upside down by the legs, shaking her and shouting her name in complete panic. Following the 911 dispatcher's instructions, they laid the child on the bed and performed CPR; paramedics arrived within ten minutes and rushed her to the hospital, but she was pronounced dead an hour later. The cause of death was drowning.

A Devoted Father, By All Accounts

The father, forty-year-old Zhang, had divorced his daughter's mother after five years of marriage marked by constant conflict over money and parenting — but both parents remained devoted to their daughter. Zhang spent every weekend with her and took her on a trip about once a month, to Japan, Taiwan, and beyond, earning enough trust from his ex-wife that she considered him, whatever his flaws as a husband, the best possible father. This trip to Korea followed the same pattern: he'd enrolled his daughter, a promising young dancer, in a Korea-China cultural dance event, and they'd spent the day sightseeing in Seoul, capped off with a Han River cruise before returning to their hotel around midnight.

Zhang said that once back at the hotel, he put his daughter on the bed, drew a bath, and hand-washed some clothes — but when he tried to wake her for the bath, she was already deeply asleep, so he decided to let her skip it. At 12:40 a.m. he went to the smoking area with a cigarette and a beer, ending up on a forty-minute phone call. When he returned to the room at 1:41 a.m., his daughter was gone from the bed — he found her floating in the bathtub, pulled her out limp, and frantically tried to revive her, later telling police, "My daughter must've woken up and tried to wash up on her own, but she seems to have slipped."

A Bathtub Too Shallow to Drown In

It read as a tragic accident until police noticed a problem: the girl stood roughly 4'3" and weighed around 60 pounds, unusually large for her age, while the bathtub held only about 9.4 inches of water — roughly knee-deep. With Zhang's consent, an autopsy was performed, and the findings split examiners down the middle. Petechial hemorrhaging was found in her eyes, eyelids, and inside her mouth — a pattern typically caused by intense pressure on the neck or chest that bursts capillaries in thin-skinned areas.

One side argued the petechiae were simply the result of an hour of CPR pressing on her chest. The other countered that petechiae appearing in all three locations — eyes, eyelids, and mouth — normally requires full obstruction of the neck's blood vessels, and that by the time she reached the ER she was already in cardiac arrest with no circulation, meaning CPR alone couldn't explain bleeding of that extent. Investigators favoring the accident theory pointed to the absence of any defensive wounds on her neck; those favoring murder countered that a seven-year-old would have had almost no ability to resist an adult strangling her underwater regardless.

The Texts That Changed Everything

Because Zhang was the only person with the child in her final hours, investigators opened a formal inquiry — and found his phone records had been wiped. Digital forensics recovered them anyway, revealing constant text exchanges that day with his girlfriend, thirty-seven-year-old Wang, whom he'd moved in with two months after his divorce.

Wang had never accepted Zhang's devotion to his daughter, growing openly hostile toward the child and, after suffering two miscarriages, blaming the girl for her own misfortune — pressuring Zhang relentlessly to cut ties and once holding a knife to her own neck when he refused. Zhang broke up with her a month before the trip, but got back together after she attempted suicide following his departure for a trip with his daughter. On the night of the murder, the messages between them read nothing like an ordinary couple's conversation: Wang wrote that there were too many cameras outside, so it would be better to do it inside the room and disguise it as an accidental drowning since the child liked water — "The hotel has a bathtub, right?" — or alternatively to push her into the river during the cruise. Zhang replied that there was a bathtub, and if that didn't work he'd go with the river plan instead, since there were cameras in some spots but he could manage it before reaching the hotel, promising to "leave a like on your SNS" afterward. Four hours later, the child was found dead in the bathtub.

Two Trials, Two Verdicts

Police concluded Zhang had filled the tub, strangled his daughter until she lost consciousness, then deliberately stalled outside with a beer and a phone call to ensure she couldn't survive before staging his panic. Zhang insisted the messages were only him playing along to placate an emotionally unstable girlfriend, and notably, the hotel manager, paramedics, and even his ex-wife all described his reaction at the scene — breaking down the door in a panic, wailing and hitting the walls, inconsolable in the ambulance — as impossible to fake.

Because both Zhang and his daughter were Chinese citizens but the death occurred on Korean soil, the case was tried in a Korean court — complicated by Wang's refusal to travel to Korea or cooperate with the investigation. In May 2020, the first trial sided with the prosecution, treating the timing of the texts as too precise to be coincidence, and sentenced Zhang to 22 years. On appeal that December, the verdict was completely reversed: the court weighed photos of Zhang looking at his daughter with visible affection, the fact that he'd overridden his ex-wife's objections to authorize the autopsy despite the risk it could incriminate him, and other messages to Wang insisting his daughter would always be his priority — concluding the murder-plan texts were more likely him humoring a fragile girlfriend than a real confession. Unable to rule out an accidental death given the conflicting autopsy findings, the court acquitted him under the presumption of innocence, a decision the Supreme Court later upheld.

Final Thoughts

No new evidence or witnesses ever emerged in this case — only two courts reading the same autopsy results and the same text messages and reaching entirely opposite conclusions. Zhang returned to China a free man. Why the child went into the bathtub alone that night, and whether her death was a tragic coincidence or something else entirely, remains unresolved.