Episode 103:
[TrueCrime] K-pop Idol-like Man Smiling After Killing a High School Girl

"Sir... please, help me..." A seventeen-year-old girl was stabbed and left bleeding to death on the street. Gripping the knife tightly, the attacker fled down the street. Except he wasn't actually running away. He was looking for his next victim.

Meanwhile, the security camera captured the killer with a cold, chilling smile.

Late on the night of September 25, 2024, seventeen-year-old Minji Nam went out in Suncheon to get medicine for her ailing father. After finding the pharmacy out of stock, she called him to say she was heading back. She had recently passed her high school equivalency exam and was studying independently for the CSAT, with dreams of becoming a police officer.

"I Feel Like He's Going to Stab Me"

On her way home she ran into a neighborhood friend and stopped to talk, then realized it was already midnight and hurried on. Partway home, she felt certain a man was following closely behind her, and called a friend in a panic: "Hey, it's me... I think there's a guy following me. I'm so scared. I feel like he's going to stab me." Her friend, caught off guard, was still asking what she meant when a scream tore through the call, followed by Minji's weak voice: "Please... call the police. Right now."

A passing delivery driver named Kim saw a man and woman struggling across the street and was about to look away when he heard her scream. He rushed over; the man backed off and fled, a knife still in his hand. Minji, already stabbed and barely able to stand, her shirt soaked in blood, managed only "Sir... please, help me" before losing consciousness. Kim called police immediately. Paramedics performed emergency intubation and rushed her to a university hospital for advanced care, but she died at 5:40 a.m.

Caught on Camera, Smiling

Security footage from a nearby hospital parking lot captured the attack in full: at 12:47 a.m., the man stalks Minji from a few feet behind before suddenly closing the distance and stabbing her from behind, shoving her down and continuing to attack her chest, abdomen, and arms as she fought to survive. Ten minutes later, at 12:57 a.m., he reappears on camera — not fleeing the area, but walking through it barefoot, having apparently lost his shoes, with an unmistakably calm, faintly smiling expression.

He was identified as thirty-year-old Daeseong Park, owner of a nearby Korean braised chicken takeout restaurant. About fifty minutes before the murder, Park's older brother had called police, worried after Park told him over the phone that he wanted to die. Officers called Park directly — he refused help and hung up — then went to his restaurant in person around 12:18 a.m., where Park physically blocked them from entering and insisted he was fine. The moment they left, he called his brother back and snapped, "Why'd you call the cops? I had to scramble to hide the knife because of you, you son of a bitch." His brother, assuming he was just drunk and emotional, brushed off the word "knife" and told him to sleep it off.

Hunting for a Second Victim

Immediately after that call, Park grabbed a weapon and left, and within minutes began stalking and killing a total stranger. His night didn't end there. Barefoot, he walked into a nearby bar at 12:58 a.m. with the knife concealed under his shirt, ordered a beer, and told the sixty-something owner, "You know who I am, right? I came here because I knew you'd recognize me" — a claim the owner didn't understand. When the owner asked why he was barefoot, Park claimed he'd argued with his fiancée; advised to just go home, his expression suddenly darkened. Only the presence of a second customer in the bar likely kept him from attacking again before he abruptly left.

Still hunting, Park headed for a nearby karaoke bar — the only place still open — at 1:05 a.m., but turned back partway, self-conscious about being barefoot, walked roughly 460 feet home to change into sneakers, and then went back. Inside a private room, he ordered beer, requested a female escort, and bragged to the owner about his restaurant income and a friend recently released from prison for murder. When the escort arrived and grew visibly frightened by his extensive tattoos, she left within a minute; Park kicked the door and shouted, "I can kill people, too." The owner, sensing danger, left to "get snacks" — a decision that may have saved his life — and Park left without paying shortly after, apparently deterred by customers in the next room.

Caught by Accident

Park was ultimately caught almost by chance: at 1:57 a.m., about a mile from the crime scene, he approached a man parking his car, kicked the vehicle, and tried to start a fight, muttering incoherently. The man fought back and restrained him while calling police. When officers arrived, Park offered no resistance — "Yeah. Go ahead, take me" — and it was an officer noticing the tattoos covering his neck that confirmed he matched the murder suspect's description.

A Blackout Story That Fell Apart

Park showed no remorse in custody, smiling and joking during questioning and even in his mugshot. A psychological evaluation found strong antisocial tendencies and pronounced psychopathic traits, with a high likelihood of reoffending. His defense was that he'd blacked out after drinking four bottles of soju and remembered nothing — but the evidence contradicted him at every turn. Only two of the four soju bottles on his restaurant table were actually empty. At least five people who interacted with him across a 1.2-mile radius that night described him as drunk but fully capable of holding a conversation. Surveillance footage showed him hiding behind a parked car to avoid a passing police cruiser — clear awareness he was being hunted — and the murder weapon was found deliberately concealed under a parked car rather than dropped in a panic.

Park's history explained the pattern, if not the excuse. He grew up watching his father regularly beat his mother while drunk, and classmates described him bullying quiet, weaker students throughout middle school while cowering before anyone bigger than him — a pattern that continued into his military service, where he picked fights and served fifteen days of confinement for sexually assaulting a subordinate, and into adulthood, with a growing record of assault convictions. In 2024, after reconnecting with estranged family and receiving financial help from his father to open a delivery restaurant, things briefly improved — until his drinking and violence drove his girlfriend to leave him that June, and by August he'd stopped running the business entirely, sinking into debt, borrowing from loan sharks, and increasingly convinced the world had abandoned him. Ten days before the murder, a final attempt to reconnect with his ex was met with a cold reply telling him to collect his things and leave.

Final Thoughts

The night before the murder, Park drank alone and called his father and brother with talk of suicide — "I'll see you at my funeral" — prompting the welfare check that, once police left, he responded to not with despair but sudden, redirected rage at a stranger. Minji, walking home alone, became his target purely by proximity, stalked silently for ten minutes across nearly half a mile before he attacked.

At trial in January 2025, prosecutors charged Park with both murder and conspiracy to murder — the latter reflecting his armed search for a second victim at the bar and karaoke room after the killing — and sought the death penalty. The court, while adding the conspiracy charge in recognition of his intent to kill again, ultimately sentenced him to life in prison rather than death, judging his crime less methodically planned than other serial cases. Park appealed to the Supreme Court on grounds of diminished capacity and disputing the conspiracy charge; the appeal was dismissed, and his sentence stood. Minji's father has said the family will spend the rest of their lives grieving while the man who killed her lives at taxpayer expense — a wound, he said, that will never heal.