Episode 89:
Text Message From a Man Who Had Been Dead for 2 Years

At 1 a.m. on July 18, 2016, a fifty-three-year-old man who worked at a law firm received a text message. His eyes widened as soon as he checked it.

"I ended up killing Ms. Yoo, a woman I work with, during an argument last night. The body is in a white Opirus at the Hwahongmun public parking lot. If you report this to the police, I'll turn myself in before the end of the month." The sender was a forty-two-year-old man named Park — someone who had completely vanished for the past two years, only to suddenly confess to murder in a text.

Shaken, the recipient couldn't sleep and reported the message to police the next morning. The details were specific enough that officers took it seriously and headed to the Hwahongmun public parking lot in Suwon, where they found the white Opirus exactly as described. Inside, a woman sat leaning back in the back seat, her face strangely covered in white wet wipes with a pair of glasses holding them in place.

A Confession That Didn't Add Up

Removing the wipes revealed a face turned deep purple, pinpoint hemorrhaging in the eyelids, and a thin cord mark around the neck — unmistakable signs of strangulation. Yet the car itself was wiped completely clean of prints, which struck investigators as strange: if the killer had already confessed by name, why go to such lengths to erase evidence? The victim, sixty-one-year-old Ms. Yoo, was identified quickly through an ID left in a handbag in the back seat — another detail that didn't fit a killer supposedly covering his tracks.

Park, the confessed killer, was nowhere to be found — no known address, no contact. Investigating his relationship with Yoo, police learned the two had once run a loan business together before expanding into an illegal horse racing track and gaming arcades, with a third man, sixty-year-old Kim, joining as an investor who'd handed over $90,000 to get in on the operation. When questioned, Kim acted surprised at the news of Yoo's death, then calmly explained the group's business dealings and claimed not to know where Park was.

The Man Who Stopped Existing

Tracing Park's activity turned up something odd: he'd stopped attending his regular physical therapy appointments in October 2014 and had no medical records anywhere since. His family said he'd fled abroad to escape business troubles and occasionally texted from China or Vietnam — but immigration records showed he hadn't left the country in two years. No one had spoken to him directly in all that time; every contact, even with his own family, came through text from a prepaid phone activated right after he supposedly went into hiding — the kind of phone that, at the time, could be registered without real ID verification, meaning anyone could have activated it in his name.

With Park looking less like a suspect and more like a possible victim, investigators turned back to the parking lot's security footage, which showed a masked figure with an umbrella entering around 12:48 a.m. on July 18 and disappearing into the dark after leaving the car. Reasoning that someone walking with an umbrella on a dry night would stand out, police expanded their search to nearby cameras and caught the same man later removing his mask and folding the umbrella once he felt safely away from the scene — revealing the face of Kim, Park and Yoo's former business partner.

A Man Who Had Killed Before

A background check on Kim turned up two prior convictions: five years for robbery and assault in his youth, and, more critically, a 2001 murder in which he strangled his wife unconscious in a car and set it on fire, killing her. Sentenced to life at trial, his conviction was reduced on appeal to twelve years after the killing was ruled accidental — he served his time and was released in May 2013, started a new business the following year, and was now connected to both a missing partner and a murdered one.

Kim was arrested four days after Yoo's murder and denied everything, but the evidence against him mounted quickly. The prepaid phone used for Park's "confession" text was linked to a bank account opened using a stolen identity — set up by Kim himself. Park's resident registration card turned up in Kim's house, and for two years, the phone location data for both men had been identical, because Kim had simply been carrying Park's prepaid phone everywhere with him. A final detail sealed it: Kim habitually typed texts without any spaces, and messages sent from "Park's" phone after October 2014 shared the exact same pattern.

The First Body

Under pressure, Kim confessed to the full story. He'd met Park and Yoo in 2013 through a prison acquaintance, and in 2014 invested roughly $92,000 — money he'd borrowed from four banks and private lenders — into their racetrack venture in exchange for what turned out to be worthless stock certificates. When profits never materialized, Yoo claimed she'd known nothing about his investment, and a legal scribe confirmed his stock documents were meaningless paper. Furious at what he now realized was a scam, Kim confronted Park at his home on the night of October 6, 2014, and the argument turned violent — Kim, in his sixties, was quickly overpowered by the much younger Park until he grabbed a nearby dumbbell, struck Park's foot, and then hit the back of his neck twice as he doubled over in pain, killing him.

To avoid being caught on camera carrying a body, Kim wrapped Park in a tent from the apartment, stole his car, and drove to a mountain in Hongcheon to bury him. He then spent two years impersonating Park through the stolen prepaid phone and a fake email account, telling friends and family he'd fled the country after his business collapsed — and, in a particularly cold twist, extorted money from Park's own family as compensation for a scam Kim himself had committed.

Final Thoughts

Kim's businesses thrived in the meantime, but trouble returned when Yoo — after Kim lent her $36,000 twice — began searching for the missing Park herself, growing suspicious when he wouldn't answer calls despite booming business. On July 17, 2016, Kim lured her to a restaurant and then a secluded spot in her own car, where he demanded repayment of the loan. When Yoo brushed him off and then admitted she'd known about the racetrack scam all along, mocking him for being used, Kim strangled her with a charging cable — his third killing.

He tried to frame the still-"missing" Park for the murder by staging the body in Park's abandoned car, and it was in that moment, glancing at Yoo's discolored face in the rearview mirror, that he covered it with a wet wipe and glasses simply so he wouldn't have to look at it. Investigators later concluded Kim's claimed motive — rage over being scammed — didn't fully explain either killing; both partners' shares in a suddenly profitable business may have given him reason enough to remove them outright. In December 2016, the court sentenced Kim to life imprisonment for both murders, a sentence upheld on appeal — meaning the man who served just twelve years for his first killing will very likely never be released again.