Episode 164:
Strangled Mistress and Buried in Parents' Grave Thinking She’d Never Be Found
At about 11:50 p.m. on November 17, 2019, police in Paju, South Korea, took a missing person report. The caller said her older sister had gone out the night before and had not come home. The sister was Yeon-ju Lee, 32. The two lived together, and Yeon-ju always said where she was going. On the evening of November 16 she had hurried out around 6:40, saying only that she was meeting a friend, and after that she answered no calls or texts.
Police traced her phone. Its last signal had come at about 9:40 p.m. on the 16th, near Tanhyeon Station in Ilsan, and it had not moved since. Officers found the phone there, crushed, as though someone had stamped on it. The names used in this account are pseudonyms.
The Phone at Tanhyeon Station
Forensic examiners recovered the phone's call and text records, but it was a new phone with only a month of history. Her sister handed over the old one, and on it police found recorded calls, including the threat to expose someone's secrets. The man on the other end was Jun-su Park, 43, and his was the number Yeon-ju had called several times a day up to the night she vanished. Park readily said he had seen her. They were former coworkers, he explained; she had worked in accounting and helped him, he had often driven her home in thanks, and he had kept doing so after leaving the company in December 2018. He said he dropped her at Tanhyeon Station at about 7:20 p.m. That left more than two hours before the phone's last signal, and the station's cameras showed neither Yeon-ju nor Park's car. Police widened the search to all of western Ilsan and found his car entering a building's parking garage five miles away at 7:14 p.m. On the footage the passenger door opened slightly and was pulled shut from inside. Park then got out, threw something on the ground and stamped on it.
The Fishing Trip
Shown the footage, Park said he must have been mistaken: they had been talking, so he pulled into the garage, and then he let her out on another street. Asked what he did afterward, he said he drove to Gapyeong for lure fishing, reached a spot near Cheongpyeong Dam around 9 p.m., fished alone for an hour and a half, and got home around 1 a.m. Detectives knew lures are little use in late November, when the water is cold and fish move deep. When they asked for his dashcam, he said it had broken and he had thrown it away, and that he had not used GPS because he knew the road. Road cameras showed he had gone to Gapyeong, but toward the mountains, the opposite direction from the dam. An hour and a half later his car came back out, stopped in front of a supermarket in Cheongpyeong, and he tossed something to the ground. On the morning of November 24, officers searching that spot found credit cards in Yeon-ju's name stuck in the dirt. Park stopped talking. Detectives had noticed that he spoke at length only about his son, so they asked him what kind of father he wanted the boy to remember: one who atoned, or one who lied. After a long silence he confessed.
The Family Burial Site
The two had been having an affair since August 2018. According to Park, Yeon-ju had begun pressing him to divorce his wife and had threatened to tell her everything. He refused, fearing he would lose custody of his son. On November 16 he picked her up at 6:45 p.m. and they argued all the way to Ilsan. He pulled into the garage to talk. When she said she was done and tried to get out, he pulled her back in, slapped her, and strangled her with both hands, less than thirty minutes after parking. He reclined the passenger seat to hide her and stamped on her phone, then threw it from the car near Tanhyeon Station on his way out of Ilsan. It stayed powered on for about two more hours. He drove to the mountain where his parents were buried, dragged her body up to the cemetery, removed her clothes because he had heard it would speed decomposition, and cut away her fingerprints with a small folding knife he carried for fishing. He dug a shallow grave with his hands, and on the way home threw out her cards.
Final Thoughts
Park had left the phone in Ilsan, the body in the hills of Gapyeong and the cards in Cheongpyeong, expecting that no one would connect the three. The broken phone connected them. Because it kept transmitting for two hours after he said he had dropped her off, police had a gap to explain, and the recorded call and the road cameras filled it in. At trial in February 2020 he maintained that he had killed in the heat of the moment. The court found the murder premeditated and sentenced him to life in prison. On appeal the court accepted that it had not been planned, took into account that he had no prior record, and reduced the sentence to 25 years. Park said he killed her to protect his family. His son now has a father in prison for murder.
The trial court found the murder premeditated and imposed a life sentence. The appeals court accepted that it happened in the heat of an argument, noted that he had no prior record, and reduced the sentence to 25 years. Given what he did in the hours afterward to keep her from being found or identified, which court got it right?
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YOU DECIDE.
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