Episode 166:
Obsessed with Women, He Used Fake Psychic to Control and Murder His Girlfriend
On May 20, 2022, a woman filed a missing person report at Deokjin Police Station in Jeonju, South Korea. Her older sister, 44-year-old Jinjoo Kim, had been out of touch for two days. For seven years before that, Jinjoo had cut off her family entirely. They saw her again only in November 2021, at their mother's funeral, and barely recognized her. Her face had changed through plastic surgery, and she was covered in tattoos.
She had brought a man none of them had met: her boyfriend, Youngsoo Jin, also 44, with whom she had been living for almost three years. He was heavily tattooed but kind. He looked after the grieving family, organized gatherings and trips afterward, and brought the sisters close again. Jinjoo's younger sister started calling him her brother-in-law.
The Brother-in-Law
A few days before Jinjoo vanished, her younger sister received a text from a shaman she had grown close to, warning that her brother-in-law should be careful with his money. When she asked him about it, he was puzzled and said he had only about $220 and that Jinjoo handled the money. When she called Jinjoo, her sister suggested they take all of his money and run away together. Then, after Jinjoo disappeared, Jin told the sister that Jinjoo had run off with another man and $3 million in cash. When she questioned how anyone could carry that much, he said it was $2.6 million plus a $400,000 illegal loan, then that he had exaggerated and it was $600,000. She texted Jinjoo and got a strange reply: "I'm the one who betrayed him so please don't call the police on me. And to be honest you're a much better match for him than I ever was." Jinjoo did not answer her calls. Jin asked the family to wait and not go to the police. They went anyway.
The Suitcase
Security footage from May 18, the last day Jinjoo contacted her family, showed her leaving home that morning with Jin and buying a large 28-inch suitcase. That evening only Jin came back. On the phone with police he flew into a rage about the woman who had run off with his $75,000 and said he wanted to find her and kill her. The day before she vanished, her car had been sold, and the seller was Jin. Officers went to his home and found him sitting in his car in the parking lot. One got into the passenger seat and asked why his figures kept changing; Jin said he had mixed them up. Another officer quietly dialed Jinjoo's number, and a phone rang in the back seat. Jin said she had asked him to pose as her and text her family until the following March. Pressed, he confessed and told them where she was. In an abandoned house in Samnye-eup, Wanju County, behind a padlocked door, they found camping and fishing gear piled in a corner, and behind it the suitcase, with liquid seeping from beneath it. Inside, wrapped in a blanket, was Jinjoo's body, curled tightly, with handprints on her neck. The autopsy found the sleeping drug zolpidem. Jin said they had argued over her spending and her plan for jaw surgery and that he had strangled her in a rage. But he had sold her car the day before, filled a new prescription for the sleeping pills the day before, and bought the suitcase with her that morning.
General Bodhisattva
Jinjoo's phone showed two people she had texted for years without ever meeting: Yoon, an old friend of Jin's who praised him constantly, and a shaman Yoon had introduced called General Bodhisattva. The shaman knew all about Jinjoo's family and Jin's money. She predicted Jin's mother would die soon, and days later Jin said his mother had died and rushed out. Jinjoo came to treat the shaman as divine. The shaman told her Jin was destined to walk the path of the Buddha and that she would be the queen who helped him, then warned that he would suffer and might die unless she changed her fate by covering her body in tattoos and having plastic surgery. When she hesitated, Jin fell ill and lay in bed crying out in pain, the shaman called to blame her, and Yoon texted that someone who had ignored the shaman had been hit by a truck. She got the tattoos and the surgery, and Jin recovered at once. After that the shaman dictated what she wore, what she ate, when she slept and when she had sex with Jin. On May 16 the shaman told her to change her phone number, find a house, and buy the biggest, cheapest suitcase she could, because a great fortune would go inside it. That day a house was rented in Jin's name for a $370 deposit and $150 a month. Both phone numbers were registered to a woman who had never heard of Jinjoo. She had lent her name to an ex-boyfriend for a phone line. The ex-boyfriend was Youngsoo Jin. Yoon and General Bodhisattva had both been Jin himself.
Final Thoughts
Jin had a record: eight months in prison for statutory rape and two and a half years for aggravated robbery. He owned a tattoo parlor, and through the persona he had remade Jinjoo's face and body to suit himself. At the funeral he had become fixated on her younger sister, and in March 2022 he gave the sister the shaman's number. On the day of the murder the shaman began telling the sister that Jinjoo had been punished for betraying her and that she should stay close to her brother-in-law and be intimate with him. On May 18, back at the house around 12:30 p.m., Jin gave Jinjoo a vitamin drink laced with five sleeping pills. When she fell asleep, he strangled her for fifteen minutes. Over the next days he texted the sister as both the heartbroken brother-in-law and the shaman, and asked employees at his tattoo shop to help him dig a hole for what he said was a septic tank. He was caught within four days. Other women came forward who had been manipulated the same way since 2019. In September 2022 the trial court called the crime extremely atrocious and sentenced him to life in prison. In February 2023 the appeals court reduced it to 35 years, citing his cooperation with investigators and a low psychopathy score, and the Supreme Court upheld that sentence. Jinjoo's younger sister later attempted to take her own life and has needed long-term psychological treatment.
Youngsoo Jin controlled his girlfriend for two years through invented people she never met, and the appeals court cut his life sentence to 35 years partly because he scored low on a psychopathy test. Should a low psychopathy score count toward leniency when the crime itself depended on such sustained manipulation?
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YOU DECIDE.
Our interpretation is only one possible perspective.
