Episode 67:
A Father's Brutal & Sexual Act Against His 18-month-old Daughter..OMG

A woman rushes into an apartment, throws open the door, and screams: "Where did you take my daughter and granddaughter?" She's facing her son-in-law, Yang Jeong-sik.

Not long before, she'd come home to find him lying completely naked next to her one-year-old granddaughter. "What are you doing?!" She could never forget that scene — and it may have marked the beginning of a tragedy no one could have imagined.

Ms. Lee had always carried a heavy weight for her daughter, Jeong Mi-young — 25 years old, with a borderline intellectual disability that made social life difficult. Ms. Lee kept working through failing health to support her, and felt real pride the day Mi-young landed her own job at a delivery company.

A Relationship Built on Opposition

At that job, Mi-young met Yang Jeong-sik — a man with a long criminal record, raised amid parental abuse and divorce, who'd bounced between relatives' homes and grown into someone with deep resentment and a pattern of targeting women with intellectual disabilities specifically because they struggled to recognize abuse or resist it. He filmed non-consensual sex with past girlfriends to blackmail them into staying, and once cut up an ex's clothes with scissors and threatened to kill her for trying to leave — all in pursuit of the government subsidies these women received.

Ms. Lee opposed the relationship from day one. It deepened anyway, and Mi-young was pregnant within a month. Yang was soon imprisoned for fraud, leaving her alone; ashamed to tell her mother, she was sent by his relatives to a single-mothers' facility and gave birth alone, overwhelmed by the demands of a newborn until she finally broke down and called her mother for help. Ms. Lee brought her daughter and new granddaughter home — resentful of Yang, but immediately in love with the baby.

"Can't a Father Lie Next to His Own Daughter?"

When Yang was released from prison in December 2020, he simply moved back in. Furious but unwilling to sever the family tie, Ms. Lee resigned herself to treating him like a son, hoping fatherhood might change him. It didn't — he ignored the baby entirely, never using her name, until the day Ms. Lee stepped out briefly and returned to find him lying naked beside her granddaughter.

His shameless response chilled her. Not long after, she discovered he'd stolen his wife's phone to take out loans while unemployed; confronted, he stormed out — a relief, she thought, until two weeks later Mi-young took the baby and vanished to reunite with him in a rooftop room in Daejeon, cutting off contact with her mother entirely.

The Cooler in the Bathroom

Haunted by what she'd witnessed and unable to locate them, Ms. Lee eventually tracked down an acquaintance's address and burst into the rooftop room demanding answers. Mi-young appeared, unharmed — but the apartment was unnervingly quiet, and the eighteen-month-old was nowhere in sight. When Ms. Lee demanded to know where she was, Yang broke into tears and claimed they'd given her up for foster care — a response so out of character that Ms. Lee knew immediately it was a lie.

Searching the apartment, she found an out-of-place cooler in the bathroom. Inside, wrapped in plastic bags, was her granddaughter's body — decomposed enough after two months that bone was already exposed. Yang fled barefoot the moment Ms. Lee called police, going on to commit a string of thefts over three days before he was caught.

The Autopsy

He first claimed the death was accidental — that he'd lost his temper over her crying while drunk and stressed about money. The autopsy told a different story: every bone in the child's body was broken, bruising covered her from face to feet, and her knee bore a deep tear consistent with someone twisting and tearing her leg apart by hand. Genital injuries pointed to sexual assault. Yang failed repeated polygraph tests before finally admitting the truth.

The abuse had started at Ms. Lee's house and escalated after the family moved out on their own — first against his wife, then against the baby as she began learning to walk and talk, beaten every time she cried. On June 15th, Yang came home drunk, shook the sleeping child awake, and began beating her as she cried, closing the windows so no sound would escape and ordering his wife to bring him a metal insect-repellent canister to strike her with. Over the course of an hour, he broke her leg by hand, laughing as she convulsed, until she died of shock from the combined trauma. He then sent his wife to the bathroom and sexually assaulted the child's body before calling her back to help conceal it — ordering a cooler online to slow the decomposition, joking about whether to dump the body in the mountains, a river, or the ocean, and reportedly laughing as he checked on the decaying remains while swapping ice packs.

Final Thoughts

While Ms. Lee searched desperately for her missing daughter and granddaughter, Yang texted her a sexual proposition. His internet search history was later found to be filled with terms related to incest and rape — and it was that history the appellate court seized on, concluding he had deliberately moved the family away from Ms. Lee's home to isolate his daughter for the purpose of assaulting her.

The first trial, swayed in part by Yang's tearful courtroom apology, sentenced him to 30 years and his wife to 18 months for helping dispose of the body — a sentence that drew public outrage and over a thousand petitions demanding harsher punishment. Both defendants appealed. The appellate court reversed course, sentencing Yang Jeong-sik to life in prison and Mi-young to three years, recognizing what the lower court had missed: this wasn't a moment of lost temper, but two months of deliberate, escalating cruelty toward a child who never had a chance to defend herself.