Episode 53:
"Stabbed 87 Times" Grandmother Found Dead After Unwanted Guests Came To Visit..

On July 17, 2012, an unprecedented murder shocked a small rural village in Yeoncheon County, Gyeonggi Province. Around 4 p.m., a man called 911: his 72-year-old mother, known as Woo, lay dead on the floor of a small room, her face and body covered in blood.

It was her youngest son who found her. He had been working nearby and stopped by after she failed to answer his calls. Rigor mortis suggested she had already been dead for at least 24 hours.

But could an awl alone kill? The autopsy revealed the answer, and it pointed to something far more disturbing than a simple robbery gone wrong.

The Awl and the Knife

The autopsy found that Woo had died from massive blood loss caused by stab wounds to her neck and side — inflicted with a knife. The attacker had first pierced her more than eighty times with an awl, then delivered the fatal blows with a blade.

Someone with a knife capable of a single fatal strike had instead chosen an awl to stab her over and over. That suggested the goal was not to kill quickly, but to inflict suffering — the mark of intense, personal resentment. And in such a remote village, an unnoticed outsider was almost impossible. The killer had to be close by.

The Granddaughter Who Vanished

Woo had been living with her 21-year-old granddaughter, Park A-Young, who had moved in about two weeks earlier after her own father collapsed from a heart attack. But on the day of the murder, A-Young was nowhere to be found.

When police called with news of the death, A-Young claimed she was in Pocheon for work and would come at once. She never arrived, and soon stopped picking up. Tracing her proved agonizingly slow: she used a prepaid phone, whose location could only be checked through a major carrier during business hours. By the time investigators got a fix, she had reached Seoul's largest bus terminal — and dumped the phone there to throw them off.

The Boyfriend and the Chase

The family revealed A-Young had not come alone. She had brought her 25-year-old boyfriend, Kim Do Myeong — jobless, a former gang member with a conviction for aggravated theft, who lived off the money she earned at an illegal karaoke bar and grew violent when drunk. Woo had openly despised him.

The couple fled to a motel in Pocheon, then vanished again — jumping from a second-floor window and abandoning Kim's phone. But police noticed something: even while on the run, Kim had spent a night at a PC room playing games. They asked the game company to flag his next login. A day later he logged in from Mokpo, a four-hour drive south, and detectives found him still glued to the screen. A-Young was arrested at a nearby karaoke bar.

The Order

The truth of that morning finally emerged. After a drunken fight in which Kim struck A-Young, Woo threw his belongings into the yard and told them both to get out — then insulted A-Young's estranged mother. Something in the granddaughter hardened. She picked up an awl from the living room, handed it to Kim, and said coldly, "Kill her... my grandmother."

As Woo screamed for A-Young to call the police, the granddaughter covered her ears and hummed to herself. When the awl wasn't enough, she fetched a kitchen knife. After Kim's blows, she re-entered the room and stabbed her grandmother's body twice more herself — then took $100 and Woo's cellphone before fleeing.

Final Thoughts

In November 2012, the court called it an unplanned, spontaneous murder and, citing the pair's remorse, handed down sentences lighter than prosecutors sought: 20 years for Park A-Young, 17 for Kim Do Myeong. Their appeals were rejected.

During the trial, A-Young sat with a blank expression, tears running down her face. But it was impossible to tell whether she wept for her grandmother — the woman who raised her from birth — or simply for her own ruined life.

A grandmother pleaded for help from the very granddaughter who had ordered her death, while that granddaughter hummed a tune to drown out the cries. Whether courtroom tears can ever answer for that is a question the sentence leaves painfully open.