Tag: DNA

The top story in Korea that is headlining all its news outlets is the announcement that the Hwaseong Serial Killer has been identified after all these years:

Police may have solved one of the Korea’s most mysterious cold cases: the serial rapes and murders of nine women in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi, in the late 1980s.  

According to Ban Ki-soo, a chief investigator at the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency on Thursday, newly analyzed DNA evidence from three of the nine cases matched the DNA of a 56-year-old convict surnamed Lee currently serving a life sentence in Busan for a different murder he committed in 1994.  

This discovery could very well bring a resolution to one of the most notorious serial rape and murder sprees in Korean criminal history, which terrified Korea from 1986 to 1991 and remained unsolved for three decades.  

Yet the suspect, who was in his 20s at the time of the killings, can no longer be charged for any of those crimes since the statute of limitations for the last of the murders expired in April 2006. He has denied responsibility for all nine murders, police said.

Lee is serving a life sentence in the Busan Penitentiary for raping and murdering his wife’s sister, aged 20 at his home in Cheongju, North Chungcheong, in January 1994. According to press reports, he is a model prisoner with a taciturn personality who is eligible for parole.

A 10-victim rape and murder spree of the late 1980s and early 1990s terrified the nation — particularly due to the authorities’ inability to find a culprit — and was compared to the so-called Zodiac killings in California in the late 1960s. The killings gave rise to copycat crimes and inspired one of the most iconic blockbusters of Korean cinema, “Memories of Murder.” 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but here is a video report of the announcement from Arirang News:

The suspect could have likely been identified sooner if the investigators back when the crimes happened did not discard so much evidence such as cigarette butts found at the scene that would have much DNA evidence. Instead modern day forensic scientists using new technology were able to extract DNA from the victim’s clothes that were saved as evidence to make this DNA match.

For those that haven’t I highly recommend watching the Korean movie, Memories of Murder which uses a dramatized account of the investigation to show how incompetent it was and the killer’s impact on Korean society back then.

What I have not been able to find out is if the identified killer was even a suspect during the time of the killings? The police back then had many suspects that they were trying to pin the murder on, so it would be interesting to see if this guy was even on the police’s radar back then.

After reading this article I was surprised to learn that these companies that use your DNA to trace your ancestry release this information to outside groups for their own initiatives:

At 68, retired Army Capt. Walter Rettberg thought he was done having children. Then he decided to trace his family tree with a DNA-testing kit and found Matthew.

Matthew Suh was a baby in South Korea when he was adopted nearly 40 years ago by an American couple. He grew up longing to find his biological mother but never thought about searching for his father because it seemed an impossible task.

All he knew was that his father had been an American soldier serving in South Korea.

Enter 325 Kamra, a U.S. nonprofit that’s building a DNA database to help South Korean adoptees find their birth parents, including U.S. military veterans.

In many cases, troops rotating through the country didn’t know the women they had sex with became pregnant, so the group is offering free DNA kits to all vets and their descendants.

“So many of them have been stationed here for a long time,” said Maria Savage, director of the group’s South Korea operation that launched this year. “So if they remember any encounters that they had then that’s enough for us.”

The DNA will help even if the vets didn’t father children, because it might lead to another relative who did, she said.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link.