38
submitted 2 years ago by happybadger@hexbear.net to c/news@hexbear.net

A South Korean court has given a life sentence to a true crime fan who told police she murdered a stranger "out of curiosity".

Jung Yoo-jung, 23, had been obsessed with crime shows and novels and scored highly on psychopath tests, police said.

Fixated with the idea of "trying out a murder", she used an app to meet an English-language teacher, stabbing her to death at her home in May.

The brutal killing shocked South Korea.

Prosecutors had asked for the death penalty - a request typically reserved for the gravest of offences.

They told the court that Jung, an unemployed loner who lived with her grandfather, had looked for victims for months, using an online tutoring app to find a target.

She contacted more than 50 people and favoured women, asking them if they conducted their lessons at home.

In May, posing as the mother of a high school student who needed English lessons, she contacted the 26-year-old victim, who lived in the south-eastern city of Busan. Her identity has not been disclosed by police.

Jung then showed up at the tutor's house dressed in a school uniform she had bought online, prosecutors said.

After the teacher let her in, she attacked the woman, stabbing her more than 100 times - continuing the frenzied attack even after the victim had died.

She then dismembered the woman's body and took a taxi ride to dump some of the remains in remote parkland near a river, north of Busan.

She was arrested after the taxi driver tipped off police about a customer who had dumped a blood-soaked suitcase in the woods.

Police said Jung's online browsing history showed she had researched for months on how to kill, and how to get rid of a body.

But she was also careless, police said, and took no effort to avoid CCTV cameras, which captured her entering and leaving the tutor's home several times.

On Friday, a sentencing judge in the Busan District Court said the killing had "spread fear in society that one can become a victim for no reason" and "incited a general distrust" among the community.

Jung, who confessed to the crime in June, pleaded for a more lenient sentence, saying she had suffered hallucinations and other mental disorders at the time.

But the court rejected her argument as the crime had been "carefully planned and carried out, and it is difficult to accept her claim of mental and physical disorder".

They noted that her statements to police had frequently changed. Initially Jung said she had only moved the body after someone else killed the woman, then later claimed that the killing had occurred as a result of an argument.

In the end, she confessed that her interest in committing a murder had been piqued by crime shows and TV programmes. While South Korea retains the death penalty, it has not carried out an execution since 1997.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
38 points (100.0% liked)

news

24519 readers
695 users here now

Welcome to c/news! We aim to foster a book-club type environment for discussion and critical analysis of the news. Our policy objectives are:

We ask community members to appreciate the uncertainty inherent in critical analysis of current events, the need to constantly learn, and take part in the community with humility. None of us are the One True Leftist, not even you, the reader.

Newcomm and Newsmega Rules:

The Hexbear Code of Conduct and Terms of Service apply here.

  1. Link titles: Please use informative link titles. Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed.

  2. Content warnings: Posts on the newscomm and top-level replies on the newsmega should use content warnings appropriately. Please be thoughtful about wording and triggers when describing awful things in post titles.

  3. Fake news: No fake news posts ever, including April 1st. Deliberate fake news posting is a bannable offense. If you mistakenly post fake news the mod team may ask you to delete/modify the post or we may delete it ourselves.

  4. Link sources: All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. If you are citing a Twitter post as news, please include the Xcancel.com (or another Nitter instance) or at least strip out identifier information from the twitter link. There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance, such as Libredirect or archive them as you would any other reactionary source.

  5. Archive sites: We highly encourage use of non-paywalled archive sites (i.e. archive.is, web.archive.org, ghostarchive.org) so that links are widely accessible to the community and so that reactionary sources don’t derive data/ad revenue from Hexbear users. If you see a link without an archive link, please archive it yourself and add it to the thread, ask the OP to fix it, or report to mods. Including text of articles in threads is welcome.

  6. Low effort material: Avoid memes/jokes/shitposts in newscomm posts and top-level replies to the newsmega. This kind of content is OK in post replies and in newsmega sub-threads. We encourage the community to balance their contribution of low effort material with effort posts, links to real news/analysis, and meaningful engagement with material posted in the community.

  7. American politics: Discussion and effort posts on the (potential) material impacts of American electoral politics is welcome, but the never-ending circus of American Politics© Brought to You by Mountain Dew™ is not welcome. This refers to polling, pundit reactions, electoral horse races, rumors of who might run, etc.

  8. Electoralism: Please try to avoid struggle sessions about the value of voting/taking part in the electoral system in the West. c/electoralism is right over there.

  9. AI Slop: Don't post AI generated content. Posts about AI race/chip wars/data centers are fine.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS