A crazed true crime enthusiast from South Korea who told police he stabbed and killed an English tutor “out of curiosity” — while pretending to be a high school student — has been sentenced to life in prison.
Prosecutors sought the death penalty for Jung Yoo-jung, 23, but she pleaded with the court for leniency, claiming she suffers from hallucinations and various mental health problems, BBC News reported.
The Busan District Court spared Jung’s life, but rejected his claim that the gruesome killing was triggered by mental illness, as the crime had been “carefully planned and executed,” Judge Kim Tae-eob said.
Jung was convicted of murder, defamation and abandonment of a corpse, five months after he was accused of brutally murdering and dismembering a 26-year-old woman he met through an app in May.
Prosecutors argued that Jung was obsessed with television shows and true crime books, and decided to kill someone in real life to satisfy his curiosity about murder.
South Korean true crime fan Jung Yoo-jung, 23, has been sentenced to life in prison for brutal murder. Busan Metropolitan Police Agency
The convicted killer, described as an unemployed man who lives with his grandfather, had been using his mobile phone and checking books from the library to research how to hide the body, Busan police said.
Jung spent months searching for potential victims through an app that connects parents to tutors, and contacted more than 50 people — mostly women — before finding one who lived alone and offered home lessons.
Posing as the mother of a ninth-grader who needed help with English, Jung arranged for her fake daughter to come to the tutor’s house for a study session.
He then put on a school uniform he bought online, went to the unsuspecting woman’s address and stabbed her to death more than 100 times in a frenzy, striking even after the victim had died, officials said, as reported by Korea’s JoonAng Daily.
Jung stabbed an innocent tutor more than 100 times, dismembered his body and dumped the body in a suitcase — seen in screenshots from CCTV video.
Jung left the slain tutor’s house to buy trash bags and bleach before returning to mutilate the body, including cutting off his fingers in an attempt to make it harder to identify him by his fingerprints.
The 23-year-old then stuffed the remains into a suitcase and took a taxi to Sungai Nakdong, where he disposed of the gruesome evidence in a remote park.
“To see the victim disappear, Jung kept the victim’s cell phone, ID card and wallet, trying to commit the perfect crime,” police said.
But Jung’s plan unravels when the taxi driver becomes suspicious and calls the police about his passenger who is said to have dumped a blood-stained suitcase in a secluded area by the river.
Jung pleaded for leniency, claiming that he had been experiencing hallucinations and mental health disorders. KBS
After Jung was arrested, he initially told police that he had only moved the victim’s body after he had been killed by someone else.
Later, he claimed that he had accidentally killed the tutor during an argument.
Eventually, he confessed to the brutal murder, blaming his interest in the true crime genre.
On Friday, the judge who sentenced Jung said the killing had “spread fear in society that someone can be a victim without reason” and “raised public distrust.”
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
