South Korean woman obsessed with crime dramas stabs and dismembers victim 'out of curiosity'
A woman in South Korea obsessed with books and TV shows about murder had hatched a plot to kill and dismember a victim found online "out of curiosity" of taking a life herself, authorities said.
In a "ghastly" murder, the 23-year-old woman also mutilated the victim's dead body to remove fingers to avoid police tracking the trail and continued to stab the victim even after she died, Korean police said on Tuesday.
Jung Yoo-jeong then took a taxi from the crime scene and dumped parts of the body, in a suitcase, in a wooded area.
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"It would have been highly likely for her to become a serial killer if let loose," police administration professor and criminology expert Lee Sang-hoon at Kyungsang University in Busan told This Week in Asia.
"It's quite rare for a woman to murder another woman who had nothing to do with her, in such a ghastly manner," he said.
Jung had scored high points in psychoanalysis tests conducted by the police after her arrest, which were results similar to the country's most infamous serial killers, investigators said.
After her arrest, Jung gave contrasting statements about why she killed the victim, saying she suffered from hallucinations.
"Even after I killed her, [the victim] came back to life and started talking to me," Jung told investigators who called for a mental health examination.
After she was arrested on May 27, Jung initially said she had only abandoned the body after the victim was killed by someone else.
She later changed her statement, saying she accidentally killed her in a fit of anger during an argument. On May 31, she changed her statement again and said she wanted to "give murder a try" after novels and TV programmes on the topic "piqued her interest".
The young woman, who was unemployed and lived with her grandfather in Busan, had been preparing for the murder for about three months, reading related content and searching for terms such as "murder without a corpse" on the internet.
She used a mobile app that connected parents with private tutors and contacted the victim by posing as the mother of a ninth-grader who wanted to learn English.
Jung contacted over 50 tutors, asked if they were women living alone and if they offered private lessons at their homes.
Jung then showed up at the victim's house dressed as a student in a school uniform she bought online. When the victim let her in, she butchered her with a knife, police said.
She left the crime scene to buy trash bags and bleach before returning to dismember the victim. It was past midnight when she put some body parts in a suitcase and took a taxi to a wooded area near the Nakdong River where she dumped the remains, police said.
She was caught on South Korea's public security cameras that showed her wearing a face mask and carrying a wheeled suitcase, walking back to the murder scene to dispose of the body.
The taxi driver also filed a police report when he noticed her suitcase leaking blood.
"After helping to unload the suitcase, my hand was soiled by some sticky liquid. After returning to my driver's seat, I found it to be blood," the driver said to the police. He remained unidentified and later quit his job due to post-traumatic stress from the episode.
Autopsy results showed 111 stabbing wounds on the victim.
"There were several wounds on the palm. The suspect must have nicked the palm repeatedly with the knife's ends as the victim [was already dead and] didn't resist", said Lee Jung-bin, a forensics expert who examined the victim.
Jung was reportedly raised by her grandfather after her mother left her when she was a year old and her father left her when she was six.
She failed to find employment for five years after she graduated from high school, attributing it to her poor command of English, although a store manager who interviewed her said it was impossible to converse with her as she kept silent throughout the job interview.
"Even monstrous criminals tend to be at a loss and fearful when they kill someone, but that's not what we see here," said Lee Soo-jeong, a professor of criminal psychology at Kyonggi University.
"It's a very unique scene that leads us to assume some kind of personality disorder," she added.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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