In January 1994, something happened that seemed unrelated to the later film Memories of Killing.
Two men, one old and one young, reported the case to the police in Gyeonggi Province, South Korea, and the young man claimed that his wife's sister was missing. Suspecting that the missing person had been kidnapped, he demanded that the police immediately launch a large-scale search. The police left a note and let them leave. Preliminary investigations the man has divorced his wife, and it has been seen that he had contact with the missing person, the wife's sister, before the incident. A few days later, the police conducted a routine questioning of him, and he casually asked: "According to the criminal law, if it is rape and murder, how many years should be sentenced", which immediately aroused the vigilance of the police. At this time, no one knew the whereabouts of the missing person, how could he think of raping and killing people.
Lee Chun-jae
The man's name was Lee Chun-jae, born in 1963. The 2004 Korean classic crime movie Memories of Killing is based on him. Mr. Lee's arrest in 1994 was more of a blessing for him. The police found blood on his wife and sister in his bedroom, and after an investigation, Lee Chun-jae was convicted of killing his wife and sister, and the South Korean court sentenced him to death and then changed his sentence to life imprisonment, and after 20 years, he had the right to apply for parole. Since then, the 1986-1991 Hwaseong Special Ring Murder Case in South Korea has been buried by mistake. At that time, more than one police officer felt that Lee Chun-jae was similar to the portrait of the prisoner in the Hwaseong serial murder case. However, they do not believe that the serial killer can be such a thin young man, and they do not think that the criminals who spent 2.05 million police searches will be sent to the door by themselves. History shows that the number of criminals in vicious cases have escaped punishment because of the experience of the police and the emotional misunderstandings of the public, how can he be a pervert, how can he kill so many people?
The five-year Hwaseong serial killings, which broke south Korea's history of criminal investigations, killed at least 10 women, the youngest being 14 and the oldest being 71. The murderer's method of committing the crime was first to bind the victim with the victim's clothes, and then strangle the victim with his bare hands or cloth, and the case-handling personnel found peach pits and other foreign bodies from the victim's body. Almost every South Korean police officer was directly or indirectly involved in the investigation of this case, and the number of suspects investigated reached 21,000, comparing fingerprints to 40,000.
The movie "Memories of Killing" basically restores the ins and outs of the case, but deliberately downplays the eighth case: in 1989, Li Chunzai killed a 14-year-old girl, but this time he did not adopt his usual modus operandi. Police found a man's hair at the scene of the crime, which belonged to a 22-year-old young man named Yoon Young-taek, who desperately cried out for injustice but to no avail, and a South Korean court eventually sentenced him to life in prison. After 19 years, Yoon Young-taek was released on parole, claiming to have been tortured to extract a confession before being forced to confess guilt.
Movie "Memories of Killing"
In September 2019, a DNA report unveiled the three-decade-old crime, with DNA extracted from the underwear of the three victims that year matching Lee Chun-jae. The eyes of the South Korean media immediately focused on this 56-year-old man, who was born in an ordinary Authoritarian family in South Korea in the 1960s, has been introverted since childhood, has become more lively since he joined the army, likes to chase competitions in tanks like other young soldiers, and his life is as bland as his appearance. After retiring from the army, he joined the construction company, married according to the rules, and had a child, and two years later, because of the divorce from his wife, his motive for killing his wife and sister was understood by the prosecutor as revenge on his ex-wife, but no one cared about the reason why his wife left him.
Lee Chun-jae is not a high-IQ and high-physical criminal imagined by the public, and in the files of the South Korean police department, there are records of his arrest in 1989, and one night on September 26 of that year, Lee Chun-jae broke into a family home in an attempt to commit a crime, but was quickly subdued by the owner. The Suwon District Court sentenced him to one and a half years in prison for attempted burglary. Lee Chun-jae appealed that he had been beaten before escaping into the family, and the court actually believed his words and eventually commuted his sentence to two years of probation. Mr. Lee had just created a homicide two weeks before the case.
In 1991, Lee Chun-jae's crime came to an abrupt end, which is certainly the reason for his family, and in December 1993, his wife left him, and the battered Lee Chun-jae sprouted, and a month later he brutally killed his wife and sister and imprisoned him. In 2019, when the police presented the DNA evidence of the Hwaseong serial murder case in front of Li Chunzai, he flatly denied it for the first time, but his lying skills were not as superb as imagined, and it was difficult to justify himself in the face of police problems. Not only did he admit 10 known homicides, but he also confessed to 5 headless cases, and to the surprise of the police, he confessed to at least 30 unknown rapes.
The scene of the crime of that year
The arrest of the real perpetrator of the Hwaseong serial murder case did not bring applause to the South Korean police, on the contrary, the public questioned the police's ability to handle cases and work style, believing that Lee Chun-jae has always stood in front of the police, who extracted his DNA 25 years ago, but did not compare it until 2019. In addition, in the 5 murder cases that Li Chunzai recently confessed, it is very likely that the modus operandi and the place of murder in one case are almost the same, but the police have not merged the case for a long time. What is even more unacceptable to the Korean public is that the prosecution period for the Hwaseong serial murder case has passed (although the law was completely repealed in 2015, the case will still be implemented according to the old regulations), which means that even if Lee Chun-jae confesses, the law cannot give him any corresponding punishment. The only slightly reassuring thing is that Lee Chun-jae will continue to spend the rest of his life in Busan Prison and will not have the opportunity to parole again.
The reporters interviewed the managers of Busan Prison, and the answer they got was once again unexpected, Lee Chun-jae is a "model prisoner" here, he treats people kindly, respects the new prisoners, and the prisoners have a good evaluation of him. In the October 2019 feature program "We Want to Know" produced by SBS in South Korea, Lee Chun-jae's high school classmates recalled that he was almost an "invisible man" and has now forgotten his voice. Li Chunzai's former neighbors, comrades-in-arms, and colleagues almost unanimously expressed disbelief: "We Chunzai are a quiet person."
Resources:
"We Want to Know" South Korean SBS
True Crime True Crime Special Issue