A South Korean woman was handed down a life sentence for a murder that she committed “out of curiosity.”
Jung Yoo-Jung, 23, who lived with her grandfather and was unemployed before committing murder, was known as someone who avidly read true crime fiction and someone who regularly watched true crime TV shows, according to South Korean police.
Jung’s curiosity for “trying out a murder” would come to fruition whenever she would use an app to find her victim, murdering her at her home in May 2023.
With this app, Jung could pose as the mother of a student needing lessons in English. She would specifically search for someone who gave tuition from their house. In total, Jung contacted over 50 people when choosing her victim.
In May, she contacted her victim, a 26-year-old woman giving lessons from her house. The police have yet to disclose the victim’s identity.
She went on to arrange lessons with the 26-year-old woman, coming to her house dressed in a school uniform. After letting Jung in her house, she attacked the aforementioned woman. She stabbed her over 100 times with a knife and sustained this attack even after she had died.
After murdering the currently anonymous victim, she went on to dismember her body. Subsequently, Jung got a taxi ride to a remote parkland area in north Busan. This is where she would dump the victim’s dismembered remains.
Jung’s Later Arrest
The police would later catch Jung when the taxi driver reported a customer had dumped a blood-soaked suitcase in the woods.
After her arrest by Busan police, they released information on her search history. This included months of research on how to kill and how to dispose of a body. This coincides with the police belief that she had carefully planned this murder for months prior.
Her murder was also careless, according to police, as she took no notice of CCTV cameras that caught her coming in and leaving the 26-year-old’s home.
The Trial
Jung would plead that she suffered from hallucinations, leading her to murder her victim. However, the court that tried this case says that her story changed frequently and was inconsistent. She claimed that she moved the body after somebody else murdered the 26-year-old. Later she claimed that it was a crime of passion, murdering her victim after an argument.
The court would later say that Jung’s crime had been “carefully planned and carried out, and it is difficult to accept her claim of mental and physical disorder,” as BBC News reported.
The prosecution would ask later for the use of the death penalty in this case, something rarely conducted in South Korea. This was due to the brutality of this murder and the shock waves it sent across South Korea.
A life sentence was given to Jung on November 24th. The rationale was that Jung had spread fear that anyone could become a victim without any apparent reason and that she created an atmosphere of general distrust in her area.
