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November 1977, inside Sold Detention Center in South Korea, a condemned man was waiting to be executed. With death only hours away, he insisted right up to the very end that he was innocent. He wasn't a murderer.
True crime look at the 1975 Seoul murder of Sukja by her partner Pyuk, who dismembered and disposed of her remains. Details his arrest, confession and execution.
Key Takeaways
- Pyuk's calculated concealment of the crime made recovery of the remains extremely difficult.
- Chance tips and a small number of witnesses (his own children) were crucial to solving the case.
- Pyuk's history of sexual violence and controlling behavior signaled the danger Sukja faced.
- Despite his protests, the courts and public firmly rejected his claims of innocence and mitigation.
What the video covers
- In June 1975, a tip about a suspicious man at a Seoul garbage dump led police to human bones that had been cut with a saw.
- Sukja, a 43-year-old dress shop owner, had been reported missing by her 23-year-old daughter; forensic analysis confirmed the bones were hers.
- Her partner Pyuk, an unemployed, educated man with a history of sexual offenses, was the prime suspect.
- Pyuk's four children described hearing an argument, a foul smell, and his obsessive scrubbing of the house.
- Pyuk was arrested, initially defiant, then confessed and asked to avoid the death penalty.
- He had dismembered the body, burned remains with briquettes, and disposed of the ash at garbage dumps, leaving little evidence.
- A reenactment drew about 50 angry residents; he later requested a psychiatric evaluation, which was rejected.
- He was executed in November 1977 while insisting he was not a murderer and asking that his children be told so.
Chapters
- 00:00Condemned Man's Final Plea
- 01:09Suspicious Tip at the Garbage Dump
- 02:02Missing Woman and Bone Discovery
- 02:58Forensic Confirmation and Children's Testimony
- 03:52Arrest, Interrogation and Confession
- 04:58Pyuk's Background and Relationship with Sukja
- 06:05The Killing and Disposal of the Body
- 08:00Reenactment, Trial and Execution
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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He said all he'd done was hitting her and she died. He didn't deserve to hang for that. And he had one last request.
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He wanted someone to pass a message along to his children. Your father is not a murderer. His pleas fell on deaf ears. And after his execution, not one person mourned him. So what exactly did this man do? What could he have done
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that he would make an entire country turn its back on his final plea? This is the murder of Isizukja, one of the most brutal crimes in the history of Korean criminal justice.
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And it was around 9:00 at night one evening in June of 1975. A tip came into a police station in Zol Chungu district. They reported a man who was hanging around the neighborhood garbage dump. Something about it just
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felt wrong. and then he dumped a large, carefully wrapped object and walked away. The caller said the whole thing gave him a bad feeling. But the officer who took the tip didn't think much of it. Somebody threw out some trash.
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That's what garbage dumps are for. There was no follow-up. No one even went out to look. Nobody could have known at that moment that this small decision was going to haunt them. Two days went by, then a missing person's report came into
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the same station. The missing woman was 43 years old, and her name was Isizukta.
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The person filing the report was her 23-year-old daughter who said she hadn't been able to reach her mother in 3 days.
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Her mother ran a dress shop, and she was diligent. She never missed work. Now, she hadn't shown up in days. Her daughter was scared. Then by pure coincidence, another report came in that same day. This one was from a sanitation
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worker. He'd been collecting garbage and he'd found pieces of bone he thought might be human. That was the moment the scattered pieces started coming together. Only now did somebody remember that phone call from 2 days earlier. A suspicious man loitering at a garbage
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dump. A woman missing. And now what could be human bones. The police connected the dots. They went to collect the bones and the first thing they had to establish was whether these bones were even human or whether they came
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from an animal. So the police sent the bones to the National Forensic Service. The initial results came back and it was devastating. The bones were human and they had been cut with a saw. The police immediately thought of one person,
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Sukja, the woman who had been reported missing. Could these remains be hers? Butbit didn't make sense. She hadn't been missing that long, and the remains they had were sauna pieces of bone. So, the police went back to the daughter for
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more. The daughter had not been living with her mother, but she knew exactly who she believed was responsible for the disappearance. Her mother's living partner, a 47year-old man named Epaluk.
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She told the police she found him deeply suspicious. He had a temper and he'd put his hands on her mother more than once.
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6 days after the missing person's report came in, the police decided they'd waited long enough. They brought in everyone in Sukja's life for questioning. And that included Pyuk's four children.
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And it was right there in that police station that the truth started to come out. The four kids were asked what they'd seen and heard, and nobody was prepared for the answer. Sitting in front of the police, the four children
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started unpacking their memories of that night. One child spoke first. Early in the morning on the 20th, they'd heard their father and Sukja fighting, but it didn't last long. Things went quiet and the child fell back asleep. Well, up to
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that point, it sounded like an ordinary domestic argument. The problem was the next morning. When the children woke up, the house rire. There was a truly foul smell filling the whole place. So, they asked their father what it was. Pyuk
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told them there was a bug infestation and he needed to clean. And then he started obsessively scrubbing the entire house from top to bottom. Another one of the children remembered the smell more specifically. It was two things mixed
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together, they said. Something burning and the smell of a butcher shop. Burning and the smell of raw meat inside an ordinary family home. It was suspicious.
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But then the full forensic analysis came back from the National Forensic Service. They determined that the bones belong to Sukjan. With the children's testimony and the National Forensic Services determination, everything pointed at one man Pog.
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On June 28th, 6 days after the missing person's report and more than a week after Sukja died, police arrested Pyog at home and they started the interrogation. But his behavior during questioning was not what anyone expected.
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He was defiant, confident even, and he'd glared at the detectives and lose his temper, insisting he was being railroaded. He was acting like he'd done absolutely nothing wrong. But testimony and evidence kept stacking up, and eventually the lies stopped working.
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Under sustained pressure, Pyuk finally confessed he had killed her. He insisted that he still loved her. And then he asked whether he might be able to avoid the death penalty. That those words came out of his mouth was almost impossible
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to believe. The investigators were determined to find evidence to back up the confession. At that point, they only had fragments of her bones. Where was the rest of her body? Officers were sent to the nearby landfill sites to comb
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through them, but they came up with almost nothing. There were two reasons for that. First, it had already been over a week since the killing. And the second reason was that Pyuk had disposed of her remains so well that there was
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almost nothing left to find. But before we get to what he did, we need to know more about the person he was. Pyuk was born in 1928 in Yong Chun, North Kong Province. His childhood was tough. He'd lost his parents early, but even in
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those circumstances, Pigle was a serious student. He worked hard from a young age and it paid off. He earned a graduate degree which in that era in Korea made him extraordinarily well educated and in 1958 he married and the couple went on
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to have four children together. So from the outside he looked like an ordinary family man educated, married, kids at home. Then at some point it all started to slip. In 1969, 11 years into the marriage, his wife died suddenly. The cause was never
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clear. And after that, Pyuk's life began coming apart. He drifted. He couldn't hold down a job. Then in 1972, 3 years after his wife's death, something happened that changed the picture entirely.
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Py was criminally charged with raping the housekeeper who worked in his home. And that was only the start. There are records of him being reported twice more for sexual offenses against housekeepers.
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The diligent, educated man had become a sexual predator. He was unemployed, living permanently in the margins. And then he met Sukja. At that time, Asukja was running a tea room and a dress shop in downtown Soul. She was capable and
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she worked hard. Pyuk started coming into the T-room as a regular and the two of them got closer. Sukja had divorced by mutual agreement 7 years before she met him and in September of 1973, Sukja and Pyuk got a place together in
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Chungnu district. The arrangement had a problem from day one. Even after they became a couple, Pyuk stayed unemployed.
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He had some sparse regular income, which meant that though he wasn't entirely destitute, the household ran mainly on her. Her money paid for both of them.
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And it wasn't just the two of them. Paguk had brought his four children with him. So Sukja was feeding and supporting four kids who weren't hers on top of everything else. Six people, all of it on her alone.
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No matter how much love is there, that tends to grind a person down. And the resentment started building. Why won't you get a job? Why are you just sitting around? She grew more and more fed up with a man who had no real job and lift
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off her. The fights got more frequent. She was killing herself, working every day to keep the lights on, and he was barely lifting a finger. Eventually, Sukta made a decision. She was done.
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Sukcha had made up her mind to end the relationship, and Pyuk knew it. So, he did something she wouldn't discover until it was too late. He forged her seal and filed a marriage registration behind her back. On paper, without her
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knowledge or consent, the two of them were now legally married, which meant her dress shop and her t-room had a claim on them that hadn't been there before. When she found out what he'd done, it didn't convince her to stay. It
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did the opposite. She was enraged and moved to end the relationship faster than she had planned. That was the situation on the night of June 19th.
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They came back to the house late and Sukja began gathering her things, her belongings, her jewelry, and Pigle made his demand, signed the dress shop over to him. After everything, he was still asking her to hand over what she'd
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built. She refused flatly. The whole idea was absurd. Why on earth would she do that? The argument escalated into a physical fight. Pyle would later lie about this moment. He claimed that during the scuffle, he'd given her a
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light shove. She fell and then she died. The investigation established that he had strangled her to death. But the greater horror was in what he did after he carried her body into the bathroom.
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So Pac had once run a butcher stall at a market. He had experience with slaughtering animals. And so from 1 in the morning until 6:00, he used that knowledge to dismember her using a knife and a saw. He disposed of her remains in
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several different ways. Each method as horrific as the one preceding it. He burned some of her skin and hair. He cut her flesh into dozens of pieces and pushed them down the drain. Andy finally chopped her eyes and her internal organs
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until they could be disposed of through the drain as well. But he realized that he couldn't fit a whole body in there.
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And so he packed the muscle and remaining flesh into a kimchi jar, burying it under the red fleck kimchi.
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Then he was left with the bones. Undeterred, he sawed them into smaller parts and used a dumbbell to turn them into powder. He mixed the powder with briquette ash and washed some of it down the drain. The rest he put in a bag and
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wrapped in a cement sack. So, he had taken a human being apart and flushed it away piece by piece until there was virtually nothing left to find. And to make it worse, he did all of this while his children were sleeping in the same
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home. When the sun came up, he sprayed disinfectant through the entire house to kill the smell. That night, he took the bone and briquette ash mixture and carried it about 2/3 of a mile from the house to a garbage dump. The tip nobody
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followed up on was Pyuk trying to cover up his horrific crime. The following morning before dawn, he took what he stored in the kimchi jar and dumped that at a different garbage site. He had covered his tracks so thoroughly that
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even with the confession in hand, police could barely produce any physical evidence. The bathroom had been cleaned spotless. The police refused to give up.
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They pulled up the bathroom tile. They tore out the drain. And after tearing the room apart, they recovered only a few small pieces of her remains. The fact that one man had erased his own crime this meticulously was for the
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investigators its own kind of horror. A week after his arrest, police brought him back to the scene for the reenactment. Around 50 neighborhood residents showed up to watch. They screamed at him, called him an animal, and shook with rage as he walked through
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what he'd done. But through all of it, Pyuk's expression never changed. From the strangling to the disposal of the body, he reenacted every step of it calmly, as if he were performing something that had happened to somebody else. The case went to trial, and the
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Soul Criminal District Court convicted Pygook of murder and desecration of a corpse. He was sentenced to death. The court found that while the killing itself may not have been premeditated, what he did afterward was savage beyond any mitigating circumstances. The
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judgment put it plainly. His contempt for human life left no room for mercy. Pyuk never accepted the verdict. Through his attorney, he argued that he had blacked out, that he'd been in a state of mental incapacity at the time, and he
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remembered nothing. Some accounts say he even requested a psychiatric evaluation, claiming a war injury had left him mentally unsound. The court rejected it outright. He appealed and appealed again. He was still filing for a retrial right up until his execution. None of it
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went anywhere. No one had sympathy for the man who had strangled a woman to death and butchered her remains. In November of 1977, 2 years and 5 months after the murder, the death sentence was carried out. And to the very last
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second, he was still insisting he wasn't a killer. That was the end of the man who took everything a woman had given him and then took her life. This case is remembered as almost impossibly brutal.
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But that's not the most disturbing part. The most disturbing part is that the man who did it never once showed remorse or even acknowledged that he'd committed murder. To the end, he said all he' done was strike her and she died and that
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what he did to her body afterward was a separate matter entirely. He asked that his children be told their father was not a murderer. But he killed Sukja. He destroyed her body and he disposed of every last part. All of that was him.
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And standing in front of those facts, he still had nothing but excuses. This case is widely known in Korea as the Epigu case. But the person we should actually be remembering is someone else. Isukcha, a woman who built two businesses from
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the ground up, who took in four children who weren't hers and carried a household of six on her own. A person who was only trying to walk away when she couldn't take anymore. That is all for today.
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Thanks for watching.
Topics:Lee Suk-jatrue crimeSouth Korea1975 murderdismembermentPyukforensic investigationcriminal historyexecution 1977Seoul
