Yoo Young-chul killed 20 people in Seoul between September 2003 and July 2004. He started with wealthy elderly people in their homes, then switched to women who worked in the massage trade. He wasn’t caught by a police investigation. He was caught by the owners of mobile massage businesses, who tracked one phone number, set their own trap near Sinchon, and held him until a detective arrived.
On May 28, 2014, a woman in her mid-thirties named Wu Shuoyan was beaten to death on the floor of a McDonald’s restaurant in Zhaoyuan, Shandong, for refusing to give her phone number to strangers. Her killers claimed she was an evil spirit. Twelve years later, the Chinese state and a group of Western religion scholars still cannot agree on which faith the killers actually belonged to. This is what we know about the Church of Almighty God, and what we do not.
Content note: this piece describes the disappearance and murder of several young children between 1979 and 1996, and — at its center — the wrongful imprisonment of an innocent man for seventeen and a half years based on DNA evidence that was later proven false. It also discusses a contested, unproven suspect theory raised by … Read more
A twenty-one-year-old student texted her mother good morning, and two days later the police called. The man who killed her was convicted, sentenced to death, and then given life on appeal. Her mother has spoken for her ever since.
Three people were shot dead in the office of a Tokyo supermarket on a Sunday night in 1995, and the money in the safe was never taken. Thirty-one years later the case is still open.
Content note: this piece describes the murder of a 21-year-old university student in her own home, two days before she was due to leave the country, and the thirty years her family has spent since with no name to put to the man who did it. It is a companion, in the hardest way, to … Read more
Jang Mi-ran walked out of her house in Jeju in slippers on May 12, 2026. A police sergeant with a domestic violence record in his file typed ‘traffic accident fatality’ into the system two hours after her boyfriend reported her missing, and deleted her name. She was one of 298 cases he closed the same way.
On November 13, 1999, a thirty-two-year-old housewife named Namiko Takaba was murdered in her own apartment in Nagoya while her two-year-old son sat in the same room. Her husband spent twenty-six years and one hundred and fifty thousand dollars refusing to let her case be forgotten. On Halloween 2025, the woman who killed her walked into a Nagoya police station and turned herself in. A companion piece to the Setagaya murders.
On the night of December 30, 2000, a man climbed through the second-floor bathroom window of a house in Setagaya, Tokyo, killed the four members of the Miyazawa family, and then stayed in the house until dawn. Twenty-five years later, despite one of the largest evidence pools in Japanese criminal history, he has never been found.
Since 1993, between four hundred and over fifteen hundred women and girls have been killed in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico — the exact number lost to decades of state indifference. This is not a piece about one killer. There is no killer in this piece to catch. It is a piece about what femicide at scale looks like, and about the mothers who painted the pink crosses because the state would not.