Content note: this piece contains references to sexual violence, the murder of an elderly couple, and dismemberment. No specific injuries are described in graphic detail. If you want to skip the physical evidence, you can skip “The Mountain at Bongwon Temple.”
The Women Who Set the Trap
I want to start where a lot of coverage of this case ends. On the day Yoo Young-chul got caught in Seoul in the summer of 2004, the people who caught him were not police officers. They were three women who worked at a massage parlor and a man who owned it. They set a trap, they lured him to a motel, and they held him until the cops finally showed up. And they did all of that because a police officer, dispatched to intercept him at that same motel, had gotten tired of waiting and left the scene before Yoo arrived.
I want you to hold that in your head for the rest of this piece. A cop left. A group of women stayed. That is the case. That has always been the case. That is the case in every country. And it is, in some ways, the reason a man like Yoo Young-chul got to kill twenty people over ten months in one of the most surveilled cities in the world before anyone caught him.
Thirteen Days After Prison
Yoo Young-chul was born in 1970 in Gochang County, a rural stretch of southwestern Korea nobody in Seoul ever thinks about. His parents split soon after he was born. His father took him and moved to Mapo, in Seoul. They were poor. He was bullied at school. That much of his biography is real, and I want to name it, because his defense will later try to make the poverty and the bullying into an explanation of what he did. It is not an explanation. It is a childhood. Millions of children lived that childhood and did not do what he did.
By the time he was thirty, he had a criminal record. Theft in 1988. Theft again in 1991, ten months. And in the year 2000, a conviction for the rape of a 15-year-old girl, for which he served three and a half years.
I want to hold you there, too. A rape of a 15-year-old girl. In 2000. Before any of what comes next. Before the class-rage narrative you will see attached to this case in every documentary and podcast. Before the “the poor kid who couldn’t stand watching the rich” framing. He raped a child. That is who was walking out of Cheongsong Prison on September 11, 2003.
Thirteen days later, on September 24, 2003, Yoo Young-chul went to an upscale two-story house in the Sinsa-dong neighborhood of Seoul. Inside were Lee Deok-su, 72, a professor at Sookmyung Women’s University, and his 68-year-old wife Lee Eun-ok. He broke in. He beat them both to death with a hammer. He arranged the scene to look like a robbery.
Thirteen days. That is how long the free society got with Yoo Young-chul before he killed his first two people. Nobody at his parole hearing thought to worry about that. Nobody at the corrections service checked in. He walked out of prison, took thirteen days to decide who was going to die first, and then he went and did it.
Phase One: The Elders in Their Homes
From September to November of 2003, Yoo Young-chul kept killing elderly wealthy people in their own homes. Sinsa-dong. Kugi-dong. Samsong-dong. Hyehwa-dong. All neighborhoods in Seoul that anyone who knows the city will recognize as money. He went to houses like the Lees’. He broke in. He used a hammer. He walked back out.
His stated motive, when he was finally arrested, was that he hated the rich. He said he had watched a rich family near where he grew up and started to hate them, and the hatred grew, and it became a plan. He said the rich were the source of everything wrong with Korean society and everything wrong with his own life.
I want to sit with that for a second, because it will come up again. Korea in the early 2000s was, in some ways, a place where a story like that could find sympathy. It was still processing the 1997 IMF crisis. The gap between old money and no money was extreme and visible in the way Seoul’s streets were built. There is a version of Yoo Young-chul’s story that documentary filmmakers can tell, that makes him into a symptom of Korean inequality. That version has been told many times. I am not going to tell it, and here is why.
He raped a fifteen-year-old girl in 2000. The girl was not rich. She was fifteen. That was three years before he had a single anti-rich thought worth writing down. What Yoo Young-chul had was a violence that reached for a story to wear, and when he needed one, class rage was there. Do not let him have it. He was a man who hurt whoever was in front of him and later dressed the hurt up in an ideology. The dressing-up is the con. It is the con he ran on Korean society when he was arrested, and it is the con true-crime coverage keeps running for him now.
Which does not mean the elderly people he killed did not matter. Lee Deok-su and Lee Eun-ok were 72 and 68 years old. They were in their own house. He killed them with a hammer in it. That is what happened. That is what the news covered. And the news covered it hard, because the victims were wealthy and old and their neighborhood was one where reporters recognized the street names.
Which is exactly why he changed targets.
The Switch
Sometime around March of 2004, Yoo Young-chul stopped going to the houses of wealthy elderly people and started calling sex workers to his own apartment.
This is not a small change. This is the moral center of the case, and I want you to see it clearly.
The elderly people in Sinsa-dong were making front-page news. Seoul was scared. There was a killer targeting the rich, and the rich have voices, and the police were under pressure. Yoo Young-chul, alone in his apartment in western Seoul, made a calculation. He noticed the class of victim he was killing was generating heat. And he noticed — because everyone who lives in a big city notices — that the class of woman he could pay to come to his apartment was a class of woman the police did not investigate hard. He noticed that if a masseuse went missing in western Seoul, her disappearance did not make the news. If a masseuse’s body was found, her body did not get a task force.
So he switched.
He was not the first man to make this calculation. In the piece I wrote last week about Richard Cottingham, the New Jersey killer known as the Torso Killer, the same calculation shows up. Cottingham killed the woman who was heard and got caught in four minutes. Before her, he killed the women who were not heard, for fifteen years. Yoo Young-chul, in Seoul, in a different decade and a different country, did the same thing on a shorter timeline. He picked the second class because he had done the math on who mattered enough to be looked for.
This is the part I want to be direct about, because true crime coverage almost never is. The reason women like the ones Yoo Young-chul killed are victims of serial murderers, over and over again, in country after country, is not that serial murderers are drawn to them by some mysterious force. The reason is that they are actively selected. Chosen. Preferred. Because the men doing the killing know, or have figured out, that hurting them costs less. That is not their fault. That is not a flaw in them as women. It is a flaw in the system that decides which women are worth looking for, and it is a flaw that men who kill women use like a road map.
The Mountain at Bongwon Temple
What Yoo Young-chul did to the women he called to his apartment was designed to keep them from being identified after he killed them. I am not going to describe the specific physical evidence in more detail than that. If you want the details, they are in the sources at the bottom of this piece. Reading them will not help you understand this case. It will only put images in your head that will not leave.
What matters, morally, is the intent. He killed them. He cut their bodies into pieces — between sixteen and eighteen pieces, per body, one woman at a time, in his own apartment. He tore off their fingertips so their prints could not be matched. He put the pieces in garbage bags. And then he drove up to a mountain near Bongwon Temple in Seoul and buried them there.
He was, in every step of that process, working to make sure his victims could not become people again. Could not be named again. Could not be counted. He built an entire physical procedure around the erasure. The dismemberment was not rage. It was administration. Same as it was in the Wilseyville bunker. Same as it was in the Torso Room in Manhattan. Same everywhere. Men who kill sex workers over and over specifically use the fact that sex workers are already partially erased by the system, and then they finish the erasure with their own hands.
Police eventually recovered eleven bodies from that mountain. Not twenty. Eleven. The rest were either buried in ways that have not been found, or in places he did not tell police about, or they were never buried whole enough to recover. He confessed to twenty. He was convicted of twenty. The gap between what he confessed to and what the police could dig up is another set of women whose families do not have bodies to bury.
How Korean Police Missed Him
You might reasonably ask, at this point, how any of this went on for ten months in Seoul. Seoul is not a small city. Seoul is one of the most densely policed capitals in Asia. And the answer is very Korean and very familiar all at once.
The Korean National Police in 2003 and 2004 worked in districts. Each district investigated its own cases. Districts rarely shared information with each other. When they did share information, it was almost always about successful arrests — because sharing an unsolved case looked like admitting failure, and admitting failure was, culturally and bureaucratically, not something you did if you wanted to keep your job.
Yoo Young-chul’s Phase One victims were spread across Sinsa-dong, Kugi-dong, Samsong-dong, and Hyehwa-dong — four different districts. His Phase Two victims were sex workers connecting to him from massage parlors scattered across western Seoul, being buried in another district entirely. On paper, in the police’s own files, there was no single killer. There were four rich-elderly-homicide cases in four districts and a growing collection of missing-masseuse reports in a fifth. Nobody was assembling the picture, because assembling the picture was not somebody’s job.
This is not a Korean problem. This is a policing problem that exists everywhere jurisdictions do not talk to each other. It exists in America. It exists in Egypt. It exists in the United Kingdom. It is one of the recurring structural reasons serial killers get double-digit victim counts. Yoo Young-chul was benefiting from a system-wide feature, and the feature was called: nobody was in charge.
The Sting
Here is how he got caught, and I love this story, because it is the story of women who did their own police work when the police would not do it.
By the summer of 2004, massage parlors in western Seoul had noticed something. Workers were going out on calls and not coming back. This was not the kind of thing they could easily go to the police about — their industry existed in a legal gray zone, and the police were not going to run a full missing-persons operation for a woman whose job the state officially did not recognize. But the parlors kept records. They knew who left. They knew who did not return. They started comparing notes.
Then Yoo Young-chul made a mistake. He used one of his victims’ phones to call another massage parlor. And the owner of that other parlor recognized the number. Because he had that number in his own records. Because the woman it belonged to was one of the women who had gone out and not come back.
The owner went to the police. The police said they would send an officer to a motel to intercept when Yoo showed up. The parlor owner and two of his colleagues went to the motel themselves. And the officer — because the story is real, and reality is not clean — got there, and waited, and got tired of waiting, and left. Before Yoo arrived.
The parlor owner and the two women he brought with him were still there. They confronted Yoo when he arrived at the motel. They held him. When police finally came back to the scene, they handed him over.
I do not know the names of the two women who did that. I have looked. Korean press does not usually print the names of sex workers, even sex workers who help catch a serial killer, and I understand why, and I respect why. But I want their function on this page, even if I cannot put their names on it. There were two women. They knew a killer was coming. They stood there and waited for him anyway. They caught him.
And then, at the police station, Yoo Young-chul faked an epileptic seizure. Officers loosened his restraints. He escaped. He was on the run in Seoul for twelve hours before he was recaptured. That is the level of competence we are talking about. The two women who caught him were, functionally, more effective at holding him than the entire Korean National Police was, and the Korean National Police is not a small organization.
What He Wanted the Story to Be
After his arrest, Yoo Young-chul gave the confession every serial killer gives if the audience will let them. He said he hated the rich. He said he hated women. He said he had wanted to kill a hundred people. He talked about his childhood. He talked about being bullied. He talked about watching rich families near where he grew up and hating them. The Korean press ate it up. Documentary crews from around the world came in and let him narrate his own villain arc.
I am not going to help him with that.
The reason to refuse the class-rage narrative is not that inequality does not matter in Korea, or that being bullied does not shape a person, or that a childhood of poverty does not do real damage. All of that is true. All of that is worth writing about. It is worth writing about somewhere else, in a different piece, about people who lived those lives and did not become killers.
What Yoo Young-chul was, at core, was a man who liked hurting people who could not fight back. In 2000, that was a 15-year-old girl he raped. In 2003, that was two elderly people in a house he could break into with a hammer. In 2004, that was women who came to his apartment because they needed the work, whose disappearances he had accurately predicted the police would not chase. The through-line is not class. The through-line is asymmetric power. Yoo Young-chul killed whoever he thought could not defend themselves and could not be avenged, and he wore whatever ideology gave him cover at the moment.
Do not let a killer edit his own story. That is the one thing I keep coming back to on this site, and this case makes it easier to see than most.
The Raincoat, and Everything After
The nickname “Raincoat Killer” comes from what he wore when police took him out to the mountain near Bongwon Temple to show them where he had buried the women. He wore a yellow raincoat with a hood pulled up over his face. The stated reason was to protect his identity from the news cameras that had followed the caravan up the mountain. The effect, in the photographs that ran on the front page of every Korean paper that week, was of a man being paraded past his own crime scene as an anonymous shape in yellow plastic. The women he had buried were nameless. He was, for a few hours, deliberately faceless. It was the case in a single image.
He was convicted of twenty first-degree murders in December of 2004. He was sentenced to death.
Twenty-two years later, in the summer of 2026 as I write this, he is still alive. South Korea has not carried out a judicial execution since 1997. It is a de facto abolition without a formal legislative one. There are still people on death row in Korea — over fifty of them — and Yoo Young-chul is one of them. He is fifty-six years old.
He is a topic of Korean television. He has been the subject of Netflix documentaries. He has, in the way killers do, become a cultural product. His name is more widely known than the names of the women he killed, and that is one of the reasons I am writing this piece.
What I Want You to Take With You
I want you to take Lee Deok-su, the 72-year-old professor at Sookmyung Women’s University who was killed in his home in Sinsa-dong on September 24, 2003. And Lee Eun-ok, his 68-year-old wife, killed the same night.
I want you to take the 45-year-old male street vendor from Hwanghak-dong. He does not have his name in the English-language sources I could pull for this piece, and if I can find it I will come back and add it. I am sorry not to have it right now.
And I want you to take the women whose bodies Yoo Young-chul buried on that mountain. Some of them were sex workers. Some of them were masseuses. Some of them were both. All of them were people. They had families. They had names Korean newspapers chose not to print, out of an old-fashioned kind of protection that ends up feeling, from a certain angle, like erasure. If you are reading this and you know any of their names, I want them. I will add them here. The whole point of writing about a case like this is to give the women back the ledger space the killer took from them.
And I want you to take the massage parlor owner, and the two women who went with him to the motel that afternoon in July 2004, who did not run when a serial killer walked into a room they were in. I do not have their names either. Not printing them is, in their case, probably the right call. But I want you to know they existed, and that they held him, and that they handed him to police who had, three hours earlier, decided this call was not important enough to sit around for.
Every serial killer story, at some point, comes down to somebody who was not supposed to be listening actually listening. In New Jersey it was a housekeeper named Eleanor. In Seoul it was a parlor owner and two working women. In some case in some country we have not covered yet, it was somebody else. Serial killers are not stopped by systems. They are stopped by people, one person at a time, refusing to let the missing woman stay missing.
Say the names you can. Hold the ones you cannot. That is the assignment.
Sources
- The Korea Herald — In 2004, serial murderer with goal to kill 100 was stopped at 20.
- Murderpedia — Yoo Young-Chul.
- All That’s Interesting — The Chilling Crimes of Yoo Young-chul.
- Simply Forensic — the Raincoat Killer profile.
- Crime & Court — the dark tale unraveled.
- Newsweek — the Raincoat Killer and South Korea’s death penalty.
- Dark Side of Seoul — Monstrous Origins.
- The National — on the Netflix docuseries reporting.