Topic summary
Hwaseong serial murders
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Lee Choon-jae.
Hwaseong serial murders
For a period of four years and seven months, between September 15, 1986, and April 3, 1991, Lee committed a series of rapes and murders in and around Hwaseong. The victims, all women, were found bound, gagged, raped and in most cases strangled to death with their own clothes, such as pantyhose or socks. The murders sparked the largest criminal case in South Korean history, with over 2 million man-days spent on investigation and over 21,000 suspects investigated. The murders remained unsolved for thirty years until Lee was identified as a suspect in 2019. He confessed to four undisclosed murders not originally included in the original list of crimes and all ten serial murders, including a case previously determined to be a copycat crime (for which a man named Yoon Sung-yeo had previously been sentenced to life imprisonment).