hankyoreh

a suspect in the 1997 Itaewon murder case

With the extradition to South Korea of Arthur Patterson, 36 - accused of a murder that occurred at a Burger King in Itaewon, Seoul, 18 years ago - there is a chance that this murder could finally be solved in court.

Patterson arrived in South Korea at Incheon International Airport early in the morning of Sep. 23. When asked by reporters whether he admitted the crime, Patterson denied all charges and repeated his claim that the victim was murdered by Edward Lee, the other suspect in the case.

South Korean prosecutors had initially viewed Lee as the culprit, but when the courts exonerated him, a fresh investigation led to an indictment of Patterson. The prosecutors are confident that they can prove his guilt.

In April 1997, a university student named Jo Jung-pil was stabbed to death in the bathroom of a Burger King in the Itaewon neighborhood of Seoul, a popular entertainment area for foreign residents. Blood was splattered all over the sink, walls, and floor of the tiny bathroom, which was only 1.5m by 2.6m in size.

Two American teenagers - Arthur Patterson and Edward Lee - were on the scene and became the suspects in the crime. It was clear that one of the two was the criminal, but both of them blamed the other.

Lee said that, while he was washing his hands at the sink, Patterson stabbed Jo on the right side of the urinal where Jo was standing. Patterson, on the other hand, said that he saw Lee stabbing Jo.

Patterson’s whole body was drenched in blood from his head to his pants, while there was a spray pattern of blood stains on Lee‘s pants and on the right shoulder and chest area of Lee’s upper garments.

Lee‘s mother ran his clothes in the laundry machine after he asked her to wash it, and Patterson had his clothing burned.

Immediately after the incident, the US Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) received a tip that Patterson had killed somebody and detained him. But the South Korean prosecutors, observing that the wounds on the right side of Jo’s neck were oriented downward, concluded that Lee, who was taller than Jo, was the criminal and arrested him on suspicion of murder. Patterson was also arrested, but he was only charged with destruction of evidence by throwing the knife used in the murder down a drain in the US military base.

Lee was convicted in his first two trials, but the Supreme Court remanded the case, instructing the lower courts to clear Lee of charges. This opened the possibility that Patterson was the real culprit.

In its decision, the Supreme Court drew attention to several points. First, Patterson testified in detail about how Edward Lee was holding the knife, what parts of the victim he stabbed, and how many times he stabbed him. This level of detail was unusual for someone who had witnessed an unexpected crime. Second, Lee‘s testimony about the blood stains on his clothing was more credible than Patterson’s testimony.

When Lee was found innocent, Jo‘s family asked the authorities to investigate Patterson on suspicion of murder. But Patterson had gone to the US in 1999, taking advantage of the prosecutors’ failure to extend his travel ban, and the prosecutors suspended the indictment on Patterson in 2000.

In 2009, when the incident was on the verge of being forgotten, it became the subject of a movie, increasing public interest in the case. This prompted the prosecutors to move quickly, and during a second investigation, they analyzed the pattern of the bloodstains and assessed anew the credibility of the testimony of the people connected with the case.

Since the Burger King where the crime had occurred was gone, a room was built identical in size to the one where the crime occurred and the crime was reenacted there. Based on this second investigation, the prosecutors indicted Patterson in 2011 for murder.

The prosecutors offered a number of grounds for indicting Patterson. First, since the victim had been wearing a backpack, even a short person could have easily stabbed him by grabbing the backpack to temporarily hold him in place. Second, given the nature of the crime, the criminal and victim would have inevitably come into physical contact, meaning that the criminal would have been covered in blood.

The prosecutors seem confident that they can pin the charges on Patterson.

“We didn‘t just indict Patterson because Lee was found innocent,” a source with the prosecutors said. This suggests that the prosecutors have found additional evidence that they believe will lead to a guilty verdict.

“In this case, there’s no possibility that a third party committed the crime. The criminal had to be one of the two people who were at the scene of the crime. For the court, there‘s no escaping this,” said one judge who participated in the previous trial.

But given the nature of a criminal case - in which criminals cannot be convicted unless the charges are demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt - it may be too soon to predict the outcome of the trial.

Even if Patterson is found guilty, there are lingering questions about why the prosecutors did not indict Patterson as an accomplice 17 years ago. In particular, it is unclear why prosecutors charged Lee with the crime when the US Army CID had fingered Patterson as the culprit during the preliminary investigation.

During their first investigation, the prosecutors relied on the coroner’s opinion that a tall person murdered Jo along with the outcome of a lie detector test - which suggested that Patterson was telling the truth and Lee was lying - in charging Lee with murder.

By Lee Kyung-mi and Seo Young-ji, staff reporters

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]