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Police investigating a crime scene involving serial killer Lee Choon-jae in January 1987. (Yonhap News)

A serial killer who terrorized the South Korean public in the mid-1980s will appear in court on Nov. 2. This will be the first public appearance of Lee Choon-jae, 57, whose identity was shrouded in mystery for three decades after his horrific murder of 15 women.

Hon. Park Jeong-je, a judge in the 12th criminal division at the Suwon District Court, will be calling Lee as a witness in the retrial of the eighth case in his murder spree. The court will hear Lee’s testimony during a hearing at 1:30 pm on Nov. 2.

There had long been questions about the perpetrator behind the eighth serial murder. The victim was the 13-year-old daughter of a man surnamed Park (living in Jinan Village, Taean Township, Hwaseong County, Gyeonggi Province). She was found dead, after a sexual assault, on Sept. 16, 1988.

The next year, Yun Seong-eo, who is now 53 years old, was identified as the criminal and sentenced to life in prison by a district court. On appeal, he objected that investigators had forced him to give a false confession, but he lost both of his appeals.

Yun served 20 years in prison and was released on parole in 2009. After Lee confessed to the crime, Yun petitioned the court for a retrial in November 2019.

Upon reopening the investigation, the police and prosecutors determined that evidence had been fabricated and Yun had been treated harshly in the original investigation. In January 2020, the court accepted those conclusions and agreed to reopen the trial, selecting Lee, who had confessed to the crime, as a witness.

That led to expectations that the public would get its first glimpse of this vicious serial killer standing in court. But the court decided on Oct. 26 that reporters would not be allowed to photograph Lee, who is technically only a witness, and not a criminal suspect.

South Korea’s Court Organization Act allows photography in the courtroom before a hearing begins or when the verdict is being read with the consent of the defendant or when necessary for the public interest. But witnesses generally move from the gallery to the witness stand after the hearing begins, when the judge calls them by name. That means that court photographs of Lee are essentially out of the question.

“[Lee Choon-jae] will be in the courtroom not as a defendant but as a witness. Since the witness will be walking to the witness stand after the hearing begins, the regulations prevent him from being photographed, and doing so would be inappropriate anyway given the need to maintain order,” the court said.

The prosecutors disclosed Lee’s name in a public meeting of a committee deliberating the case on Dec. 11, 2019, when it launched its investigation into Lee’s eighth serial murder. The police also mentioned Lee’s name in a meeting of their own, held six days later. But they decided not to publish a photograph of Lee’s face.

In September 1986, after completing his military service that January, Lee Choon-jae killed a 71-year-woman surnamed Lee (no relation) in Annyeong Village, Hwaseong County, Gyeonggi Province. That was the beginning of a horrific crime spree, the first of 10 murder cases that were filed through April 1991; Lee turned out to have been behind all of them.

“We’ve reached the conclusion that Lee Choon-jae killed 14 women and raped and robbed nine others,” said investigators with the Southern Gyeonggi Provincial Police agency, after wrapping up their investigation on July 2, 2019. Lee raped most of his victims before killing them.

One of his victims was a girl in the second grade of elementary school. On July 7, 1989, an eight-year-old girl surnamed Kim (living in Taean Township, Hwaseong County) disappeared on her way home from school. Since her body was never found, she was categorized as a missing person, rather than a murder victim, until Lee was identified as the perpetrator.

Other murders that investigators were able to pin on Lee were a high school girl at Hwaseo Station, Suwon, in December 1987; a high school girl in Cheongju in January 1991; and a housewife in Cheongju in March 1991. Considering that Lee is currently in prison for raping and murdering his sister-in-law in Cheongju in January 1994, he murdered a total of 15 women during a period of seven years and four months.

Lee’s serial murders remained unsolved for three decades and might have remained that way forever if crime scene evidence hadn’t yielded a DNA match for Lee in July 2019.

The police spent over 2 million man-days on the case, investigating 21,280 people and naming 3,000 suspects. But Lee can’t be prosecuted, because the statute of limitations has expired for all the crimes he committed.

By Kim Gi-seong, South Gyeonggi correspondent

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