A Busan taxi driver pulled over before dawn for what looked like a middle-schooler with a heavy suitcase she refused to let him touch… She was 23, and the suitcase held the dismembered body of the English tutor she had visited the day before.
Before dawn on May 27, 2023, a taxi driver in Busan pulled over for what looked like a middle-schooler with a heavy suitcase. She refused to let him touch it.
She slid into the back seat — polite, soft-spoken, careful with her bag. The driver glanced at her in the rearview mirror and turned the key. Late hour. School-age girl. A suitcase that looked like it weighed almost as much as she did.
She told him to drive to a park near the Nakdong River.
He had been doing this job long enough to know the city’s nights. The pre-dawn fares were usually drunk businessmen, club-shift workers, the occasional tourist who had misjudged the train schedule. Not this. Not a girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen, alone, going to a wooded park with luggage she would not let anyone else handle.
He drove. She paid. She got out, dragged the suitcase across the grass, and disappeared into the dark.
He should have driven away. He didn’t. He pulled over and lit a cigarette and waited, telling himself she’d need a ride back.
Fifteen minutes later she came walking out of the trees. The suitcase was rolling so easily behind her now that she was almost skipping. She got back into his cab. She did not seem to notice it was the same driver. She asked for a ride home.
He kept watching her in the mirror the whole way back.
When he dropped her off, he sat in his car for a long minute. Then he called the police.
He could not have explained, in that moment, why he was making the call. Nothing she had done was technically a crime he could name. A young girl had asked for a ride. A young girl had walked into a park. A young girl had walked back out. But the suitcase had gone in heavy and come out light, and the girl who had refused his help had walked back across that field like a child who had finished a chore.
Five hours later, she was under arrest.
When officers walked the field where the driver had dropped her off, they found scattered remains in the tall grass beside the river. They also found a wallet. The driver’s license inside it belonged to a 26-year-old woman who lived in the Geumjeong district of Busan and worked as an English tutor.
The woman in custody was not 14. She was not in school. She was 23 years old and her name was Jung Yoo-jung.
The clothing the taxi driver had described — the uniform, the schoolbag stance — had been a costume. The school uniform, investigators would later confirm, had been bought online from a thrift account weeks before the trip to the park. Underneath it, when she had first walked into the victim’s apartment the day before, she had been carrying a knife.
In her first interrogation, Jung was calm.
She told the officers the remains in the field belonged to her own newborn baby. She said she had given birth at home, panicked, killed the child, and disposed of the body. It was a story that fell apart the moment a coroner looked at the bones and the moment any doctor looked at her body and saw no evidence she had been pregnant.
When the police told her they knew who the victim actually was, Jung changed her story. She said she had not killed anyone. Someone else had killed the woman, and Jung had only been hired to dispose of the body. The reward, she said, was supposed to be the dead woman’s identity.
The detectives told her that wasn’t true either.
She tried again. This time she said she had killed the woman, but only by accident, in a fight that got out of hand.
While she was talking, she said her stomach hurt. She said it hurt so badly she might die. The officers — bound by procedure not to take chances with a suspect’s health — drove her to a hospital. Doctors found nothing wrong with her. They drove her back.
By the time she was sitting in front of detectives again, they had already pulled her phone records. They had already pulled her library records. They had already started building a different kind of case from the one she was trying to tell them.
The phone records were the first thing that stopped them.
When digital forensics opened her device, there were no contacts. No saved numbers. No calls in or out beyond a handful that traced to delivery apps and the tutoring platform. No incoming or outgoing messages from friends. No social media accounts. No threads that suggested she was in regular contact with another human being.
A 23-year-old woman in 2023 with a phone that had no one on it.
The browser history was different. The browser history was full.
Investigators found a digital footprint that stretched back months: searches on how to dispose of a body. Searches on how to clean blood from fabric. Searches on which bleach worked best on what surfaces. True-crime documentaries watched repeatedly. A South Korean thriller called Helpless — about a woman who steals other women’s identities and kills to keep them — watched multiple times in the weeks before the murder.
The library logged the rest. In the months leading up to May, Jung had borrowed multiple books on real-life murders, on serial killers, on the methods criminals used to cover their tracks. The books had been checked out under her own name.
Police would later tell reporters they had rarely seen a digital trail this clean of human contact and this saturated with a single subject.
Asked again what her motive had been, Jung — for the first time — gave them an answer that didn’t immediately collapse.
She said she had wanted to know what it felt like to kill.
To understand who Jung Yoo-jung was, the investigators had to go backwards. A long way backwards.
She had been born in 1999. Her mother, according to court records, had left when she was a year old. Her father had left when she was six. The man who raised her, alone, was her grandfather.
He was listed in the family registry as her sole legal guardian. Neighbors who knew the household described the grandfather as warm, hardworking, well-liked. They described his granddaughter, when they could place her at all, as a presence rather than a person. She lived in his apartment. She did not seem to leave it often. They could not remember her speaking.
Her former classmates, contacted after her arrest, used a word that comes up rarely in profiles of teenagers: invisible.
Not shy. Not bullied. Not awkward. Invisible.
If you waved at her in the hallway, they said, she did not wave back. She did not nod. She did not look up. If a teacher asked her a direct question, she might answer with a single word, eyes on the floor. If a classmate asked her to pass something, the room would just go quiet around her.
She had a habit, several of them remembered, of sitting alone behind the curtains in the back of the classroom during break. They could see her shoes under the hem. Sometimes, from behind the curtain, they would hear the sound of someone slowly chewing snacks.
She graduated from a Busan girls’ high school in 2018. She did not enroll in university. She did not get a job. She told her grandfather she was studying for the national civil-service examination — one of the most competitive tests in South Korea, requiring a college-level command of multiple subjects, including English, in which she had no demonstrated proficiency.
For the next five years she stayed in the apartment.
The grandfather paid for everything. He believed she was studying. He believed that one day she would pass.
She would not have been the only young Korean to retreat into a sealed bedroom for years. South Korea, like Japan and parts of China, has a known and growing phenomenon of young adults who simply opt out of the social world after high school — who choose their screens, their delivery apps, and their walls over the brutality of the country’s adult job market. Jung was not officially that. She left the apartment. She liked, neighbors said, to take walks in the park near the Nakdong River.
But the phone with no contacts in it was hers, and the five years with no friends were hers, and the long afternoons watching crime documentaries on her grandfather’s wifi were hers, and the silence behind the curtain at school had grown into a silence that filled her whole adult life.
Somewhere in those five years, the silence had decided what to do with itself.
Investigators believe the planning began in earnest about three months before the murder, in February 2023.
That was when Jung joined a Korean tutoring app. The app exists to connect parents with vetted private tutors — university students, graduate students, working professionals — for everything from math to English to art. The platform verifies the tutors. It does not verify the parents.
Jung joined as a parent.
She told the app she had a daughter in the ninth grade who urgently needed English lessons. She messaged tutors. By her own later admission to investigators, she had contacted 54 of them over the course of the spring. She favored women. She asked, repeatedly, whether they held lessons in their own homes.
Her victim — referred to in Korean media by an alias to protect her family, and in Western coverage as Hannah — was the 55th.
Hannah was 26. She was a university student at a prestigious school in Busan, working as an English tutor partly to pay her own way and partly because she liked it. By the accounts of those who knew her, she was bright, accomplished, and patient with younger students. She was the kind of tutor parents fought to hire.
When Jung first reached out, Hannah said no. The mother’s address was too far from her own apartment. She thanked the woman politely and declined.
Jung pushed back. She said she would send her daughter to Hannah’s apartment for the lessons. She was insistent. She made the offer impossible to keep refusing.
Hannah, who had never met the woman she was negotiating with — who was speaking by app to a 23-year-old with no children at all — agreed.
The first lesson was scheduled for the evening of May 26, 2023.
Around dinnertime, Hannah heard a knock at her door.
When she looked through the camera, she saw what she had been told to expect: a middle-school girl in a uniform, standing in the corridor with a school bag.
She opened the door.
The girl stepped inside. Within minutes, by police reconstruction of the scene, she had established that Hannah was alone in the apartment. She drew the knife she had been carrying under the uniform.
The autopsy would later count more than a hundred stab wounds. Investigators noted that the wounds were concentrated on a single specific area of the neck — a placement consistent, forensic experts said, with someone who had researched where a knife would be most lethal.
The attack, prosecutors would later argue at trial, did not stop after the victim was already dead.
When it was over, Jung did not run.
She stayed.
Closed-circuit cameras in and around the apartment building would later let police reconstruct the next eighteen hours almost minute by minute. They show Jung leaving Hannah’s apartment, walking calmly to a nearby store, and returning with bleach, trash bags, and additional knives. They show her dragging an empty suitcase from her own apartment to the building. They show her, at one point, wearing a jacket that was not hers — a jacket that belonged to the woman she had just killed.
By the early hours of May 27, she had cut the body apart.
She removed parts of it that would make identification more difficult. She loaded what would fit into the suitcase. Some time later — afternoon by some accounts, before dawn by others — she called for a taxi.
A forensic professor who later studied the disposal site told Korean media that the choice of location was probably not random. The tall grass on the bank of the Nakdong River concentrates insects and natural agents that accelerate decomposition. The professor’s assessment was that whoever had chosen the spot had likely walked it before. Jung’s neighbors had said she liked walking in that park.
She had picked her own favorite spot for the body.
The taxi driver who picked her up did not see what was in the suitcase. He could not have. He did not feel blood on his hands — that part of the story, repeated online, was later refuted by people who knew him.
What he had was a feeling.
He could not have explained it to a court. But the feeling kept him in the parking lot smoking after he had already been paid, and the feeling kept his eyes on her in the mirror on the ride home, and the feeling — when she got out of his cab and walked away — was strong enough to make him pick up the phone.
Five hours after that call, Jung Yoo-jung was in custody.
After the lies fell apart, after the false confessions, after the hospital trip for a stomach pain that wasn’t there, the police did the one thing she had not planned for. They called her grandfather.
He came down to the station immediately. The officers brought him into the room with her and asked him to talk to his granddaughter.
He cried, by the accounts of officers who were there, for a long time. Then he asked her to tell the truth. He asked her to do it for him, for his name, for the only family he had.
She told the truth.
She had been planning the murder, she said, since February. She had picked the tutoring app because she had thought of it as the cleanest way to find a stranger who would let her into a house alone. She had picked English tutors specifically. She had cycled through more than fifty of them. She had wanted, she said, to know what it felt like.
She was charged with murder, mutilation of a corpse, and abandonment of a corpse.
In her press appearance the next morning, on June 2, 2023, she said two short sentences before being driven away. “I was out of my mind. I’m sorry for the victim’s family.”
She also said thank you at the end.
Korean criminal psychologists watching the clip noted the thank you in particular. It is a phrase Korean killers have ended press conferences with before. It did not, the experts said, sound natural in her mouth. It sounded copied.
The grandfather gave one interview to Korean media after the arrest. He told them, “I feel really sorry for the bereaved family because I’m a sinner who raised my granddaughter wrong. I never expected this situation. I never even imagined this.”
A neighbor, asked the same week, told reporters that Jung herself had been “calm, quiet and kind of okay,” but that the grandfather had been a really nice man.
Investigators ran a standardized psychopathy assessment on Jung twice. The score on the first evaluation came back at 15 — above average for the general population, below the clinical threshold for psychopathy. The second evaluation, a day later, came back at 28. For comparison, the same instrument had given John Wayne Gacy a 27. South Korea’s own most notorious modern serial killer — a man who had murdered eight women — had also been scored at 27.
A Korean professor of criminal psychology, asked for comment, said something that stayed in the coverage. If she had not been caught on her first kill, the professor said, there was almost no chance she would have stopped at one.
The prosecution in Busan asked the court for the death penalty.
At trial, Jung’s lawyers argued for a reduced sentence. They cited her family background. They cited mental and physical weakness. Jung herself submitted nineteen handwritten letters of apology to the court.
The presiding judge, Kim Tae-eob, said the letters were not credible. The court said the way Jung had behaved in custody was deliberate and contrived. The court said the killing had been carefully planned and carried out, and that her claim of mental disorder was difficult to accept.
The judge spoke directly about the public reaction to the case. The killing, he said, had spread fear in society that a person could become a victim for no reason at all, and had incited a general distrust between strangers in the country.
On November 24, 2023, the Busan District Court delivered its sentence.
Life in prison.
Thirty years of electronic location tracking after her release, if she ever made it that far. Eligibility for parole, under current law, after twenty.
The court declined the prosecution’s request for capital punishment. South Korea has retained the death penalty in statute but has not actually executed anyone since 1997. Both sides appealed — the prosecution asking for a harsher sentence, Jung asking for a lighter one. In May 2024, the Supreme Court of South Korea upheld the original verdict.
She is currently serving her sentence in a Busan prison. According to officers, she has been calm in custody. She eats well. She sleeps. She has not, by any account anyone can read, expressed remorse beyond the words she said into the cameras on her way to the prosecution.
The taxi driver was given an award for solving the case.
He refused to take it.
According to former colleagues who spoke to Korean reporters, he quit driving shortly after the arrest. He has not given any public interview. The men who used to drive the same shifts said he was terrified of being identified — terrified that one day she would be released, that she would track him down, that the call he made in the parking lot at the edge of the river would come back for him.
He had driven her there twice. He had sat ten feet from her with the windows up. He had watched her walk back through the grass with a suitcase that was suddenly light, and he had known, without being able to say how, what he was looking at.
He has been allowed, since, to disappear.
He is the one person in the case who was never invisible by accident.
