Rotten Mango - #380: Korean High Schoolers Join Role-Playing App & Kill 8 Yr Old Girl For Sick Fantasies

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

Ophelia, an Italian mafia boss, had a thing for fingers. She likes the way they curve, the soft bend at the knuckles, the tender skin, just everything about hands. She loves.  She just hates that she only has one.  Her hand was cut off in a war with the enemy mafia over territory.  Ophelia is sitting at a bar when Kim walks in. Kim is part of the enemy mafia. Kim sits down and slides over a gift.  Ophelia peers inside and a small smile creeps onto her face…. This is perfect.  So beautiful.  She uses both of her hands to place the gift bag under the table. Yes, both of her hands.  Because Ophelia’s hands were never cut off.  She’s not a mafia boss.  In fact, her name is not even Ophelia.  She is a South Korean high schooler who joined a role playing game. But now the question is - who is Kim? Because inside the gift bag are very very real human lungs and flesh.  Including a pretty little finger. Ophelia’s favorite.    Full Source Notes: rottenmangopodcast.com To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ophelia is a higher up at one of Italy's most powerful mafias and she's got a thing for fingers. The way that Ophelia loves hands and fingers, the way that the fingers curve, especially when they're slightly slender. They almost feel fragile when Ophelia is holding them in her hands. Like you could just snap a finger off like a little carrot. When the fingers are slightly bent, the knuckles that softly curve. I mean, everything about hands just gets Ophelia going. She loves them. She loves hands. And she hates the fact that she only has one.

Her right hand was chopped off during this particularly nasty fight with the enemy mafia. They're fighting over mafia. They're fighting over territory. They're fighting over land, which is why Ophelia is now sitting here sipping a cocktail in the middle of this very busy bar in South Korea. Yeah, Hongdae. This person named Kim shows up. Kim is part of that enemy mafia and the two of them, I mean, I don't know how I would describe them other than enemies that are still enemies but are sometimes sadistically, romantically, sexually involved with each other. They hate each other. They're destined to despise each other. They're from opposing mafias.

But right now Kim is sitting next to Ophelia and pushes a bag closer to her. What is it? Take a look. Ophelia peers inside and she smiles. This is why she keeps Kim around. This is why they get along. Only Kim would know that money, gold, I mean these aren't even good gifts. Kim asks Ophelia, isn't it pretty? Very pretty. Ophelia looks up, smiles at Kim, and then Ophelia uses both of her hands to tuck the gift bag under the table. Because Ophelia looks up, smiles at Kim, and then Ophelia uses both of her hands to tuck the gift bag under the table. Because Ophelia's right hand was never chopped off.

Ophelia is not a mafia boss. Ophelia is not even her real name. In fact, she's never even been to Italy. She is a 17-year-old girl from South Korea that met Kim on a role-playing website. But then the question is, who is Kim? Why would Kim actually kill for her? Because inside of that bag are very real chunks of human lungs, human thighs, as well as a single severed finger. A pretty little finger.

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Few quick disclaimers on this case. There are mentions of self-exit, cannibalism, dismemberment, other details of graphic crimes. They all unfortunately also involve juveniles, so please keep that in mind going into it. But with that being said, today's case is Korean, we had our wonderful Korean translators help assist in the gathering of data for this case. And another thing to note is, we only know the last names of the parties involved due to Korea's privacy laws. The victim is given an alias, so we're gonna stick with that.

With that being said, let's get into it. There are online communities in South Korea that you can join. It's a mixture of the games Dungeons and Dragons, Mafia, and social media. You have the roleplay aspect from Dungeons and Dragons, the mystery plot driven game aspect of the game Mafia, and it's all combined in social media chat rooms. Here's how some of them work. Obviously each community, each chat room plays by different rules and this is just a sub-genre of a bigger community essentially. But there are chat rooms you can join with game masters,

chat room owners. They start the chat room, they let anybody that they approve inside the chat room, and they're the one guiding this game. They've all concocted a plot that you can read up on before you join or before you apply to join. An example would be this chat room plot is a high school that has been shut down during the zombie apocalypse. If you are infected with the virus, it takes 72 hours before symptoms arise. It is up to the students to decide which five students are positive with the virus before the 72 mark is over.

Meanwhile, the five infected students know that they are infected and want to quietly infect as many people as possible. The catch here is, the ones with the virus, they emanate a very specific scent. That scent is very weak in the first few hours of infection, but within 72 hours, it becomes overpowering. But the more people that you infect, the less intense your scent becomes. It's almost like you are giving away some of that scent to each person that you infect. So it would be in every infected person's interest, self-interest, to infect as many people as quickly as possible.

If you decide that this is a game that you want to play, you likely already have a host of characters that you've been playing. Like you have a repertoire, maybe you have 10 characters that you've been playing. Like you have a a repertoire, maybe you have 10 characters that you've already recycled in different chat rooms because it takes a lot of energy to come up with every single individual character. So maybe you have a high school character, a middle aged character, some fantasy characters that have superpowers ready to be recycled, maybe a little bit tweaked to be used in different chat rooms. However, if you want to play, then you have to create a character and submit that character to the game master.

The more thorough the character developing is, the more fun the game becomes. So let's say you want to join the zombie chat room. You would create a high schooler. Let's say I'm creating a junior in high school, a girl named Suzy. She's very smart. She has a studious personality, but that's boring, right? We gotta add more to her character. But it's because she's being manipulated by the teachers. She has this one teacher that's groomed

her since middle school and he helps her get all the exam grades before the tests come around. She thinks that she's in love with this teacher, but it could also be because her parents are incredibly strict with her getting the best grades. She just found out that not only are they quarantining in this high school with the teacher that's grooming her, right? There's people infected with the zombie virus. But this teacher has essentially manipulated her, exerted control over her since she was younger.

And she just found out that he's been doing this to all these other students as well. Saying the same things. Now her objective is to find out who has the virus and somehow, without exposing herself in the process, to get them to give the teacher the virus. Because she wants to kill the teacher. Yes. For example, if she finds out that Michelle is infected,

it would be in her best interest to somehow get Michelle and the teacher constantly in the same room together and to perhaps evolve into something that they shouldn't. But she doesn't think that she should die. She wants to get out alive. She doesn't care if her other peers do. All her end goal is get into that dream college still and get that teacher infected so that he can die. That's all she cares about. She doesn't care about identifying which students so that they can kill him off. She doesn't care about other students getting out carefully.

She wants to find out who has the virus so they can give it to the teacher. So when she's playing, basically she's like, keep on setting up a scenario for this Michelle and the teacher to be in the same room. That's her whole objective. Yes, but first she has to find out which ones have the virus and she has to make sure they don't get killed by the other students who their probably their best interest is to kill the infected students. Right, right, right.

Okay. Now, I believe in most cases, if I'm not mistaken, the game master will go through and approve each character's requests to be admitted into the game, which means they read through all the characters backstories. They want to create the most complicated plot. They don't want just someone to come in and be like, I am a high school girl who's smart but likes Kevin. That it's not enough. And once the characters are in this chat room,

they create social media profiles for their character. There's one big chat room with the game master that will narrate the events of that night. Night one of the high school zombie apocalypse, the students have organized a meeting in the stadium where each student was to go up to the podium and explain why they couldn't have been the ones to be infected, to try and give alibis, to try and give proof.

There was a vote with paper slips of names being slipped into a box that would vote off 20 students that seemed the most suspicious. The whole process was incredibly tense, with the group stopping to argue nonstop about how is this fair, are there better methods, who should even be in control of counting the freaking votes. The students opted for a public counting. Each slip would have to have been opened in front of everyone, shown, the name read, and separated into piles.

Those students were then barricaded into a classroom with no way out. One of those students happens to be a powerful governor's daughter And now the governor and the police are heavily involved in tracking the movements of every single student inside that school And they have sent a very strong message if the governor's daughter does not get out alive and uninfected Nobody else will but most alarming is last night on floor five. There is a girl found in one of the bathroom stalls She was drowned in the toilet Because last night on floor 5, there is a girl found in one of the bathroom stalls. She was drowned in the toilet. There is a note in her pocket that reads, watch out, it's not just the virus that can

kill you, it's in the water systems. So these are the, what, this is the setup of the whole game by the Game Master? Yes, so the Game Master, it's like, where they have to narrate every single sequence of events, recap, and then give a new mission. Okay. So it's in the water system, but the water system control panels is in room 251, the room where the 20 students have been locked in and they're waiting to get out. They're waiting to kill, beat up, or possibly infect everyone that locked them in there to begin with.

We will all gather by the end of day tonight in the chat rooms to discuss what is the next step, what to do, and what we have all learned. So now each chat room player is then ready to go off into groups. You can start a new chat room with just maybe five people in there, almost like you walk into a classroom and there's only five people having a little meeting.

Or you can have one-on-one direct messages with other people and you can trade secrets, you can lie to other people and then by the end of the night, given that time period, everyone comes into the big chat and they start saying what they know. No, I was talking to Michelle and she said this. I was talking to Kevin and she said this. Kind of like Among Us. Yeah, it's like Among Us. Yes, that's a very good, but it's such a fun, fascinating concept that I think that I would really be into. I think I would really enjoy being a game master. Just depending on how each game is played

and how it's set up, you can actually be immersed in one singular role play story, one room for days, weeks, some have gone six months. There's actually warnings in some of these communities. Sometimes when your character is killed off in rather graphic ways, and since you've been so immersed in these people, in this life, in this character, with everybody around you in this storyline, they say it almost feels jarring. There is a sense of almost emotional betrayal. Many in those communities have said, I mean sometimes it can feels jarring. There is a sense of almost emotional betrayal Many in those communities have said I mean sometimes it can be a lot It feels like someone and you died and then you have to remind yourself. That's literally a roleplay chat room

Why am I crying? Why do I feel grief? Why do I feel like I've been broken up with? I imagine it's like acting you get attached to your character and when something happens or maybe you get killed off in the middle of the season and everybody goes on without you, you have to disconnect from the real world emotions of that. I think that's why it's up to the game master to make sure that each person is well vetted. That's also very important because imagine everyone is playing this well-crafted roleplay and yet there's an immature troll that's like, I walk into the room and I kill 20 students with my samurai sword. Everything, everyone has to be immersed in the fantasy. Interestingly enough, I believe some of the bigger webtoon authors and game illustrators,

they've all at least to some degree have been in roleplaying communities online. So it's not this weird niche community. It seems pretty common. A lot of people enjoy it. It's a community that everyone tries to keep up with everybody's fantasies. For example, if you describe your character's backstory, nobody is going to be like, okay cool story bro, because then no one wants to hang out with them. They're gonna engage, they're gonna treat it like it's real. They're not gonna be like, that's gross and immature, you're dumb. It's gonna be very realistic, which also means people have

the ability to lie in these chat rooms. They can lie about their ages. There could be a 25-year-old guy talking to a 17-year-old girl trying to get more information on her in the real world, not her character. But you would never really know, because that's the point of the community. You never break the fantasy, which which if you're not careful it can lead to some very very dangerous situations.

One of the roleplay chat rooms for today's case, two separate Italian mafias that hate each other but somehow a higher boss of mafia A and a random henchmen for Mafia B have fallen in this weird angsty sexually tense relationship. One of the people in the chat room is Ophelia Clements. Her bio reads, well do you even know my name? She's a higher-up in one of the Mafia's who seems to be interested in dating the henchmen named PJ from the enemy mafia. They have a bit of an enemies to lovers storyline. I mean it seems more like they hate like each other. Their idea of flirting consists of torturing each other and trying to murder one another. Their

messages to each other are semi threatening, semi flirtatious, like when one of them does something to harm the other they'll text each other. Our revenge is beautiful and devastating. Of course it is. Then I'll be waiting. PJ's profile reads, mentally speaking, I'm not great. Male, 5'7", 141 pounds. Now Ophelia, the mafia boss, seems to have that character of put together woman that's forced to be harsh considering she's in this male dominated field and everybody's trying to kill her.

She has to be even more ruthless than her male counterparts for the reason that she has something to prove as a woman, as a mafia boss that happens to be a woman. She didn't get to the top by smiling and being nice to boys. PJ, on the other hand, is just an unhinged, mentally unwell henchman for the other mafia. He likes to kill for the thrill of killing. He would post on Twitter things like, The most pain is to grab a fistful of your own hair and slam your head up against the wall. But at least you'll be knocked out.

Doesn't it feel painful to cut your neck before you cut your nerves off? The top of the neck is the most comfortable in terms of cutting the cartilage. I've never eaten brain before. Have you? So the two of them, they have this tumultuous relationship where they'll try to kidnap, torture each other.

At one point, Ophelia kidnaps PJ, holds PJ hostage, force feeds him human flesh, which results in PJ developing a massive phobia of chewing and swallowing. But secretly, PJ starts to develop this almost craving for the taste of human meat, particularly the lungs and the organs. And then Ophelia would essay PJ, but according to the characters, deep deep deep deep down, PJ likes the abuse. He likes being abused by Ophelia. So all these are being talked about in the chat room? Yes. So even the kidnapping is narrated. It's almost like I kidnap you.

So I believe there's asterisks or parentheses for actions and they even do like emotes. So they'll write something asterisks smirking. I don't know if that's all the roleplay chat rooms, but I know for this specific one these specific details that's how they do it. In the roleplay chat rooms a message goes out from PJ to Ophelia, the two mafia members. PJ texts Ophelia, I'm going hunting. But this is the interesting part. PJ sends a real life picture of themselves wearing this mafia hitman style outfit. So this is becoming like a blending of the roleplay and reality because this is not a fake internet photo or at least

that's what Ophelia thinks this looks like a very real photo of PJ PJ promises to bring Ophelia her favorites fingers and lungs that's in the roleplay that's part of their little roleplay because remember Ophelia loves fingers and PJ has a thing for lungs right now. But in the real world, March 29th, 2017, a little 8 year old girl named Sarang goes missing. Sarang is her pseudonym by the way, her real identity has not been revealed on the wishes of her parents. Now, 8 year old Sarang goes missing after school, but the thing is, she goes missing in her apartment complex.

They call it an apartment forest in South Korea. It's a collection of the same apartment building. They look identical in this massive park. It's a big giant circle and there's maybe 12 giant skyscrapers, tall buildings scattered around and then on the ground there's little playgrounds, there's little walking areas, recreational areas scattered about. You could live your whole life in one of these apartment complexes. And they all have this massive group chat. Every single resident has a group chat. And it is becoming overly active March 29th.

A mom is looking for her child. Has anybody seen her? What's her name? Sarang from Complex D. Maybe the child fell asleep at her friend's house? These are real text messages in that group. Oh, I know that child. Redacted's mom is probably taking her in for a snack. They're really close.

Have you guys checked at her friend's house? It has been a few hours since the little 8-year-old girl Sarang has gone missing, and it's a very safe, relatively wealthy area. But why is everybody on edge? It doesn't make sense. There have been recent reports that a cult had been approaching all the kids with coins and snacks promising to take them to an arcade if they follow them. And each child would follow them.

Eventually the parents would find them, the child would have had so much fun, the cult would use this as an opportunity to lure the parents into joining, or at least trying to slowly indoctrinate them through their children. Yeah, there have been reports of that. So people are getting freaked out. Typically nothing happens to the children. They have fun at the arcade. But we don't know.

It's not a great feeling for the parents. Besides, Sarang's parents know their daughter. They're saying she's not the type to go anywhere, even an arcade without asking her parents first. This doesn't make sense. The police are called and they're quick with their search. They find the little girl that was last seen playing with Sarang, Sarang's friend. They were playing at the playground and they ask her, where did your friend Sarang go?

She asked this adult for their phone to call her mom to tell her mom that she wanted to play more at the playground. But the person said that they didn't have any battery on their phone, which is why Sarang followed them to their apartment. Which apartment? That building. They pull CCTV cameras of that building and they see… wait, that's Sarah, no? Sure enough, they see her around 1pm following

this figure up to a floor 13 of one of the nearby buildings. It's good, they found her. There's nothing about the footage that's alarming. It's not like the adult with her is grabbing her hand, forcibly pulling her into the apartment It's just the only thing is the figure is a little weird The person in the elevator with her is wearing a suit with sunglasses They're carrying a large suitcase with them But they won't look at any of the CCTV cameras and it's just something about this person's body movements It's yes, their clothes are weird. The suitcase is weird. The suitcase, they're dragging it but it feels awfully light the way they're dragging it. Like there's nothing in there. Is it a big one or? I would say

about carry-on size. Oh, so it's a smaller one. Yes, but it's just whipping around. It's not, it's just weird. I don't think I could ever whip around like that unless it's fully empty. And the way that they move in the clothing, it doesn't seem like they're comfortable. It doesn't feel right. It's just weird. They can't really put their finger on it. And it almost seems like they're dressed like a caricature of a mafia hitman or something. But it's fine. They get off on the 13th floor. They just need to search the 13th floor, right? The police search the whole floor. They turn floor 13 upside down and these two are nowhere to be found. They start combing through the rest of the footage to see maybe 8-year-old Sarang is seen coming back down

or maybe she goes to another floor in the elevator. But no, they just see other residents going about their day. They see teenagers in their pajamas throwing out trash, moms hauling groceries inside grandmas going on their afternoon walks, they don't see an eight-year-old Sarang anywhere. So they got out on 13th floor and police checked every single residence. On the 13th floor. And nothing. Nothing. Nothing even a miss. Nothing suspicious. Nothing that looks like the people in the footage. One of the lead investigators would later say along the lines of, this is good. I mean not that the situation is good, but considering the facts,

this is a very safe area. It's a densely packed apartment forest, they call it, which is, you know, and the same apartment building? Her grandparents live in them. The complex itself is right around the corner from a police station. It's incredibly low crime. They know which building she was last seen going up to. Maybe she took the stairs where there's no cameras.

And clearly she didn't leave the building. There's no footage of her coming down, which means she's in the building somewhere, in some of these 15 floors. They just have to find her. Because how else does an 8-year-old leave the building without the police knowing? That same day, March 29th, 2017,

Katie, this is a fake name, because she wishes to be anonymous, but she does tell authorities and reporters what happened March 29th. Katie says she got a text message from one of her distant friends, I guess you could call them, come to my dinner party. I'm slicing up some meat right now. It'll be fun. Tonight. Katie's looking at her phone. It's Wednesday night. An impromptu dinner party from someone... I mean this friend is just... it doesn't feel right. She flips over on her bed and sends a very polite Sorry, can't make it. Maybe next time. She just thought what a weird invite. What a weird person. Whatever.

She throws her phone on her nightstand, falls asleep, but within a few hours, Katie says, she jerks awake. She hears someone punching in the numbers to her door code. In Korea, most people don't have key locks on their apartment doors, but rather they have door keypads where you input a code to unlock the door. But each time you press a number, it's a noise. It's like a beeping noise. She hears beep beep beep beep beep. And her eyes are wide open.

She can't see anything. The whole room is dark. And she someone has come into the apartment she hears loud heavy footsteps and it sounds like it's coming closer and closer to her room the door swings open and Katie says she sees that friend the creepy friend that invited her to the creepy dinner party, the one that Katie turned down, standing in her doorway holding a knife. You didn't come over. The friend starts charging towards her with the knife and Katie said she screams, wakes up from the nightmare, drenched in sweat, she's frantic, she's breathing very quickly,

checks the time, middle of the night. Thank god, this whole thing was a nightmare. Katie reaches over, grabs her phone, but the invite to that dinner party was very real. Her strange friend Kim really had invited her to a dinner party. Kim is... The one from the beginning of the story that gifts Ophelia the fingers. The police are stuck. They have no idea where eight-year-old Sarang has gone inside this building. They take the footage of her going up to the 13th floor with this random person and they start asking the residents, do you know who this person is with eight-year-old Sarang? I don't know,

I think that looks like the resident from floor 15. I don't know why they're dressed like that but I think it's them. That's strange. Floor 15, are you sure? Yeah, I'm pretty certain. Do you see why that's weird? They got out on floor 13. Yeah and they have a suitcase. Why would you walk up two levels with a suitcase and get off on floor 13? It just doesn't make sense unless you're hiding something, unless you want everyone to think that you live on floor 13. It just doesn't make sense unless you're hiding something, unless you want everyone to think that you live on floor 13 or misguide them. What did you say the residents' names are again?

Oh, it's the Kim family. Authorities rush into the apartment in question, the Kim house on the 15th floor. They rush past the front door, past the kitchen, and when they get to the living room, they're standing there and they're staring at a completely spotless living room. Nothing is amiss. Nothing is in disarray. Not a single hair out of place. The lead investigator points at the bedroom doors. They split off. They search the entire house room by room, closet by closet, bedrooms cleared, closets cleared, kitchen cleared,

restroom cleared. Not a single drop of blood. Not a single hair, nothing. There is absolutely nothing. Except on the way out, the investigators see in the corner of the entryway, shoved to the side, a pair of shoes. Tiny, tiny, small shoes. Small enough to fit an eight-year-old. What? They bring in the luminol. They spray it across the bathroom, the kitchen, everywhere.

They turn down the lights and the whole bathroom lights up. Someone had cleaned up an entire crime scene. The bathtub in particular was at one point recently caked and smeared in blood. To the point that this indicates some kind of dismemberment, murder, or torture of some sort. But one question authorities have is, how were they able to clean it up so well? It almost seems like a seasoned professional hit job, the work of a professional. What did you say the Kims do anyway? I think the residents said the dad

is a doctor? A few months later, the door of the courtroom pushes open an in-walk 12 attorneys from some of the top law firms in South Korea. This is the dream team of attorneys. They are the best of the best in the criminal defense attorney field. To get them on retainer, each one would be at least $10,000, if not more. There's 12 of them? 12 of them. They hire 12 lawyers at the same time? Yes. You're talking about lawyers fees close to a million maybe.

Wow. They're here to defend their client. Eight-year-old Sarang's killer. 16-year-old Kim. The daughter of a well-established doctor. It's not the doctor, it's his daughter. 16 year old Kim. She was the last one seen on the CCTV footage with Sarang. She was wearing her mom's oversized suit, oversized sunglasses, dragging around a suitcase. That's why the figure looks so

weird. It's like a little kid wearing clothes that they're not comfortable with, that are a little too big for them. Luring Sarang into the house. She is the only one that was in the Kim family apartment the whole time during the murder. 16 year old Kim is now on trial for the murder of 8 year old Sarang. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Sometimes it feels like taking care of myself is a chore. I mean, a whole day could pass where I spend most of it researching or helping take care of my nieces when they come over. And then the moment that I get a time to myself, all I want to do is brain rot on the couch, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

But I was spending so much time doing that that I felt like I had no energy to do anything else. And my therapist, she helped break down this cycle I realized with her help that I have all of these self-care tasks that I skipped that are actually beneficial for me because they help ground me and at the time when I'm thinking about doing it, I'm like I don't want to do that, I want to brain rot but when I actually do it

and with her help, I create this list of non-negotiables things I have to at least try for five minutes at a time things that are gonna help me feel like myself. One of them, of course, is to never skip therapy. Once I do these things, I just feel so much better. It always is like, you know when you go to the gym and you go, oh, I don't want to go, but when you end up going, you think, why didn't I do this sooner? That felt so good.

See, that wasn't that hard. I know taking the time to start therapy may feel overwhelming, but I will be the first to say that it has helped me release a lot of bottled negative emotions towards myself. If you thought of trying therapy but haven't gotten to it, give BetterHelp a try. It's completely online and it's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. All you have to do is fill out a brief questionnaire to match with a licensed therapist. They even let you switch therapists anytime for no additional charge if you and your

therapist just don't click. So never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash rotten today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp.com slash rotten. When Kim was first brought into the police station immediately after her arrest, she was arrested I want to say 16 hours after Sarang went missing or after the murder. She wasn't reported missing until later. So maybe like 12 hours after she was reported missing. And she, the 16 year old cleaned up the whole apartment?

In actually less than two hours. Like spotless. Not a single drop of blood. Wow. Two hours. And the police almost overlooked it. Yes. If it's not for the shoes.

If it wasn't for the shoes, I think she would have gotten away with it for a while. I mean, perhaps they would have eventually come down to her, but yeah, it would have taken longer. Wow. When Kim is first brought into the police station after her arrest, she's led into the interrogation room. The investigators that aren't maybe working on this case, but they knew that some of their peers were because they're working other cases. They're looking at her and they're asking their peers, is that another witness you got coming in? Just from the way she carried herself, her look, nobody assumed that they caught the killer. She

looked more like a helpful neighbor that might be able to provide a few more statements, a few more insights to the prosecutors. Not a full-blown killer who dismembered an eight-year-old. One of the officers even asked, the one that killed and dismembered a child is a child? A child killed a child? The interrogators bring her into the room and up close she actually looks even younger than her age. She almost has this plush cheeks, innocent, childlike, naive appearance. She looks like a fresh-faced maybe 13 year old. But it's chilling. The investigator working on the case said, her eyes, she would just follow you with her eyes, observing and staring so intently. They said it was very creepy.

She just looks at them and she bluntly states, I don't remember. I think I had a dream. I don't know. My head just hurt so much and it felt like someone had hit me on the head. And then when I woke up I just had a feeling that I had done something bad. But I don't remember. I really killed her? I thought it was a dream. I don't remember. You don't remember?

The police are like, you don't remember anything? Let's jog your memory then. 10.50am she goes out hunting with her new disguise on, trying very clearly to make herself appear like she does not live at this apartment complex. Because why else is she lugging around a suitcase? It's not like there's a kill kit in there. There's nothing in there. It seems like she's trying to misguide people into thinking that she's a visitor rather than a resident. And then she gets off on the 13th floor, this whole outfit, she's wearing sunglasses,

she's trying to appear like an adult. You don't remember any of that? She doesn't remember how 8-year-old Sarang was playing with her friends on the playground but wanted to call her mom to ask her if she could stay out longer, but she doesn't have a phone. So she went to the only adult that was at the playground, and she specifically even went to a woman. Because a lot of kids are taught in South Korea, and probably perhaps everywhere, you know, you don't really approach a male adult for help.

You approach someone who looks like a mom is typically the advice that's given to children. She approaches a female adult, excuse me miss I need to call my mother can I borrow your phone? The woman in this oversized blazer aka Kim leans down gets eye level with her and smiles, my phone battery is dead. Why don't we go back to my house and you can use my landline. Forensic data would later show that Kim's phone was indeed not dead and had a lot of battery. Eight-year-old Sarang did not know that.

Sarang looked around debating on what to do. Her friend said that there were no other adults readily available. Otherwise, she would have just been like, oh, it's okay. I'll just go to the next adult and ask for their cell phone and she does have to call her mom before she stays longer That's the rule they have and her friend has seen her talking to this nice woman Even if she wasn't eight, I think most people would have been like, okay, I'm sure this is safe She tells her friend she's gonna be right back and she goes with her Kim again is not pressuring her, is not creeping her out. Her voice, her attire, the fact that she lives in the same apartment complex that Sa-rang's family also lives in,

everything points to the idea that this is a safe thing to do. The two walk up to Kim's apartment with no incident. If you watch CCTV footage of them in the elevator, Kim is neither dragging Sa-rang, neither forcing her to follow. She's incredibly nonchalant. They even briefly share some small talk in the elevator, Kim is neither dragging Sa-rang, neither forcing her to follow, she's incredibly nonchalant. They even briefly share some small talk in the elevator. We don't know what they've said, but it seems very casual. Technically, it's like following a neighbor into their house to fetch something for your parents. That's the energy here.

But now Kim is telling the investigators that she doesn't remember getting off with Sa-rang on the 13th floor, she doesn't remember walking up two flights of stairs to her own apartment on the 15th floor for the sole purpose of trying to mislead whoever's watching the CCTV cameras. She doesn't remember then getting the little girl into the apartment where both of her parents are off at work so she's completely alone with her and then strangling her with a charging cord, like a phone charging cord, just wrapping it around her neck and strangling her. She then proceeds to take off 8-year-old Sa-rang's clothes, so to not get blood on them for whatever

reason, placing her into the bathtub, grabbing six of her mom's kitchen knives to dismember her. She starts first by severing Sa-rang's right hand pinky finger. Interestingly, the knives were cleaned before being put back in their original spot. She has no memory of that either though. She also doesn't remember pouring bleach down her whole body to wipe off the blood after Sarang's dismemberment. She poured bleach on her own body to make sure she had none of Sarang's blood on her. She showered in bleach. Again, I do want to mention that this whole murder took place over the span of roughly two hours.

That's how long it took for Kim to lure Sarang into her house, strangle her, dismember her, then clean up every single drop of blood in that entire house, and then get rid of her remains. In just two hours. And she doesn't remember anything? Because right after the murder, that same day, when the whole neighborhood is looking for Sarang, she even posts on her social media. Question mark, question mark, question mark? What? Question mark?

The child apparently disappeared in my neighborhood. Because at this point, it wasn't just the apartment complex looking for this little girl. It seemed like it was the whole town. A few hours later, right before the arrest, she tweets, I'm going to be away for a while, dot dot dot. You don't remember any of that? When she's confronted with all of this information,

her parents shut her up and state, it's not that she doesn't remember, it's the fact that she is not responsible for anything she has done or said because she has schizophrenia and DID. She is insane. Oh, so parents are in the room with her? The parents decide that they're gonna have the lawyers plead insanity.

And the parents are very supportive of their daughter. I don't know if I wanna say supportive, but they're very protective of their daughter. They're not good people, the parents. They're not good people, and now they're staunchly arguing, my child is innocent by reason of insanity Not guilty by reason of insanity because she has schizophrenia and DID. Oh the parents so the parents are rich doctors Yes, that is and they're the one that hired 12 lawyers for her Yes, but there's gonna be another defendant that also hires 12 like they all hire a bunch of attorneys

I'm talking these attorneys aren't even just the best. They used to be judges. They used to be prosecutors. They know the system in and out. These people are experienced and they have connections. The family are just very wealthy. Very wealthy. I know that Kim's dad is a doctor. Some sources state that Kim's mom is also a doctor or she's in the medical field but I don't know what kind of doctors they are. I mean doctors in Korea they do well. Kim just bluntly states now there's another me inside of me. What? This girl is claiming that she has DID and schizophrenia. Kim is claiming that she has two alters A and J. A strangled the victim's neck and J dismembered the corpse. She states, that day I heard hallucinations so I went outside and was watching the kids.

Just random kids at the playground. And in the midst of my hallucinations, I saw the kid harassing a cat, herding a cat on the playground. And I got angry seeing that because I have a cat myself. And the hallucinations told me to do it. I took her home and I committed the crime. Or at least my alter did. I'm rolling my eyes because it's ridiculous.

She further claims that she constantly hears a ringing in her ear, which actually is a very real condition called tinnitus, I believe, where one hears ringing or slight buzzing in one or both of their ears. It could be caused by a whole range of issues, hearing loss, whiplash, head injuries, too much earwax. There is no link to tinnitus and schizophrenia. At least not that I could find. I will say there is a link, interestingly, between tinnitus and anxiety and depression though. But none to schizophrenia. Not that it matters, because even if she is schizophrenic, that is not a link to cold blooded murder. Most people that

suffer from schizophrenia or DID do not commit violent crimes. But because that's the defense's claim, now both parties, the defense and the prosecutors, they got to bring psychologists in to see if she was in fact not in her right mind. It's not enough to be schizophrenic and to have DID. You have to prove that you were in a state of psychosis during the murder. The psychiatrists go in and they start reviewing all of Kim's records. Kim actually does have a psychiatric record. Even just last year before the murder, Kim was seeing a psychiatrist because she admitted to her art teacher that she wanted to strangle a cat, maybe even hinted that she had. She gets reported and the psychiatrist writes in her notes, patient states, it's

not that the violence comes out of me, but I think there is a lot of violence inside of me. I thought I should strangle a cat once, and I watch a ton of gory, cruel movies. Patient also states very bluntly, It's better, I think, that two-thirds of the human population disappears. I think it's better for humanity to survive in smaller numbers. Just remove the bottom layer. It would be the best.

Some classmates indicate that Kim has this strong air of superiority around her. to survive in smaller numbers. Just remove the bottom layer, it would be the best. Some classmates indicate that Kim has this strong air of superiority around her. Her dad's a doctor and they drive around in these expensive cars. And her psychiatrist also worry that she's got some antisocial tendencies, you know? She doesn't make a lot of friends. One of her favorite pastimes is to just sit at the neighborhood playground watching little kids run around. It's a slightly alarming thing to do. She often tells her doctor that she's depressed, struggling, and wants to end it all. She said she lies down at home all the time. Sometimes she draws, sometimes she reads, but a lot of

times she doesn't have the energy for anything except maybe punching her bed or ripping at her dolls, okay? She has a lot of built-up anger, resentment just boiling inside of her. In South Korea, every year they do an emotional behavior test for all students in schools. This is very interesting, but it's supposed to be an early intervention measure. I don't know how well it's implemented or executed,

but the purpose would be to identify the students who are at risk of mental health issues and provide early help. According to Kim's reports, she scored higher than normal on the self-exit score, meaning she was actually placed in the group of concern for her school. Kids that might need intervention, which is another reason I think she had to undergo therapy. Now Kim wasn't actually in school at the time of the murder, even though she's 16, so I'm not sure if that test is from a year before or right before she dropped out, but she

drops out of high school, which is not that common in South Korea, especially for the daughter of a doctor They even asked her why and she bluntly tells the authorities. There's nothing more to learn at school But back then when she was in school, she does have a very unapproachable attitude Her teachers state she's really smart. I will say that. She has an IQ of 140 and typically does really well for herself in terms of grades. Always on top of her class.

140, you say? Yeah. She's a genius. She's smart. Yeah. She's in the gifted education programs for math and sciences. One of the comments left by her teacher on the reports reads, makes efforts to independently solve problems and tasks, which is pretty good for a 16 year old, but she's what you would call a smart ass. Yeah, they said

she's a smart ass. She would ask questions in class, which is great, yes, but a lot of the times they had nothing to do with the subject matter. She was so persisting. That was what her teacher said about her. It's almost like she wants to interrogate her teachers when she asks questions. She doesn't want to learn. She wants to interrogate them. Classmates remember her being called a prodigy growing up. She learned how to read very quickly when she was very, very young, before the average reading age. She was also very interested in medicine and anatomy. She would just carry around medical books and tell everyone she's going to be a doctor just like her dad. But there does seem to be some trouble at

home with her dad. One time when classmates said, once Kim came to class with this eye patch, and like a pirate's eye patch, multiple days had passed and everyone thought it was so strange. So they asked her, what's wrong with your eye she lifted up the entire whites of her eyes were bloody clearly she was injured she said my dad hit me because i missed a single day of hagwon which is after school tutoring she's claiming her dad punched her in the face it was widely agreed upon that yes kim is smart but she uses all of her smarts to be calculating and persistent more than anything. The type of person that uses all their brain capacity for bad.

That's just the feeling that everyone got from her even before the crime. Kim also liked to draw. She had a ton of drawings that she would post online, so the authorities and psychologists had to analyze all of those. Now there's not too many public observations of each specific drawing, but I will say that a lot of those drawings have been made public, and right off the bat, you can just tell. Kim likes to draw very, very dark things. Almost all of her drawings center around cannibalism, harm, violence, gore, weapons,

death, just dark stuff. She has one drawing of a person sitting at this dinner table with this plate of food in front of them. There's a wine glass on the table and the whole drawing is in this light blue shaded color. Except the food. Except the liquid in the wine glass. They're the only ones in color and they're both drawn in this dark deep shade of red. I'm gonna be blunt. I think the person is being forced to eat human flesh and drink human blood. That's what this drawing looks like. The person in the drawing is holding the knife, but also trying to not gag and their other hand is covering their mouth like they're gonna throw up everywhere. Which is very interesting because remember Kim's role play character was PJ and PJ was forced to eat human flesh by Ophelia.

Do you remember that? So do we can we assume that this is Kim drawing Kim? Is this a depiction of PJ? How closely does she feel with the person that she's drawing? It's just very interesting. Her role-play drawings. In another drawing there's just a decapitated head on a plate. Half the scalp has been peeled off and opened. Kind of like a bowl if you will. Half the head is peeled open and you just see a brain. It feels like someone is about to grab a spoon and start scooping out the brain and eating it. It's all very gory and done very specific. Some people

believe that this picture of the brain being eaten is almost a cry for help from Kim to almost indicate that she doesn't know what's going on inside of her head. Almost like she wants to crack open her head and see what's going on. Maybe she's got some, yeah, a lot of people say that's the analysis that was taken away. Now, it's all very gory, but it's done in a very specific, almost anime inspired drawing style that it doesn't feel initially startling. There are other drawings which is closeups of people's necks with ligature marks around them.

It looks like they had just recently been strangled. Another one of a scared-looking girl that's covered in blood. There's drawings of bloody eyeballs cut in half and thrown onto a plate to be consumed. One art therapist analyzed Kim's drawings and said, "'The human head is originally quite a symmetrical structure, "'but if you look at this subject's drawings, "'they're all different, not symmetrical.

"'Most of them are not. "'This can be seen as an unstable psychological state "'of the subject or someone who's not in balance. "'It could also represent someone who has a very aggressive "'or threatening tendency.'" Like what do you mean? The drawing of the head is not symmetrical? there's always something going wrong with the head to make it asymmetrical and overall, most of Kim's drawings, they said that there does seem to be a clear indication of inconsistent psychological states

the emotion of anxiety and overall emotional agitation seems to be very present. Another analysis includes, and I don't know how they got to this, okay, based on the way that each stroke is handled and the contents of the drawings, just an overview of all the drawings, the psychologist said, it appears Kim is very self-assertive in her personality. Even her brushstrokes, they don't seem hesitant. They don't seem like someone who is erasing and then redoing and contemplating and is unsure of their movements, unsure of their ability to draw. It shows someone who's very self-assured but has somewhat paranoid tendencies.

Another observation is it appears Kim wants to receive attention from others, but there's a clear hesitation and reluctance about it. So there does seem to be some reports that children of that age, when they're around 16 and they draw a lot of these dark things, there might be an inner need to want to receive attention. But also hesitation because maybe the attention that she receives from her parents is not the type of attention she wants. It's unclear. Now, ultimately, the psychologist analyzed, there's almost no chance, however, okay, regardless of her drawings, that she actually has DID or schizophrenia. All of her symptoms appear to be someone pretending to have such disorders, but she may or may not have. Now, side note, quick disclaimer here. Her official records show that she may have Asperger's syndrome.

This is no longer recognized as an actual disorder, at least in the United States. I'm not sure about South Korea. If I'm not mistaken, the disorder was no longer formally recognized in the US in 2013, but Kim is diagnosed in 2017. So I don't know if things are just different in South Korea, but in the US, it would have been diagnosed as autism, which is just a diagnosis that again has nothing to do with

her crime, just like DID and schizophrenia. It does not make her more or less likely to commit a crime. And like I said, people with such diagnosis are more often than not victims of violent crimes rather than perpetrators. But you get what I'm saying. She's diagnosed with autism. That doesn't mean anything because she wasn't in a state of psychosis. When one pleads insanity, you can't just show proof of any sort of mental health disorder

and state that you're insane. You're not insane. You have to quite literally be in a state of not knowing what you're doing. And there is just way too much planning to be involved in this murder. To say that I truly don't know what I was doing, I wasn't in my right mind. There's clear meditation, the disguise, the cleanup, the disposal, everything. Even before, during, and after the crime, Kim's got some interesting Google searches. She's searching up juvenile commits murder.

Find a way to get rid of blood showing up in luminol test. Duration of blood showing up on luminol test. Is it illegal to sprinkle corpse cremation remains in the sea? Busan murder case without a body she doesn't even live in Busan. So I think she's referencing a former case She lives in Incheon, which is where the airport is That's how most people would recognize the city. I think Butchery how to make bone powder cremation sea burial Whoa, this is like long before this is an hour or two before and even during.

She even searches up very specific elementary schools and their schedules, what time they get off. That does not seem to be someone who is in a state of psychosis. The way she also dismembers Sarang's body in the bathtub, putting her organs and fingers separately in a bucket. There's evidence that she cut off the finger first, took out all of Sarang's organs, and put them in a bucket of water so that they don't go bad. Then she continues to dismember the rest of Sarang's body. Again that doesn't sound like someone who's in their state of psychosis. Wait what happened to the girl's body though? We're gonna get there. She manages to clean the entire bathroom, getting rid of every drop and speck of blood, and at the end, she stands in the shower herself and pours bleach on her own body to get rid of any blood stains on her.

Again, not psychosis. In fact, the crime scene was so clean that the authorities initially suspected that her parents must have been involved. They were like, they must have come home, must have seen what happened, and helped her clean up. There's no way a 16-year-old did this. But her parents have an airtight alibi. There's no way anybody else was in that apartment aside from Kim. Ultimately, you can't just say you're crazy and just get a mental health diagnosis in order to be deemed not guilty by reason of insanity.

But apparently Kim doesn't know this. One cellmate of Kim said, this is while they're waiting for the trial. This is while they're doing all the tests, all the psychiatrists are coming in, she's lawyered up. The cellmate said, this girl is weird, very strange. The very first day she came into our cell block, she sat down, joined a group of inmates.

She didn't even introduce herself. She sat down, joined a group of inmates. She didn't even introduce herself. She didn't ask anybody else for their names. She just sat down, stared at each one, and said, ask me questions about my case. Like she knew that her case was famous and she's doing some sort of Q&A. But most of the time they said Kim was just very pissy in jail as if someone had wronged her. Like someone did this to her. Very ohgure is the feeling. Ohgure in Korean is a very specific word. Sadness is your sad. Ohgure is sadness due to some sort of injustice typically.

Like you didn't do anything wrong and why are they doing this to me? I'm so sad. I'm so upset. It's like I just feel pity for myself One day her cellmate said she comes in practically skipping which is a change. She's humming. She's singing She's laughing and this is after a meeting with her attorney. They said that they'd never seen Kim in such a good mood What's it the high spirits? Did your lawyer say something? They said if I have a mental illness, I'll get five to ten years So I have hope again. Wow. After Kim, again, another disclaimer, this no longer exists. After Kim's Asperger's diagnosis, her parents sent her books on Asperger's syndrome for her to read. And the inmates said that she would just, every day she would read a page

and that symptom that she would read up on or that action she would read up on would become her whole personality. It's like she's method acting in prison. She was so creepy that the guards and other inmates that have children, they would hide their photos of their babies around Kim because they're like, I don't want her to remember my kid's face. I don't want her to do anything with my kid. I'm scared. And the fact that parents gave her a book? Yeah.

Wow. They know what they're doing too. Oh yeah. One of Kim's doctors said the possibility of mental illness is low. In terms of the legal letter of the law, it would have to just be that she does not know where she was or what she was doing or what would have been the result of her actions, which is not the case here. At one point in jail awaiting trial, she even turns to her cellmate and says, because I'm crazy, I'm innocent, right? Nobody agreed with her. Not after what she did, not after how she left Sarang's body.

Ten hours after Sarang is reported missing, before Kim is arrested that night the forensics team of the police department as well as the firefighters are gathered up on the rooftop nobody's saying anything it's pretty clear nothing is going as planned because just a few hours ago they're like this is good she's somewhere in the building but now it's not looking good the rooftop is not a pleasant space it's not a rooftop bar or a lounge area or a communal area,

it's just a roof with all the air conditioning units and this platform. Imagine a roof is a rectangle. In the center of this rectangle, there's a square. It's a platform. But in order to get to the top of that square, you have to walk up a flight of stairs and then climb up this 10-foot vertical ladder. And on top of this square in the middle of the roof, there's just a water tank. So it's a very tall platform for a water tank. Yes, and the only thing on there is a water tank. There would be no reason for anyone else to be up there.

Firefighters and forensics teams, they're staring at this platform. And Sarang's family, they're not allowed on the rooftop But they can just sense, they said that they could just sense their lives were never gonna be the same They might have had hope but when they see these four forensic team vehicles arrive at the scene They said they were starting to lose everything. They just had this terrible feeling. They were screaming at the police Please can you just tell me what's going on if we can't go up? And they said that they knew it was wrong when nobody would say anything and nobody could even hold their eye contact. So they're like what's going on in this roof? The firefighters start slowly climbing up the platform, which side note

even for some of the forensic teams climbing up this very straight vertical ladder, even if they were to fall off, they're not gonna fall off the roof. It's not that dangerous, but it's just creepy. It's scary. They said it was hard, and it's crazy to think that someone is coming up here by themselves willingly. So they climb all the way up, and right next to the ladder on top are two white bags. Two of them. Nothing alarming about the bags from the outside. There's no blood, no dirt. Clean two white bags that are filled with stuff. But then you look to the left of those bags.

Right next to it is Ha-rang's diary that she carries to school every single day. It's placed right next to the white bag. And this is so weird. We don't have an explanation for this. You know when you're just little, you pick out what outfit you're gonna wear to school the next day and you almost lay it out

like you're wearing it. So you lay out the t-shirt flat on the bed and then the jeans flat on the bed like a little person, right? That's how Tarang's clothes are laid out. That is crazy. There's no reasoning for it either. That's some really sick behavior Yeah, it's almost like a sign a signal of something No blood just her clothes are laid out. So the forensics teams reach over, open up the white bags, and they find the dismembered remains of 8-year-old Sa-rang. Obviously, the grief of finding her little body is high, but these teams are trained

to observe and take the emotions out of it until later. And they notice something fascinating. On the white bag that the remains were placed on, again, not a single drop of blood. This is the cleanest body disposal that they had ever seen. There's blood inside the body, but on the outside, how did they get the remains in without getting any blood? It's just done like a professional hit. And when you say dismembered body, what do you mean? A lot of pieces. Like big chunky chunks? Yeah.

And that takes a lot of effort. A lot. Six knives were used and a lot of blood. It's yeah. Wow. Yeah. And the fact that there's no blood on the outside of the bags, considering how many separate pieces of body parts were in the bags, is just a lot.

Now the second thing that the forensic teams notice is the full body of the little girl is not in this bag. There are parts of her that are missing. Her organs, some of them, and interestingly, her right hand pinky is missing. The police turn to each other and they say, search the food waste bins now. Now, there's a lot of context needed here. The first being we mentioned earlier

that the entire apartment for the Kims was spotless. Not even a single drop of blood is found, which means there's no way that there are any human remains left hiding inside that apartment, which means the only other place that there could be human remains is the food waste bins of this apartment complex. So in the US there's usually two trash chutes in apartment buildings, regular trash and recyclables. There's a

bit of an honor system here. I believe you sort your trash yourself, you throw it into the according bins that shared with other residents of your apartment complex, those massive bins or dumpsters then get picked up by the corresponding waste management teams, regular trash I sure, usually ends up getting burned or in the landfills. Recycling bin typically ends up, hopefully, in a recycling facility. But all of it is pretty optional for the residents. You know, there's no law that you have to sort your trash like that. You could just throw all your trash, including your recyclables, into the general trash. It's morally not great, but legally, nothing's going to happen to you. In South Korea, that is not the case. All

the trash has to be sorted by each citizen. There's rule books. General waste includes all non-recyclables, tissues, sanitary pads, mixed material and packaging. You have to purchase specific waste bags at supermarkets for all of different sizes and different colors based on the district you're in. The districts have their own labeling. Then you can also throw into general waste, food waste that can't be digested by animals. So you're talking shells, really thick bones, certain vegetable peels that they can't compost and feed livestock.

Now those are sorted separately. Then you have food waste that can be turned into compost for animals. Then you have recyclables, oversized waste like furniture and appliances. They have special waste, electronics, light bulbs, batteries. Those are all separate. The trash then gets sorted once more by waste management. And because South Korea's cameras near trash bins are so high, if you are resident number 365 out of 1,000 residents from that apartment building

and you throw a recyclable into the general waste bin, you're gonna get a text message and you're gonna get a fine. They're gonna know it's you. Even if there's no identifying features in that waste bag, there's no address, there's no letter mail that you accidentally slipped in there. They're gonna find you. Like we have family friends who have a place in South Korea and they'll get text messages while they're in America and they're like, hey, you didn't sort your trash well so we're gonna find you. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. Now if you were to put human

organs into the general waste bin, they're gonna track it to you. They track a recyclable water bottle in there to you and they find you. They're going to track it to you. The only reasonable place to put it in would be to chop it up to make it appear like compostable food waste, animal liver, stuff like that, and throw it into the food waste bins. Those are not as heavily regulated because you're not going through each one. You can't tell either. Yeah, they're usually just scanned to make sure there's no metals and plastics in there and then turned into animal feed.

The forensic teams were able to find Sarang's organs in the food waste bins. I guess she did not cut them up so they were just like globs of human. It just seemed like Kim had gutted her like an animal for consumption. When they run through the CCTV cameras again, they see a teenager, Kim, wearing her pajamas, appearing as if she'd been rolling around in bed all day, bringing down a baggie of food waste and placing it in the bin. Yeah, I don't know how Kim left her apartment the day of the murder. I don't know if she took the stairs, but she gets out of her building, she's wearing a disguise. Then she gets out on floor 13 with Sarang. There's no CCTV cameras in the hallways or the stairwells. She takes the stairs up to the 15th

floor with Sarang. Kills her, takes her dismembered remains, takes the stairs to the 16th floor, again no cameras, disposes of her body parts, goes back to the 15th floor, changes into pajamas, and walks out and gets on the elevator like she's just throwing out some food waste. Wait, didn't you say she brought a finger to... Oh, we're gonna get there. So she throws out some of the organs into the food waste and she even texts her mom before that.

She texts her mom, I'm taking out the food waste, I deserve a bonus. When investigators piece together Sa-rang's remains, they realize that there are still a few pieces missing. Most notably her lungs and her right pinky finger. The police trace Kim's full day from disposing of Sa-rang's body parts on the rooftop at 3pm. The murder took place around 12.50pm, so truly 2 hours-ish. Till her arrest that was around midnight that same night.

There's about 9 hours of where did she take the pinky and lungs for the 9 hours that are unaccounted for? Did she hide them somewhere? Did she dispose of them somewhere? Where the hell are they? A friend of Kim's comes forward. She told me that she was gonna meet up with a Twitter friend. I don't know an online friend that she met on Twitter I don't know. They were gonna grab drinks in the city. So with that investigators track Kim's movements. She gets on a subway goes all the way from Incheon, South Korea, which is where the main

airport is, down to Hongdae in the city of Seoul. It's about a 40-minute subway ride. When authorities watch her through CCTV cameras getting off at around 5.50pm, she meets up with somebody. And what is she carrying? What is that? She's carrying a small little shopping bag, like a gift bag. On camera, she hands it over to the Twitter friend who accepts it.

And inside, where's HaRang's lungs, pieces of her flesh, and her right pinky finger. You know those skincare dropper bottles? Like you squeeze the top, and then you apply it. The finger was placed in a glass dropper bottle in liquid. The friend takes the gift and they link arms and start walking. The two of them then go on to order fried chicken bites and they walk around swinging around this gift bag with no care in the world that a little eight year old girl's body parts are in that bag. So now the next question is who the hell is this Twitter friend and does she know what's in the bag and does she know that just a few hours ago Kim was

dismembering a little eight-year-old girl in her bathroom? The Twitter friend is 18 year old Park and Park always had a thing for hands. I mean at first glance Park is a very ordinary girl. She graduated high school, but she has to retake the college entrance exam So she's apparently studying for that her personality is very Someone describes her as she's always calm quiet no laughing, but she's also not wild But also not depressed and crying just like very in between. I don't know just no feeling is that how I should say that It's very clear that her parents restrict. Her mom is an elementary school teacher

and her dad is a higher up at a big corporation, they said. Very wealthy. Another wealthy girl. Yes, they live in Songpa-gu in Gangnam, which is very expensive. Wow, so two very wealthy girl. Yes. They said, park is weird. Wow, so two very wealthy girls. Yes.

They said, Park is weird. I've never seen her get emotional or even raise her voice. Not even once. She's just very bland, well-mannered, polite. The only extraordinary thing about Park is, like I said, her family's wealthy. Very wealthy. Other than that, nothing stands out. Well, one of her former classmates in high school said,

she's really sweet, very quiet, always either sleeping or on her phone, nothing else. But sometimes she would caress your hand while talking. If you're telling her about your weekend very naturally, slowly, she'll grab your hand and start stroking your fingers while you're talking and just interrupt you. You have very pretty hands. The classmate said, for sure, it seemed like she had some kind of hand fetish. But having a hand fetish is not something abnormal or something that would indicate criminality in somebody. So what does this very normal girl that has nothing

to do with Kim and the gruesome murder of an eight-year-old Sarang, how are they connected? I mean if she has this strong liking for hands could it be possible that she was purchasing the finger from Kim? Is that what's going on? Because Park is kind of the wild card. Kim, from the beginning of the investigation, it's very clear that Kim's got a lot of plans and none of them are good.

It is believed that Kim strangled multiple cats during her childhood. She stated she thought about it, but people believe she did. There's stories that she even fully dismembered and pulled apart a bird on one occasion, which is wild considering earlier she tried to argue that she was having that hallucination and killed Sarang because she saw Sarang harming a cat. Which I don't even believe, first of all. And second of all, it's like, you've been accused of killing cats and birds, so you can't really stay on this moral high ground of animal abuse is bad. Anyway, Kim constantly lurks on the character communities, frequently creating all sorts

of characters. One time she's a teenage girl that self-exited and I guess she's telling grim stories on social media now. Other times she's an unemployed alcoholic in her 30s or a mafia henchman that's unhinged, every character that Kim develops seems to only escalate in their dark background lore. And even the types of chat rooms that she starts joining, apparently they're just getting more and more gory and violent. Maybe the crime is her way of living out her fantasies.

Her interests in life clearly skew darker. Classmates of Kim said, that girl liked anything that had to do with cannibalism. She would quite literally eat it up. Anything bizarre, gory, that freaks other people out, dismemberment stories, she's always reading them. She even joked about how much she loves the American TV show Hannibal about a brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who happens to be a serial killer and a serial cannibal on the side. He's being hunted down by an equally brilliant FBI profiler, Will Graham, who happens to be Dr. Lecter's patient. So the FBI agent hunting down the serial killer needs therapy and his therapist is the very serial killer that he's hunting and because his therapist is sick and twisted, he starts playing mind games with Will, even attempting to slowly make this FBI agent insane.

starts playing mind games with Will, even attempting to slowly make this FBI agent insane. She's obsessed with that show. Now, one fascinating part of the show Hannibal is that all the cannibalistic scenes, all the human flesh is prepared by the serial killer Hannibal himself. But he prepares his meals like he's Gordon Ramsay, like a Michelin star chef, listening to classical music, spending hours crafting the perfect taste profile. It's a visual experience. The concept of cannibalism mixed with the perfect taste profile, it's a visual experience, the concept of cannibalism mixed with the highly meticulous, delicate culinary art is good.

But Kim would write, I really crave cannibalism after watching that show. I keep trying to download more episodes of Hannibal. It's an American drama where he cooks with dismembered bodies and even shares them with acquaintances. where he cooks with dismembered bodies and even shares them with acquaintances. We got back from our trip in South Korea and my husband did one of the most surprising things. He was actually able to speak a lot of Korean. I'm talking conversational, understandable Korean and there was barely even an accent when he was talking and I do have to thank Rosetta Stone for that because the moment that I found out that we were going, I told him he needed to study every barely even an accent when he was talking, and I do have to thank Rosetta Stone for that. Because the moment that I found out that we were going, I told him he needed to study

every day, every hour, every minute, because I just didn't want him to get lost in the city without me and be unable to find his way back. Even though he only started days before our trip to get back into the flow of really going into the Korean lessons, I have to say that I was really impressed of how he did. But he said Rosetta Stone made it very easy for him. Which makes sense because Rosetta Stone is the most trusted language learning program for 30 years with millions of users and 25 languages offered. My husband really liked that Rosetta Stone forced him to immerse into the language, meaning

it doesn't give him any English translations. So he could learn to speak, listen, and think in Korean it teaches you the language how you would naturally learn meaning you learn words, phrases, and then sentences this is not one of those apps where you just learn a few words a day and then forget about it Rosetta Stone is built for long-term retention it even comes with this built-in true accent feature meaning it's gonna give you feedback on your pronunciation

it's almost like having a personal trainer for your accent. you can train anywhere with rosetta stone because it's built for the desktop or it has an app, it has an audio companion, and you even have the ability to download lessons offline. rosetta stone has korean, japanese, chinese, and so many more languages for you to learn from. You can literally get a lifetime membership for all 25 languages, meaning you literally get access to all 25 language courses for 50% off. No matter where you plan to go or what trip you want to take, Rosetta Stone can help you learn the language. Don't put off learning that language. There's no better time than right now to get started. For a very limited time, Rotten Manga listeners can get Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off. Visit rosettastone.com slash rotten. That's 50% off unlimited access to 25 language courses for the rest of your life. Redeem your 50% off at rosettastone.com slash rotten today.

Kim had met Park, or should I say Ophelia, online two months before the murder. And instantly Kim is attracted to Park's tweets and messages about her fascination with hands. Park was sending anybody on these character chat rooms just videos of people massaging hands sensually, slowly, writing messages like, Someday I want to touch your fingers like this too. This video might actually be too much for our kids. Yeah, they were, I don't know, it's just a lot. Now later the authorities ask Park about the gift that she received because it's such an odd part of the the body to be missing, the right hand pinky. And they also ask Kim, and Kim says, I thought the fingers were pretty.

I thought it'd make a really good gift. Why did you also bring a knife when you went to meet with Park? Oh, to eat with it. Wait, there's a knife in the bag too? She brought a knife separately, not in the bag too? She brought a knife separately not in the bag but inside the bag there's thigh flesh there's lungs and the finger. So she's trying to go eat the thighs and the lungs because remember Kim's character was forced to eat lungs and they developed a weird craving for it. Ophelia's right hand was chopped off so she gets a right severed pinky. Right so they're still like role playing more or less before all of this. Yeah I don't know if I

want to say they're role playing because I wonder if it almost gives the connotation that they're insane but I think they want to bring role playingplaying to the real world. Yeah, they're really like, yeah sick and twisted Yeah, they want to make it real like their role-playing games have a lot of influence in their actions. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's creepy So I wouldn't say like the game this role-playing game. It's like they are like literally bringing their own fantasies Online offline like doing all of it. Yeah. That's very true because the role-playing game itself has nothing to do with this. Yeah.

These are like their characters and their lore that they created for their exact characters. So after the murder, Kim brings Park fingers and human flesh to consume together as a gift. But again, why would anyone take mutilated organs and corpse pieces as a gift? Park is brought in and she looks at the investigators in this creepy interrogation room and she tells them about the gift bag she received and how she just thought it was a gift from an online friend but she never even looked inside. In fact, she said she didn't even know there were body parts in there until just now. What? What do you mean? Okay. She said, I just took it home and I got rid of it the next day without ever checking what's in the bag. I threw it away because it was

a weekday and I was scared that my mom would find it and realize that I was out hanging with friends and I just took it and threw it out without even opening it. That does not even remotely make sense as something that somebody would do. Maybe you throw out the packaging, but you're going to at least look, you're going to at least keep the gift and act like, Oh, what are you talking about about mom? I've always had this. When the authorities confront her with that, she changes her mind and she says, okay, yes, I did open the bag, but I felt like you would think I'm genuinely guilty if I told you that. Let me tell you what really happened. What really happened was she states she was role playing with Kim. Kim told her she was going to bring her some organs in the roleplay. She opens up the bag thinking, you know, they look like organs. Yeah, they do,

but they can't obviously be organs. That's insane. So she's like, they're props. Park is like, I thought they were props. Really, really good props like you use in the movies. Okay, then where are these really good high quality props now? And Park says, I threw them away the next morning. When I woke up I opened the shopping bag and I still thought it was a prop and I wanted to get rid of it and I was about to throw it away but I thought it looked so real that I was scared it would shock the waste management teams. I just thought if I threw it away even though it is a prop I felt like they would still freak out. I'm

not an expert but I touched it and it looked like it was made out of some sort of high quality protein. I thought the protein is food waste, so I just cut the lungs and fingers into really small pieces, put them into a plastic bag, and threw them out with the food waste. She also states that she put on plastic gloves and used kitchen scissors to finely chop up the pieces of the finger to throw them into the food waste as to not alarm them. But the authorities know, first of all, there's no prop that looks that real. Which even if there is, once you start touching it and you start finely chopping it, dicing it, mincing it up,

you're gonna have a clear idea that this is not a prop. Before Kim is even arrested, both Kim and Park had deleted their conversations on social media networks. They had deleted their Kakao messages, which is like WhatsApp of South Korea, their Twitter DMs, all deleted before Kim's arrest in the beginning. So it's like they're clearly trying to delete something. The police in South Korea were able to reach out to the US Justice Department, who reached out to Twitter to recover some of those deleted messages. And these are just things that they've been able to get back and have also been made public.

And some of these phone call contents were later revealed by Kim, but just keep in mind at the time she doesn't reveal them. So there's a phone call place between Kim and Park from 1056 a.m. to 1107 on the day of the murder. We don't know what they talked about. How long was the call? From 1056 to 1107. So that's like 20 minutes?

Yeah, not that long. Maybe they talked about the weather, maybe they talked about murdering someone, we don't know. Earlier that week, Kim texted Park, I'm planning to commit a crime this week and I'll meet you with your favorites. Fingers and lungs, right? Park texts, be sure to check the CCTV cameras around the crime scene.

Send me a picture of your disguise so I know you're not exposing yourself. Park claims again, she was just roleplaying. The morning of the murder, sure enough, Kim sends Park a picture of herself wearing the disguise, her mom's oversized clothes, pants suit, sunglasses, carrying a suitcase. She sends the selfie with the text message. I'm going hunting, Miss Park. You're just very pretty, quite flashy. The little kid's playground is visible from my apartment. Then one of them is going to die.

Like she literally does a killing, spells it out. Like, you know how you go, she spells it out. Yeah. how you go she spells it out yeah one of them is gonna today what time does elementary school finish again remember Parks mom is an elementary school teacher so she tells Kim lunch starts at 12 the lower grades probably go straight home after eating later Kim text Park I caught one the situation was good I brought her home saying she could use my phone did you check the CCTV footage yeah checked I haven't been caught if Kim text Park. I caught one. The situation was good. I brought her home saying she could use my phone. Did you check the CCTV footage? Yeah, I checked. I haven't been caught. Is she still alive? She's still alive, but I'm gonna wrap a cord around her neck. We know that little Sarang followed Kim to

her apartment around 1 p.m. and there's a series of phone calls placed between the two during that time frame that Sarang is in Kim's apartment and before her body is disposed of. One call at 1 p.m., 1 37 p.m., 1 38 p.m. We don't know the exact details of these three calls but we do know at 2 20 p.m. there's a phone call placed from Kim to Park where Kim tells her, I cleaned up the body let's meet up after I clean up the restroom. Soon a string of text messages get sent from Kim to Park. Please save me, there's a dead person in front of my eyes. Ugh, there's so much blood, it's terrible.

Should I bring you human organs, Park? Just fingers or lungs would be good. Then one last call before Kim disposes of Sa-rang's body on the rooftop at 2.50, 2pm, where apparently Kim asks Park to meet She says, let's meet, I'll give you something as a gift Then if we follow the security cameras and the clear timeline we know that the two girls meet up in Hongdae The exchanging of the gift happens

when both of them part ways at 6pmish They get back from their outing Kim texts again, are your fingers pretty? Because she gifted it to Park It's pretty. Good job. Then around 8 PM, it seems that the news of Sanan going missing and the police are just stressing them out, especially Park,

the one that received the fingers. She texts Kim, there would have been CCTV of you meeting me and giving me the gift. Let's say it was cookies in the bag. A little while after that, Kim tells Park that her mom called to let her know that the police are looking for Kim. Kim is like, I'm about to go down. She's about to get arrested. When Kim tells Park that, Park responds,

Am I going to get involved in this? What's going to happen to me? I'm so anxious I could die. I'm throwing up. I guarantee to keep you out of it. You will not have a criminal record. Park conveniently responds, I really like you. Do you believe me? I believe you. I'll buy you flowers one day Park. Then Kim sends another message. For now, I'm stating that I have mental issues. This is crazy. All these text messages have been very clearly proving that Park indeed knew what was going on and she indeed was not phased at all by the fact that Kim killed a little girl. Because in one of the last text messages Park sends Kim she writes

I think it's gonna be a pity that I can't see you So once the police uncovered these messages and texts they realized okay clearly both these girls are involved they both know way more than what they're saying Kim just kept arguing that she always she has fake memories that were planted inside her brain she's got all these mental health disorders she doesn't remember. She felt like she was in a dream.

She was killing the cat. But then she states for Park, Park did not know those were real organs. She's sticking by that. She's like Park had nothing to do with this. How does that even make sense? How could she have not known? It feels like Kim is covering for Park. But it's so curious, isn't it?

A 16 year old girl from Incheon, an 18-year-old girl from Seoul, they've only met each other a few times in person, have only been online friends for a month or two, it's not like they're best friends. Why on earth would Kim cover for Park? Would there be a reason? Does Park have something on Kim? Police go through more data, more accounts,

and they find Kim messaging a friend of hers about an incident recently between her and Park. Now they met up, went into a dark alleyway and started making out, ten days before the murder. The police state that they were shocked to find out that Kim and Park were quote lovers. Netizens start going crazy when this new development breaks. They start commenting what kind of third-rate low-level K-drama soap opera plot is this? We don't care if their lovers are not, give them the death penalty.

But most netizens felt a sense of unease during this time. They said, it feels just like a sick onion. The more we peel, the more and more we're uncovering. What else are we going to discover? Side note, this seems to be a pattern for Kim. Another witness comes forward to authorities to state that she was actually chatting with a guy that she met on one of these role-playing communities and she really liked the guy. They're getting along so well, she thought, okay, you know what? Maybe I'll meet up with them in person. They arranged to meet up at a very public cafe, but when she gets there, it's not a guy,

it's Kim. Which fine, I mean the two of them had so much in common for a reason, there's no reason that they can't be friends, right? I mean the two of them had so much in common for a reason. There's no reason that they can't be friends, right? They grab a coffee and since that day forward for the next however long Kim would call her every single day before school right after school If she didn't pick up Kim would bombard her with angry cursing messages And when she ignored those Kim would call back apologizing and crying It would just be 25 different emotions back-to-back one time She even came to the girl's house without notice or even being invited. The girl's parents put Kim back on a bus and sent her home.

She was very possessive. Another time she was hanging out with another friend of hers when they noticed, wait, something just moved behind you. She goes back behind the display stand in the cafe, looks and Kim is crouching behind and hiding. It was alarming. Just the emotional mood swings were a lot. In one single text message Kim would say things like how are you doing baby but also I want to bang my head on a piece of wood

and die because you're not responding. For the investigators, yes all of this is new information but they need to use it to their advantage so they think we're gonna drive a wedge between them too because as of right now Kim is stating she has mental disorders that impair her understanding from right and wrong, which is an unbelievable defense. However, she comes from a wealthy family. In most countries money can buy you innocence or at least it can buy you less time. Add to the fact that she's a minor in South Korea with crazy juvenile sentencing protection laws,

the investigators need to slam dunk. As for Park, she's not a juvenile. She's 18 when the crime took place, but she's arguing that it's role play. They don't even have the pieces missing in their possession to try to see if it could be even considered a prop, right? It could technically be argued that she was in character during all of that,

and she had nothing to do with any of this. Again, a very unbelievable defense, but Park also comes from a wealthy family. So the best way to proceed is when you have two perpetrators that turn on each other mmm cuz they almost sounds like they could get away with this yes which is what they do the interrogator sits down with Kim we just talked to your friend Park she's not involved in any of this oh yeah we know she told us she's not she said I don't know why I was hanging out with such trash in the first place.

Yeah, I mean, obviously the police thought she was guilty for a reason. She must be trash. Yeah, she told us the time that she spent with you was quite unpleasant. And it just made her uncomfortable. So they should talk each other to them. The interrogator said right when those words came out Kim's entire face expression changed. That girl has no reason to speak so badly of me. She should pay for her crimes too Did you know that Park knew about the murders and actually conspired with me? Those were her words What do you mean? How could she ever really think that finger is a prop? Do you really believe that? There's no way that she did that

Okay, she knew they were real body parts and with with that, the two girls, quote lovers, they turn on each other. Kim's new story is that they were playing the murder game. That Park is the mafia boss, because that's what her character is, and Kim is a henchman, and the two were going to throw a Hannibal themed human flesh party, but they needed to acquire the flesh first, and Park was the one giving her instructions. She said Park ordered it, and because I'm mentally ill, I felt a compulsion to listen to whatever Park told me to do because I was scared of Park. Yeah, she said if Kim ever wanted to back out, Park would instigate her, push her and

say things like if killing people is nothing to you, if you kill someone, give me their pinky finger and lungs. Just egging her on. She said even when she gave Park the gift while they were out eating fried chicken, Park opened the bag, checked inside, and they talked about how pretty the finger was. So she's like, Park's lying. Park knows about all of this and Park wanted me to do this. And they asked Kim, why would you protect Park in the beginning? And she said, I wanted Park not to be punished so that if I'm punished because I did everything alone,

then Park could still visit and be my friend. As to why she's confessing about Park being involved now, she says, well, I tried to protect Park for a while, but my parents and relatives told me that it's best to change my mind on that and do what's right for the victim, which is to tell the full truth. Wow.

Now there's gonna be two trials with two defenses and two stories if you will. Kim who claims that Park ordered this and then Park who claims the whole time she thought this was a role playing game, she didn't realize any of this is real. She argued, I had no idea Kim would actually commit murder. I thought we were playing like we usually do. Interestingly enough, in court though, Park was the picture of remorse. I think she had a lot of training and guidance from her attorneys, but she behaved in the way that the public at least maybe wanted her to,

that she could in that moment. She's bowing her head, she's apologizing. She's trying to appear like she's reflecting on her actions. Kim, on the other hand, she's very blunt when she answers questions. She doesn't seem embarrassed or feel an ounce of guilt. One of the trial specialist's presence said it was fascinating. When she sat down, she would look at everybody in the courtroom like this. Her expression—

Like side-eyeing everyone? Yeah, like just looking at them like, what? What? Her expression could only be interpreted as one that feels no guilt. When witnesses would take the stand to speak, her face always had the expression of, okay then, let's see what you have to say about me. At one point, the prosecutor's side was going to call Sa-rang's mother as a witness to testify on the stand during Kim's trial. Kim's defense team tried to block that by stating,

why do we have to call the victim's mother to court and hurt her twice? As if they care about anything but getting Kim last time because if the mother comes it's you know it's going to be more depressing and everybody is going to see the impact and it's gonna make Kim look worse. Additionally, if you think it's that bad, a jailhouse informant came forward to say that in jail Kim was complaining about how everybody is forcing her to apologize to Sa-rang's parents. She said to her cellmates, I'm having a hard time too why do I have to keep apologizing? She said, I keep having to think about the incident and it's very scary I just want forget, but I'm told I need to remember all these details.

I mean, I'm a person who deserves to suffer. Yeah, but I'm going crazy. I just hope this is all over very soon. It's hard to be alive. I want to die. But if I die, then there's still going to be people sad when I'm gone, so I can't die. I don't know who you're talking about.

Overall, the way Kim was handling herself in court was just startling. She's very brazen. Even when someone would ask her a question about the crime, she would just say, Could you repeat that? I didn't understand. Could you speak clearer, please? One time her attorney was speaking in a microphone, and I guess the court couldn't hear him, and they were like, Can you please, like, move the microphone?

And she just reaches over and pulls the microphone closer to his mouth. To the lawyer's mouth? Yeah. Just like, Please like move the microphone and she just reaches over and pulls the microphone closer to his mouth To the lawyers mouth. Yeah, just like come on. You don't even know how to do your job. Like that's her energy Yeah, it's very clear she does not care another example The prosecutors had Kim on the stand and they're asking her for the community name that she and Park met online and and she just stares And responds I mean I have the name but I don't know why that's important the community chat room is just the place that I met Park nothing more nothing less yeah but that must have been to a prosecutor she didn't find attractive at one point during the trial she stated that one of the prosecutors was very handsome and

afterwards when he was in the courthouse she would keep fixing her hair and looking at herself in the mirror. Someone that was present at Kim's trial wrote on a forum, her face looked more innocent and nice than I would think. If you pass through a busy part of Seoul, she has the type of face that you'll see every 10 seconds. I would ask to borrow her phone if I needed to. It's the kind of face that I would follow without any doubt if they asked me to

quickly follow them home. And the voice, her voice is so kind So in Korea, there's two types of teenagers There's teenagers who look like law-abiding teenagers And then there's teenagers that even as adult you just know to stay away from and you can tell you go into a store And there's usually a three groups of teenagers and just there and they're like, yeah, and then they start cussing and then you're like Okay I don't think I would ever ask them to borrow their phone But she looks like she'd be in her school uniform and very soft and kind

Yeah, it's kind of the what she's trying to say here for most of Kim's trial She just spent it throwing all the blame on Park even though she's the one that physically murdered Sarang She just kept saying things like I have Asperger's Park was exploiting me Park would then have a chance to refute those statements and she would argue she doesn't have Asperger's. She's just a cruel person I know nothing about any of this at one point the two of them Kim and Park They just start screaming at each other in the courthouse during the middle of the trial. They would call each other sons of bitches Yeah For most of Park's trials. She did seem a bit more like I said

apologetic right but um I don't know if this is a reflection of people over analyzing or skinny culture but I thought it was fascinating that a lot of news headlines read park is gaining weight during the trial so it must mean she's comfortable what yeah which I just feel like you would never say in America like that is such a weird observation to make because people stress see like that yeah but they were like it seems like she's comfortable enough to digest food it's weird so then you have these two trials for these two girls pointing the finger at each other but one interesting thing to note and I don't know how to decipher

this okay like I don't know how to understand it Kim is 16 she's the one that physically killed Sarang Park is 18 and even their roles in the roleplay fantasies. Park is the mafia boss. She's the older one. She's the mafia boss. Kim is a henchman. However, in their text messages, Park is using honorifics to Kim, which is formal Korean that indicates respect. Kim does not use honorifics for Park, which doesn't make sense.

So usually both parties will use honorifics if it's in like a workplace setting or if they don't feel comfortable. Or only the younger person uses honorifics or both people speak casually. Yeah. So that that's weird. What does that mean? That means Kim is in a higher status, certain kind of status. Yeah, but we don't know what.

But one prosecutor thinks this actually. They think that Park is smart. Park gives off a very, very calming impression. However, she's the type to try to control the situation without ever engaging in getting her hands dirty. So they believe even her using honorifics is a way to make Kim feel like she's in control, make it appear like Kim is the one doing everything. But she's probably through phone calls and other messages emotionally manipulating her into doing something. Right, okay.

But because her language is very like, oh, I'm not the one in charge here. Yeah. It's she's doing all of this without getting her hands dirty. I see. It's she's doing all of this without getting her hands dirty See The the prosecutors also believe that Park has a lot more to do with the crime Just the phone calls in the middle of the crime really Kim is in this high intense Emotional state where there is a dead body in her house, and she's just calling you to talk about the weather People actually believe that Park was guiding her, giving her instructions during those phone calls

Sarang's grandparents that live in the same building, they can't even sleep without medicating themselves Sarang's parents were recommended by their doctors to take psychiatric medications but they both said they're scared because they read online that sometimes you can have strong visual things pop up in your mind when you're on these meds and They're scared of what they'll see Sarang's grandmother would later cry and this is Sarang's dad's mother. She cries my granddaughter. What do I do? I'm here asking every Korean. Will the perpetrator not be found guilty? Please save us. Please my poor son my son Sarang's uncle cried to reporters. Why why would they take someone else's pretty child and kill her? Why would they do that? I want to know why. Why? Just tell me why!

Sarang's mom said during the trial, Although it's hard to even breathe after losing a child, whose mere existence brought happiness and strength, I have to bring up this uncomfortable story again because I know it's a parent's duty to reveal the truth and the end for their child. As you've seen through the broadcast in newspapers, the perpetrators have put together a 12-person defense team claiming it was an impulsive crime. Mental disorders, however, they conspired with the words, let's hunt to plan this incident

and brutally murdered, mutilated, and abandoned an innocent 8-year-old child. How can they argue this was impulsive? My heart is torn by the behavior of trying to cover up such a crime with social status and money without ethics or morality. I plead to all the parents of this land. I am the mother of Sarang, the victim of the Incheon 8-year-old murder case. She begged parents to sign a petition to abolish the juvenile sentencing law. During the end of the trial, Sarang's mom had to go and give a victim impact statement.

She says about the day, everyone was looking for Sarang. The police went silent. No one would say anything. And my husband was crying. What do we do? What do we do? That's when I realized my child wasn't coming back. I couldn't sleep or breathe.

So I just moved as if I was running away. I thought if I could just escape, just keep moving, I might be able to breathe. I went to see my daughter's body in the morgue. I didn't expect her face to be like that. My daughter couldn't close her eyes. Half of her face was dark red with blood. I wanted to see my daughter and pretty close to send her off but she wasn't in a state for that. So I had to cut up one dress into different pieces because she was dismembered so that I could dress her. She continues, they said they were going hunting? How

can they say that? They're not human. Please hold the defendants accountable for their crimes and deliver a verdict befitting the price for their sins. Please impose a severe punishment. Sae-rang's father testified saying, really? Just because of this one reason of mental illness, she killed and even abandoned the body? Does that even make sense? They're trying to get the saying, really? Just because of this one reason of mental illness, she killed and even abandoned the body? Does that even make sense? They're trying to get the offenders out by any means, using the juvenile's mental illness, trying to reduce the sentence even just by a little. That's all I can think of. I can't forgive them. Really? Even if they're 20 years older, even if they serve

15 years, 30 years, they're going to be out. And then what? You're going to let her be free until she attacks someone else again? It's been said frequently about these two in chun cha killers These are people who commit murder simply because they want to experience committing murder Other child trial specialists have stated about Park even though technically she was an adult at the time of the crime How do you eat fried chicken while carrying parts of a victim's body? Part of a little child. The judge announced the verdict and sentence. Kim, 16 year old Kim, would be sentenced to 20 years in prison. That is the maximum allowed under the juvenile sentencing law.

She was technically given life, but because she's 16, life can only be 20 years. She'll be 36. Yes. That is crazy. Park was given life in prison but it's don't smile it's not gonna be good okay it's gonna get bad. Park allegedly turns to her attorneys and states in the court why is that that bitch who did the murder gets 20 years and I get fucking life in prison. Her attorneys immediately appealed the sentencing which Park was deemed an accessory and conspired to commit murder but now they're trying to appeal it and say that she was an accessory after the murder. The court states they will be reducing her sentence from life in

prison to 13 years. Kim is going to be released in 2037 where she will be reducing her sentence from life in prison to 13 years. Kim is going to be released in 2037 where she will be 36. Park is going to be released in 2030 where she will be 31. Some netizens have stated they actually think Park is the scarier of the two. Others just resort to expressing their frustration by commenting, These crazy bitches, these bitches should die. They should go through the same thing, cut off their fingers. But one big thing is before the two are released, netizens want their full identities disclosed.

They state if they can't get punished harshly, at least let everyone know who they are so the general public can protect themselves. One netizen wrote, why can't their identities be disclosed? Disclose it for the safety of the nation. The crazy part is it's alleged that Kim threatened some of the people working on her case even. She allegedly looked at one of the investigators and said, I'll come find you when my sentence is over. But she could argue it's interpreted as to thank you for teaching me about remorse. I didn't mean it as a threat.

Yeah. Now, side note, there was one journalist who did release a blurred image of Kim's face. Kim's mom, her, yeah her mom, calls the media company. Her voice sounds very agitated and she screamed, my child is not someone who would do that. She was manipulated into committing the crime. What did our child do that was so wrong? Do you know how hard it is for us right now? And you post that picture? We can't even go home to feed the cat right now. Because I guess their house was being hounded by reporters the journalist said it was so ridiculous Kim also sent a letter to a journalist that reads I have no plans for what kind of life I'm gonna live after my release I think it's premature

after continuing my studies a bit more I hope to do something that can help others using that as a stepping stone you know I hope that various studies I'm doing here now will serve as a foundation for that. Someday I dream of becoming a small light that shines on those living shadowed lives so that they can make choices that they won't regret with my help." Sarang's mother was interviewed after the trial and she said one of the biggest things weighing on her heart was the fact that she had recently purchased a phone for Sarang so that she wouldn't have to ask adults for their phone at the playground and she was just holding on to it waiting for the perfect time to surprise her with it and she feels a lot of guilt looking at

that phone and she said quote I didn't know all of this would happen because of a cell phone which I think she's putting a lot of blame on herself it's I didn't know all of this would happen because of a cell phone Which I think she's putting a lot of blame on herself, it's I don't think it was a cell phone It's clearly Kim and Park But what are your thoughts on this case? I mean just the fact that their identities are protected the fact that Kim got 20 years and the fact that she's 16 and that good at covering up a crime scene who knows if she goes on to commit more crimes when she gets out will they even find out but that's it for today's case please stay safe and I will see you in

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