True Crime Campfire - Never Too Late: A Grab Bag of Lethal Old Ladies

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

David Bowie once described aging as “an extraordinary process by which you become the person you have always been.” We want to think of this as a nice sentiment, right? Like, aww, I’m gonna come into my full flower as the best possible version of myself. But what if the “person you’ve always been” is a nightmare? What if the monster’s just been biding its time? Join us for two stories of killer old ladies: Olga Rutterschmidt and Helen Golay, a pair of serial killers who preyed on the most vulnerable members of society; and South Korea's Madame Yoon, a woman who let delusion and obsession take over her life, and the lives of everyone around her. Sources:Court papers, PEOPLE v. RUTTERSCHMIDT (2009)LA Magazine, "What Can I Tell You?" by Paul Brownfield (2015)CNBC's "American Greed," episode "The Black Widows" (2010)Investigation Discovery's "Wicked Attraction," episode "Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt"Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Widow_MurdersYouTuber Grazy TV: https://www.youtube.com/@GRAZYTV/videosMedium, "Madame, Are You Still Laughing?" by Magda Szymanska: https://medium.com/@szymanskamagda11/madame-are-you-still-laughing-10ab19d72ad1Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. David Bowie once described aging as an extraordinary process by which you become the person you have always been. We want to think of this as a nice sentiment, right? Like, ah, I'm going to come into my full flower as the best possible version of myself. But what if the person you've always been is a nightmare?

What if the monster's just been biting its time? This is never too late, a grab bag of killer old ladies. Case 1 Not So Golden The Crimes of Helen Goulet and Olga Rutterschmidt So, campers, for this one, we're in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, November 8th, 1999. It was early on a rainy morning when police responded to a 911 call about a body lying in an alleyway off of La Brea Avenue. The man was lying splayed across the asphalt in the center of the alley, and his body was a mess.

He'd clearly been hit by a car. His torso was crushed and sort of twisted around. He had burns of the type you tend to see when human skin comes into contact with the hot undercarriage of a car. He was all scraped up and covered in grease. He had road rash from being dragged across the rough pavement. Oddly, though, there was no glass on the ground. No car parts like you usually expect to see in a hit and run. In fact, to the officers experienced eye, it looked as if this man had been slowly, deliberately run over while he was already lying on the ground, not hit while he was crossing the street. What the hell was going on here? They didn't find any ID on the dead man, so he was initially logged in as a John Doe. From his clothing, in the general condition of his body, it looked like he'd done some hard living. He was an elderly white man, maybe in his 70s or so. Unfortunately, for the investigators, nobody had witnessed what happened to this guy, and there were no security cameras in the area. This was before CCTV took over the world, so they didn't have a lot to go on. But an autopsy soon confirmed what the responding officer had suspected.

The victim had been lying down when a car ran over him. That was weird. I mean, why would somebody just stop and lie down in the middle of the street? I'm sure, people pass out sometimes, but usually not just dead ass in the middle of the road. The medical examiner did a talk screen on the body, checked for all the standard street drugs you might expect to see, Coke, meth, heroin, stuff like that, but there was nothing. Before long, the investigators managed to solve at least one part of the mystery, the dead man's identity. His fingerprints came up in the system as those of Paul Vados,

a 73-year-old Hungarian immigrant and retired electrician who had been in the States since 1956. His life had taken a nose dive since his wife's death in the mid-80s. He'd developed a pretty significant drinking problem. hadn't seen his adult daughter in four years. But as it turns out, just a few days before those fingerprint results came in, a couple of very well-dressed, very stylish, very charming older ladies had shown up at the Wilshire Division police station, concerned about Mr. Vados. They filled out a missing person's report and everything.

Their names were Helen Goli and Olga Rutterschmidt. Paul Vados, they said, was Helen's fiancée, and a distant cousin of Olga's from Hungary. We've been taking care of him for a while now, Helen said, her sweet southern accent. We're the only two people he has. He has no other family at all. They made no mention of Paul's daughter. And now he's gone missing, Olga said. We're so worried. So when the fingerprint match came back, the police department contacted Helen and Olga, who rushed in to find out what had happened to their dearest Paul,

identify his body, and ask, oh, by the way, for a copy of his death certificate. Now, you know why people tend to need a death certificate, don't you? To file a life insurance claim, of course. The two ladies took charge of Paul Vado's body from the coroner's office and promptly had him buried as cheaply as possible in an unmarked grave. Kind of a weird move to put your fiancé in a pauper's grave or your long lost cousin from the old country, for that matter. But hey, who are we to judge, right?

We are the judges of this, actually. But, yeah, actually, it's totally normal. to treat a loved one's death with as little reference as possible. It's very, very cool. Investigators would later learn that Paul Vados had been living in a run-down apartment by himself. The place was a pigsty. Olga came and visited Mr. Vados once every couple weeks. She told the apartment manager she was his sister. She'd bring him groceries and then leave. He didn't have any other visitors and he stayed drunk most of the time. After his death, Olga stopped by the apartment one last time to tell the apartment

manager to dump all his stuff. He got hit by a bus, she told her. If investigators felt a little suspicious about the death of Paul Vados, well, they didn't do anything about it at the time. And as the LAPD went about other business, Helen Goulet and Olga Rutterschmidt got busy cashing in. In total, they'd taken out six life insurance policies on Mr. Vados. Some with both of them as beneficiaries, some for just Helen alone, which it would later turn out

Olga didn't know about. No honor among thieves, you know. Between the two of them, Paul Vados's accidental death yielded more than half a million dollars. Our not-so golden girls didn't end up back on police radar until six years later in 2005. On June 22nd, a 911 call came in that felt eerily similar to the one from 1999. A body lying in an alleyway off West Hollywood Boulevard near the body was a broken bicycle. Like the Polvado scene, this one didn't look like your typical hit-and-run crime scene. There was no glass, there were no broken-off car parts, the bike looked weird too. It didn't look like it had been hit by a car.

It looked like somebody had carefully removed one of the wheels and laid it underneath the bike. Staging. Yep, and this is awful. Although the dead man's head had been crushed, his glasses were perfectly fine. Almost like somebody had placed them next to the body after the fact. This time, first responders found ID on the dead man. His name was Kenneth McDavid, and he was 50 years old at the time of his death. The autopsy showed severe blunt force trauma to the torso and chest.

Kenneth's shoulders were crushed. His ribs and spine were broken. You could see tire tracks across the body. The findings were consistent with being driven over, slowly and methodically by a big, heavy car. The talk screen showed alcohol, just a strong. scosh above the legal driving limit, but more importantly, it found a cocktail of prescription drugs, stuff you probably wouldn't want to mix together if you want to enjoy a long and happy life. First, it was Zolpidem, otherwise known as the heavy-duty sleep aid Ambien. Then we had a hefty dose

of the painkiller hydrocodone. And to top it all off, a big dose of Topamax, an anti-seizure drug. Any one of these has the potential to knock you on your ass, especially if you mix it with alcohol. Put them all together and you've got a recipe for night night. So investigators figured, okay, this guy must have passed out in the alley from all the alcohol and drugs in a system and we're dealing with an accidental hit and run. But this time, they were able to get their hands-on security footage from the alley and what they saw made their next prickle. It was 2005, so the footage was super grainy, but they could tell something weird was going on. A car turns into the alleyway, drives a little ways down, then stops. The lights go off

for about five minutes, putting the whole scene in darkness. Then the lights come back on, and you see the car go backward, then forward, and out of the alley. Strange. They couldn't make out a lot of detail, no license plate, no clear image of the driver. All they could really figure out was the make of the car, a Mercury Sable station wagon. So they sent the video off to be computer enhanced, which was obviously going to take some time. no CSI instant enhancing tech for real investigators. Meanwhile, they canvassed the area, trying to find a witness to the hit and run, but no joy.

For the moment, the detectives were pretty much out of leads. All they had was Kenneth McDavid's last known address, so they headed over to talk to the apartment manager. He doesn't live here anymore, she told him. He was a nice guy. Came to L.A. to be a screenwriter, but I don't think he had much luck. He was homeless for a while before he came here. so what changed the detectives wanted to know how do you end up in this apartment building an older lady the manager said she was helping him renting him this apartment paying his bills what was the lady's name helen golay the detective jotted the name down in his notes thinking why does that sound familiar well it sounded familiar campers because a woman by that same name of course had just been down to the morgue to i d kenneth mc david's body I'm his fiancé, she told the coroner.

I'd like him to be cremated. And Helen Golet wasn't the only person to show up at the police station asking about the dead man. Another woman had shown up a day or two later, asking for the police report. She introduced herself as Olga Rutterschmidt. I'm his cousin, she told them. And besides the thick Hungarian accent, there was something else that stuck out to the people who dealt with Olga that day. Most of the time, when relatives come around asking for info on their loved one's death, they're, you know, sad.

But Olga Rutterschmidt acted like she was there to pick up the paperwork on a new car. Just totally cash, no emotion whatsoever. She was cold as ice. Creeped everybody out. Add that to the toxicology report with all those sedative drugs and the weird surveillance footage

from the night of the hit and run and you had a recipe for suspicion. No proof of anything. Just suspicion. But then a couple months later, they got a call from an investigator for an insurance company. He was looking for any information

on the Kenneth McDavid case, he told them. Two women were trying to claim life insurance proceeds on the guy. A substantial amount. This seemed odd to the detectives right away, given that Kenneth had fallen on hard times in the years before his death. It's not like the guy had a high-powered job.

Why did he need a million dollars in coverage? It was actually a lot more than a million to. This was just one policy. There were. Brace yourself. 19 other policies on the guy. Jeez, Louise. So who are the beneficiaries, the detectives wanted to know?

Two older ladies, the insurance guy said, Helen Goulet and Olga Rutterschmidt. I have him down as business partners of the deceased, but the thing is, I can't seem to get either one of them to talk to me. As far as I've been able to tell, this guy wasn't involved in any business ventures with these two, and they're just flat out refusing to answer, any of our questions. So it's twang in my radar. Well, it was twang in the detective's radar, too,

and it just so happened that later that day, the lead detective in Kenneth McDavid's case, Detective Hernandez, happened to mention all this weirdness to one of his colleagues, Detective Wilman, and it latched on to something at the back of Wilman's memory. A case a lot like this one from 1999, the death of Paul Vados. Wilman went to the cold case room and pulled the old file, and yep, these same two women had come sniffing around after Votto's death. Now here they were again. Two 70-something ladies who knew each other, God knows how, both filing for a hefty chunk of life insurance money

on yet another down-and-out man, found dead in an alleyway. It was time to take a good, hard look at these chicks. A background check didn't bring up much on the two women, nothing at all on Helen Golae and a piddly little shoplifting arrest for Olga Rudder Schmidt. But something was up with these old ladies. The investigators could just feel it. So they did a deep dive on both their pasts and assigned a surveillance team to keep eyes on them in the present. They weren't hard to pick out of a crowd, Helen especially. Ms. Thing drove a big Mercedes SUV. She liked to tease her blonde hair into like one of those, the higher the hair, the closer to God sort of hairdos, you know. And she really liked to wear tight skirts. And Olga had sort of a wild-eyed look that made you want to take it. a step back. Yeah, they're the kind of odd couple that like reminds me of like grace and

Frankie, which is like just, this is like a lifetime version of grace and Frankie if like after the divorce, they went on to a life of crime. Yeah. Right. Helen Galeigh grew up in Texas and a sort of fractured family. Her dad died when she was young and she got shuttled around a lot, eventually ending up in the foster system. When she aged out, she moved to California.

Got married and divorced a couple times, had a few kids, and eventually got into the real estate biz. Specifically, she bought apartments and rented them out. But when rent control laws took effect in the 80s, Helen's business took a nosedive. And Helen had to get creative. She couldn't raise her tenants rent, but she could spy on them day and night. Her goal was to catch them violating whatever rules she could and then find the ever-loving shit out of them. Oh, my God, the landlady from hell. I know.

I've had some bad landlords, but not this bad. She was also fond of filing lawsuits and sometimes just threatening them to bully people into giving her what she wanted. And then one fateful day in the 80s at an exercise class at the gym, presumably jazzercise, it was the 80s. Obviously. Of course it was jazzercise. Right.

There were leg warmers abound. Helen met Olga Rutter Schmidt. Olga grew up in Hungary, intense political times that kept her on edge all the time. As forensic psychologist Dr. Julie Armstrong told investigation discovery, times were desperate and you had to be clever and cunning to survive. You had to manipulate to get what you needed and what you wanted. In the late 50s, Olga and her husband moved to the States to Hollywood, and Olga quickly became the neighborhood weirdo, not the fun kind. Thank you for saying that because obviously,

I am the neighborhood. You know this. Yeah, we both are. That's the thing, is like, I walk around with my horse of a dog. You walk around with a pocket full of cat treats. Like, we're a match made in heaven. We're a blast to have around. But not Olga.

She kind of had crazy eyes, and she'd corner you in the stairwell of the building and rant about God knows what. She was always banging on everybody's door, yelling about the noise they were making, like regular everyday noise. It wasn't like her neighbors were blasting loud music all day. Yeah, she was like, stop that pot from boiling. I can hear it. I can hear it. Olga got a cosmetology license, but she didn't really use it. She mostly just spent her time making other people's lives miserable.

That is, until she met Helen. They were both in their 50s then, and they were still good-looking ladies. They hit it off big right from the jump, and I have no idea how this came up, but it didn't take them long to join forces as con women. How the hell does this come up? I always wonder about that with, like, people who team up, you know, to scam or murder or whatever. Like, did Helen just turn to her one day at the juice bar? Like, hey, so how about we scam the shit out of people? You in? Like, how? It's so weird. I kind of

envision it to be like how podcasting came up between you and I, you know? Like, we danced around it until you popped the question. But there was definitely some, like, we were feeling each other out. We were like, hmm. Yeah. That's true. Could I start a podcasting empire with this bitch? And the answer was yes. But anyway, it probably was Helen who started it. She was definitely the boss in the relationship. Helen was way more polished and charming. Olga had those Manson family eyes going for her, so she was more useful behind the scenes. But they both loved money more than anything else in the world, and they were both more than willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get it. Their MO in the early days was to meet well-off men at the gym, poses rich ladies, get themselves asked out to dinner, and

then rob the dudes blind. They had various methods for doing this from just straight up stealing their cash and credit cards to talking them into dubious investment deals. The men, like a lot of scam victims, were too embarrassed to report the thefts. Helen used her money to grow her real estate empire. She might have also used fraud to grow it too. One of the developers she worked with a lot died under mysterious circumstances in 1999 and somehow Helen ended up with the deeds to more than a dozen of his high dollar properties. A lot of people were suspicious about that, but I guess they couldn't prove anything. And Helen schooled Olga in her favorite way to make money.

Lawsuits. Or threatening them, anyway, to get people to settle out of court. Olga hung on Helen's every word. She looked up to her, wanted to be just like her. But for whatever reason, Olga never could get her shit together quite as well as her buddy Helen. She lived in a teeny little apartment, and she never seen her. seemed to get nearly as much profit out of their schemes as Helen did, because of course Helen made sure of that. There's no honor among these, like you said, these bitches screwed each other over every chance they got.

Helen was just a lot better at it than Olga was, but they definitely made a lot of money over the years. After a while, though, you know, the looks start to fade a little bit and the rich guys aren't as easy to lure into the web, so the ladies had to change tactics. And as she always did, Helen had a great idea for making their second act the most profitable yet. And in the late 90s, they started hanging around quite a bit at the Hollywood Presbyterian church homeless shelter. They were interested in the outreach program, they told the pastor. They just wanted to give something back to the community. See, for Helen and Olga, this was an unlimited pool

of vulnerable potential victims for the next phase of their criminal careers. And it was there, of course, where they met Paul Vados. They had an easy-in with him because he was a Hungarian immigrant like Olga. a sweet guy who'd fallen on hard times because of his alcoholism. He was lonely, and he was having trouble taking care of himself, and he was basically a sitting duck for these two old vipers. It didn't take them long to figure out that he was the perfect victim. He didn't have much family left, and he didn't have contact with the family he did have,

and he was as malleable as Plato. They moved him into an apartment, Helen owned, and for a while they just kind of fattened him up, so to speak, like you would a calf. Olga brought him groceries, occasionally took him to the doctor, Helen paid his bills, and all the while they were taking out policy after policy, and just marking time until they matured enough to cash in on. Paul signed whatever Helen put in front of him. Unbeknownst to Olga, she took out several more policies with just herself as beneficiary,

even though the plan was for them to take out a couple and split the cash 50-50. They had to wait two years for the policies to kick in. And once they did, the girls didn't waste any time. On November 8, 1999, they drugged him, dumped him in an alley, and drove over him until he was dead. And then they cashed in, had to threaten to sue the insurance companies to get their payouts, but that was old hat to them. They got 600 grand, all told. And when that ran out, they chose another victim. Talented musician and aspiring screenwriter Kenneth McDavid, a kind, generous guy who'd come to Hollywood to chase a dream.

found himself on the street instead. When he met Helen and Olga, I think he thought his ship might have finally come in. I mean, these were well-off ladies, dressed up in designer clothes, and they showed interest in his screenplays and made him all kinds of promises. He thought they wanted to help him. What they wanted instead, of course, was to house him, long enough to cook up about five-mill worth of life insurance on him, then kill him, the same way they'd killed Paul Vados.

And that's exactly what they did. And now, the LA detectives knew it. and they'd been compiling evidence one piece at a time. For one thing, they had proof that Helen and Olga had rented a Mercury Sable station wagon using a friend's stolen identity, and they tracked down the car and found Paul Vados's DNA all over the undercarriage. It was time for search warrants, and they found a gold mine of evidence in Helen's house. Ambien, Vicodin, and other sedatives, including some all crushed up,

all kinds of little incriminating post-it notes with the victim's info, records of the life insurance policies, just so much stuff. All of the stuff. All of the stuff. All of it. So they put the habeas grabus on both of the ladies, even though they had a lot more evidence against Helen than they did against Olga. True to form, Helen put on her sweet Southern Lady Act,

pretending to have no idea what any of this was all about. And Olga kicked and fought like a pissed off cat and tried to blame the whole thing on Helen. At the station, they plopped them in a room together, hoping they'd be dumb enough to talk about the case. Yeah, you know, the problem with doing crimes with the partner is you have to both be smart, you know, and Olga, bless her heart, decided to leave her brain at the door. Yeah, like, you know, they say that, like, wisdom comes with age. No. And a lot of chatter on this case is about how terrifyingly smart and cunning these two bad. old bitches are. But I'd like to point out how fucking stupid they are instead. Cunning and dumb are not mutually exclusive, but geez, Louise, they were both about as sharp as silly putty

on a hot cement. Not only did Helen leave just a K2-sized pile of evidence lying around, but Olga decided to run her mouth in an interrogation room. I guess she figured that little black thing with a blinky red light in the corner of the ceiling was just there for decoration or something because no sooner had the detectives left the room. The latch just clicked. Then she started in on Helen.

Why did you make all those goddamn extra insurances? There's a limit. Because she's trying to screw you over, Olga. Olga's like, that's what raised the suspicion. You can't do that many. You were greedy. That's the problem. Yeah. astute observation.

Greed is indeed the problem here. That in psychopathy. Be quiet, Helen Histed her. They might be listening. Oh, you think? But Olga couldn't seem to stop herself. You're going to go to jail, honey. She said, they're going to lock you up.

And it was so funny to me because her voice had this kind of like playground, like neener-neeter type of quality to it as she was saying all this. I can't imagine why she thought she was going to skis. Kate, Scott Free. Yeah, what Olga actually accomplished with this little hissy fit, only a small part of which we shared with you here, was to incriminate the absolute shit out of herself and Helen. If they'd been worried about not having enough evidence to nail Olga before,

they did not have to worry now. She had taken care of that for them. Yep. One of the last things she said to Helen was that she was mad at herself for not, quote, fleeing back to Europe a month ago. Good job, Olga. Way to hold it together, girl. Yeah, she is not being released on bail. Ever. Never. She just proved that she's a fucking flight risk. Now, it wasn't a tough case to make in court. Helen and Olga were convicted of conspiracy and first-degree murder.

Both were sentenced to life in prison, no chance of parole. When they were caught, they were already working on their next victim. Another man they met through the homeless shelter. Dude dodged a bullet. So not exactly the cookie-baking kind of grandmas, right? Talk about wolves and sheep cosplay, but still, maybe not as scary as our next lady. Yeah, moving on to case two, the delusions of Madame Yun. So, campers for this one, were all the way over in Seoul, South Korea, March 6th, 2002. 21-year-old Gie Ha was up early, as she usually was. Every day, she left home at 5 a.m. to walk.

to the swimming pool, both because she liked it and because it helped her with back problems. And swimming was pretty much the only relaxation in G.A.'s life, because my girl was busy. She was a fourth year student at the prestigious Iwa Law School and was on the verge of wrapping up her education. All that was left was graduation and the bar exam. Shea didn't come from a wealthy family, and she knew if she was going to get to where she wanted to be in life, she'd have to work hard. But G.A. didn't have a problem with that. She was a dedicated student, and other than the pool, she split her time between cramming at the university library and cramming at home. And she knew what she wanted to do after the bar. She was going to be a public defender,

helping people who couldn't afford their own legal representation. She would never get the chance. After leaving her home early in the morning on March 6th, G.A. Ha vanished. G.A. was close with her parents, and when she didn't turn up for a regular lunch date, they started to get nervous. They couldn't get hold of G.A. and none of her friends had seen her. by the afternoon her folks were at the police station asking for help and you've heard us sing this tune a dozen times the police bless him didn't take him seriously despite hearing how completely out of character it was for ga to just drop off the map like this your daughter's an adult the police told them maybe she's just run off somewhere is it comforting or horrifying that this transcends culture this kind of attitude from police Horrifying, I think, is you'll find it's horrifying. Yeah. Even when G.A.'s father, T.quan, told him G.A. had been stalked for over a year.

He still got little more than the polite, official version of a shrug in response. But then, Dad got hold of security footage from the front of G.A.'s apartment building, and it showed two burly dudes trailing her right after she left to go swimming. Now, this got the attention of the police. but Tiquan was still unsatisfied with their response. South Korea is a low-crime country. Most violent crimes occur at less than one-tenth their rate in the U.S., and really the only downside of this is that when something bad does happen,

the police don't necessarily have the institutional experience to deal with it. T-Qan felt the police didn't really know what they were doing, investigating his daughter's disappearance, and he had to just keep pushing him, pushing him all the time. And then on March 16th, days after she went missing, Gie's body was found by a hiker, covered in leaves in the wooded hills outside the city of Hanam, about 13 miles from her house. Her hands and feet were tied with red rope, and her face was covered in duct tape. She had fractures in her arms, probably from

trying to break free from the ropes. She'd been dead maybe two days, shot six times, four times in the face and twice in the back of the head, with an air gun. And while air gun, my have you thinking about like a kid's BB rifle, South Korea has really strict gun laws, and this meant that regular firearms are nearly impossible to get hold of. So there's a market over there for hunters for like these really powerful compressed air weapons, and it was one of these that had killed GA. The police had trouble making any forward progress in the case. A milkman had come forward to say that he'd seen an SUV parked outside of GA's building the day

she disappeared. And the cops even had the guy hypnotized to try and help him remember more details. This scored them a description of two young men, one with bad acne on his face. But the sketch artist's portraits of the suspects didn't lead anywhere. When they questioned GA's dad about anything weird that might have happened in the weeks before the murder, he said he did actually remember something weird. A young man had turned up at his company a while back, claiming to have come into some money that he wanted to invest in the dad's company.

Now, Ticuan Ha hadn't just fallen off the turnip truck, and he was suss about this from the get-go. Why did you pick my company? He asked the dude. But the guy didn't have an answer, and Tiquan cut off contact, figuring the weird interaction was probably the first step in an attempted scam. Desperate for any lead, the investigators chased the story down and managed to identify this mysterious young man. His name was Monsuk Kim, and he sure as hell wasn't a wealthy investor. This guy was unemployed, and he hadn't paid his rent in a year. And when they checked Kim's cell phone records, they put him right outside GA's apartment on the day she disappeared,

and later on, up in the hills where her body was found. A little more digging showed that Kim had bought an air gun just a month before GA's disappearance. Investigating Kim led the police to another young loser, his friend Namshin Yun. Both Kim and Yun, despite barely working, had bank accounts. that were suddenly flush with cash, and they'd both fled to Vietnam soon after GA's body was discovered. GA's dad immediately followed them there, offering rewards for their capture and trying to get Interpol on the case.

Realizing they were being hunted by their victim's father, Kim and Yun headed for China, where they were quickly arrested before being sent back to South Korea on April 11th. With this pair of doorknobs in custody, it didn't take long for the plot to unravel, And a plot was exactly what this was. Kim and Yun had been hired to abduct and kill GA by the most unlikely source imaginable. Gil Jah Yun, Nam Shin Yun's aunt, a woman whose only connection to GA was that her daughter was married to GA's cousin. Madam Yun, as the Korean media would come to call her, wasn't just your average Josephine either. She was married to Ji Han Ryu.

chairman of one of the largest flour milling companies in South Korea. These were seriously wealthy people, members of South Korea's elite. But despite money and influence, there was more than one fly in Madame Yun's chardonnay at the end of the 90s. For one thing, Habi Ji Hun had apparently had trouble keeping it in his pants. He was a chronic cheater. Sometimes Madame Yun even caught him in the act. Oh, no. Yeah, like multiple times.

And for another, Madame Eun's beloved daughter, an only child, was almost 30 years old and not married yet, heaven forbid. Clutch the pearls, not a spinster. That will never do. So, Madame Eween hired a matchmaker to find a husband for her daughter, and the matchmaker offered kind of a wild card choice, suggesting a young judge by the name of Kim. I know we got two Kim's. It's very confusing. As you might imagine, semi-arranged marriages like this tend to stick pretty close to the same social group and level of wealth, but Kim wasn't from a prominent or wealthy family. He was already a judge in his early 30s, though, and that respectable position apparently made up for the divide in social class.

The couple had an extravagant wedding in 1999, and in the old-fashioned way, moved into Madame Yun's house for the start of the marriage. Now, I know this is a cultural thing, but seriously, married campers, would you like to move in with your in-law? right after your wedding or with your mom because I'd rather live in a dumpster behind Costco. I'm just saying, sorry, mom. And the start of their marriage was rocky. Not really surprising when you consider that they barely knew each other

and hadn't really even dated much before getting married. But sometimes turbulent beginnings can settle down and sometimes your mother-in-law can go completely bat-shit nuts and ruin everything. Now, knowing us,

which option is your money on here? It's going to turn out great, Right? During the first year of marriage, Madame Eune got a call from the matchmaker she'd employed, and what she said sent a chill through Madame Eun's heart. Your son-in-law is cheating on your daughter. I don't know what this lady's motive was here, if she's just a shitsterer or what, but this call hit Madame Eun like a semi-truck to the sturdom. She started obsessively watching her son-in-law's habits, to the point of putting a bug in the newlywed couple's bedroom. A bug, meaning a recorder, which is just begging to hear some stuff you really, really, really don't want to hear,

unless you're a mega-perve, which let's hope she wasn't. And one day, thanks to her handy little spyware, she overheard her son-in-law talking to a young woman on the phone. Now, the cheese was already balanced pretty precariously on the edge of Madame Unes cracker at this point, okay? And she jumped to a conclusion with absolute certainty. her son-in-law had been accused of cheating. Now he was talking to a girl on the phone. This was obviously his lover. Despite the fact that when she asked him about it, he said, what? That's my cousin GA. She's in law school. She's wanted some advice from the judge in the family. I mean, that seems like a reasonable explanation to me, but no. Madam wasn't having it. So at first, she tried her own hand at stalking. She would sit in her car outside Judge Kim's office and take notes on a

woman who went in. She put a wiretap on his phone. She broke into his email. If he was more than a minute or two late coming home from work, she'd scold him. Makes me wonder, and I wish I knew more about Korean culture here, because I could be dead wrong about this, but it makes me think maybe Madame Yun liked the fact that this guy didn't come from a rich family, like hers. Like maybe that's why she picked him for her daughter. He had a prestigious enough job that he'd come with some status, but because he didn't come from money, he might be easier to control. You know, I don't know.

It's just a theory. Anyway, no matter what Kim said, Madame Yun's mind was firmly made up, and before you could say, you're actually furious with your cheating husband, lady, go talk to him. Instead of taking it out on your daughter's man, she'd hired her loser nephew, Nam Shin, to trail GA

and try and get evidence of this affair. The problem with that was, the affair only existed in Madamune's brain box. Oh, Shin arranged constant surveillance of GA over the next two years, hiring a bunch of sketchy dudes, including police officers. You love to hear that, to follow this poor girl around. At the high point of this coordinated stalking, 25 people were following GA, like, on a day-to-day basis. Rich people are fucking crazy. She'd rather pay two dozen people to follow this kid around that admit she might have been wrong.

I'm sure they found something, though, right? 25 people on the payroll couldn't have been for nothing. Yeah, not so much. What they found was pretty much what we described to you right at the start, a dedicated student whose time was divided between the pool, the university, and home. She wasn't involved with anybody, let alone her own frickin' cousin, ew. But Madame Yune wasn't having any of it. She was sure she was right, and something as weak as, you know, actual reality wasn't going to change her mind.

GA was spending all her time in the library? Well, then, there must be a secret door in there somewhere. That's how they were doing it without the surveillance guys seeing. Jeez, crackers. There's not a whole lot to be gained by trying to pick apart the reasoning of a person as genuinely paranoid as bad immune. But still, this whole operation was dumber than a chocolate teapot. Her matchmaker friend had just told her that her son of the same, law was having an affair. She hadn't even mentioned GA. Like Whitney said, we're not sure what the

matchmaker was up to with this. Maybe Judge Kim was having an affair. Maybe she wanted to break up the marriage so she could get some more business from Mad Amune. And like you said, maybe she just liked stirring up drama. Who knows? But she hadn't mentioned GA at all. So if you're going to hire dozens of people for a surveillance operation, why not follow Judge Kim instead? I know, right? That would be too reasonable for someone as stable and normal and sane as Madam Yune. So, Madam Yune had fixated on GA. When her spies didn't turn up any evidence, she started calling GA's friends, offering them money if they could get pictures of GA and Judge Kim together. And then she called GA's parents and demanded they get their wild daughter under control, which was the first time they learned of the stalking.

They were furious, of course, and confronted Mad Amune, demanding she back off their daughter, which she refused to do, of course, still totally convinced her delusions were true. There was a serious rupture between the two families, and Judge Kim, the man at the center of it, didn't exactly cover himself in glory. He took a passive role, refusing to tell Mad Amun to back off. He'd later say he felt he had a duty as a judge to stay neutral, which, wow, that's bullfew. shit. This isn't a court case, dude. It's your family, and you don't have to stay neutral between the truth and the lies of a delusional maniac. I think Judge Kim was either flat out scared shitless

of his mother-in-law or just not willing to risk the new status he'd acquired by marrying into this rich, prominent family. Either way, ew, dude, get your shit together. Ew, ew, David. Ew. Ew. Ew. Ewe. Once they found out about the stalking, the Ha family got a restraining order against not immune, forbidding her from contacting or approaching GA or paying anybody else to do so. All this did was piss her off and convince her she was definitely right about GA and Kim. Like, this is like a fucking one-trick pony, man. Oh yeah, she was fixated.

The Ha family was trying to stop her getting proof of the affair. That was what was happening. And that was when her thoughts turned to murder. G.A. wasn't even the first target. That was her father, Ticuan, who had dared get up in Madame's face and pushed G.A. to get the restraining order. The idea behind that clumsy fake investor plot, we told you about earlier, was to lure Tiquan to a remote location and then ambush and kill him. Oh, my God. His gut feeling that there was something fishy about the whole situation had seen.

saved his life. Damn, good job T-Quan, seriously. So then it was time for the real target of Madam's rage, Gie Ha. Her nephew and his childhood friend, Man Suk Kim, bundled her into an SUV early on the morning of March 6th, and after that, we don't know what happened, which might be a blessing. Yeah, evidence showed that G.A. was probably kept alive for eight days before she was shot and killed. And what happened to her in those eight days, God only knows. The two killers and Madam Yun were all quickly convicted on murder and conspiracy charges, but unfortunately, the

story doesn't end there. In 2013, a whistleblower told Tiquan Ha that the mastermind behind his daughter's murder wasn't even in prison. Hadn't been since 2007. She was staying in a luxury hospital suite, having been released from prison because of a whole host of medical conditions. Breast cancer, Parkinson's, diabetes, asthma, like literally, if you can name it, this bitch had it, allegedly. So, a convicted and theoretically imprisoned murderer was being waited on, hand and foot, and allowed to leave the hospital to go to family parties. Gross. As you can imagine, the story blew up in the Korean media, and the crew of a documentary TV show actually somehow managed to smuggle a hidden camera into Madam Yun's room. how the hell they did that? I don't know, but I'm damn impressed. Impressive, yeah.

And they found that when the doctors and nurses were around, Mad Amune couldn't even manage a shuffling little old lady walk without help, and her hands would shake when she was trying to eat. Oh, bless her poor little heart. But then as soon as they would leave and she was alone, she'd just be bouncing around the room, just free and easy as could be. Now, obviously, you can't act your way into all those medical diagnoses. so it quickly came to light that Mad Amune had bribed her doctors to fake medical reports. And it didn't hurt that the prosecutors handling her case,

who had decided to let her move into this hospital, were friends and former classmates of Mad Amune's own lawyers. It was a scandalous story of corruption, but according to Medium.com's Magda Shiminska, one with infuriatingly minor consequences for everybody involved. Some of the doctors and prosecutors were fired, and one doctor spent like a few months in jail. Madame Eune did go back to prison,

but like a prison with a reputation for being cushy and easy, a club fed, if you will. So there are a couple of things to take away from this case. One is just how damaging and toxic absolute certainty can be, despite all evidence to the contrary. Madame Eune was sure, completely sure. She was right about her son-in-law's affair and who he was having it with.

And that certainty, in the face of common sense and evidence and everything else, led her to end one bright young life and wreak all kinds of havoc across countless others. And the other more rage-inducing lesson is that if you have buckets of money, you can get away with a hell of a lot. We really got a fix that. And just a brief final note, we came across this case via YouTuber Grazie TV, G-R-A-Z-Y, which is a great source for Asian true crime cases that don't always get a lot of exposure in the U.S. I just binge everything. Like that channel is so great because it's just a ton of

great cases you've never heard of and some of them are bonkers. Like bonk, like holy shit bonkers. They've got some scary female serial killers in Korea. I'm just saying. So go check her out if you haven't already. She's cute as button. She's funny. Smart. It's great channel. So that was a wild one. Right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, watch your grandmas and grandpas, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Donna, Eric with the K, Emily, Cynthia, Sarah, Emily, Melinda, and Amy with two ease. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a

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