South Korean man admits burying girlfriend in cement as 16-year-old cold case solved

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

Police in South Korea arrested a man who reportedly confessed to killing his girlfriend 16 years ago after her body was discovered in a suitcase encased in cement on his apartment balcony.

The man, now in his 50s, admitted to striking her with a blunt object during a heated argument in 2008 when they were living together in an apartment in the southern city of Geoje, police said.

After her death due to the trauma to her head, he buried her body in the suitcase under bricks and cement on the balcony, where it remained undetected for years, they said.

Fingerprint analysis confirmed that the body, preserved inside the suitcase, was the missing woman. An autopsy revealed she had died from blunt force trauma to the head.

“The body hadn’t completely decomposed to bones, allowing us to identify her using fingerprints,” the local police were quoted as saying by AFP.

The body was only discovered in the apartment, which the landlord had been using as a storage space, last month by a maintenance worker who was there for drilling to repair a rooftop balcony leak.

At the time of the woman’s disappearance, the man told the landlord they had broken up, and with no physical evidence or leads, the investigation went cold.

The unidentified man continued living in the apartment for eight more years until he was imprisoned on drug charges in 2017. Unable to clear out his belongings, the landlord left the unit vacant until a court-ordered eviction was completed in 2020.

The man also confessed to discarding her mobile phone and the murder weapon in the sea off the coast of Geoje, according to The Korea Times.

A police officer was quoted as saying by Hankook Ilbo: “The landlord, who lived elsewhere, used the room as a storage space. The concrete structure was located on a balcony separate from the rooftop room, making it difficult to notice from inside the room.”

The woman had lost contact with her own family and in 2011 when they visited Geoje, they reported her missing, three years after her murder.

After the discovery of the body, police swiftly identified the boyfriend as the prime suspect and arrested him on 19 September in the southeastern city of Yangsan, where he had been residing. The man is now in police custody and faces murder charges.