True crime fan killed and dismembered stranger ‘out of curiosity’
A court in South Korea has sentenced a true crime fan to life in prison for committing a murder out of curiosity.
Jung Yoo-jung, 23, was found guilty of fatally stabbing an English-language teacher more than 100 times – a killing that shocked the country earlier in May.
Prosecutors had pushed for the death penalty for Jung, who police say was obsessed with true crime TV shows and novels, the BBC reports. Instead, she will spend the rest of her natural life in prison.
An unemployed loner who lived with her granddad, she is also understood to have scored highly on psychopath tests.
Jung reportedly spent several months using online apps to contact more than 50 people before eventually deciding on her 26-year-old victim, who has not been identified.
After making an appointment with the victim, prosecutors say Jung turned up at the tutor’s house wearing a school uniform she had purchased online.
Jung is then understood to have stabbed the woman more than 100 times and continued attacking her victim even after she died.
She then dismembered the victim’s body before taking a taxi and dumping a portion of the remains near a river north of Busan.
It was this taxi ride that eventually led to Jung being apprehended, after the driver tipped police off about a customer having dumped what appeared to be a bloody suitcase.
Police said Jung’s browsing history revealed months of research ahead of the killing, but added she appeared to have made no effort to avoid CCTV, which showed her repeatedly entering and leaving the tutor’s home around the time of the killing.
Having admitted to the crime earlier in June, Jung had pleaded for leniency on grounds she was suffering from a mental disorder, including hallucinations, when she committed the crime.
A judge rejected her argument on grounds the killing had been ‘carefully planned and carried out, and it is difficult to accept her claim of mental and physical disorder’.
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