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Gye-hwa Choi was a woman whose dismembered body was found in a sewer next to a bean sprout processing factory in Songdo Beach, Busan, South Korea. Notably, her case was buried for years by South Korean authorities due to it occurring during a time of widespread public unrest in the country.
She was identified in 1985 and her husband, Chang-sun Seok, was convicted of her murder.
Case[]
Discovery[]
On the morning of 15 February 1979, a resident of Amnam neighborhood, close to Songdo Beach, left her home to travel to a bathhouse. On her way to the bathhouse, she passed a bean sprout processing factory run by her husband and noticed an abandoned wheelbarrow. Upon trying to move it, it fell over and revealed two sacks hidden beneath a sewer cover that the wheelbarrow had hidden. The resident assumed it was just someone's bags that would be retrieved soon. However, when she returned later in the day and noticed that the sacks hadn't moved, she called over a local briquette deliveryman to investigate them with her. The deliveryman would first remark that it felt like there was meat inside of the sacks after touching them. After both people got a "strange feeling", they alerted authorities.
When a police officer arrived, he cut the strings tying the bags together with scissors. Upon looking inside one of the bags, he was met with the sight of two severed arms. All of the sacks contained the six dismembered parts of a nude woman. The woman's face had been bashed with a blunt object, possibly a hammer, so many times that it was left unrecognizable. All of her fingers had been removed and were missing, deliberately rendering fingerprint identification impossible. Investigators determined that the woman was in her 40s and that she had died from blunt-force trauma to the head. She had been dead for likely 3 to 4 days before her discovery and her body smelled strongly of chemicals.
During the investigation, authorities took an interest in the sacks that held her body. They were green PVC bags used to hold different chemicals that were imported from Japan. An inscription on the outside of one of the bags read "SEED SYLOID NICRON SEED FUGI DAVIDSON CHEMICAL NAGOYA JAPAN 8k". They all had thick nylon straps for packaging and had been sealed in a manner used for luggage. Aside from the green sacks, there was one beige PVC sack produced in South Korea that was generally used for farms and lacked markings. Several chemical plants and businesses were investigated, but since it was raw material imported from another country, the search proved highly difficult.
During the autopsy, it was noted that the woman had been dismembered professionally and the bags containing her body parts had no traces of blood in them. It was believed that the woman's body had been washed or chemically treated with a preservative and that the murderer was likely someone with anatomical knowledge and connections to chemical plants. The case had been brought to public attention across South Korea, but authorities did not receive any meaningful leads. Instead, the police forces of Busan believed the incident to be shameful due to the bags being located only 100 meters away from the nearest police station. With the rise in public unrest at the time due to the high frequency of gruesome crimes occurring in the country, authorities quietly buried the decedent's case to avoid causing more unrest.
Arrest and identification[]
On 29 June 1985, Sun-hwan Lee was found dead inside his restaurant, Ottogi Chicken. During the interrogation of the unnamed suspect, he revealed that a man named Chang-sun Seok had confessed to him that he had murdered his wife while drinking together. Seok was found to have 5 prior theft convictions and had changed his address at least 7 times after his wife had gone missing in 1979. The suspect was interrogated about Seok's whereabouts, and police tracked him down on 26 September. He was immediately arrested and taken into custody. Once his interrogation began, he confessed to murdering his wife, Gye-hwa Choi, and told the police that she was the woman who was found in sacks close to Songdo Beach.
According to Seok, on 10 February 1979, he returned to his home in Daegu, a city located 135 km from Busan, after working abroad for a while. He found that neither his children nor his wife were home, so he searched for them. Eventually, he came across them with his younger brother and his children admitted that Choi had left their children with his younger brother. Seok went out to further search for his wife and finally met with her on 13 February while highly intoxicated at a market in the Chon District of Daegu. Seok then took Choi home with him.
When they got home, Seok asked why Choi had left their children with his younger brother when they had plenty of money and weren't starving. Seok was admittedly infuriated and was upset that his wife was not only dirty but smelled foul. He demanded she wash herself thoroughly with cold water despite the temperatures in Daegu being sub-zero at the time. When Choi tried to exit the bathroom after bathing, her husband demanded to know what she had been doing that had kept her away from home. Before she could even answer or dry herself, he hit the back of Choi's head, which made her slip and hit her head on the wet vinyl flooring. Seok initially thought his wife had suffered a concussion. but began to panic when she did not wake up immediately after shaking her.
In his panic, Seok ran out of the house, drank makgeolli alone at a local bar for two hours, and then returned home much more intoxicated. He found that Choi was still lying on the floor in her bathroom, and authorities presumed that she had been dead by then. Seok decided to try and report her death to the Bisan neighborhood's police station, which was 500 meters away from their home. However, as he staggered to the police station, he began to fear getting a heavy sentence for Choi's death due to his 5 prior theft arrests. Seok decided to not report her death and returned home to dismember Choi to dispose of her. After severing all her fingers, he placed them into a bag and threw them into his garbage. Afterward, he took the sacks holding the rest of her body and hailed a taxi to take him to the Dongdaegu Express Bus Terminal.
At the bus terminal, Seok told the attendant that he wanted to take an express bus to Busan with the fastest arrival time. He was directed to the Cheonil Express and went through a luggage check. When asked what was in the bag before storing it in the cargo compartment of the bus, Seok claimed that it was meat. The attendant told him he could not put it in the cargo compartment, so Seok held the bag on his lap on the bus. In Busan, he called a porter and was transported to an area near the Busan Maritime High School. He dumped the bag with Choi's remains into a sewer and immediately returned home.
After his confession, Seok was taken to the morgue to conclusively identify the woman found near Songdo Beach as Choi as her body was one of the few that had been embalmed. After confirming that the body did belong to his wife, he was allowed to perform spiritual rites, in which he bowed and apologized to Choi's body. He then left the custody of Choi's body to his son and allowed him to cremate her.
While the statute of limitations on Choi's murder had expired by the time Seok was prosecuted, he was still able to be charged and convicted for causing bodily harm. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, though was released on parole in 1988 after contracting a liver disease as a result of his excessive drinking following Choi's murder. Seok committed suicide at an inn a few years later.
Characteristics[]
- Crescent-shaped scar on her left thigh.
- 19 cm long black permed hair.