True crime fan who posed as teen and dismembered tutor ‘out of curiosity’ sentenced

A deranged true-crime fan from South Korea who told police she savagely stabbed and butchered an English tutor “out of curiosity” — while pretending to be a high school student — has been sentenced to life in prison. 

Prosecutors had sought the death penalty for Jung Yoo-jung, 23, but she begged the court for leniency, claiming that she suffered from hallucinations and a host of mental health issues, reported BBC News.

The Busan District Court spared Jung’s life, but rejected her claims that the monstrous killing was triggered by mental illness, given that the crime had been “carefully planned and carried out,” the presiding Judge Kim Tae-eob said.

Jung was convicted of murder, desecration and abandonment of a corpse, five months after she was indicted for brutally killing and dismembering a 26-year-old woman she met through an app in May.

Prosecutors argued that Jung was obsessed with true-crime television shows and books, and decided to kill someone in real life to satisfy her curiosity about murder.

The convicted killer, who was described as an unemployed recluse who lived with her grandfather, had used her cellphone and checked out books from a library to do research about how to hide a body, Busan police said.

Jung had spent months looking for prospective victims through an app that connects parents to tutors, and contacted more than 50 people — mostly women — before finding one who lived alone and offered lessons at home.

Posing as the mother of a ninth-grader who needed help with English, Jung arranged for her bogus daughter to come to the tutor’s home for a study session.

She then donned a school uniform she bought online, went to the unsuspecting woman’s address and stabbed her to death more than 100 times in a frenzied attack, delivering blows even after the victim had died, officials said, as Korea JoonAng Daily reported.

Jung left the slain tutor’s home to buy trash bags and bleach before returning to dismember the body, including cutting off her fingers in a bid to make her more difficult to identify her by her fingerprints.

The 23-year-old then stuffed the remains into a suitcase and took a taxi to the Nakdong River, where she disposed of the grisly evidence in a secluded park.

“In order to make it look like the victim had disappeared, Jung kept the victim’s mobile phone, ID card and wallet, attempting to commit a perfect crime,” police said.

But Jung’s plot unraveled when the cabbie became suspicious and called the police about his passenger who he said had dumped a bloodstained suitcase in a remote area by the river.

After Jung was arrested, she initially told the police that she had only moved the victim’s body after she was killed by someone else. Later, she claimed that she had accidentally killed the tutor during an argument.

Ultimately, she confessed to the heinous killing, blaming it on her interest in the true-crime genre.

On Friday, the judge who sentenced Jung said the murder had “spread fear in society that one can become a victim for no reason” and “incited a general distrust.”