A South Korean court has given a life sentence to a true crime fan who told police she murdered a stranger “out of curiosity”.

Jung Yoo-jung, 23, had been obsessed with crime shows and novels and scored highly on psychopath tests, police said.

Fixated with the idea of “trying out a murder”, she used an app to meet an English-language teacher, stabbing her to death at her home in May.

The brutal killing shocked South Korea.

Prosecutors had asked for the death penalty - a request typically reserved for the gravest of offences.

  • Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    The weird thing about this to me is how someone who has watched all this crime stuff, which generally (at least the English ones I’ve seen) portrays the police as being competent and successful at catching criminals, doesn’t come up with a far more detailed plan to not get caught.

    The interesting thing is she could genuinely have done a murder to see what it’s like, just as she wanted, and probably never gotten caught. If you murder someone with no motive, no connection to you, chosen at random, in a place not close to your home or place of work or any other frequently visited locations…the police have little to go on. As a fan of these shows, she would surely be aware of this. But instead she chose to do things that would basically guarantee she’s caught if the police are even minimally competent.

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
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      11 months ago

      Maybe she wanted to get caught to have her own episode? It wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened.

      • RaincoatsGeorge@lemmy.zip
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        11 months ago

        Everyone here is getting tunnel vision. Person obsessed with true crime podcasts kills someone makes for a good headline but it’s not the reality. It should really say mentally ill person who happens to listen to podcasts kills someone.

    • stoy@lemmy.zip
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      11 months ago

      Aren’t psycopaths often quite arrogant of others abilities?

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      From the sound of things, she wouldn’t have gotten caught if she hadn’t tried to dispose of the body. If she had just left after murdering the woman, it would have been much harder to solve the case.

      • Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        The app she used to find the victim likely had enough of a digital trail to link back to her, so body disposal or no, she would likely have been investigated and caught sooner or later.

      • Stovetop@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I don’t think harder, but probably longer.

        The article also says that she was caught on CCTV leaving and entering the house multiple times. Even if she left the body there, eliminating the need for her to make multiple “drop off” runs, she’d still be the last person seen entering the house and subsequent DNA evidence would be enough to convict.

        The taxi driver reporting her to police just expedited how quickly she was caught. The crime would have likely been discovered as soon as the teacher failed to report in to work or to her next appointment. But if she hadn’t been reported so quickly, it would have given her more time to disappear.

      • Mac@mander.xyz
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        11 months ago

        Someone who recently disappeared would have their meetups and messages gone through. She would have been investigated.

      • stifle867@programming.dev
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        11 months ago

        She would have left a strand of hair at the scene that they DNA test then the whole case gets busted upon. That’s how it works in the shows anyway

        • wrath_of_grunge@kbin.social
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          11 months ago

          if the shows are any indication, the hair strand won’t be tested, and innocent person will be charged, and in 20 years, they’ll figure it out after the innocent person basically became their own lawyer and found out about the hair, then managed to get the hair tested on their final appeal.

        • VaultBoyNewVegas@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          DNA testing is only useful if someone is already in the system, so long as the killer isn’t in the system then they need a sample from the killer somehow to compare the DNA. This is why if you’re interviewed formally by police at the station they offer you something to drink, so they can get fingerprints from the glass/cup and DNA from your saliva on the rim.

          • stifle867@programming.dev
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            11 months ago

            Yeah it was just a joke about the cliches of the true crime category. To be fair I don’t watch true crime myself.

    • Eezyville@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      That was probably why she did the things that would get her caught. It wouldn’t be true crime if the criminal got away with it.