When one of the worst serial murder case in South Korea was unsolved for 30ish years, until the criminal, Lee choonjae, was caught in 2019.

I grew up hearing about these horrible murders and it was really agitating imagining the murderer being loose out there, enjoying their life.

There was a Korean movie named Memories of Murder(same director with Parasites) which was inspired by this, and it also ended with criminal not getting caught.

So it was really shocking to hear that he was finally caught after all those years. Ironically he was already in jail serving life sentence for rape and murder.

From what I understand, the reason why it took so long to catch him wasn’t because he was a 4D chess genius, but because South Korea lacked scientific methods for approaching criminal cases during that time, and also because DNA database of prisoners didn’t exist until 2010s.

Interesting thing is, another infamous Korean serial killer, Yoo Youngchul, said before the case was solved, that the murderer must be already dead or in jail because serial killers can’t stop from murdering.

Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, who claimed in 1980 that a dingo killed her baby while she was camping. It was ruled as a murder, but after many years, a coroner’s report confirmed that, actually, a dingo had killed her baby. The phrase ‘A dingo ate my baby’ became a very, very early equivalent of a meme at the time, and continues to show up in media occasionally.

There’s always an xkcd for it: https://xkcd.com/1235/