In October 2016, the body of Ms. A, a woman in her 30s, was found in a field in Daesomyeon, Eumseong-gun, Chungcheongbuk-do. She had died four years earlier.
The culprits were Ms. A’s aunt, 38, and her younger brother, B, 36, who lived with her at the time of her death. The police investigation revealed that in September 2012, Mr. Lee beat Ms. A to death at home for mentioning another man, and then called his brother, Mr. B, to bury her.
An aunt who beat her live-in daughter to death and buried her in a family-owned field is examined after her emergency arrest by police in October 2016. (Photo: Yonhap)
Police investigated the case with a suspicion of murder in mind, but a post-mortem examination by the National Institute of Scientific Investigation found that the cause of death could not be determined because the body was highly skeletalized.
As the cause of death could not be determined, the police were forced to charge Mr. Lee with assault and battery instead of murder. The prosecution followed the police investigation and put Lee’s brothers on trial for assault and hiding the body.
In January 2017, the Court of First Instance sentenced Mr. Lee to five years in prison, stating that he “committed an inhuman crime that violated even the most basic human decency toward the deceased and tried to cover up the crime forever,” and that he “seems to have accidentally caused Mr. Lee’s death during an argument.” The younger brother, Mr. B, was sentenced to one year and six months in prison, suspended for two years.
However, at the second trial in June 2027, Lee’s sentence was reduced to three years in prison. The second trial court cited the fact that “the victim’s bereaved family has forgiven and settled with Mr. Lee and does not want him to be punished” as the main reason for the reduction.
The bereaved family that settled with Mr. Lee was Ms. A’s father. However, the relationship between A and her father was actually a “male-male” relationship스포츠토토. Mr. A ran away from home when he was in the fifth grade and lived with his grandmother after his parents divorced.
He was bounced from orphanage to orphanage, with few ties to his grandmother and other family members. He had virtually no contact with his father, only seeing him once a year.
From the time Mr. A was killed by Mr. Lee in September 2012 until his body was found in October 2016, Mr. Lee’s father never contacted him. Nor did he report her missing.
He only realized that she had been defecated after the police arrested Mr. Lee and others and contacted him as her only next of kin. “I thought my daughter was doing well on her own,” A’s father reportedly told the police.
After decades of neglecting his fatherly duties, Mr. Lee exercised his fatherly rights after Ms. A’s death. During the second trial against Mr. Lee, Mr. Lee received a large settlement from Mr. Lee and submitted a non-punishment petition to the court stating that he did not want to be punished.
The court viewed Mr. Lee’s “no punishment” as a “favorable normalcy” for bereaved families, and drastically reduced Mr. Lee’s sentence. The court took into account that the agreement was made by the father, who was the only bereaved family member, even though they were virtually estranged.
At the time, prosecutors were outraged, saying, “It is regrettable that the sentence was reduced because of the settlement of a father who had an isolated relationship with the victim during his lifetime,” and that “it is problematic to equate the settlement with the general settlement of a bereaved family member who is related to the victim.”
“As the father-daughter relationship was not actually severed, the court had no choice but to reflect the agreement in the sentence,” said a legal expert, “but reducing the sentence by almost half seems a bit excessive.”