Jung Yoo-jung

Jung Yoo-jung (Korean: 정유정; born 1999) is a South Korean murderer. In May 2023, disguised as a secondary student seeking for English tutoring, she killed the tutor at her home in Busan. Investigation revealed that Jung had been engrossed in true crime media, claiming her act as "out of curiosity."

After dismembering the body, Jung carried the body remains in a suitcase and dumped them in an isolated forest by the banks of Nakdong River. The driver of a taxi which she took, tipped off the police as he became suspicious of his passenger's bloodstained suitcase. In November 2023, the Busan District Court sentenced Jung to life imprisonment. Prosecutors wanted a death penalty and she was retried by the Supreme Court in May 2024, which upheld the conviction of life sentence.

Background Jung lived with her grandfather in Busan. Her mother deserted her when she was one year old, and then by her father when she was six. She completed her secondary education in 2018 and since then remained unemployed, and had applied for university entrance several times but without success. At the time of the murder, she was preparing for competitive examinations for civil services.

With plenty of free time, Jung developed a hobby of watching crime shows and reading murder stories. She had learned from internet sources on how to conceal and dispose of bodies. Wanting to act out a real-life scenario, she started to make plans for killing. As the Busan police later revealed, she had well-researched on the modus operandi, one of which was learning from books she borrowed from a local library. The library record showed Jung borrowing many books on crimes in the past months. Targeting more vulnerable female home tutors, she joined a tutoring app pretending to be a parent. By May 2023, she had approached 54 tutors posing as a mother of a 9th-grade student who needed English tuition. Then, in late May 2023, she found a willing tutor, a 26-year-old freelance worker and a university student, who was living in the south-eastern area of Busan.

Murder Jung contacted the female tutor, who agreed to a home lesson with her fictitious daughter. She had bought a school uniform from an online seller. She severed the victim's fingers to make biometric identification difficult and also kept the victim's mobile phone, ID card and wallet. The plan was to make a scene of traceless disappearance – "a perfect crime", as the police reported. She took a taxi and dumped the suitcase with its contents in a secluded forest near Nakdong River in Yangsan, South Gyeongsang Province.

On 24 November 2023, the court issued a verdict of guilty of homicide, and will be eligible for parole after 20 years. South Korea has capital punishment of death penalty, but has not been in actual effect since 1997. The prosecution moved the petition to the Busan High Court. In March, the court ruled that the death penalty "should be executed only in very limited and exceptional cases," rejecting the petition. The prosecution then moved the petition to the Supreme Court, which reopened the case in May 2024. On 13 June 2024, the Supreme Court announced its decision that Jung's life sentence was justified. According to the court, the judgment was based on circumstantial factors such as the offender's age, behaviour, background and motive for the murder.

Impact Jung's action was said to "spread fear in society that anyone can become a victim for no reason." It also led to distrust of others in a community. According to Lee Soo-jung, a forensic psychology professor at Kyonggi University, Jung's conduct was most unusual as most murderers would be terrified, and Jung showed no sign of panic or tension. Lee further suggested that the main motive could be that Jung wanted to steal the victim's identity in light of her taking the ID card and wallet, based on her failure to get university enrollments.