Show Notes
On a Saturday afternoon in October 1991, the biggest open space in Seoul was doing what it did every weekend. Families. Rental bicycles. Roller skates. A flat sheet of asphalt the size of a small airfield, right in the middle of the capital, packed with children. Then a small car came onto the plaza and did not slow down. It took less than a minute. Two children were dead. Twenty-one people were hurt. And the twenty-one-year-old behind the wheel — a man who had never held a driving licence, whose eyesight was so bad he had been fired from every job he ever had — told police afterwards that he had wanted to take revenge on society and then die. Six years later, he was one of the twenty-three prisoners hanged on the last morning South Korea has ever carried out an execution.
Yeouido Plaza Car Rampage (여의도광장 차량질주 사건) · 1991-10-19 · Yeouido Plaza (여의도광장, now Yeouido Park), Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul
More from Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries
In January 2008, a fire tore through a cold-storage warehouse under construction in Icheon, just outside Seoul. Forty workers died. The company was fined 20 million won. Twelve years later, in the same city, another cold-storage warehouse under construction caught fire in almost exactly the same way. This time, 38 workers didn't make it out.
A hospital is supposed to be the safest place you can be when you're old and sick. On a freezing January morning in 2018, in a small city in southern Korea, it became one of the deadliest places in the country. Almost no one there was burned. They died of smoke, in beds, in hallways and in a stalled elevator. And some of them were still tied by one wrist to a bed rail when the smoke reached them.
On a cold Thursday afternoon four days before Christmas, women in a small city in central Korea were doing something completely ordinary. They were at the sauna. Some came with their mothers, some with their daughters. Within an hour, twenty people on that floor were dead. And outside, a few meters away behind a wall of glass, their families were on the phone with them, begging firefighters to break the windows.
A building is a promise. You walk in, you go to sleep, you cross a river on your way to school, and you trust that someone, somewhere, did the work to keep it standing.
In March 2014, a fifteen-year-old girl in Gimhae had just started high school. Her father said she was excited about it. She'd barely worn her new uniform. Within four weeks she was dead, and her body was hidden under cement on a hillside in a rural county north of the city. The people who did it weren't strangers in the usual sense. Most of them were teenagers, some about her own age. And the only reason anyone found her was that the same group killed again nine days later.