Episode 64: Shin Chang-won Prison Escape and Manhunt (신창원 탈옥 사건)
Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & MysteriesShow Notes
At three in the morning on the twentieth of January, 1997, a man serving life in a prison in Busan pulled himself up into the ceiling of a cell toilet and squeezed through a ventilation hole roughly the size of a kitchen drawer. To get through it, he had spent months starving himself thin. To cut the bars, he had used two small saw blades hidden in the soles of his shoes, twenty minutes a night, filling the cuts with chewing gum so nobody would see them. He was gone by the time the morning roll call reached his name. What followed was what Korean media still describe as the longest hunt for an escaped prisoner in the country's modern history — nine hundred and seven days, something on the order of nine hundred and seventy thousand police deployments, four and a half million wanted posters. And somewhere in the middle of it, a country that was losing its savings in a financial crisis started, quietly and then not so quietly, to root for him.
Shin Chang-won Prison Escape and Manhunt (신창원 탈옥 사건) · 1997-01-20 · Busan Prison, Busan; a nationwide manhunt across South Korea; captured in Suncheon, South Jeolla Province
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