Dark Files: Fabricated Cases — Three Stories the State Wrote for Itself
Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & MysteriesShow Notes
Most of the cases on this show start with a crime and then ask who did it. Tonight's three work the other way round. In each one, the state decided what the story was first, and then built a case to fit it.
This is Dark Files. These are fabricated cases.
We begin in April 1975, in a Seoul prison before dawn. Eight men were hanged, about eighteen hours after the Supreme Court confirmed their death sentences. They had been convicted of belonging to an underground communist organisation. Thirty-two years later, a court acquitted all eight. The organisation they died for had never actually existed.
Then January 1987. A Korean woman named Kim Ok-bun was killed in a flat in Hong Kong by her husband. The intelligence service had reason to doubt his story almost at once. Even so, they presented him as a hero who had escaped North Korean agents, and they presented her as a spy. Her family carried that label for fourteen years.
And May 1991. A young activist died at a Seoul university, leaving two handwritten pages. Prosecutors said a friend had written them for him. That friend, Kang Ki-hun, served three years in prison. His acquittal became final in 2015.
Three cases. Three families who were told the state's version was the truth. And the long years it took to prove otherwise.
In this compilation: • Episode 63: People's Revolutionary Party Rebuilding Committee Case (인민혁명당 재건위원회 사건) • Episode 59: Suzy Kim Spy Fabrication Case (수지 김 간첩 조작 사건) • Episode 61: Kang Ki-hun Suicide Note Forgery Case (강기훈 유서대필 조작 사건)
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