True Crime (1) Killer behind the lens

Have you ever imagined what it would be to get a glimpse of someone’s final moments, before life slips away?

It’s a disturbing thought, but death makes headlines.

In 1982, a South Korean photographer was consumed by the desire to witness and capture death. He believed death could be art; provocative, forbidden art that would make his name known worldwide.

In this first installment of True Crime, we revisit the case of South Korean photographer Lee Dong-shik, who was, in the end, nothing more than a killer with an expensive camera.

Let’s start with the photos ― they mark the beginning and the end of this case.

In them, there is no one but the victim, Kim Kyung-hee. Some are black and white, others in color. Yet all trace back to the same source: the sensational news story that shocked South Korea in early 1983.

She lies on a bed of dry, winter leaves, dressed in a black tank top, a striped shirt and a brown skirt. Her fingernails are painted a vibrant red.

She’s a young woman, in the prime of her life. There’s no blood or any sign of violence. At first, it’s hard to say what to make of the photos.

But looking at the photos together, apparently taken in sequence, the scene becomes clearer: She was gasping for air, twisting and turning, her mouth agape.

Then the realization hits. Behind the lens and outside the frame was a killer.

The year was 1982. Ronald Reagan was the US president and Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev led the Soviet Union. The Cold War had reached a new peak as the nuclear arms race intensified. In the free world, people were swept up in the global phenomenon of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

On the Korean Peninsula, South Korea was under the rule of a military general.

It was politically illiberal, but the capital Seoul pulsed with dynamism and energy. Once shackled by poverty and war, the country was now in an era of explosive economic growth, a transformation so remarkable it earned the nickname the “Miracle on the Han River.”

That miracle was the main way the military regime justified its rule: It had positioned South Korea as a prime example of a free-market economy, in stark contrast to communist North Korea.

The country was getting ready to show its achievements to the world. It was building roads, subway stations and stadiums for the 1986 Asian Games and the eagerly anticipated 1988 Summer Olympics.

Seoul’s eastern neighborhood of Garak-dong had also undergone a significant transformation as desolate mud flats and impoverished farming villages gave way to new low-rise apartment complexes. In one of these buildings lived Lee Dong-shik.

His was a life of duality. By trade, he was a plumber, but in his heart and to those he met, he was an artist ― a photographer with a portfolio of award-winning work and solo exhibitions.

A man of small stature, he was a husband and father of three children, but he concealed a dark and difficult past as a convicted criminal.

Born in 1940, he became an orphan at the age of 6. Little is known about his early years, but records show he lived with his uncle until moving to Seoul at 14 years old.

In Seoul, he lived on the streets, scavenging for scraps to survive.

Lee’s first brush with the law came at 23 when he was convicted of theft. The years that followed brought two more theft convictions.

After his release from jail, Lee wanted a fresh start and became a plumber. How he developed an interest in photography remains unclear. But despite having no formal training, he was passionate enough about his hobby to spend several months’ pay on a high-end Japanese camera.

His talent was undeniable. A pivotal moment in Lee’s journey as a photographer came when he won a prize in a respectable photo contest. The winning work was a haunting image of a chicken in its final moments. This recognition marked his first major achievement, but it also planted a troubling notion in his mind: that death made a fascinating subject for art, and that capturing real-life portraits of death could be his path to success in photography.

In 1982, the photographer’s ego received a major boost. At some point that year, he earned a place in the Photo Artists Society of Korea, a prestigious club for recognized photographers, signifying he was no longer just an amateur hobbyist, but an artist.

Before the year was over, he had killed.

Kim Kyung-hee was a young woman who, at only 24, had already faced some tough choices.

Originally from the city of Gyeongju, North Gyeongsang Province, in the central part of South Korea, little is known about her childhood.

Records show that she worked at a factory in Daegu, a big city not far from her hometown, where she met her husband. They married in 1978, when Kim was just 20 years old.

But their marriage didn’t work out.

Leaving behind her two young boys, she headed to Seoul, where she hoped to build a new life.

She settled into a cheap rented home just outside the city. She had also started seeing someone.

In November 1982, she found a job as an assistant in a barbershop in Seoul’s Garak-dong.

But this barbershop was not a conventional establishment; it offered “extra” services that were sexual in nature. Her main job there was to provide shaving services.

One of her customers was a middle-aged man who always carried an expensive camera. More than once, he’d praised her posture, commenting that she could be a model.

Did she buy it? We can never know for sure. But when he promised to pay her for a modeling stint, she agreed.

So, on Dec. 13, 1982, at 9 a.m., she waited for him in front of the barbershop, which had not yet opened. He told her he wanted to take her to a mountain to shoot in a natural setting.

It was a chilly morning on Jan. 11, 1983. A group of kids huddled together on a slope of Hoamsan in western Seoul. They were on a winter adventure.

Suddenly, one of them shrieked.

He’d found a mannequin.

The others scrambled closer, their eyes wide with curiosity. But as they got nearer, a shiver ran down their spines.

This was no plastic doll. It was a woman, frozen solid, her naked body sprawled among the fallen leaves.

Before long, the mountain was swarming with police.

The body showed no signs of physical harm. There were no indications of resistance or external injuries. Investigators suspected poisoning.

Three days later, fingerprints identified the victim, but how did she end up frozen on a Seoul mountain?

Investigators checked with her boyfriend, who lived with her at the time. They also spoke to her neighbors and people from work, including regulars at the barbershop.

Lee Dong-shik was one of the regulars.

When detectives came to Lee’s home, not far from the victim’s barbershop, he welcomed them with some enthusiasm.

He then introduced himself as a photographer and proudly showed them some of his work. It was a gallery of female portraits ― disturbing, but none of the pictures seemed to connect him to Kim.

While going through the photos, sharp-eyed detective Seo Gi-man noticed Lee’s hurried attempt to hide one specific photo.

It was another portrait of a woman, but her face was obscured. She was wearing a gray skirt and brown boots, and she was lying on a bed of leaves.

Lee explained to the detective that the photo was staged.

Detective Seo didn’t think it was much more gruesome than Lee’s other pictures, some of them rather bloody. But he found it unsettling and decided to examine it further.

Kim’s grief-stricken boyfriend confirmed that the clothes belonged to her. Detectives investigated further, and hidden behind a wall at Lee’s house they discovered 21 more photos of Kim, all taken in the same location.

Lee’s story began to unravel.

He claimed he and Kim had a photo shoot. After taking pictures with her, he said, he left, and suggested that she must have killed herself at some point later.

Police pointed out that the position of Kim’s body and the leaves in the photos were an exact match with the crime scene as it was discovered.

At this point Lee had no easy answer, so his story changed. He said he accidentally choked her to death after a quarrel. He claimed they were lovers and that she became clingy and tried to blackmail him.

This too was revealed to be a lie. The evidence showed Kim had not been choked, but poisoned.

When Hong Soon-taek, a member of the Photo Artist Society and a professor at Shingu College, examined the 21 other photos of Kim, he made a chilling discovery.

He noticed that in some frames, the fine hairs on the victim’s body stood upright, meaning she was alive, while in others, they lay limp. On this basis, the 21 photos could be arranged in the order they were taken. Sometime between the 15th and 16th photograph, the victim died.

A further search of Lee’s house discovered potassium cyanide, the poison found in Kim’s body, along with a notebook containing the names of about 20 women.

This is what the police concluded: Lee lured Kim to the mountain under the pretense of a photo shoot. The December chill provided the perfect cover for his dark plan to poison her. He offered Kim what he told her was “cold medicine,” claiming he was worried she might catch a cold during the shoot.

But the medicine was laced with potassium cyanide. As the poison coursed through Kim’s veins, Lee used his camera to meticulously document her final moments. After she died, he removed her clothes while continuing to take pictures.

When the truth was revealed, Lee shouted excitedly at investigators that the sight of a dying human is art. He called the photos artistic, saying they were what he’d always yearned for.

That was the last statement by Lee that we have. He was sentenced to death, and a few years later, on May 27, 1986, he was executed by hanging.

Was Kim the killer’s first victim? Are we to believe that all the pictures taken by Lee, a man obsessed with photographing death, were staged? All staged, except for Kim’s?

Police thought it to be unlikely.

They wanted to investigate the names in Lee’s notebook along with the other gruesome photos in his collection. But the investigation stopped there.

It’s widely believed that with major international events coming up, the Korean government was mindful of the country’s image and was concerned that uncovering more murders could attract negative attention. The case had already been reported internationally, and Japanese media had shown particular interest.

Today, the case is a popular subject for local criminologists.

While some experts link the case to necrophilia — an obsession with, and often erotic attraction to, dead bodies — a more widely accepted analysis is that he acted on his ever-growing ego and lust.

During the 1983 investigation, authorities had uncovered that he had previously lured a young woman under false pretenses and raped her. They also discovered his persistent demand that his wife re-create sexual images he had seen in Japanese magazines and pornography.

Perhaps we’ll never know exactly what he did or why he did it.

What’s more revealing in this case is the way his crime was reported in the media at the time, and how it continues to be today, highlighting society’s fascination with gruesome imagery, and how the misfortune and violence that befell an innocent victim served to reinforce our own sense of safety.

In one article covering Lee’s case in 1983, the photos of Kim dying were printed without any obfuscation of the macabre details, accompanied by the caption, “This is the picture he wanted to take.”

That article and a multitude of others are the source of the images of Kim’s dying moments still circulating online.

Kotaro Iizawa, a Japanese photographer and photo critic, explores the public’s morbid fascination with images of death in “Photography and Fetishism,” citing Lee’s case as a notable example.

In the book, he explains, “Death has long been a popular theme in photography, and when combined with sexual elements, it creates an even more intense impact on viewers.”

He argues that Lee’s crime was so widely covered by the media because of our innate desire for shocking content.

Today, publishing graphic images of a victim is unthinkable in many countries, including South Korea, because of measures taken to protect the privacy of the victims of crime. But our innate curiosity of those victims hasn’t disappeared. It’s simply moved into cyberspace.

And so, with a heavy heart, we, again, express our deepest condolences for Kim Kyung-hee. She may not have had a perfect family life, but she did nothing to deserve her fate ― she only trusted a man she should not have.

This article is a written adaptation of The Korea Herald’s new podcast True Crime. You can listen to the full episode on Spotify and Podbbang. ― Ed.