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Murderer who lured young victims to sea with false kindness dies behind bars
Oh Jong-geun, Korea's oldest death row inmate, killed four tourists in 2007
A death row inmate convicted of multiple sexual assaults and murders has died in prison at the age of 86, nearly two decades after he was incarcerated for committing the heinous crimes in 2007.
It was belatedly reported Sunday that Oh Jong-geun, born in July 1938, died last year at the Gwangju Correctional Institution, where he had been imprisoned. He had become the oldest person in Korean history to be sentenced to death in June 2010, a month before he turned 72.
The cause of death was not revealed to the public.
Oh was a fisherman who lived his entire life in Boseong-gun, South Jeolla Province, and committed two separate double murders. On Aug. 31, 2007, he took a young couple both aged 19 out to sea, where he pushed the male victim into the water and murdered him.
He then sexually assaulted the woman before killing her.
The second attack occurred on Sept. 25, when he attempted to sexually assault two young women on his boat in the same manner as the first attack. In both attacks, he is believed to have used a fishing pole to strike the victims and keep them from climbing back onto the boat.
The victims were reported as missing, and the deaths in the first attack were initially thought to be an accident, even after the bodies were found. But investigators suspected foul play after they found that one of the victims in the second attack had sent a text message to a woman whom she had met by chance shortly before getting on Oh's boat.
The woman who received the text had earlier asked one of the victims to let her use her cellphone to call her husband, whom she had lost track of while on a family trip. This left the husband's phone number on the victim's phone, enabling the victim to send a text message saying, "We're the people who lent you our phone. I think we're locked inside a boat. Please call the police."
The couple attempted to call the victims throughout the night to no avail, and learned the next day that one of the women had been found dead at sea. They said they had offered to give the victims a ride, but the two women declined, saying they were about to go on a boat ride offered by "a kind old man."
Investigation and aftermath
The police grew suspicious and searched the nearby docks, pinpointing a single boat that had switched positions on the day of the attack -- indicating that the boat had been used. A subsequent search found the victims' hair and belongings such as credit cards and pens, which prompted officers to arrest Oh at his home.
Oh admitted to the September attack, but claimed that the deaths in the August attack were purely an accident.
The victims' DNA was not found on the murder weapon, and the recorded call from the female victim's phone to the 119 emergency center was not conclusive. However, authorities recovered the female victim's digital camera, which had fallen into the water, and the National Forensic Service managed to restore the data to find incriminating photos of Oh onboard the boat.
He was indicted for the murder of four people, and received the death penalty from the Gwangju District Court in February 2008 for rape and murder. Despite the evidence, he denied committing the crimes, claiming he was too old and frail to harm young people, and even saying at one point it was their own fault for trying to get a boat ride for free.
Oh's crime dealt a fatal blow to his family as well. His oldest son reportedly took his own life in 2008, a year after the crimes. His wife left their hometown and went to live with their daughter in Seoul.
Another of his daughters, who remained in Boseong, told visiting reporters that she had nothing to do with the man who committed the crimes.
Oh would continue to fight his sentence, filing a constitutional complaint seeking a punishment less severe than the death penalty. It was the second constitutional complaint ever filed challenging the death penalty itself.
But the Constitutional Court ruled against Oh in a 5-4 decision in 2010, and the Supreme Court later that year upheld the sentence.
While South Korea's legal system upholds capital punishment as the most severe penalty for a crime, it is internationally considered to have de facto abolished the death penalty as it has not carried out an execution since 1997. As of 2024, Ministry of Justice data showed that 53 people were serving indefinite prison sentences after receiving the death penalty, excluding death row inmates held at the Military Correctional Institution.
The last time a death sentence was handed down was in 2016, sentencing soldier Im Do-bin to death for a shooting spree at a military barracks that killed five and injured nine.
