After the Incident, Left Prosecution and Opened Practice in Jeongeup in 2000
Police "No Signs of Homicide"... Investigating Cause of Death
A current lawyer who was the prosecutor in charge of the 1997 'Itaewon Murder Case' was found dead, prompting the police to launch an investigation.
According to a Yonhap News report on the 29th, Mr. A was found dead around 5 a.m. that day in a commercial building in Jeongeup-si, Jeonbuk Province. Mr. A was a former prosecutor who handled the investigation of the 'Itaewon Murder Case' and had been working as a lawyer since the case.
The Itaewon Murder Case refers to the brutal killing of the late Jo Jung-pil (then 22 years old), a university student, who was stabbed multiple times in the restroom of a fast-food restaurant in Itaewon, Seoul, in April 1997. The suspects were Arthur John Patterson, a 17-year-old American national at the time, and Edward Geon Lee, who was 18 years old.
In December 2011, a restroom set reenacting the Itaewon murder case scene created by the prosecution at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office in Seocho-gu, Seoul. [Photo by Yonhap News]
Immediately after the crime, there was a tip-off that "Patterson is the culprit," and both the police and the U.S. military criminal investigation unit also identified Patterson, the owner of the weapon, as the suspect. However, the prosecution indicted Lee, not Patterson, for murder. Mr. A, who was the prosecutor at the time, argued that Patterson, who was 172 cm tall, could not have overpowered the victim Jo, who was about 176 cm tall, and that Lee, who had a sturdy build at 180 cm tall and weighing 105 kg, was the culprit. He also blindly accepted Patterson's statement that "Lee killed him."
Lee was convicted in the first and second trials but was acquitted by the Supreme Court in 1998. It then took the prosecution a full 16 years to bring Patterson back to court. Patterson fled to the United States in August 1999, taking advantage of the fact that Mr. A’s successor prosecutor mistakenly did not extend the travel ban. Having committed various crimes in the U.S. as well, he was extradited to Korea in September 2015 under the extradition treaty and was indicted on murder charges. The Supreme Court upheld the original sentence of 20 years imprisonment for Patterson in January 2017.
Meanwhile, Mr. A, who believed until the end that Lee was the real culprit, left the prosecution about a year after Lee was acquitted in 2000 and had been working as a lawyer in the Jeonbuk region since the following year. The controversy over the true culprit of this case has been covered multiple times in broadcast programs and was also made into a film. The police believe there is no suspicion of foul play in Mr. A’s death. The exact cause of death is under investigation through interviews with family members and others.
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