Man gets life for killing woman who reported him to police

A man who tracked down and killed a woman after she reported him to police for a sexual assault was sentenced to life in prison on Thursday.

The Suwon District Court convicted the man, who is in his 30s, of retaliatory murder under the Act on the Aggravated Punishment of Specific Crimes.

The court also ordered him to register as a sex offender for 20 years, barred him for 10 years from working at institutions serving children, adolescents or people with disabilities, and placed him under five years of probation in the case parole is granted. The court rejected prosecutors' request that he be fitted with an electronic monitoring device.

The murder happened between 2:40 and 2:50 a.m. on Aug. 21 last year, in the underground parking garage of an apartment building in the Suji District of Yongin, Gyeonggi. The man stabbed the woman, a Chinese national in her 30s, several times with a knife.

He had been a customer at a shop the woman ran. The victim reported him to police in May 2025 over a sexual assault, and he set out to take revenge, investigators found.

"The defendant tried to rape the victim but failed," the court said.

"She reported him to the police, and as the investigation proceeded, she refused his demand to settle. Out of spite, he decided to kill her. Given that motive, his culpability is especially grave," the court said.

To find out where she lived, the man filed a series of unsubstantiated insurance-claim lawsuits against the woman and her husband, investigators said. He prepared a telescopic baton and a knife in advance and pinpointed her movements using a GPS tracker he had fixed to her car.

"He did not hesitate to abuse judicial procedures to achieve his aim, filing all manner of false lawsuits to find out the victim's address, and he confirmed her location with a GPS device," the court said.

"Given the meticulous and brazen preparation that led up to the killing and the cruelty of the method, the nature of the crime is also very grave."

The court also pointed to the devastating impact the crime had on the victim and the bereaved family.

"The physical and mental suffering and terror the victim must have endured before she died appear to have been beyond measure, and her family has been left in profound pain and anxiety," the court said. "Even so, he has made not the slightest effort to repair the harm, and the bereaved family is calling for severe punishment."

After the killing, the man drove a rental car to Hongcheon in Gangwon, abandoned it in front of a school at around 4 a.m. and fled into a wooded hillside. Police tracked him with scent-detection dogs and arrested him about 30 hours after the crime, roughly 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the car.

Prosecutors had demanded the death penalty at the final hearing. "The defendant killed a woman who had reported a sex crime to investigators, and by denying part of the offense during the trial, he also brought dishonor on the deceased victim," they said.

BY CHO MUN-GYU [[email protected]]