A case of 'he said, he said' — how the killer in the infamous Itaewon murder went unpunished for 19 years

Home > National > Social Affairs

A case of 'he said, he said' — how the killer in the infamous Itaewon murder went unpunished for 19 years

Published: 01 Sep. 2025, 07:00 Updated: 01 Sep. 2025, 16:55

MICHAEL LEE
[email protected]

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Cho Jung-pil, who was murdered at a Burger King restaurant in Itaewon, central Seoul, on April 3, 1997, smiles next to his mother Lee Bok-su, left, in a 1994 photograph that she provided to the media after his death. [LEE BOK-SU]

[KOREAN CRIME FILES #5]

Behind the glitz and glamour seen in pop culture, Korea’s grimmest and most harrowing crime stories, some more well-known than others, continue to haunt society today. The Korea JoongAng Daily takes a deep dive into some of these stories, sharing a glimpse into the darker side of society as well as the most up-to-date known facts. — Ed.

For almost two decades, the man who stabbed a young Korean university student to death eluded justice because prosecutors initially charged the wrong person with his murder.

The site of the killing was as mundane as the act itself was shocking: a small bathroom inside a Burger King restaurant just outside Exit 3 of Itaewon Station in central Seoul.

The Itaewon murder case, as the stabbing came to be known, shocked the nation and cemented the neighborhood’s then-reputation as a freewheeling hub of crime and antisocial behavior.

As the years passed, the notoriety of the killing — and the suspected killer — only grew, fueled by investigative reporting, a film based on the murder and the unrelenting pleas of the victim’s mother for justice.

Promise of a life cut short

While the Korean public in the late 1990s may have viewed Itaewon as a place of revelry for miscreants and delinquents, 22-year-old Cho Jung-pil was anything but to his family.

A photograph of Cho Jung-pil taken by his mother Lee Bok-su while they were on vacation in 1996, just after Cho completed his mandatory military service. [LEE BOK-SU]

According to one of his older sisters in an interview years later, he was not only a straight-A student who attended Hongik University on scholarship, but was also “an ideal brother and son.”

“He never swore once or caused any trouble,” she recalled. “He was so kind and full of warmth toward us, his sisters and our mother.”

As far as she knew, Cho’s first and only visit to Itaewon was the night of April 3, 1997, when he stopped by the Burger King restaurant on his way to drop his girlfriend off at home.

After ordering food at the ground-floor counter around 11 p.m., he ascended the staircase to use the men’s bathroom on the second floor.

He would not return alive.

A drinking game turns deadly

That same night, a group of about 20 teenagers — many of them children of U.S. military employees or ethnic Koreans from abroad — gathered in a fourth-floor pub. Among them were 17-year-old Arthur Patterson, son of a U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) contractor, and 18-year-old Korean American Edward Lee.

After drinking for some time, they descended to the Burger King on the building’s ground floor for food, which they ate at a table near the staircase.

The Burger King restaurant located outside exit 3 of Itaewon Station in Yongsan District, central Seoul, as it appeared in September 2005. [SEOUL RESEARCH DATA SERVICE]

There, as Patterson began cutting his burger with a pocketknife, members of the group began playing a game of “truth or dare.”

Witness accounts diverge from this point. Some recalled that Patterson or Lee was dared to stab a stranger. But no one anticipated this dare would actually be carried out, even as the two headed toward the upstairs bathroom after Cho.

Dueling accounts of murder

For decades, both men denied instigating the murder of Cho.

Patterson, whose seat at the group’s table faced the stairs, claimed Lee was the one who led him to the second-floor bathroom. According to Patterson, Lee “opened the door to the toilet bowl to check whether a man was there” before pulling out a pocketknife and stabbing Cho, who was using a urinal.

Patterson, who claimed to be in the corner between the washbasin and urinal during the attack, said he picked up the knife after Lee flung it away.

But Lee told the opposite story: that Patterson urged him upstairs, looked into the empty stall himself and began stabbing Cho as Lee watched in the mirror above the sink, where he was washing his hands.

The only point of agreement in their accounts was that Cho attempted to strike Patterson before he collapsed, blood gushing from his neck and chest.

According to the coroner’s report, he was stabbed a total of nine times by the blade, which measured 9.5 centimeters (3.7 inches). The critical wounds included one on the right side of his neck, which cut off a single branch of arteries, and another that severed both the jugular vein and arteries on the left side.

Left: Arthur Patterson claimed Edward Lee checked the toilet stall to make sure no one was inside before stabbing Cho Jung-pil as he used the urinal. Patterson claimed he stood in the corner between the washbasin and the urinals as the attack unfolded. Right: Lee claimed he was washing his hands when Patterson started stabbing stabbing Cho. Lee said he saw the assault begin through the reflection of the mirror above the sink. [YUN YOUNG]

As Cho lay dying on the tiled floor, both teenagers fled.

Patterson, drenched in blood, washed his hair and body in a different restroom on the fourth floor. He changed into clothes provided by a friend, who burned his shirt inside the nearby U.S. Army garrison, where both lived. Patterson also stashed his bloodied shoes in a locker at the Dragon Hill Lodge, located on the base.

Lee, meanwhile, returned to the group still spattered with blood and reportedly told them, “We thrust a knife through a guy’s neck. It was just for fun.”

A story unravels

Unlike most murder mysteries, it did not take long for authorities to track down the two Americans.

The U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) arrested Patterson two days later after receiving an anonymous tip that the teenager had boasted about the stabbing and was seen covered in blood.

Upon learning of Patterson’s arrest through the news, Lee turned himself in to Korean police on April 8, 1997.

Patterson’s bloodstained shoes were found in the hotel locker. His pocketknife — later identified as the murder weapon — was recovered from a nearby sewer.

According to the CID report, Patterson initially denied any knowledge of Cho’s murder, but later changed his story and admitted involvement. He also claimed to have never seen the knife before the murder, which he said was committed by Lee.

The blood that soaked his clothes, Patterson told investigators, came from Cho “trying to hit him” as he was being stabbed.

But even after witnesses present at the restaurant later identified the knife as Patterson’s, Korean prosecutors only charged him with destruction of evidence.

Arthur Patterson shortly after his arrest in 1997. [JOONGANG ILBO]

They brought the main murder charge against Lee, whose comment to friends immediately after the stabbing — “We thrust a knife through a guy in the neck” — was interpreted as an admission of guilt.

Prosecutors also considered Lee, who stood 1.8 meters (5 feet 11 inches) tall and weighed 105 kilograms (231 pounds) at the time, to be more capable of overpowering Cho than Patterson.

The coroner’s report stated that the downward wounds on the 1.76-meter-tall victim were probably inflicted by a larger person. Prosecutors thus considered it unlikely that Patterson, who stood 1.72 meters tall and weighed 53 kilograms at the time, could have killed Cho.

‘A killing without a killer’

Lee was convicted of murder in October 1997 and initially sentenced to life, later reduced to 20 years. Patterson received 18 months for destroying evidence.

But in 1998, the Supreme Court quashed Lee’s conviction for lack of evidence. The Seoul High Court acquitted him in a retrial that September.

Patterson, freed under a government amnesty a month prior, soon faced calls from Cho’s family to be charged with murder. However, he managed to flee to the United States in August 1999 after prosecutors failed to renew his travel ban.

The release of both suspects prompted national outrage. Korean media dubbed the case “a killing without a killer,” and critics condemned what they saw as a bungled investigation that allowed a murderer to walk free.

Long fight for justice

For years, Cho’s mother, Lee Bok-su — whose name is a homonym for the Korean word “revenge” — protested outside prosecutors’ offices and filed multiple petitions calling for Patterson’s extradition.

Finally, in September 2005 — more than six years after Patterson fled the country — the Korean Ministry of Justice requested assistance from the U.S. Department of Justice to locate him.

But these efforts went unnoticed by Patterson, who was tracked down in California by reporters from a Korean investigative television program in 2009. Calm and composed on camera, he said he had never been contacted by Korean authorities.

A promotional poster for the movie ″The Case of the Itaewon Homicide″ (2009), which reignited public outrage over Cho Jung-pil's murder 12 years prior. [SCREEN CAPTURE]

Coincidentally, public anger over the killing surged that year following the release of a popular film, “The Case of Itaewon Homicide” (2009), which reinforced suspicions about Patterson’s guilt.

The television program and the film spurred the Justice Ministry to formally demand Patterson’s extradition in December 2009. He was arrested by U.S. authorities in May 2011 and, after an extended legal battle, extradited to Korea in September 2015.

Patterson’s protracted extradition process added fuel to the then-ongoing criticism of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between Korea and the United States.

Critics argued that the treaty, which gives the U.S. military jurisdiction over incidents involving on-duty American soldiers, had prevented Korean police from properly investigating Patterson.

However, USFK officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to Stars and Stripes in November 2011 said that Patterson “was made available for all legal proceedings when he was in Korea,” and that Korean prosecutors “just decided to bring more charges years later.”

A Korean prosecutor also told the outlet that Patterson left the country legally, and the SOFA caused no problems during his case. “USFK very actively cooperated in his case,” he said.

Belated verdict

Seventeen years after both Patterson and Lee were released from prison, the two men found themselves back in the Seoul Central District Court, accusing each other once more of having killed Cho.

Arthur Patterson, center, speaks to reporters at Incheon International Airport on Sept. 23, 2015, upon his extradition to Korea from California on charges of murdering Cho Jung-pil. [SHIN IN-SEOP]

This time, however, the court agreed that Patterson was the one who wielded the knife that took Cho's life.

The judge noted that Patterson had tried to wash off the blood and change clothes following the attack, while Lee made little attempt to conceal the relatively smaller amount of blood on his clothes — a detail that undermined Patterson’s claim that he was a bystander rather than the perpetrator.

Forensic analysis also supported the conclusion that the blood spatter on the wall between the sink and urinal could not have occurred had Patterson been standing in that space, as he claimed.

In January 2016, the court found Patterson guilty of “committing the enormous crime of murdering a random stranger for no reason at all,” a ruling that was upheld by the Supreme Court a year later.

The outcome of Patterson’s second trial granted Cho’s parents a modicum of reprieve.

His father Cho Song-jeon told reporters, “Jung-pil can rest now. He no longer appears in my dreams,” after the Supreme Court finalized Patterson’s conviction.

Fighting back tears, Cho’s mother said, “I hope my son is born to a rich family in his next life so he can do all that he wants to do.”

Cho Jung-pil's mother Lee Bok-su, center, speaks to reporters outside the Seoul Central District Court in Seocho District, southern Seoul, on Jan. 29, 2016, after Arthur Patterson was convicted of her son's murder. [KIM HYUN-DONG]

But while Cho’s ashes are interred at a Buddhist temple in central Seoul, his killer is unlikely to die in prison.

Patterson was only handed a 20-year sentence, the maximum for a minor convicted of an especially violent crime under Korean law.

He is scheduled for release in 2036.

BY MICHAEL LEE [[email protected]]