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Ransom calls, a runaround and a cold case: The kidnapping and murder of a 9-year-old boy

Published: 30 Sep. 2025, 07:00 Updated: 22 Oct. 2025, 16:39

MICHAEL LEE
[email protected]

A photo of nine-year-old Lee Hyung-ho that was taken shortly before his kidnapping in 1991. [LEE WOO-SIL]

[KOREAN CRIME FILES #7]

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.

On a cold winter evening in 1991, a nine-year-old boy vanished from the playground of an upscale Seoul apartment complex in Gangnam District into the night.

His disappearance would trigger one of the largest police investigations in modern Korean history, spanning months, then years of mystery.

Behind the boy’s abduction was a faceless voice on the phone — a man who taunted the child’s parents with more than 60 ransom calls and sent them on wild chases through Seoul, but ultimately left them with only despair.

A child disappears

It was just after 5:20 p.m. on Jan. 29 when Lee Hyung-ho was last seen on the monkey bars outside building 205 of the Hyundai Apartment complex in Apgujeong-dong, a wealthy neighborhood in southern Seoul.

A third-grader at a nearby elementary school, Hyung-ho was playing outside with neighborhood friends. As dusk fell, the children began heading home for dinner, but Hyung-ho told his parents he would stay outside until they returned.

One boy later recalled seeing a man loitering by the playground as the kids left, but thought little of it.

Around 7 p.m., when dinner was ready, Hyung-ho’s father, Lee Woo-sil, went to fetch him. But the playground was empty. He and his wife — Hyung-ho’s stepmother — searched the neighborhood and knocked on friends’ doors, but to no avail.

Midnight phone call

At around 11 p.m. that same evening, as Lee returned home, the phone rang. When he picked up, he heard the voice of an unfamiliar man on the other end.

“We have Hyung-ho,” the man said flatly in a Seoul accent, the only identifying trait the police had to work with. “I’ll call back in two days. Prepare 70 million won and a vehicle with a phone. Don’t tell anyone.” The line then went dead.

The demand — roughly equivalent to 200 million won ($144,000) today — was steep. Further, few people in Korea used mobile phones in 1991. Most who did relied on bulky car phones mounted on dashboards.

But what struck Lee most was the caller’s manner of speaking. Calm, businesslike and devoid of emotion, the mysterious man’s ransom demand sounded less like a criminal threat than a transaction.

Cat-and-mouse in the city

Two days later, after Lee had borrowed a car with a phone, the man called again.

Almost immediately, Lee begged him to put Hyung-ho on the line. “What happened to our baby? At least let us hear his voice,” he said.

The caller replied that the boy had a cold. “He went to sleep after taking medicine,” he said, giving Hyung-ho’s parents and police some hope he was alive.

Later that day, the caller rang again and directed Lee to drive to Gimpo International Airport. He was told to open the trunk six minutes after the call, then close it, park in the domestic terminal lot, flash the headlights twice, leave the interior lights on, leave the keys in the ignition and take a bus home.

Once he left, police staked out the parking lot, but no one approached the car.

After three tense hours, Lee received another call.

“Why aren’t you keeping your word? I saw someone in the back seat of your car,” the caller said. When Lee denied the accusation, the caller responded, “You want your son to die, don’t you? I walked around that area several times. Also, why did you park the car so far in the corner by itself?”

In truth, a detective had leapt inside the trunk when it was opened and moved to the floor of the back seat after Lee parked the car. The kidnapper’s awareness of his presence unnerved Hyung-ho’s parents and police.

At around 10:40 p.m. that same evening, the caller orchestrated a different ransom drop scheme for Lee to follow.

That night, through calls traced to pay phones in the downtown Chungmuro area, he told Lee to park at a taxi stand by the historic Dae Han Cinema, leave the doors unlocked and walk to a nearby cafe.

The Dae Han Cinema in the Chungmuro area of Jung District, central Seoul, before its demolition in 2000. [JOONGANG ILBO]

In Lee’s absence, two men approached the car and tried to seize the ransom. Undercover officers arrested them on the spot, believing they were the kidnappers.

But through questioning, police realized they were just petty burglars.

While Lee was still downtown, the caller rang his wife at home. “There are at least two detectives I recognize wandering nearby. Didn’t I tell you not to tell anyone?” he said.

The caller, who apparently had eyes on the Chungmuro area, berated Lee’s terrified wife and accused her of working with the police. She denied it and begged him to return her stepson. “We’ll do anything you ask,” she said.

In response, the man warned, “If the police intervene, you’ll never see Hyung-ho again."

Fruitless chase

At 1:47 a.m., Lee received yet another call about a new ransom drop. This time, the caller wanted Lee’s wife to deliver the ransom.

Disguising herself as Lee’s wife, a female police officer accompanied Lee as he drove around the city. The caller rang multiple times on the car phone, changing the location of the ransom drop over and over.

The chase lasted until 5 a.m., but no one appeared at any of the locations.

Scavenger hunt

On Feb. 4, the caller promised that Lee would see his son the next evening. When Lee broke down in tears, the man scolded him. “This is all because you couldn’t keep your promises.”

The caller told Lee that he would find a note inside the glass of a newspaper bulletin mounted outside Taegukdang, a famous bakery in Jangchung-dong, central Seoul. The note directed him to another hidden in the crevice of a utility pole outside the Midopa Department Store in Myeong-dong.

Lee Hyung-ho's kidnapper left his parents notes written in cursive Korean in Jung District, central Seoul, on Feb. 4. The note on the left details the location of another note hidden near the Midopa Department Store in Myeong-dong. [JOONGANG ILBO]

The second note instructed Hyung-ho’s parents to wire 20 million won to an account with Hanil Bank, which had a branch across the street from the department store.

While banking identity laws today would make this a risky method for collecting ransom, bank customers in Korea before 1993 did not have to present verification to open accounts. A person could register under any name by simply filling out a form.

After consulting with police, Lee deposited 20 million won into the account, hoping to trigger a withdrawal that could be tracked. Yet no one attempted to withdraw the money.

On Feb. 13, the caller phoned again, accusing the parents of lacking “affection” for their son. “You want him to die, don’t you? This is your last chance.”

This time, the caller told Lee to prepare 50 million won in cash. The caller’s instructions led Lee down the Olympic Expressway to a bridge in Yeouido, where he retrieved a note directing him to a lamppost near the Yanghwa Bridge, located farther west. Beneath a rock at the lamppost lay another note, ordering him to leave the ransom package on a nearby utility box and deposit 20 million won into a different account with the Commercial Bank of Korea.

A sketch of the kidnapper, or an accomplice, that was drawn by police based on the description provided by a bank teller at a branch of the Commerical Bank of Korea in northern Seoul, where he attempted on Feb. 19, 1991, to withdraw money from the account where Lee Hyung-ho’s father transferred part of his son’s ransom. The sketch shows the suspect as he would have appeared 15 years later. [JOONGANG ILBO]

Detectives had advised Lee to fill the ransom package with a thin top layer of real cash, counterfeit notes, trash and empty bottles. After Lee left the package on the utility box, an officer leapt from his car and radioed colleagues to watch the drop site. But the officers mistakenly stationed themselves elsewhere due to miscommunication with the officer accompanying Lee.

By the time the detective returned to the utility box, the package was gone. Shortly afterward, Lee received his final call.

“What a way to trick me,” the caller taunted. “But you really shouldn’t behave this way.”

But that was not the last the police heard of the kidnapper. He — or an accomplice — made a final appearance on Feb. 19.

That day, a man walked into a Commercial Bank branch in northern Seoul, trying to withdraw from the account that held the 20 million won transferred by Lee.

The teller, finding the account frozen, told the man his passbook didn’t work. Sensing trouble, the man snatched it back and fled. He left no fingerprints, and the bank had no video surveillance system. The teller’s recollection was all the police had to draw a sketch of his face.

He was never identified.

A man points to the drainage culvert on the Han River in Jamsil District, southern Seoul, where the corpse of nine-year-old Lee Hyung-ho was found on March 13, 1991. [JOONGANG ILBO]

Dead end

On March 13, 44 days after Hyung-ho vanished, workers cleaning a drainage culvert beneath the Olympic Expressway in Jamsil District, southern Seoul, made a grim discovery: the boy’s body, bound hand and foot, his eyes, nose and mouth sealed with tape.

An autopsy determined he had died of suffocation, though his head showed signs of blunt trauma. In his stomach, the coroner found something else: the undigested remains of the lunch he had eaten hours before his abduction.

All the attempts by Hyung-ho’s parents to pay the ransom for their son had been for nothing — he had been dead all along.

Suspect in the family

The older brother of Lee Hyung-ho cries as he carries his portrait during his funeral procession on March 15, 1991. [JOONGANG ILBO]

After Hyung-ho’s body was discovered, investigators turned their attention to his uncle. As the brother of the boy’s biological mother, he had helped her secure a generous alimony when she divorced Hyung-ho’s father. The two men were not on speaking terms, and the brother had received little support from Hyung-ho's mother since.

He was also unemployed, deeply in debt and familiar with Hyung-ho’s family circumstances, including the sizable wealth of his grandfather — all of which suggested a strong financial motive to commit the kidnapping. Further, the names on the two bank accounts matched those of his acquaintances.

But Hyung-ho’s uncle denied involvement and produced highway toll receipts showing he was in Gyeongju — a city more than 300 kilometers (205 miles) southeast of Seoul — on the day of the abduction. A local innkeeper also testified that he had checked in. Without physical evidence tying him to the crime, police were forced to let him go.

By 2006, with the 15-year statute of limitations expired, the case was officially closed.

Theories and speculation

A poster for the 2007 film “Voice of a Murderer,” which was based on the 1991 kidnapping and murder of Lee Hyung-ho. [CJ ENTERTAINMENT]

In the years since, the case has remained a topic of macabre fascination for criminologists and journalists.

Many experts believe the complexity of the ransom drops — from tracking police movements to orchestrating real-time location changes and retrieving money from a moving vehicle — required the involvement of multiple people.

The kidnapper also referred to himself using plural pronouns, at times saying “we” and “us,” further implying he was not alone.

Even so, it is his voice over the phone — calm and unfeeling, yet ominous — that has stuck in popular memory, inspiring even a 2007 movie titled “Voice of a Murderer.”

Tormented by his inability to save his son, Lee fell into alcoholism. He would recover only after several years, supported by his surviving son and wife.

In an interview with an investigative television program almost two decades after Hyung-ho’s death, Lee said he just wanted to ask one question of his son’s kidnapper:

“Why did you have to kill my son?”

BY MICHAEL LEE [[email protected]]

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Ransom calls, a runaround and a cold case: The kidnapping and murder of a 9-year-old boy

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