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Pocheon suspect charged with killing foreign lover

August 8, 2014

How her husband died and why still remain mystery

By Jung Min-ho

Pocheon murder suspect

Police have filed murder and child abandonment charges against a woman in a case where two men were found dead, officers said Friday.

The Pocheon Police Station questioned the suspect, surnamed Lee, over allegations that she killed her husband and boyfriend, and left their bodies in her house.

Police secured her testimony that she killed her boyfriend but who killed her husband remains a mystery.

“Lee choked her boyfriend to death with her scarf and a plastic wrap after an argument,” Pocheon Police Station Chief Kim Choong-hwan told reporters. “Then she hid the body in a red rubber tub.”

According to police, he asked her to pay 4.5 million won (about $4,346) she owed him.

When police found the dead bodies on July 29 with Lee’s 8-year-old son, who was crying, they believed she killed the two. But she only admitted that she killed her boyfriend.

The National Forensic Service (NFS) failed to determine whether her husband was murdered because the body was seriously decomposed.

Police added charges of abandoning her son for nearly two months by locking him inside the house. When they apprehended her at a textile factory in Songu-ri, where she had been hiding with her new Sri Lankan boyfriend, she thought her son had starved to death.

Lee, however, denied killing her husband, claiming that he had died of natural causes 10 years ago and that she just “kept” the body.

Yet the NFS found doxylamine, which induces drowsiness, in her husband’s body. Police also found Lee was prescribed with zolpidem, a medication for insomnia, from 2000 to 2006, but failed to find any evidence that she used it to kill her husband.

“There is still a firm belief that Lee murdered her husband,” said Kim Jae-woong, a lead investigator on the case.

Police believe her first son, who was 17 years old at that time, helped her move the dead body of her husband, but will not bring charges against him because the statute of limitations on that crime has expired.

Police have sent the case to the regional prosecutors’ office.

Pocheon