Yoo Young-cheol, South Korea's Brutal Serial Killer

In March, he called a phone sex parlor and had a woman sent over to his Mapo apartment.  He hit her head with his hammer, then cut her body into eighteen pieces.  It worked for him.  He didn't even have to leave his house except to dispose of the body.  He hauled the dismembered woman to a small mountain trail behind Seogang University and buried her there.

Yoo purchased some counterfeit Viagra pills from a vendor in the Hwanghak-dong Goblin market.  It's a warren of some 500 shops and hundreds of street vendors that sell everything from old LP records, live snakes, used clothes and secondhand appliances, to plates of stuffed pig intestines for the hungry shopper.

A few days later on the evening of April 13, Yoo returned to shake down Mr. Ahn, the vendor that sold him the fake Viagra.  Yoo posed as a police detective and flashed his forged ID.  He threatened him and tried to solicit a bribe.  Ahn didn't trust him and he said he would make an inquiry at the nearby police station. 

Yoo wrestled him into Ahn's van and handcuffed him inside.  Yoo drove back to Mapo and parked near his house.  He put his hammer, knife and gloves into a bag, went back to the vehicle and drove to an underground parking lot of a nearby hospital. Then he killed Ahn inside the van.  Yoo walked home and washed off the bloodstains and brought another knife along with him.  Back at the van, he cleaned the blood mist off the windows.  At 1:00 a.m., Yoo drove to Wolmi Island near Incheon, 25 kilometers west of Seoul.  

Wolmi Island was built on reclaimed land and was connected to the mainland to create a tourist spot.  It has a gaudy carnival-like atmosphere and a street of raw fish restaurants, numerous cafes, curbside gewgaw hawkers, and four amusement parks.  Cement piers extend out into the harbor where ferries, cruise ships and fishing boats anchor under hordes of seagulls.

He parked near an abandoned gas station and sawed off Ahn's hands.  Then he placed them in a plastic bag and tossed it into the riprap rocks that embank the pier.  Yoo torched the van and backed away into the shadows to watch it burn.  Firefighters eventually arrived and he slipped away from the area and got a taxi.  Thinking the cab driver might remember his face; he got off at Bupyeong Station and took another taxi home.