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| A mockup of the Burger King restroom in Itaewon, Seoul, where the so-called "Itaewon homicide" took place. Prosecutors set it up at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office building in Seoul in 2011 as part of a reinvestigation into the case. / Yonhap |
By Chung Ah-young
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| Poster for "The Case of the Itaewon Homicide" |
He will stand trial beginning in October at Seoul District Court, 16 years after he fled to the United States.
The homicide took place on April 3 in 1997 in Itaewon. A Korean college student, Cho Choong-pil, 22, was found dead on the floor of the bathroom in a Burger King restaurant. He was stabbed several times in the neck.
Prosecutors indicted two suspects ― an 18-year-old Korean-American Edward Lee and Arthur Patterson, the 17-year-old son of a U.S. Army contractor and his Korean wife ― for murder and possession of an illegal weapon, respectively.
A district court found Lee guilty of murder, sentencing him to life in prison. Patterson was sentenced to 18 months in prison for possessing the weapon and destroying evidence in 1997.
A high court appeal reduced Lee's sentence to 20 years, then the Supreme Court acquitted him in 1998, ordering a retrial of his case at the high court. At the 1999 retrial, Lee was acquitted on lack of evidence.
Prosecutors belatedly reopened the case to indict Patterson as the murder suspect. But he was released from jail in August 1998 after serving eight months. He then left for California in 1999 after prosecutors failed to renew a travel ban on him.
His return to the U.S. angered many people, especially Cho's family. In 2006, a Seoul court ordered the government to pay 34 million won in compensation to the victim's family because the prosecution's failure to impose a travel ban deprived them of a chance to find truth.
The case was made into a film, "The Case of the Itaewon Homicide," in 2009 and public call for reinvestigation grew.
Prosecutors then reopened their investigation, and the Ministry of Justice requested that Patterson be extradited from the United States.
In the initial investigation of 1997, prosecutors didn't find any injuries or physical evidence proving that Cho resisted the attack. As a result Lee, who was more than 100 kilograms and two centimeters taller than Cho, became the suspect. Patterson is six centimeters shorter than Cho.
But prosecutors say during their reinvestigation that they found Cho was wearing a backpack, which means Patterson could have overpowered the victim if he grabbed the backpack.
Lee and Patterson gave different testimonies about the details of the crime. Also from the reinvestigation, prosecutors said blood stains on the bathroom wall show that Patterson wielded the knife as Lee claimed. Patterson's face and hands were soaked with blood while Lee's clothes were smeared with small stains of blood when they were arrested after the incident.
Based on this evidences, prosecutors indicted him on charges of the murder after he was detained in the U.S. in May, 2011, following an extradition request.
The U.S. court allowed Patterson's extradition to Korea in 2012 but he submitted multiple habeas corpus petitions. But the last petitions were rejected by a U.S. court in June in 2014 and in May this year. He appealed to review the extradition in July but the court also rejected this.
