Final verdict on 'Itaewon muder' due Wednesday
Arthur Patterson / Korea Times file
By Jung Min-ho
The Supreme Court will deliver a final verdict Wednesday on the “Itaewon murder” case in which the son of U.S. military contractor stabbed a 22-year-old Korean to death at a Burger King outlet in the Seoul district 20 years ago.
The top court said Tuesday it will finalize the case after Arthur Patterson, now aged 38, appealed the Seoul High Court’s ruling that sentenced him to 20 years in prison for the killing of college student Cho Joong-pil in 1997.
In September, the appeals court gave him a 20-year prison sentence ― the maximum term for suspects aged 18 or younger at the time of murder ― for killing Cho in a Burger King bathroom.
Patterson was able to avoid heavy punishment for such a long time because prosecutors failed to identify the right suspect in their initial investigation. They wrongly pressed murder charges against Edward Lee, another U.S. citizen present at the crime scene.
Meanwhile, Patterson was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 1997 only for possessing an illegal weapon and destroying evidence.
After Lee was acquitted due to lack of evidence in 1999, the public denounced the prosecution over the “murder case without a murderer.”
Prosecutors belatedly reopened the case to indict Patterson as a murder suspect. But by then, he had returned to California after serving eight months in prison. His departure was possible because prosecutors failed to renew a travel ban on him.
In 2006, a Seoul court ordered the government to pay 34 million won in compensation to the victim’s family because prosecutors failed to do their job properly.
This could have been the end of the story. But a film, “The Case of the Itaewon Homicide” which depicted the case, was released in 2009 to pressure the prosecution to reopen their investigation.
Prosecutors then took another look at the case, and the Ministry of Justice requested that Patterson be extradited from the United States.
In the initial investigation, prosecutors didn’t find any injuries or physical evidence proving Cho resisted the attack. They believed Lee committed the murder because, in large part, he was taller and bigger than Patterson.
After their reinvestigation, prosecutors concluded Patterson killed the man while Lee watched.
Patterson was arrested in Los Angeles in 2011 and extradited to Korea in 2015.