Stepfather's Murder Followed by Biological Father's Hometown Secret Burial: 40s Man Arrested... Police Request Warrant

A man in his 40s who killed his stepmother and secretly buried her in his biological father's hometown was arrested by the police.

The Seoul Yeongdeungpo Police Station announced on the 19th that they arrested a man in his 40s, Bae Mo, on charges of murder and corpse abandonment, and applied for an arrest warrant.

Bae is accused of strangling his stepmother, a woman in her 70s named Lee Mo, at her residence in Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul, on the 19th of last month after a dispute over money, and then secretly burying her body near a reed field by a river in Yecheon, Gyeongbuk.

Lee had remarried Bae’s father over 30 years ago and was found to have died about a year ago.

The police received a report on the 13th of this month from a welfare officer at the local community service center that Lee could not be contacted. They confirmed that 300,000 won had been withdrawn from Lee’s bank account, prompting the investigation to shift from a simple missing person case to a suspected murder case. Neighbors reported that Lee’s dog kept barking, leading the community center to send an officer, but it was determined that Lee was neither a basic livelihood security recipient nor under any special management.

The police confirmed that Lee’s mobile phone was turned off in Yecheon on the 20th of last month, the day after she was killed.

After killing Lee on the evening of the 19th, Bae went to Yecheon on the morning of the 20th, discarded Lee’s mobile phone, searched for a place to abandon the body, and then returned to Seoul.

The police arrested Bae at a motel in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, at around 8:20 p.m. on the 17th, and discovered Lee’s body secretly buried near the reed field by the river in Yecheon, Gyeongbuk, at around 10:30 a.m. the next day, the 18th.

The police applied for an arrest warrant for Bae. The warrant hearing will be held at the Seoul Southern District Court in the afternoon, and the decision on detention is expected late at night.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.