An apartment complex in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province.
To one side of the complex playground stood an old handcart.
The kind you'd see collecting waste paper, its load draped in blue cloth — an ordinary pushcart.
Nothing about it stood out.
Every day the children played beside it, sliding down the slide, pushing one another on the swings.
Just how long that handcart had stood in that spot,
no one could remember exactly.
July 6, 2011
That day, a resident made a request to the management office.
"That handcart abandoned in the playground — the children are going to run into it and get hurt. Please clear it away."
A little past 3 in the afternoon, a security guard went to move it.
When he pulled back the blue cloth covering the load, a cooler box appeared.
A cooler box in a summer playground is nothing unusual.
Without a second thought, the guard opened the lid.
Inside was a travel bag, wrapped in dozens of layers of plastic.
And inside that bag, there was a woman.
Three years
As the investigation began, the very first fact it uncovered left people frozen.
That handcart had been in the playground for about three years.
Three years.
Across three springs that came and three summers that passed,
the children had played beside that handcart every single day.
No one knowing what was inside the cooler box.
Parents sent their children to that playground, and grandmothers rested on the bench beside it.
The most ordinary neighborhood playground had, for three years, been the site of a dumped body.
That is why this case still sends a chill through people to this day.
The erased person
The victim was a woman in her forties with cerebral palsy.
She was a resident of that very apartment complex.
When investigators traced the records, her trail had gone completely cold after 2006.
Her resident registration had been struck from the rolls, and no one had been looking for her.
The body's neck and both thumbs had been severed.
It appeared to be an attempt to make identification impossible.
A person had vanished from the world, and not even one soul had noticed she was gone.
The vanished suspect
The investigation snared one man.
He was the owner of that handcart, and was known to have been the victim's caretaker and live-in partner.
There were suspicious circumstances around him.
Even after the victim disappeared, the disability allowance issued in her name was still being withdrawn.
What is more, he had a prior conviction for murdering his wife.
When police tried to question him, they hit a decisive wall.
He was no longer of this world.
In 2009, he had died of illness.
There was no one left to ask.
Before we close this drawer
The prime suspect was dead, there were no CCTV cameras near the playground, and the victim's final few years lie buried in darkness.
And so this case was left permanently unsolved.
Let one thing be clear: the man was named only as a prime suspect — the crime was never proven.
Now no one remains who could tell the truth.
There is just one thing to sit with.
The children who played beside that handcart for three years must be all grown up by now.
Not one of them ever knew what it was they had been laughing beside, every single day.
The most terrifying things in the world sometimes wear the most ordinary face, set down right beside us.
For three years, as if it were nothing.
