This is a heartbreaking case in which the victim was a young child.
We will not describe anything cruel — only the perpetrator who is still at large and the clues that remain.
We write this in the hope that it might stir someone's memory.
The evening of August 5, 2000
A playground beside an apartment complex in Jakjeon-dong, Gyeyang-gu, Incheon.
On a summer evening, a few children were playing at the playground.
It was just past 8 p.m.
A strange man approached and asked them:
"Kids, which way do I go to get to the Hyundai Department Store?"
An utterly ordinary question.
Without a trace of suspicion, the children moved to point him the way.
And in the next moment, the man turned.
A seven-year-old girl lost her life on that spot.
The man vanished at once into the dark.
The face the children saw
This case had witnesses.
The children who had been playing with her.
But they were all young, and their statements alone were not enough to identify the man.
Still, the children remembered his face.
Police gathered their accounts and produced a composite sketch.
Five thousand copies were distributed across the country.
The case was featured on a televised most-wanted program.
Tips came in from all over the country, but not one of them pointed to the man.
Three months earlier, the same neighborhood
There was a reason police took this case so gravely.
Just three months before, in the very same Jakjeon-dong, a similar case had occurred.
At a flowerbed by another apartment in the same neighborhood, in the ten-odd minutes a mother had stepped home,
a young girl was taken in the same way.
There was no sign of robbery, no sign of any other motive.
A crime committed in moments, with no discernible purpose.
The two cases were far too alike in method.
Police believed it was highly likely the work of the same person.
One neighborhood. Three months apart. The same person, twice.
A case past its deadline
Time passed.
Under the law at the time, the statute of limitations for murder was fifteen years.
In August 2015, the statute of limitations on this case was set to expire.
Once it lapsed, even catching the man would make punishment impossible.
For those who had carried the girl's death in memory for 25 years, that was a second loss.
And then, at that very moment, the law changed.
"Tae-wan's Law."
Named for another young victim, this law abolished the statute of limitations for murder.
And it applied retroactively to any case whose deadline had not yet passed.
The Jakjeon-dong case, with expiration just days away, came dramatically under this law.
The deadline vanished.
Which means:
if that man is caught now, he will be punished.
Before we close this drawer
The Incheon Jakjeon-dong case is not over.
The police cold-case unit is still looking into it today.
The man who asked for directions at the playground that evening 25 years ago may be living somewhere now, an ordinary life.
The children who saw him then are grown adults now.
And the face in that composite sketch is still, even now, waiting for someone to recognize it.
If this face brings to mind someone you know,
then even if it was 25 years ago, it is not too late.
The deadline is gone, and the case is open.
A single small memory could protect one child's name.
