Diksha Sundriyal
The fifth and sixth episodes of Netflix’s ‘The Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea’s Tragedies’ tell the horrific story of the crimes perpetrated by the Chijon family. The group was brought together by their shared hatred for the rich and their desire to make money by extorting well-off people. However, their plan went awry the first time they tried to kidnap a couple they thought would be rich. Instead, they kidnapped a woman who worked in a café, and kept her around while they killed her friend and another couple. The woman appears in the Netflix docuseries to tell her side of the story. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Lee Jeong-su was Mistaken for a Rich Girl by the Chijon Family
On September 7, 1994, Lee Jeong-su (alias Lee Hyo-Jin used in the Netflix series) and her friend, who worked as a musician, were targeted by the Chijon family while the duo was out on a ride after work. Neither Lee nor her friend came from a wealthy family. However, they were in a Hyundai Grandeur, which was considered a status symbol at the time. When the Chijon family noticed their car, they laid a trap where they cornered the victims, and then launched an attack on them using tear gas and other weapons. They kidnapped Lee and her friend and took them to the house that was constructed for the sole purpose of holding victims and later killing them.
The criminals had planned to extort money from the duo, but they had no idea that the people they kidnapped were not rich. Lee’s friend had bought the car second-hand at a very low price. When the group realised their error, they knew they had to get rid of the victims, who had seen their faces and could lead the cops to them. First, they intoxicated Lee’s friend by giving him a lot of alcohol. Then, Lee was forced to hold the plastic bag that was used to asphyxiate her friend to death. With this act, the group made Lee complicit in their crimes, which made them believe that even if she escaped, she couldn’t go to the police now. They took her friend’s dead body back to his car and orchestrated the whole thing to look like an accident.
Prior to this, several group members had also raped Lee. The group also considered killing her, but one of them, Kim Hyeon-yang, persuaded them against it. Kim believed that because Lee had already killed her friend with them, she could become a part of their group. This intent was taken further when the group kidnapped a couple, extorted them for money, and then killed them. This time, Lee was forced to kill the couple using a gun. According to the Daily Mail, she was also allegedly forced to eat their raw livers. These events already had a severe impact on her psyche, but what made things worse was the realisation that once the leader of the gang, Kim Gi-hwan, returned from prison, they would kill her for good.
Lee Jeong-su’s Daring Escape Led to the Capture of the Chijon Family
While the entire group was set on the idea of killing Lee Jeong-su, Kim Hyeon-yang seemed like the only person standing between her and them. One day, he injured his hand while training with dynamite. He needed a visit to the hospital, and he decided to take Lee along. This act was protested by his group, but he did not listen to them. At the hospital, before he walked into the doctor’s room alone, he left Lee behind with 500,000 won in cash and a cell phone that belonged to one of the group members, Kang Dong-un. He even told her to run away if that’s what she wanted.
When left alone, Lee was initially unsure of running because she thought it was a test, and if she ran, she would be caught and killed. But then, she gathered courage and quietly walked out of the hospital, but didn’t go to the cops just yet. She spent that evening hiding in the greenhouse of a vineyard, and later asked the owner to help her get a rental car, with which she drove all the way to Daejeon. There, she rented another car and went to Seoul, where she checked into a motel before calling her friend for help. Lee’s friend reached out to the cops, and this is when she eventually sat down with someone in a position of authority and told them everything.
At first, the cops thought that she was high on drugs, and they even checked her arms to confirm that she hadn’t taken anything that would impair her thoughts. But then, she gave publicly undisclosed details about the couple that was killed, and a little bit of fact-checking confirmed that her story was true. The cops took her back, where she helped identify the house where the Chijon family was set up. From here, the cops took charge and arrested every single member, while also uncovering all of their crimes.
Lee Jeong-su is Still Haunted by the Events of Her Captivity
It has been more than thirty years since she escaped the captivity of the Chijon family, but for Lee Jeong-su, it feels like all those horrific events happened just yesterday. As the news about the horrendous crimes broke, all eyes were on the culprits. Meanwhile, Lee preferred to slip into anonymity. She had already been through enough, and she did not want to live through the same thing all over again due to the media attention. Once the criminals were convicted and executed, Lee decided to completely recede away from the public limelight and didn’t come forward to speak out about the crimes until 2011. This is when she sat down with the Hankyoreh newspaper to recount the events of that September in 1994, and also expressed her dissatisfaction and criticism against the authorities and the public, in general, for not standing up and supporting the victims enough.
Following the interview, she went back to her life, the details of which she likes to keep private. She didn’t resurface in the media until the Netflix docuseries. However, while she agreed to tell her tale, she chose not to show her face and remain anonymous. In the docuseries, Lee revealed that she has severe post-traumatic stress disorder, which she tries to curb through therapy and medication. The trauma has also led her to remain confined to her house, and she doesn’t go out much. She also said that she doesn’t have many friends because of this, which makes her feel lonelier. While she bravely talked with the creators of the docuseries about the experience that changed everything for her, she also suffered panic attacks, reliving the whole thing in her mind all over again. Now, she is working on getting better and prefers to stay away from public scrutiny to preserve her peace of mind.
Read More: Was Kim Hyeon-yang a Cannibal? Did the Chijon Family Members Eat Human Flesh?
