Memories of Murder: Part Three
By JL COPELAND
This is the third part of a three-part series on the two murder cases I worked on during my time as an intern at a criminal law firm in London’s East End.
You can read the first part HERE and the second part HERE.
Once again, the humour (humour JL? What humour?) is trimmed back to the bare minimum, and the following contains disturbing content. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
Previously on Memories of Murder:
The body of a young Korean woman has been found in a suitcase in Yorkshire.
Her landlord, Mr Kim, has been arrested.
Another Korean woman, Miss Song, who also stayed at Mr Kim’s, is missing.
My wife may have had a lucky escape.
And ‘M’ Solicitors have been called to represent Mr Kim. Which means your favourite half-witted chancer and mine (me!), is poised to enter the story.
DIY Disasters
Mr Kim has been remanded in custody (i.e. he’s in prison awaiting trial), but the prosecution are struggling to tie him to the disappearance of Miss Song.
No body, no dice.
Until March, that is.
A painter and decorator, who is renovating Mr Kim’s other apartment in Poplar (under new ownership) reports a swarm of flies and a foul stench coming from the floor of the bathroom.
The police are called but can’t see any way a body can fit under the floorboards.
However, the bathroom wall looks, well, wrong. They remove a sealed part of the wall and find a hidden space. In the space is a pile of clothes. Under the pile is the decomposing body of Miss Song.
Just like Miss Jin, she is naked with the familiar tape wrapped around her head and her hands bound. She too has suffocated.
In April, Mr Kim is charged with both of their murders. In May, he appears in court with an interpreter to plead his innocence.
This was around the time that I first met Mr Kim.
Don’t Open the Box
But before I met Mr Kim. I had to familiarize myself with the case.
I’m given the ring binder. I read it.
They directed me to the file on the computer. I scan through the folders.
I notice there is a video file.
A video file of the autopsy of Miss. Jin.
Apparently, a defendant’s lawyer is supposed to watch the autopsy to check it’s all above board.
I should stress that someone from our firm had already done this.
But I’m on my lunch break.
I’m bored.
And I’m incredibly stupid.
I opened the file.
It starts with the infamous suitcase on an autopsy table, muted conversation in the background.
I take a bite of my steak and kidney pie.
Then someone in gloves steps forward and slowly unlatches the suitcase.
There are a few things in my life that I wish I could un-see. These are things that I didn’t need to see, but chose to anyway. Things I’ll unfortunately never be able to forget.
What came out of that suitcase is probably top of the list.
I remember what flopped out onto the table was black and green. But most of all, I remember her face. And whenever I see her photo in the article I share with my students, I see what I saw that spring lunchtime all over again.
So yeah, with shit like that, no matter how tempted you are. Don’t do it.
I Meet The Murderer
After my experience with Mr X in my first murder case, my expectations had been turned upside down.
I was scared again.
On the one hand, I predicted Mr Kim would be nowhere near the size of Mr X, nor was he (diagnosed as) mentally ill.
On the other hand, from what I’d read of the case, the dude was a cold-blooded killer.
Some people claim that a good defence lawyer should believe in their client’s innocence.
I suppose some people believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden.
I mean, come on. You’ve read the evidence above; what do you think?
Mr Kim. didn’t let me down. He is hands down the most disturbing individual I have ever met, simply because he was a complete blank. There’s that phrase ‘the banality of evil.’ Mr Kim was just that.
I remember the first time I met him in prison. I was shocked my how demure he was. Unassuming. Dare I say, meek?
It wasn’t that he seemed nervous or scared about facing British justice, more… indifferent.
It was as if we were not his defence team but a minor annoyance, a double-glazing salesman you politely endure rather than immediately kicking to the kerb.
We asked him what had happened; to, you know, give us a defence to work with. We’re your defence team. I mean, duh.
He made a few vague, unhelpful statements, mostly one or two words long.
Assuming it was a language problem (the guy had lived for the best part of a decade in the UK, but it was possible), we came back with a Korean interpreter.
It seemed for every fifty words she asked, Mr Kim responded with two.
It wasn’t a language problem; it was a personality problem.
Or maybe a shocked disbelief that he had been caught and was in deep shit problem.
Who knows?
I don’t recall most of what we asked him or what he said, because it was so deadly dull.
But there is one part I recall.
JL Becomes Bait
Later on, just before the trial is about to start, Mr Kim starts talking.
It wasn’t me who killed them.
Then who killed them, Mr Kim?
It was a big black drug dealer.
O-kay.
Yeah, the women were mixed up with this drug dealer. It was he who murdered them, not me.
Do you know his name?
No.
Do you know where he lives?
No.
Erm…
But I know where he deals drugs; you can find him along a street near Aldgate East underground (subway) station after midnight.
Nb. The streets around Aldgate East at this time were dark, run-down. Few businesses, fewer people.
That’s because it was a red-light district.
Aging, drug-addicted, toothless prostitutes roamed the streets.
I knew it well.
No, not like that, you cheeky monkey.
At the time, I lived with friends in Bethnal Green, a little further out. When taxis took my friends and me home from a night out in the city, we asked them to speed up whenever they drove through this area.
It was grim as f*ck.
Anyway, the police think his story is bullshit; they’re not even going to bother to take a look.
We think his story is bullshit, but it’s sort of our duty to take a look.
So we have a defence team huddle.
Senior lawyer 1: What we need is a photo of this guy.
Me: Yeah.
Senior lawyer 2: If Mr Kim identifies him from the photo, the police will have to investigate.
Me: Yeah.
Senior lawyer 1: We need someone to hang around on the street all night, taking photos of drug dealers.
Me: Erm…
Senior lawyer 2: But who could we get to do that?
*BOTH TURN TO LOOK AT ME*
Me: *GULP*
A small part of me is excited. Like a toenail on my pinky toe-sized part.
The rest of me is soiling my britches.
I’m a shy guy. I’d be reluctant to ask you for a cup of water if my hair was on fire.
I’ve never taken a photo of a stranger. It’s my opinion that people don’t like strangers taking photos of them.
They like it even less when they’re being photographed selling drugs.
If one of them spots me, I don’t think I’m going to receive a polite request to cease and desist.
More likely, they’ll be finding pieces of me all over East London.
But I’m still here to write this, aren’t I?
At the last minute, when I was all camera-ed up, about to go out the door, quivering like a jelly…
They cancelled it.
Cooler heads had prevailed.
I heard later the conversation went something like this.
Senior lawyer 3: Are you really sending JL out in the middle of the night, to one of the dodgiest parts of London, to photograph drug dealers?
Senior lawyer 1: Yes.
Senior lawyer 3: You don’t think that’s dangerous?
Senior lawyer 2: Dangerous?
Senior lawyer 3: *EXPLAINS*
Senior lawyer 1: He’ll be fine.
Senior lawyer 3: If he isn’t, we’ll probably get sued.
Senior lawyer 2: Ah.
(On a side note, there was some speculation that Mr Kim may have been a drug user himself, and the guy he’d fingered was actually his drug dealer)
Then, at the very last minute in the trial, Mr Kim. comes up with the wheeze of pleading guilty to manslaughter, claiming the deaths weren’t intentional or premeditated.
Right, so not one but two women had tied up and suffocated themselves.
The prosecution doesn’t even sniff our application before flushing it down the toilet.
Time to face the music, Mr Kim.
Prosecuting lawyer Johnathan Laidlaw remarked during the trial, “They were both alone when they suffered the horror of it. One hopes their suffering did not last long.”
On March 25, 2003, the Central Criminal Court found him guilty of both murders, and Judge Jeremy Roberts sentenced him to the mandatory life sentence for murder with a minimum of 23 years and 10 months.
In sentencing, Jude Roberts asks how he could have murdered, ‘two innocent people who placed their trust in him in such a cruel and deliberate way?’
Motive?
Money? Mr Kim did have debts of around £20,000 (26,000 US dollars, 3720만원), and although he did drain the two women’s bank accounts, students are the last people you target when you’re after cash.
If he’d targeted me at that time, he would have been rewarded with an unhealthy overdraft and angry letters from my bank.
Sex? Given the state of the women’s bodies: naked, bound; perhaps. But he certainly wasn’t some kind of lonely incel dude: interviews with Mr Kim’s—mainly Korean—associates and former tenants suggested he was charming, likeable and a hit with the ladies.
That wasn’t my experience with him, but most people are more comfortable when they speak in their own language (and haven’t been charged with murder). I’ll let you make up your own mind.
Sadistic pleasure? Maybe. Why else would you do this to someone? Twice. Detective Superintendent Peter Ship was concerned that Mr Kim had travelled extensively throughout Europe and Asia. It was believed he may have run sublets elsewhere; that he had committed these two similar crimes in such a short space of time made the police wonder what else he’d been up to in these other countries.
I suppose we’ll never know.
I left the firm before sentencing, so I’m not sure what happened to Mr Kim in the following years. In cases like this, the defendant was usually deported to their home country after serving one-third of their sentence to spend the rest of their time in a ‘home’ prison.
Mr Kim is likely—and hopefully—still languishing in a Korean jail.
But not for long.
You can do the math. Wherever he is (and assuming he serves his full sentence), including time served in custody, he will be released at the end of next year (2026).
So spare a thought for the victims’ families.
But remember his face.
Don’t have nightmares.
JL
PS: If this is all too dark for you, check out these two posts on the time I spoke with Gandalf and Princess Diana (among others), and the tales I spun from the experiences.
PPS: To keep up to date with blog posts, freebies, writing tips, life in Korea in 2026 and more spew from my fractured mind, sign up to the newsletter: