The Marmot’s Hole

I know it’s a sin not to eat what you kill, but please, for the love of Christ, could we please stop eating each other (I mean this in the literal sense). First we got this out of the Philippines (hat tip to the Gweilo Diaries), and now this in Korea:

The prosecution said Friday it has secured testimony from Yoo Young-chul, a serial killer suspect, indicating that he ate the flesh of his victims, and would have killed more than 100 people if he had not been caught.

“Yoo told investigators that he ate human flesh on four occasions, and plotted to commit more murders,” Lee Dong-ho, a prosecutor of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office said during a press briefing. “We are making efforts to confirm his testimony. Yoo has shown little sense of guilt during questioning. He said he ate some human organs to ‘refresh himself.’”

CBS has the full question and answer session from the prosecutors (in Korean), but they [the prosecutors] seem to doubt that Yoo actually dined on human flesh. Investigators did find a lump of meat in the suspect’s fridge, but it turned out to be pork. Might get you in trouble in Saudi Arabia, but a perfectly legal foodstuff in the Republic of Korea.

BTW — and sorry for having to be the one who had to do the research on this — if it turns out that Yoo did consume parts of his victims, it would be the first recorded case of cannibalism in South Korea since the 1993-1994 “Jijon-pa” killings, in which a gang of six (originally seven) kidnapped four people who were driving expensive cars and brought them back to an isolated, self-made “human butcher shop” in Yeonggwang, South Jeolla Province — complete with a prison and a specially-made oven — where they tortured, raped and killed them and burnt their bodies. They apparently ate the flesh of their victims, too, believing it would give them courage. In addition, they also killed a member of their gang who was thinking of leaving the trade — apparently in an unpleasant way eventually involving an axe. Like in the recent case involving Mr. Yoo, the police displayed a truly staggering degree of ineptitude — the only reason the gang was ever caught was because a young woman who had been kidnapped (along with her boyfriend) had escaped and tipped the cops off (but not before she got gang-raped, watched her boyfriend die, and was forced to live with the gang for about a week). Good thing they caught the monsters, too, because they apparently had gotten a hold of a department store customer list that they were planning to use in their war against the wealthy.

And yes, after their arrest, the gang reportadly claimed that they got ideas for their crimes from watching “Silence of the Lambs.”

Hey, but at least they didn’t beat six people to death with baseball bats over a fuckin’ X-Box. Or stab a guy 70 times over an X-Box, for that matter.