He confessed, which is an unhappy let-down for the imagination.
Before this Koreans could effortlessly build up the Hwaseong Serial Killer through terror and fascination into something pan-human – wintry, cunning, and penetrating. When hushed myth-telling and corner store gossip wasn’t enough, books, movies, and conspiracy theorising articles were pushed along by the public appetite.
Serial killers do this to us – they steal away our minds. When they remain at large, uncaptured, unreformed, and unidentified, decades of late night energy is spent thinking about them. For the residents of Hwaseong, greater-Gyeonggi Province, and South Korea as a whole, this produced three decades of hunches and tip-offs, over two million ‘man-days’ of investigation, the probing of over 21,000 suspects, 3000 people officially questioned, and the largest ever criminal case in South Korean history.
The most obvious analogy is always animal, some aberrant ‘man-killer’ – crocodile, lion, bear – that seems to develop a taste for human flesh; hunting through lust and excitement, rather than for territory, food or defence. In their menace this might be true, but psychologically it misses what crimes of this kind actually do to us.
There is something strangely personal about serial killers, something borderline romantic. Selective, and matching their victims to some internal ideal, they don’t maraud clumsily like a high school shooter. The crime scenes are extravagances, types of performance art; serial killers want to be chased, to be appreciated, perhaps even caught; anything to make their actions reciprocal. Just as with love, it is unbearable to be ignored.
With multiple victims over multiple years, they are creating a chilling body of work, a portfolio, and the development of their own artistic craft.
Sold as studies in omnipotence and domination, movies like ‘Memories of Murder’ – depicting the Hwaseong killings – don’t tend to come across as the cautionary tales that you might expect or hope for. They are rather archetypical lessons in romance – everything that the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ phenomena is also. And no different to the constant eroticisation of vampires and werewolves through movies and literature.
Serial killers touch the mind in just this way: told that one is stalking the night, prowling your neighbourhood, and the world begins to beat a little faster. The concerns and worries of everyday life disappear in an instant – it is hard to casually think about serial killers, you can only ever obsess.
But this is real, people suffer, loved ones die, families grieve, and communities are swallowed by fear (ten women were killed in Hwaseong). And yet if you pay close enough attention to how the human body experiences fear – elevated heart rate, sweating, dizziness, shortness of breath, muscle tension, goose bumps, upset stomach, inability to sleep, tingling limbs, clouded thoughts – it is remarkably similar to how the body also experiences excitement.
The Hwaseong Serial Killer strangled his last victim in 1991, and yet, just as it goes with love, his growing absence did nothing to dull the emotions. There was suddenly even more room, and more reason, for innuendo and rumour to take hold. Where it mattered – in the thoughts of everyday Koreans – he was still out there, perfectly camouflaged, and walking the streets perhaps just a step or two behind you.
Our better instincts don’t do us much good here. We tend to glamorise, and be attracted to, exactly what we know we shouldn’t. Whether it is rebellious youth, charismatic strangers, domineering tyrants, or wasted talent, one of the great challenges in life involves overcoming this urge to fantasize dangerous people and dangerous situations.
This runs through another – and much more visible – romantic archetype. The desire to win over and then tame menacing people – think ‘Beauty and the Beast’.
Perhaps this is so hard of a thing to overcome exactly because we also have it, dormant and unsatisfied, but unmistakably there, inside ourselves. A vicarious recognition that if circumstances had fallen differently, if we had grown up with different DNA, different parents, a different up-bringing, different experiences, then the pathway toward murder might not be so firmly closed-off.
But more than just feeling it in our anatomy, the quintessential serial killer is unashamed, unremorseful and generally uninhibited; a kind of open, uncomplicated honesty that we also value so highly when it comes to falling in love. They are not afraid of who they are, and they won’t be held back in expressing themselves.
Yet just as with all erotic ideals, they never survive contact with the real world. The Hwaseong Serial Killer – now identified and confessed – is a frail looking 56 year old man, so clumsy in his crimes that he was already in prison for murder, and so out of touch with his circumstances (he cannot be charged with any of his killings due to the statute of limitations) that he unnecessarily professed his innocence when first presented with the new DNA evidence, only to sheepishly come clean a few days later.
Which is exactly why serial killers seem to be a dying breed. In the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s, they were everywhere. Now the only ones popping up are the retirees and the geriatrics who barely remember who they are, let alone who they once killed. Where are the new generations of serial murderers? Already in prison! Arrested and sentenced before they could ever get started – advances in technology and methods of policing often mean that their first murder is now also their last.
Our misconceptions about serial murder are as rich and unsatisfactory as our misconceptions about love. The Hwaseong Serial Killer was always likely to be found in this way – inept, panicked and weak; a pathetic end to decades of undeserved grandeur. There are no deep waters here, nothing to deserve infatuation, no worthy aura; just as there are no such things as seductive monsters, only monsters…