Did an Obsession with True Crime Lead a South Korean Woman to Murder?

The following content contains disturbing accounts of violence. Discretion is advised.

On the phone, 23-year-old Jung Yoo-jung posed as the mother of a 9th grader who needed English lessons and made arrangements to meet with a female tutor in her native Busan, South Korea.

On May 26, 2023, Jung showed up at the tutor's home wearing a school uniform. She stabbed the woman more than 100 times, dismembered her and stuffed her body parts in a suitcase that she dumped in the woods.

Jung was convicted of murder, desecration and abandonment of a corpse, and was sentenced to life in prison in November 2023. She told authorities she acted on her curiosity to kill, and police said she had been obsessed with crime shows and novels, the BBC reported.

Could her obsession with true crime be blamed for the gruesome murder? Experts say no.

"There are millions of people, just in the United States, that would probably consider themselves huge true crime fans, but obviously you don't see millions of people going out and murdering someone just because they are curious," behavioral scientist Coltan Scrivner tells A&E Crime + Investigation.

"It takes a lot of additional personality traits and predispositions in order for someone to actually commit a murder. Maybe, combined with many other things, [an obsession with true crime] could be somewhat predictive—but so are a lot of traits."

The Meaning of Morbid Curiosity

Described as an unemployed loner who lived with her grandfather, Jung spent months contacting more than 50 tutors via a tutoring app, prosecutors said, and searched online how to conceal a body.

After the brutal kill, she left to buy trash bags and bleach, returned to the victim's house and dismembered her body, including cutting off her fingers to make an ID more difficult. She took a taxi to dump the bloody suitcases with body parts in a forest, and was caught when the taxi driver became suspicious and alerted police.

Initially, Jung told police the tutor had been killed by someone else, and that she'd only moved the body. Then she said she killed the tutor after an argument. At trial, she blamed "hallucinations and other mental disorders."

All the while, she maintained she'd been curious about killing. Yet, morbid curiosity, meaning curiosity related to death, is not indicative of a predisposition to commit murder, Scrivner says.

Scrivner developed a scale to measure morbid curiosity, one category of which is motives of dangerous peopleand a proxy for interest in true crime, he says.

There are benefits in trying to understand the mind of a killer through morbid curiosity, Scrivner says. "We are so fascinated with Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy, who for the most part seemed like normal people. When we find out someone deceived us so well, we are naturally curious about that. What should we have seen? What did we miss? It's a protective mechanism," he says. "If you put yourself in the mind of the killer, it can help you escape the killer."

Also, the mind is constantly coming up with "what if" scenarios and hypotheticals, but it doesn't necessarily mean there is a desire to act on any of it, Scrivner adds.

Jung scored high on psychopath tests, according to police. Psychopathy is not an official mental health condition, but rather "an indication that you have callous, non-emotional behavior, that you're coldhearted and manipulative," Scrivner says.

Dahmer, generally considered a psychopath, said he was morbidly curious, but that's not what turned him into a murderer, Scrivner says. "It was an additional motivating factor after all the other preconditions were met: psychopathy and many other things."

Jung maintaining that she killed out of curiosity is a "grossly inadequate" explanation for her actions, says David Schmid, an English professor at the University of Buffalo and an expert on the development of true crime pop culture in the United States.

"When we hear someone say, 'I killed someone just to see what it would feel like,' that's very different than motives like sex, revenge or greed. Those motives we can understand, so for that reason, we don't inquire much into them," he says. "[Jung's murder] is a kind of situation where we go looking for answers, we go looking for motives that we find more adequate, more satisfying."

Pointing to an obsession with true crime as the culprit is an example of modern society's "addiction to simple explanations," Schmid says. "We want an explanation that is 'one size fits all.' We are drawn to simple cause-and-effect," he says. "We often forget that any event, but especially murder, is the result of a complex combination of circumstances.”

In Jung’s case, her high psychopath test score is a crucial factor, along with her interest in true crime and other aspects of her personality and background, he says. “It would be a mistake to isolate any one factor and say, 'This is the problem.'"

A Serial Killer in the Making?

Modern society has blamed violent tendencies on a variety of things, such as the occult in the 1980s and video games in the 1990s. True crime obsession has become a similar scapegoat, clinical psychologist Rachel Toles tells A&E Crime + Investigation. "While it's possible someone might relate to a killer because they themselves want to kill, I believe they would have murdered regardless of whatever medium they, or anyone else, wants to blame," she says.

Toles says she believes that if Jung hadn't been caught, she would have continued killing, and likely was on her way to becoming a serial killer. "She fits the profile of my 'serial killer formula' [for] how serial killers become serial killers," says Toles, who has a touring show titled "The Psychology of Serial Killers."

Serial killers don't murder due to "outside inspiration," but because of a rich fantasy life that typically begins around age three to five, Toles says. "In all of my research, I've never encountered a serial killer who was simply born a 'bad seed,'" she adds.

The fact that Jung contacted 54 other people, mostly women, via the tutoring app before choosing her victim, posing as a mother and showing up as a high school student all point to a very specific fantasy, Toles says.

At trial, Jung was described as having "a feeling of resentment and anger toward her family, helplessness due to continued failures such as college entrance and employment," according to The Korea Herald.

Toles says she believes that, as a young child, Jung developed a growing fantasy that came into "full force" by the 9th grade. Stabbing her victim more than 100 times including after she was dead points to a "very personal" kill fueled by rage.

Another common link between Jung and serial killers include keeping "trophy" body parts.

When caught, some killers confess immediately while others never admit to their crimes, Toles says.

"Jung is definitely in the latter camp of the people who externalize blame. She deflects responsibility."