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Yoo Young-chul: South Korea's 'Raincoat Killer'

Jun 5
4 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

For a while, the detectives in Seoul thought they were hunting two different men. One was breaking into the homes of wealthy elderly couples and beating them to death. The other was luring sex workers to a small apartment and killing them there. The methods looked nothing alike, the neighbourhoods were different, and for months the two sets of crimes sat in separate files. It took far too long to accept the truth: it was the same man, and his name was Yoo Young-chul.

Over roughly ten months in 2003 and 2004 he killed 20 people. South Korea had seen murder before, but rarely anything this deliberate, or this soaked in resentment.

Crime poster of masked Yoo Young-Chul in rain; Seoul night skyline, evidence notes, and title South Korea’s Raincoat Killer.

A grudge that grew teeth

Yoo was born in 1970 in Gochang County, a rural corner of South Korea, and grew up poor after his parents separated. He was bullied at school, nursed a talent for drawing and music, and was turned away from an arts high school because of weak grades. Out of that disappointment grew two hatreds that would later define his crimes: a loathing of the wealthy, and a separate, uglier contempt for women. By the time he began killing he was in his early thirties, with a long record behind him and years already spent in prison. The anger had had a long time to harden.

Phase one: the rich

His first murders, in the autumn of 2003, struck the well-off districts of Seoul. In September he bludgeoned an elderly couple — both university professors — to death in their home, and over the following weeks he broke into the houses of other affluent seniors and killed them, usually with a hammer. He took care to leave little behind, and money and valuables were frequently untouched, which baffled investigators chasing what looked like burglaries gone wrong. These were not robberies. They were statements against a class he despised.

One detail did connect the scenes: matching shoe prints. Slowly, reluctantly, the Seoul police accepted that a single killer was moving through the city's wealthy enclaves, and the spectre of a serial murderer took hold of the nation.

Phase two: the vulnerable

When the killings of rich seniors brought intense scrutiny, Yoo changed direction entirely. He began contacting women, many of them sex workers, and luring them to his small apartment — an 'officetel', a combined office-residence — where he murdered them. He disposed of remains in a wooded area near a temple on the city's outskirts. The switch in victim type was so complete that it worked as camouflage: the police were braced for one kind of killer and now faced another.

There is something damning in how differently the two sets of crimes were treated. The deaths of wealthy, respectable citizens triggered urgency, task forces and headlines. The disappearances of marginalised women did not, at least not at first. That gap in attention bought Yoo time, and it cost lives — a disparity that Korean commentators have returned to ever since.

Undone by a phone

In the end, it was not brilliant detective work that stopped him. The owners of the massage parlours where some of his victims worked began to suspect that something was wrong, and Yoo handed them the proof: he used a phone belonging to one of the dead women to call a parlour. The owner recognised the number and alerted police. When Yoo arrived to meet another intended victim, the officer assigned to intercept him had already left the scene — and it was the parlour's own workers who seized him and held him until police returned. He was caught in July 2004.

The confession

In custody, Yoo spoke with a flat, unnerving calm. A police profiler who studied him, Kwon Il-yong, would become well known in Korea for the analysis. Yoo confessed to around 20 murders and, at one point, claimed acts of cannibalism that horrified the investigators in the room. He framed his killings as punishment — of promiscuous women, and of a wealthy class he believed had wronged people like him. In December 2004 a Seoul court convicted him of 20 murders and sentenced him to death; he reportedly thanked the prosecutors for asking for it. One case was later reassigned to a different serial killer, Jeong Nam-gyu.

Still on death row

Yoo has never been executed. South Korea has maintained an unofficial moratorium on capital punishment since 1997, so his sentence sits unenforced while he remains imprisoned. His case became a fixture in the country's arguments about the death penalty, mental illness, and the uncomfortable question of whose deaths a society treats as urgent. It echoed through popular culture too, inspiring the acclaimed 2008 film 'The Chaser' and, later, a Netflix documentary that revisited the investigation.

The 'Raincoat Killer' is remembered for the cold theatre of his crimes and the yellow coat he wore when he led police to the dead. But the heavier weight of the case belongs to the twenty people he killed — the wealthy and the marginalised alike — and to the reminder that a city is only as safe as it is willing to be for its least protected residents.