The 23-year-old woman in South Korea was obsessed with crime shows and hunted for victims on a tutoring app.

A South Korean court has given a life sentence to a true crime fan who told police she murdered a stranger “out of curiosity”.

Jung Yoo-jung, 23, had been obsessed with crime shows and novels and scored highly on psychopath tests, police said.

Fixated with the idea of “trying out a murder”, she used an app to meet an English-language teacher, stabbing her to death at her home in May.

The brutal killing shocked South Korea.

Prosecutors had asked for the death penalty - a request typically reserved for the gravest of offences.

  • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.mlEnglish
    61·
    1 year ago

    I do watch true crime and I know what you mean, and I personally do struggle with whether it’s even ethical to watch it. No matter how respectfully they approach it and no matter how good their intentions may or may not be, even if the wanted to raise awareness for unsolved cold cases just in case people watching may have information, it still doesn’t change the reality that they are making a spectacle out of and directly profiting from someone else’s tragedy without their consent or knowledge.

    Then you have truly disgusting people in the true crime space like this: https://nypost.com/2023/07/12/youtuber-slammed-for-charging-to-see-autopsy-photos-of-boy-11/

    And then you have CBC, Canada’s national, State owned broadcasting service. They also have multiple true crime shows/podcasts, where they have reporters employed by the Canadian government interviewing police and investigators who are also employed by the Canadian government. There’s nothing wrong with that on its own, BUT, it gets infuriating sometimes because there have been cases where the reporters get really suspicious that a certain person did it and has dug up a ton of seemingly new evidence that supports it, and the police wouldn’t even comment on it, sound super apathetic when being told all this, and seem to have absolutely no intention to investigate further after the reporters brought their findings to them and gave them a bunch of (seemingly) new leads. Like if another government agency has already done half the work for you why would you not follow up? Is the goal of the government only to talk about horrific monsters that take the lives of their citizens and not to actually punish them and remove them from society? I suppose it’s possible that the police already investigated that avenue and ruled it out and are just not telling the reporters (and by extension the public), but if that’s the case why not just come out and say that so not only the suspected person’s name is cleared and also let the public know that they are indeed on top of the investigation?

    • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
      2·
      1 year ago

      I suppose it’s possible that the police already investigated that avenue and ruled it out and are just not telling the reporters (and by extension the public), but if that’s the case why not just come out and say that so not only the suspected person’s name is cleared and also let the public know that they are indeed on top of the investigation?

      If they say they are investigating that way and it turns out the reporter was wrong, wouldn’t there be repercussions for the reporter?

      If they say they are investigating that way and it turns out the reporter was right, wouldn’t it make a fair trial in front of a jury nearly impossible because of public image?