Flowers are placed in front of a public restroom at Sindang Station on the subway line No. 2 in Seoul on Sept. 16, 2022, following the murder of a 20-something female colleague by a 31-year-old subway station worker in the restroom on Sept. 14. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, Sept. 19 (Korea Bizwire) — A planned murder is three times more likely if it is preceded by an act of stalking, a study indicated Sunday.
A thesis recently published by Kim Sung-hee, a police science professor at the Korean National Police University and Lee Soo-jung, a forensic psychology professor at Kyonggi University, studied 336 cases of murder or attempted murder between persons in intimate relationships that the first-instance court rendered a guilty verdict in between 2017 and 2019.
Among them, 37.5 percent were preceded by an act of stalking. Other cases did not involve stalking.
Among the murder cases that involved stalking, 63.5 percent were premeditated, easily exceeding premeditated murder in non-stalking cases (21.4 percent).
In non-stalking murder cases, the criminal’s motives were largely based on self-reproach or emotional instability (24.2 percent) and jealousy or obsession (22.2 percent).
In murder cases preceded by stalking, 58.7 percent of the motives were based on jealousy or obsession.
Sorted by injury patterns of the victims, 56.1 percent of the stalk-and-murder cases involved victims sustaining multiple wounds to multiple parts of the body.
In contrast, a majority of non-stalking murder cases involved a singular injury to one part of the body (47.2 percent).
Almost three-quarters of the stalk-and-murder cases took place in a location closely related to the victims, while 66.7 percent of the non-stalking murder cases took place in a location closely related to both the victim and the perpetrator.
“If stalking continues after a couple breaks up, the risk of murder increases,” the research team said. “Here, we can see the need to separate the perpetrators from the victims as a preventive measure.”
Lina Jang (linajang@koreabizwire.com)
