Why did a murderer send a letter to Kkokkomu?
On the October 22 broadcast of SBS's "The Story of the Day When You Bite Your Tail" (hereafter "Kkokkomu"), the program shed light on Yeonghwasuk and Jaesaengwon in Busan, where horrific events took place in the 1960s, under the subtitle "A Murderer's Letter - Yeonghwasuk and Jaesaengwon."
In March 2025, a letter arrived at the broadcasting station. Kyeong-ho, who identified himself as a serving life-prisoner convicted of murder, wrote, "I spent time at 'that place,' received education necessary for committing crimes, and roamed all over Busan committing crimes like theft and robbery. Everything started right there," mentioning places called Yeonghwasuk and Jaesaengwon in Busan.
To verify the unbelievable story in the letter, the production team tracked down individuals who spent their childhoods there and could not hide their shock upon hearing their accounts firsthand.
Things changed completely after a new director, Lee Soon-young, arrived at Yeonghwasuk and Jaesaengwon. Following his arrival, people died every single day, and construction began.
Children who went missing from all over Busan were gathered there one by one. The Park Chung-hee government sought to drive vagrants and vagabonds out of society at the time for the purpose of social purification. Accordingly, Director Lee Soon-young, who signed a consignment contract for accommodating and protecting vagrants and the homeless with the city of Busan, illegally kidnapped people for money, confining those under 18 in Yeonghwasuk and those 19 and older in Jaesaengwon.
Ordinary citizens of Busan were forced to sleep spoon-style in rooms piled with human waste and were monitored day and night. Controlled like a military camp every day, they even suffered forced labor amidst physical assaults.
Children who could not even get a proper meal a day lived subhuman lives, picking at and eating maggots from the toilet because there was nothing to eat and even envying pig feed. However, they could not easily escape due to collective punishment. With assaults continuing daily as if dying meant nothing, they had no choice but to give up on escaping.
Moreover, the director made children catch those who escaped and had inmates bring in other inmates, creating a structure where victims became perpetrators. Thus, even though the inmates knew what they were doing was wrong, they inevitably repeated bad deeds. The children suffered human rights violations that included not only violence but also sexual assault at the place.
Friends who slept next to them yesterday would be dead by the next day, and those who died from such harsh treatment were secretly buried in the reed fields surrounding Yeonghwasuk and Jaesaengwon.
Father Aloysius, an American priest who happened to see this place and is known as a father to the poorest of the poor, learned of the actual conditions at Yeonghwasuk and Jaesaengwon and fell into shock. He exposed the reality to rescue the children, but he was ignored and even threatened.
However, he did not give up. He sent petition letters all the way to the Minister of Home Affairs, the Prime Minister, and Park Chung-hee, which eventually led to Director Lee Soon-young being investigated by the police and arrested. However, Lee Soon-young was released just six days after his arrest on the grounds that there was no risk of flight.
Following negotiations with Lee Soon-young, Father Aloysius obtained permission to take care of the children. Continuing his efforts to rescue the children, the consignment contract between the city of Busan and Yeonghwasuk was eventually cancelled in 1971. It seemed that the children there were finally finding their daily lives.
However, behind the scenes, Director Lee gave the children crime education. Among the children who thus entered the path of criminality was Kyeong-ho. Yeonghwasuk and Jaesaengwon had become a criminal academy. Director Lee would even pin someone else's crimes on other children.
This led Kyeong-ho to end up in a juvenile detention center, but he evoked heartbreak by saying that he found freedom inside the juvenile detention center. After leaving the juvenile detention center, he had no choice but to return to Yeonghwasuk. Director Lee assigned Kyeong-ho another mission. Delivering drugs became his new job. He was also made to provide bribes to public officials.
Later in 1976, the Busan city corporation permit was revoked, causing Yeonghwasuk and Jaesaengwon to shut down, and Lee Soon-young's final sentence amounted to a mere 300,000 won in fines. The reason given was that there was no grounds to prove Lee Soon-young had given the orders.
However, the wealth amassed through the inmates' forced labor and funds illegally acquired all reverted to Director Lee Soon-young's family assets. Lee Soon-young died of a chronic illness in 1981, four years after the final trial.
The victims who thus left Yeonghwasuk were subsequently dragged off to the Brothers Home (Hyeongje Bokjiwon) and then successively forcibly interned in the Samcheong re-education camp, unable to escape the shackles of evil.
The victims suffered from panic disorder, anthropophobia, and claustrophobia. Furthermore, due to the names changed on the registries at the time of their internment in Yeonghwasuk, they became unidentified persons and were even branded as spies and subjected to torture.
After committing various crimes, Kyeong-ho turned 28, began working at a restaurant by chance, and got entangled in a fight that took place there, crossing a line that should never have been crossed.
Now in his 70s, Kyeong-ho expressed his wish, stating that this was all he hoped for before dying: "If I am recognized as a victim of Yeonghwasuk and Jaesaengwon and receive compensation, I want to donate it to a welfare foundation helping the needy so that no more people like me are created. And I want to excavate the bodies secretly buried around Yeonghwasuk, including the ones I secretly buried, and return them to their families."
He then left a bitter lingering impression by saying, "I am a heinous criminal, a life-prisoner. I hope for no forgiveness or chances of any kind."
Victims who lived through a lifelong, hellish trauma won 51.1 billion won in damages from the state and the city of Busan. Yet, they evoked heartbreak by expressing utter dismay over their irreversible lives, saying, "Money is not the issue. Who am I supposed to resent and live now?"
(Photo: Yonhap News) (SBS Entertainment News Editor Kim Hyo-jung)
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