Season 08 Episode 29: Go Tell Fire to the Mountain (Pt.2 of 2)

fallen acorns, a culinary delicacy for many Koreans. Up ahead, one of the men saw what seemed to be discarded clothing among a pile of rocks. He drew closer and recoiled suddenly when he saw something unexpected poking out from the tattered fabric, something that looked for all the world like a human bone.

been an easy job. Aspiring students have to spend six years at medical school, then undergo a further five years

of extra training to become a forensic specialist. According to the National Police Agency, about twenty five thousand people die from unnatural causes in Korea every year, but only twenty percent to typically undergo an autopsy, an extremely low figure compared to a country like the US, for example, where forty percent of potentially suspicious deaths are sent for further examination.

This is in part due to some persistent cultural norms, in particular the extensive belief among older Koreans that dissecting a corpse kills the person twice. In the United States and Europe, forensic doctors commonly accompany the police during their initial investigations of a suspicious death, but in South Korea,

forensic scientists only conduct autopsies when specifically asked to. So when the phone rang in Professor Chai's lab late on that Somber September day, a call from the police urgently requesting his assistance on Woyong Mountain. He dropped everything and

rushed to the scene. Many had forgotten the tragic tale of the missing frog Boys that had so gripped the nation eleven years before, but for anyone involved with law enforcement or forensic pathology, the suggest question that bones had been found on Woyang Mountain could mean only one thing. In the hours since the two hikers reported their discovery of possible human remains, the area was inundated with police, reporters,

and locals. The police quickly established the bones were indeed human, with initial observations suggesting they constituted the remains of five separate individuals. Back in two thousand and two, South Korea had not yet established a system to ensure that only

a forensic specialist could excavate dead bodies. The police weren't trained in the delicate skills of unearthing corpses that might have died in suspicious circumstances, so they hadn't followed structured procedure, either in their digging or inadequately securing the scene to preserve any forensic clues. On his own, rival, Professor Chai was shocked to find members of the public and the media trampling over the ground just a few feet away

from where the bodies had been found. But what shocked him most was the way in which the bones and clothing were being treated. Rather than stopping to carefully document the scene one after another, the remains were just hauled out, with no attempt even to keep the bones from each apparent body separate. For some inexplicable reason, the skulls and any long bones had been lumped together and laid out on sheets of paper, and not even clean paper, but

old newspapers. The remains, as someone later commented, had been set out as if they were produced on a cheap market store standing watch. Equally shocked by what they were witnessing were the parents of the missing boys. As news of the find had spread quickly through the local community, they were among the first to travel to the scene. One by one, the clothes each of their children had been wearing on the day they disappeared were dug out

of the earth and brought over to them. Many didn't want to believe it at first, but in the end all were left to face the brutal truth their children were dead. What upset them as much as anything was just how close to home the boys had been all this time, How could they have been overlooked, they wondered, in an area that had been so thoroughly searched in the days and weeks after the initial disappearance, At some point, a school jacket was pulled out and taken over to

the onlooking parents. Kim Juan Dou, the man whose haunting dream had presaged this very moment, recognized it as having belonged to his eleven year old son Young Jieu. Through floods of tears, he took the jacket into his arms to absolutely confirm it for himself and the police. He began to search for the school's badge that was sewn on the front of it. He noticed then that the sleeves of the jacket seemed to have been deliberately tied

in a knot. When he untied them, he was astonished to see a number of empty cartridges and three unused bullets fall out from the garment onto the dirt. After Kim he Onundo's shocking discovery, it emerged that his son's trousers were found to have been removed from his body and placed over his head. More bullets were found among the clothing, including in one of the boy's underwear, as well as being scattered in the soil and on the

ground around the boy's remains. For mister Kim, as soon as he saw the bullets immediately became convinced that his son had been shocked. News of the strange find soon spread among the other parents, onlookers, and reporters, who were quick to publish the findings, which made what the police did next or the more inexplicable. Less than twenty four hours after the remains were found, without the forensic examination having even begun, the local Dalso police chief called a

press conference in front of the nation's media. The chief delivered his verdict because of the way their remains had been found huddled together, He and his team determined that the boys had simply died of hypothermia. The parents were stunned, and so was forensic's professor Chai Jong Min. Even without conducting an autopsy, he knew the.

car as he was traveling for work. He was so baffled by the police's assessment he contacted members of his team as soon as he got home and arranged to meet at Mount woyon the next day to have a look for themselves. Arriving at the scene, Choi and his team found that the spot where the boy's remains had been located was barely one hundred meters above the nearest

city streets. According to weather data, Although there had been a little wind and rain the night the boys went missing, the lowest temperature recorded was three degrees celsius, hardly cold enough to cause the children to freeze to death, and in any case, as Choi thought, if they had become wet and cold, surely the boys would have just made

the quick and easy journey back to their homes. It was only when Choi and his team asked to see maps of the area as it was at the time the boys went missing, that a whole other angle began to emerge. What Choi one Sercentis team discovered was that the boy's remains were found extremely close to the base of the Korean Army's fiftieth Division. But more than that, the precise spot was less than three hundred meters away from what at the time was the division shooting range.

Was it possible, Choi wondered that one or more of the children had been shot by someone on the army's firing range. As this possibility found its way into media reports, the frog Boy's parents couldn't help but be reminded of that strange night several years earlier, when they'd been called onto the military base in the dead of night to speak with the medium. What on earth had that all been about, they wandered.

Division held a press conference. Incredibly, they confirmed that the bullets found with the frog boy's remains were indeed from their firing range, but they insisted they were stray bullets that had all come from a routine target practice and just happened to have become mixed up in the boy's clothing. Furthermore, they said the boys couldn't have been killed by an army shooter because the division soldiers had been given the

day off for the national holiday. In any case, even if they had been on site, no one was allowed to shoot without a commissioned officer present. But there was one inconvenient detail to the military's dismissal. Commissioned officers themselves were entirely free to go out onto the firing range

and shoot on their own any time they wanted. There was even an unconfirmed rumor that one such officer did fire his rifle that day, having told someone at the base that he had some rounds of ammunition to use up. The Army has never confirmed this, and the identity of who that officer might have been remains a mystery to this day. Under Professor Chai Chong Min's direction, it took the forensic team two full days to find all the boy's bones, which were taken back to his lab for analysis.

On the second day, one of the skulls lifted from the ground was found to have been pierced by two holes on opposite sides, giving greater credence to the theory that the boys had been shot. However, when Professor Chai examined the injury closer in the lab, he found no evidence of the usual fractures around the cavities that a bullet would have made. But what Chai did discover, first on this skull then on the others, was even more chilling. That where a series of unusual, small cut marks all

over the skull bone surfaces. The police suggested they had most likely been made some time after the boys had died, perhaps caused by so some one unwittingly working over the area with a farm tool, but Professor Chai didn't agree. He sent detailed photographs of the marks to an expert anthropologist in the US. She responded with complete conviction that the marks were definitely human made and were caused by

a very narrow, sharply pointed implement. But most horrifically of all, there was no doubt in her mind that the injuries had been inflicted before death. Although the police were unwilling to countenance it. To Professor Chai, the boy's deaths were starting to look very much like the work of a psychopath. Certainly, it wouldn't be the first time a psychopath had killed in South Korea, perhaps it's most notorious. Long before the Frog Boy case was a man called Kim Dai Do

born in nineteen forty nine. He was the eldest of seven from a low income family in a southern rural province. Despite his parents high expectations, Kim failed academically and soon turned to petty crime. After being caught stealing and spending some time in prison, he was determined to try and turn his life around. On his release, he tried to earn an honest living as a factory worker, but his reputation as an ex convict always preceded him, and he soon became resentful toward society and how.

his crimes the following year. Kim Dai Dou died long before the five young boys from Daegu, but there were others who could well have been suspects. One well known serial killer active in South Korea at the time of the Frog Boy's disappearance was Leechun Jai born in nineteen sixty three. Between nineteen eighty six and nineteen ninety four, he committed numerous sexual assaults and murdered fifteen women and girls, mainly in the city of Hassiong on the northwest coast.

The murders went unsold for thirty years before Lee was finally caught in twenty nineteen. In the end, Lee was sentenced to life imprisonment, but only for the killing of his sister in law in nineteen ninety four. Despite conclusive DNA evidence and Lee's confession to the other murders, he could not be prosecuted for the crimes because the fifteen year statute of limitations on cases of first degree murder, which South Korea had in place at the time, had expired.

But the so called Hasseeong murderer's victims had all been female and in the far northwest of the country, nowhere near Daegu. Another man named Yu yong Chul killed as many as twenty people by bludgeoning them to death with a hammer. In an effort to confuse investigators, You attempted to make his crime scenes look like robberies that had turned violent, although, as it would turn out, nothing of

any monetary value was ever taken. You first targeted only elderly people, then, when police investigations of the crimes started to intensify, he switched to targeting female massuses and sex workers. He dismembered and mutilated his victims to prevent their identification. And buried their remains in nearby mountains, but his crimes were not thought to have started until about the time when the remains of the boys were found, and he was not thought.

mountain once the police and public searches had stopped. Professor Chai's forensic investigations quickly disproved this theory, finding no evidence whatsoever that the bones had been moved. In addition, dead bodies released chemicals into the surrounding soil, including ammonia, hydrogen sulfite, as well as elements like iron, zinc, and calcium chiese. Analysis of soils taken from around the body suggested that

they had all but certainly decayed in situ. With all the new evidence that had come to light, the DLSO police chief promised to reopen the case and conduct a new analysis, but by then there was very little time left before the fifteen year statute of limitations on first degree murder cases would expire. In the end, the police abandoned the reinvestigation, claiming it was impossible to achieve a

result before the senseless deadline. On the twenty fourth of March two thousand, four, thirteen years after the so called Frog Boys went missing, their funerals were held at the Kioonpuk National University Hospital. As his tradition for Korean funerals, there were no eulogies. Instead, visitors bowed twice to an altar bearing images of the deceased, and then once to the next of kin before offering some words of condolence,

and then the boys. His remains were placed in hearses, each covered in yellow and white chrysanthemums, and driven to the Daegu City Crematorium. From there they were taken to a bridge on the nearby Nakdong River, where their ashes were scattered into the water and floated out into the ocean. They were closer than brothers, one father said, through tears, like five musketeers. Angered by the bungled police investigation. The

parents filed three separate lawsuits against them, but all failed. However, much has changed in South Korea over the last two decades. The boy's parents say that these days the police are much more sympathetic and inclined to listen to them and other parents of missing children than.

small sculpture featuring five flower shaped stones. The high school that the Frog Boys attended was relocated and renamed, while the fiftieth Army Division base was also moved away from the area, a landfill site can now be found where it used to be Today, many people believed that the unexplained deaths of thirteen year old Wu chield One, twelve year old Joho Yon, eleven year old Kim yong Ju, ten year old Park Chan Inn, and nine year old

Kim Chong Sheikh involved some sort of conspiracy between the police and the military to cover up the true events. As the boys played on the mountain, did they stray too close.

much for the public to bear. Certainly, if the military were determined to hush up such an incident, it's unlikely that anyone, even the police would have had the power in that political climate to investigate the case thoroughly, or had the boys in fact been murdered by a random psychopath who may remain at large.

Productions podcast created by Richard McClain smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McClain smith.

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