PORN STARS
A
NEW ABDUCTION CASE
KWON
YOO JIN
In another part of Seoul, a woman was on the phone with her daughter, who was on her way home.
   
Moments later, upon chancing a crippled person who had fallen down, the young girl, Kwon Yoo Jin, stopped to give the stranger a helping hand.
A taser, which was used to incapacitate her, had reduced her to a helpless, unconscious abduction victim.    
ASSESSING THE MURDER PATTERN
The previous abduction case had yet to be solved. But, the NCI
was burdened with another similar case.
 Kim Hyun Joon and Team Leader Kang exchanged ideas about the new case. The team leader’s opinion was that, based on the victim’s age, appearance and the way she went missing, it seemed likely that the previous abductor and the latest kidnapper were one and the same.     Since the criminals had not yet sent any videos, it meant that at least, the victim was still alive. The NCI raised strong objections to the police's desire to publicize the investigation. If the police intervened, it would hamper their ongoing efforts to solve the cases. The criminals might deem it less fun or pleasurable for them to prolong the victim's life.         
The team quickly got down to brass tacks to start their criminal profiling and analyse the behavourial patterns in order to narrow down the suspects.
  
It seemed plausible that the victims had meekly followed the kidnappers, so the unsubs had to be good-looking.
The victims were in their early 20s, so the unsubs had to be in their 20s and 30s.
    It was clear that the criminals could easily abduct their victims between morning and night on weekdays without any hindrance or restriction.  
They were able to dispose of the corpses between night and dawn.
   Kim Hyun Joon argued that considering the time of their crimes and the disposal of their bodies, it was likely that the criminals did not have a job. Even if they did, it was not the traditional 9-to-5 job but one with flexibility and without time-constraints.     Lee Han believed that as sadists, they would be predisposed to being unsociable. One of them, the leader is certainly a dominant, controlling personality.    
THE VICIOUS CYCLE
OF VIOLENCE
Violence begets violence. Ha Sun Woo believed that the unsubs had possibly been abused by their parents. The mental stress that they had endured from such experiences could have caused damage in certain parts of their brain.
    Team Leader Kang stated that those who had been abused may try to overcome their feelings of helplessness by committing violent acts like arson or murder. They may turn out to be violent and dominant sadists. The vicious cycle of violence is thus repeated.       
Kim Hyun Joon raised the issue that the murders seemed to point to something peculiar: The link between mothers and daughters. The was no room for misinterpretation of the evidence.
      
UNWARRANTED
PUBLICITY
Yoo Min Young, seemingly agitated, interrupted their discussion to switch on the TV news.
The mother of the latest victim, Kwon Yoo Jin had complicated matters by appearing on TV. She was appealing to the abductors not to kill her daughter. The victim had been kidnapped two days before. According to the news anchor, Kwon was a victim of the on-going Namcheon Serial Abduction and Murder Case.
        
The furious Team Leader instructed Yoo Min Young to immediately bar the press from broadcasting the case. He did not want the city to be gripped with fear. The investigation process could be stymied if the bad publicity went viral.
     |
THE
‘S’ TATTOO
PORNOGRAPHY
CULTURE
In a certain flat, a young man was being reprimanded by his father, a crippled man on a wheelchair. There was an ominous warning from the older man that the young man might be caught for the wicked sins that he had committed. Well, fathers knew their sons from A to Z.      Yoo Min Young walked into the office to find that Nana Wang had pulled an all-nighter and was clearly burnt out. The eccentric lady wearily claimed to have watched the video of the man with the gruesome mask 3560 times over a 22-hour period. And, she had discovered nothing. Was her way of doing things asinine? Though a brilliant hacker, the lady was quite idiosyncratic. Her zany outfits, neon-coloured fashion accessories, her numerous dolls and odd behaviour gave people the impression that she was, at best, quirky. Her dolls were facing the other way from the screen monitor. She explained to Yoo Min Young that she did not want her dolls to watch the gruesome scenes on her computer screen. She must have provided comic relief to all the serious NCI team members.        
Her screen suddenly alerted her to a new and clearer version of the S tattoo of the sadistic criminal in the video.
 When she met up with the other profilers, they expressed that it was a common tattoo of certain young men. But, the genius Lee Han recalled seeing the tattoo design four years previously in some files. In 2003, a famous celebrity committed suicide when his pornographic videos went viral. The police swooped on the pornographic sites as part of the clamp down on pornography. The NCI team members expressed interest in reading those interesting files. But when Lee Han announced that the pages totaled 67,321, they thought better of it.                
A
SUSPICIOUS ENVELOPE
Meanwhile, Kwon Yoo Jin’s mother had received a suspicious envelope. She had been told not to open it but she was tempted. In the end, she surrendered it to Yoo Min Young. She would have assumed the worst had happened to her daughter.
The teary-eyed mother blamed herself for her daughter’s abduction. She explained that her husband had warned her daughter to be cautious with strangers and not to be too trusting, while she was of the persuasion that one should be kind, honest and helpful in life.
Young people often face dilemmas if their parents possess conflicting views.
That anecdote, which may make many people unreasonably panicky, serves as a lesson for everyone, especially young and vulnerable people, not to throw caution to the wind.
                       
PORN
STARS
While studying a pornographic site, Lee Han pointed out that the table and the wall in those images from the site were exactly the same as those in the sadistic video.
The actor in the pornographic show, a corrupting influence on its audience, had an S tattoo, a symbol of the S Culture Club. Some people knew that fake sadistic porn-themed videos were specifically produced for secretly operated Internet sites. The operators used overseas servers to avoid detection.
It meant that the criminals who produced the VCD had links with the S Culture Club.               The NCI now have a new clue. Something struck Nana Wang’s memory. She persuaded the puzzled Lee Han to wait for her while she went in search of an old friend. She requested the friend from her younger days to send her an important file.       
The file Nana Wang received was about Kang Jae Deok who ran the S
Culture Club. The 31 year-old criminal had a record of imprisonment for rape,
assault and distribution of pornography. His mother had run away from home.
IN
PURSUIT
OF
THE
CRIMINAL
When Kim Hyun Joon and Team Leader Kang were alerted to the information, they raced to the the criminal's flat in the younger profiler's sporty and modern-looking SUV.
Kang Jae Deok’s father was unobliging and refused to entertain them. He was fuming over the unwelcome presence of the NCI profilers.
                     
Kang Jae Deok, the unsub, might have caught
wind of the situation because of the loud commotion at the door.
Upon catching a glimpse of the
suspect, Kim Hyun Joon forced his way into the flat. The suspect quickly bolted
by jumping out of the window with Kim Hyun Joon hot on his heels.
   
The suspect had decided to take his chances and fled through a narrow back alley. Hoping to lose his pursuer, he rushed up the many flights of stairs to the rooftop.
      They arrived at a flight of stairs that led upwards to more flights of stairs. How did the profiler negotiate the winding flights of stairs? Like the criminal, the agile profiler took the short cut. He had nimble, flexible and athletic limbs. He was not in the Special Forces for nothing. The acrobatic Kim Hyun Joon, hoisted himself over the bannister of the staircase and scrambled up the stairs with vigour and determination. There were many flights of staircases for the NCI Spider Man to climb. But it was no big deal. Scaling heights was nothing new to him. He was going to hound and pursue the criminal right to the rooftop. Step aside for Spider Man.           
When Kim Hyun Joon reached the rooftop, the criminal, with a history of unspeakable criminal offences, had unexpectedly clambered up the balustrade and was trembling with nervousness. He blurted out that he did not want to be hauled into the prison again.
Shocked, Kim Hyun Joon tried to dissuade him from doing something stupid but the twisted criminal knew that his time had come.
              Kim Hyun Joon’s pursuit should have ended in triumph with the arrest of the criminal. But, like many such police-criminal chases, it ended in tragedy. The criminal had eluded capture; he plunged to his death. It was heart-wrenching to watch Kim Hyun Joon, the hunter, dealing with the horrific death of his prey.   Team Leader Kang had the grim task of breaking the tragic news to the criminal's father. The suspect’s father was not only told of his son's demise but also the fact that his son had been suspected of 4 murders and 1 abduction. The father knew of his son's evil doings. Would one consider the father to be also a partner in crime, though an unwitting one?           
The Team Leader made some swift observations about the dead man’s room, and came to the conclusion that he was not the dominant partner in those crimes. His room was in disarray. The chaotic mess indicated that he was far from having sadistic controlling tendencies.
There were no mirrors: it just meant he had rejected himself. He had been controlled and dominated by others.       But, one gruesome find was a fingernail probably belonging to the deceased victim, Choi Eun Seo, the second victim. It was possibly, a momento, a fetish keepsake of his sadistic crime. Sadistic Fetishism. Shudder.         
Meanwhile, Ha Sun Woo and Yoo Min Young had visited the S Culture Club and had inadvertently interrupted the pornographic filming session by a couple. The porn actor declared that he was not psychopathic.
Ha Sun Woo showed him a picture of some people on her mobile phone. She was given a lead by the informer.
According to Nana Wang, their wanted man, Yoon Jeong Sub, had grown up in a child-care institution since he was 8.             |