A South Korean man has been arrested after confessing to murdering his girlfriend 16 years ago and hiding her body under cement on his balcony, police said on Tuesday.
The man, now in his 50s, was charged with the murder, which occurred in October 2008 during an argument, according to the Gyeongnam Provincial Police and Geoje Police Station. He fatally struck the woman with a blunt object and placed her body in a large travel bag, police said.
To conceal the crime, he entombed the body on his balcony by stacking bricks and covering it with a 10-centimetre (four-inch) layer of cement. The woman wasn’t reported missing until 2011, three years after her death, as she had lost contact with her family.
During the 2011 missing person investigation, the man told police they had “broken up,” and the case remained unsolved due to a lack of evidence.
A police official explained that the body wasn’t discovered earlier because it was hidden in a small balcony space, and the room had been mostly unused since 2016. That year, the man was arrested for drug use, and the property was repurposed for storage.
The body was finally found last month by a worker looking for water leaks, who came across the travel bag.
Upon inspection, police discovered the woman’s body, which was “preserved to some extent.”
“The body hadn’t fully decomposed, allowing us to identify her through fingerprints,” police said.
The man was subsequently questioned and confessed to the murder. According to a Gyeongnam Provincial Police official, the investigation is nearing completion, and the man will be “sent to prosecution soon.”