Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries

On the night of October 26, 1979, the most powerful man in South Korea sat down to a private dinner a few minutes from his own residence. Around the table were the three men closest to his power: his chief of staff, his chief bodyguard, and the head of his secret police. Within minutes, the president and his bodyguard were both dead, and the man who pulled the trigger was the spy chief himself. Nearly half a century later, a Seoul court is still deciding what that gunshot really was. Assassination of Park Chung-hee (10·26 사건) · 1979-10-26 · KCIA safe house, Gungjeong-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea

In October 1979, one of the most feared men South Korea had ever produced walked out of a casino in Paris and was never seen again. For six years he had run the country's secret police. Then he turned on the president he had served and told the United States Congress what that police had done. For twenty-six years, his fate was one of Korea's great unanswered questions. When the answer finally came, it came from the spy agency he once ran. Disappearance of Kim Hyong-wook (김형욱 실종 사건) · 1979-10-07 · Paris and its outskirts, France

It was a Sunday afternoon, and the train from Seoul was a few minutes from home. In car six, passengers were already standing up with their bags, waiting for the Gupo stop. Then the engineer saw the track ahead sinking into the earth. There was a screech of brakes and a bang, and four cars of the train went over. Seventy-eight people died in what was then called the worst railway disaster in South Korean history. The ground under those rails hadn't just given way. Someone had been blasting a tunnel beneath them. Gupo Train Derailment (구포역 열차 전복 사고) · 1993-03-28 · Gyeongbu Line between Mulgeum and Gupo stations, Buk-gu, Busan, South Korea

It was a sunny autumn afternoon, and the hills around the lake had turned red and gold. More than a hundred and thirty people had boarded a small tour boat to see the leaves. About fifteen minutes out, smoke came up from the engine room. Survivors say the crew told them it was nothing and sent them inside, into a cabin that soon filled with smoke. Within an hour the boat had burned to the waterline, and twenty-nine people were dead. It happened three days after a bridge fell into the Han River in Seoul. Chungju Lake Cruise Ship Fire (충주호 유람선 화재) · 1994-10-24 · Chungju Lake near Aegok-ri, Jeokseong-myeon, Danyang County, North Chungcheong Province, South Korea

For about six hundred years, the great south gate of Seoul stood through invasions, a colonial occupation and a war. It took one man with a folding ladder about ten minutes to set it alight. He was 69 years old, he was angry about a land deal, and he was still under a suspended sentence for doing almost the same thing to a royal palace two years before. A whole country watched National Treasure No. 1 burn on live television. And when it was over, the question wasn't only why he did it. It was why it had been so easy. Sungnyemun Arson (숭례문 방화 사건) · 2008-02-10 · Sungnyemun (Namdaemun) gate, Jung-gu, Seoul, South Korea