An entire family was murdered. The killer claims he loved them so deeply that he had to take their lives.
There are countless murders in this world.
Some are driven by rage, others by revenge -- or by money.
But what if someone kills without hatred, without greed, claiming instead that they did it out of love? What if the victims were not strangers, but one’s own parents, one’s wife, one’s children?
Today’s story is about a man who killed his entire family, believing he was protecting them from future hardship.
This story begins with a single text message a woman received from her younger brother, surnamed Lee, on the morning of April 15, 2025.
“I sent the family to heaven. I’m sorry.”
When police arrived at Lee's apartment in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, they found five dead bodies: his parents, in their 80s; his wife, in her 50s; and two daughters, one in her 10s, the other in her 20s. Only one person was missing from the crime scene: the head of the household, Lee.
What happened to this family?
Beginning of a family tragedy
If you had met the man a month before the killings, you would likely have seen him as an ordinary businessman, even a responsible family man who provided for his elderly parents and two daughters, one studying overseas and the other just starting college.
As CEO of a housing construction company, Lee was overseeing the construction of a residential apartment complex in the Gwangju area. For this project, he was staying in Gwangju, away from his family.
This project, however, began to go astray around March, when he came under police investigation for recruiting buyers without obtaining the required approval from the local district before opening a promotion space.
On March 24, his office was searched. As word of the investigation spread, the project’s credibility was called into question, prompting dozens of contract holders to seek refunds or suspend payments by filing civil lawsuits and criminal complaints. More than 60 people filed accusations against him.
Suddenly, he found himself under police investigation and facing mounting legal battles, with his building project plunging him into massive debt totaling tens of billions of won. With unit sales now simply unfeasible, there seemed to be no way he could turn things around.
According to prosecutors, he came to believe that his failure would doom his family to unbearable hardship. It was under this belief, they say, that he planned their deaths.
On March 31, he bought a grinder. On April 9, he crushed his sleeping pills -- Zolpidem and Lorazepam -- into powder. Between April 13 and 14, he bought multiple yogurts to mix them.
On the night of April 14, he went to his home in Yongin, gave the drug-laced yogurt to his parents, his wife and his two daughters. His first daughter, who was studying overseas, had come home for a visit.
How he managed to get all five of them to consume the yogurt remains unknown. They fell asleep. One by one, he entered their rooms and strangled them.
After killing them all, he drove back to his Gwangju residence and sent the message to his sister. When police found him, he had taken a large amount of sleeping pills himself. He survived.
In court, the crime was described with a single word: Familicide. Or more specifically, the killing of family members under the belief of authority and ownership.
In August last year, the man was sentenced to life imprisonment. Prosecutors appealed, seeking the death penalty. They argued that the crime was especially grave because the killings were planned and deliberate, carried out under the pretext of protecting his family after his business collapsed.
In January, the higher court upheld the life sentence. This time, prosecutors accepted the ruling, making his penalty final.
Familicide is not uncommon in Korea
Cases like this are not rare here.
In another incident in June, a man drove his car into the sea during a family trip, killing his wife and two teenage sons after drugging them with sleeping pills. Again, the motive was debt. Again, the justification was “for the family.”
In 2023, a mother killed her daughter after giving her a drink laced with sleeping pills, as the restaurant she had been running was hit hard by the COVID-19 crisis, leaving her in severe financial difficulty and burdened with mounting debt. She attempted to take her own life but failed. She later said she felt an overwhelming psychological burden, fearing that, if she died, her daughter would be left to repay the debt.
In many of these cases, perpetrators claim they were acting to spare their families from a future of debt, shame or legal ruin. Yet this belief rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the law; in Korea, heirs who formally renounce an inheritance inherit neither assets nor liabilities.
Experts say this is not sacrifice. It is distortion.
Lee Soo-jung, a criminal psychologist and professor at Kyonggi University, explains that in many familicide cases, the perpetrator does not see family members as independent human beings. They are seen as possessions -- as extensions of the self.
At his final hearing, Lee, who killed the entire family, said only this. “Please punish me with the harshest sentence, even the death penalty. I deserve it. I will spend the rest of my life in repentance.”
He offered no excuses. No explanations.
But the question remains: Were they truly acting out of love, believing they were protecting their families?
Or did they see their families as something they owned -- something whose fate they believed they had the right to decide?
