Questions linger in 'frog boy' case

Social Affairs

Questions linger in 'frog boy' case

Published: 06 Jan. 2003, 00:36

Although the forensic medicine team from Kyungpook National University concluded Tuesday that the five "frog boys" were murdered, a couple of questions remain unanswered.

First, there were no blood stains on the clothes of the boys, whose bodies were found in October in the foothills of Mount Waryong in Daegu. If their heads were repeatedly hit with a sharp metal object as the team said, the clothes should have had some traces of blood, some observers said. But their clothes looked almost as good as new. A spokesman for the team said, "Blood stains could have disappeared three to four years after the crime." But why did their clothes look so clean after presumably more than 11 years buried on a hillside? "We don't know," the spokesman said. "The clothes were remarkably well-preserved."

The boys, who were mostly in their early teens, were last seen alive in March 1991 on their way to Mount Waryong to catch frogs.

The second question, which was raised by the police, is who did the crime and how? The team suggests the possibility that a lunatic or a person of dysfunctional personality killed the boys. But police officers said it seems unlikely that one person could kill five teenagers at the same time. They suggested that there must have been at least two men.

Third, the skull of Cho Ho-yeon, one of the boys, showed no external wounds. The team and the police said the killer could have strangled him to death. Also, the jackets of Cho Ho-yeon and Park Chan-in have not been found. The police believe the jackets are somewhere near the mountain, but they have not been able to find them after more than a month.

The police are currently focusing on finding exactly what kind of object was used to kill the boys. Since the forensic medicine team said that the marks on the boys' skulls were created by blows with something similar to a screwdriver, the police said they are working on tracking down repairmen, mechanics or other tradesmen who lived near the area at the time of the boys' disappearance.

by Hwang Sun-yoon