Suspect arrested in slaying of husband and lover

Police yesterday arrested a suspect in the murders of two men whose bodies were found in a container in an apartment early this week. An 8-year-old boy was in the apartment when police arrived Tuesday after a call from a neighbor who heard the child crying.

In custody is a 50-year-old woman named Lee, who was arrested at a factory dormitory in Pocheon, Gyeonggi. But the details of the matter are still confused.

Police say one of the bodies they found was her husband and the other her boyfriend; the child in the apartment is her son.

“In the initial investigation, she confessed that she killed her foreign boyfriend after a fight,” Lim Hak-cheol, of the Gyeonggi Provincial Police Agency, said yesterday at a briefing, “but she denied killing her husband.”

She also told police she did not know the name, age or nationality of her boyfriend. The police first described the second victim as a foreigner in his 20s but said after further testing by a forensic laboratory that he was a 49-year-old Korean. That would seem to throw her confession into doubt; she also said she did not remember the exact time of the crime.

Lee became the main suspect when she disappeared after the media reported the discovery of the boy and the bodies. The woman reportedly went to her job at a snack factory in Pocheon on Wednesday but fled after she learned the police were seeking her.

The police found that a 44-year-old man from Sri Lanka often appeared on the suspect’s call list. Police officers came to his factory dormitory in Pocheon, about 10 kilometers (six miles) from where the bodies were found. The man was there, but said the female suspect was not. Police found her, however, in the building. The man was held for questioning about any role he may have played in the deaths.

Lim said the 8-year-old boy is being cared for by the police at a hospital. Press reports said he was malnourished when found, but the police said the boy was in stable mental and physical condition.

Police said they planned to file murder charges against the woman today, but it is not clear whose murder she will be charged with.

BY KIM BONG-MOON [bongmoon@joongang.co.kr]