SEOUL, South Korea — An American man was convicted and sentenced here Friday to 20 years in prison for a murder committed more than 18 years ago — a notorious case that has gripped South Korea for years.
SEOUL, South Korea — An American man was convicted and sentenced here Friday to 20 years in prison for a murder committed more than 18 years ago — a notorious case that has gripped South Korea for years.
In a verdict read at the Central District Court of Seoul on Friday, the man, Arthur John Patterson, 36, of Sunnyvale, California, was convicted of killing a 22-year-old South Korean college student in April 1997. The student, Jo Jung-pil, was found in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor of a Burger King in Itaewon, an entertainment district popular among foreigners in Seoul, the capital.
The 20-year prison sentence given to Patterson by Judge Shim Kyu-hong was the maximum penalty for a person convicted of murdering someone while a minor. At the time of the murder, Patterson was 17, the son of a U.S. military contractor in South Korea.
Patterson’s lawyer said he would appeal the verdict.
In South Korea, where people are sensitive about crimes perpetrated by foreigners, especially those connected with the U.S. military, the murder in Itaewon has drawn intense scrutiny, not only because who killed Jo was a mystery, but also because of the perceived bungling by South Korean investigators.
Patterson and his Korean-American friend Edward Lee, then 18, were the only other people in the restroom when Jo was killed. During the investigation, the two teenagers angrily accused each other of repeatedly stabbing Jo in the neck and chest with a pocketknife, first attacking him from behind as he stood at a urinal.
The knife used in the murder belonged to Patterson.
Lee told investigators that he was washing his hands when Patterson suddenly attacked the student. Patterson said that it was Lee who took his knife and walked into the restroom, asking him to come along, before attacking Jo. Each accused the other of being on drugs during the attack.
In 1997, prosecutors indicted Lee as the murder suspect. He was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment and later to 20 years in prison after an appeal. But the Supreme Court overturned the case, citing lack of evidence. Lee was cleared of the murder charge in 1998 and freed from prison.
Patterson, sentenced to 18 months in prison on a lesser charge of trying to hide his knife and other evidence, was released in a government amnesty in 1998.
By the time Jo’s family asked prosecutors to reopen the case and charge Patterson with murder, he was back in the United States, having left South Korea in 1999 before the government renewed his ban on travel.
Jo’s mother, Lee Bok-su — her name happens to be pronounced similarly to the Korean word for “revenge” — has campaigned tirelessly for justice, picketing prosecutors’ offices and filing numerous appeals for Patterson’s extradition. She was told only that Patterson could not be found.
The tide turned in Lee Bok-su’s favor when a South Korean television station discovered Patterson’s whereabouts in the United States and even interviewed him. (He said no South Korean officials had come looking for him.) Public anger in South Korea was reawakened in 2009 after the release of a popular movie based on the killing.
In 2011, Patterson was detained in the United States, and South Korean prosecutors formally indicted him on a murder charge. After losing a long legal battle to block his extradition, he was taken to South Korea in handcuffs in September.
This month, prosecutors called Patterson’s crime “satanic” and asked the court to give him the most severe penalty. But Patterson continued to insist that Edward Lee killed Jo.
On Friday, the court decided that Edward Lee’s version of events was more persuasive than Patterson’s. Patterson’s shirt was covered in so much blood after the killing that he had to wash himself and change clothes, while Edward Lee had just a sprinkling of blood on his shirt, the court said.
The court added that Edward Lee was an accomplice in the killing because he had challenged Patterson to show that he was capable of murder. But under South Korean law, prosecutors could not charge Edward Lee with murder again because he had been acquitted of that charge before.
Patterson “deserves a stern punishment because he has never repented, shifting all the responsibility to his accomplice,” the court said Friday.
For Lee Bok-su, the ruling was long overdue.
“Jung-pil can now rest,” she told reporters outside the courthouse Friday.
But she has not forgiven Edward Lee.
“I want them both dead,” she told the court this month. “They killed my beloved son just for fun and destroyed my family. And look, they are still shifting the blame to each other.”
© 2016 The New York Times Company