Has Yoo Byung-eun faked his death?
The endings to real-life stories often fail to pay off our emotional investment in them, and so it was with the conclusion on July 21 of the manhunt for billionaire Yoo Byung-eun. His badly decomposed body, found lying in a plum orchard near his vacation home, disappointed the nation.
For the previous two months he had been the most-wanted fugitive in Korea, a bounty of 500 million won on his head due to his de facto ownership of Chonghaeijin Marine; the company’s allegedly criminal negligence is considered a primary reason that the MV Sewol ferry sank on April 16, killing over 300. Not only was he the most important figure to be implicated in the disaster, but he made a great villain; Yoo had personality, and a history. He had already spent four years in jail for fraud, because he took donations to his church and invested them in his own business. That business, Semo, went bankrupt in 1999, suggesting incompetence as well as criminality. He was mysterious, nicknamed by some “the millionaire without a face.” He had a character-defining hobby, using his fortune to fund global exhibitions of his photography, which he promoted under the alias Ahae (“Child”). And on top of all of that, Yoo had built his own creepy religious movement: the Evangelical Baptist Church of Korea that is more commonly known as the Guwompa, or Salvation Sect.
A bad guy like that is a godsend to a grief-stricken country looking for a person on whom to focus its fury, and many are finding it difficult to accept a fate for him other than the one they had planned. Thus we have lately seen a proliferation of reasons for why the chase is not necessarily over, with some saying Yoo’s death is part of a larger cover-up – and some even saying Yoo is not dead at all.
Their suspicions are centered on the body and how long it took the police to identify it. Yoo’s body was so decayed at the time of its discovery that on August 25, the National Forensic Service finally admitted it could not ascertain how he died. But Yoo was last seen only 18 days before his body was found, leading some to question how he could have deteriorated “almost down to the bone” so quickly. They also ask how such a connected man could die alone.
A little research, however, shows full decomposition within almost three weeks is entirely possible – especially in a rainy summer – and Yoo is hardly the first powerful man to be brought low by national outrage. While it is conceivable Yoo Byung-eun has escaped, the more likely explanation is he died uncomfortably sometime shortly after watching the dismantling of his legacy. With a little time, Korea may agree his ending was swifter and more brutal than any court would have given.