The Chijon family hosted a neighbourhood barbecue in the autumn of 1994, inviting people in the area around their isolated home in the small town of Bulgap-myeon, South Korea.
There was little to suggest that the seemingly-generous group were anything more than a set of amiable, if rag-tag, people who had selflessly spent their hard-earned money on renovating the house of one of their members’ mothers.
But the barbecued pork they dished out to their neighbours was a facade that hid a terrible truth, involving rape, kidnapping, extortion, murder and cannibalism, masking the stench of cooked human flesh that was thrown into an underground incinerator just feet below the social gathering.
The truth was that the Chijon family, now-infamous for their gnawing hunger for human flesh and vitriolic hatred of ‘rich snobs’, were unlike any family who came before them.
They weren’t related by blood, only the fury of the dispossessed, and worked more like a gang, interested only in leeching money from those unfortunate enough to come across them.
Between the family’s formation and their subsequent executions just over a year later, they targeted and kidnapped those they deemed wealthy, subjected their victims to horrific gang-rape, and killed, dismembered and ate them, before using a hidden incinerator to dispose of their bodies.
They also inflicted cannibalism on one woman they kidnapped, forcing her to eat the livers of two people she was made to kill.
Her boyfriend, who was kidnapped alongside her the week before the barbecue, was disposed of, forced into a car that was thrown off a cliff.
It was a poker game in the summer of 1993 that laid the foundations of the family.
Kim Gi-hwan met Moon Sang-rok and Kim Hyun-yang to gamble, and quickly began spouting his hatred for the richest people in Korean society.
The others agreed, and set out establishing their doctrine.
The nihilistic clan agreed to follow only three principles: We hate the rich, a traitor to the group must be killed, do not trust women – not even your mother.
Over the following weeks, the three founding members would approach hard-up construction workers and persuade them to join their cause – steal one billion won (worth around £1.3million in today’s money) through kidnapping and extortion.
Convicted robbers Kang Dong-un and Baek Byung-ok were convinced, while Kang Moon-seop and Song Bong-un joined later. The final member, Lee Kyung-sook, the group’s only female member, was the last to join, well after the gang began its nefarious activities.
Kim Gi-hwan, the leader of the group, required all seven members to pool their finances to buy the resources they needed to carry out their agenda, collecting one billion won.
With their savings, they bough two vehicles, walkie-talkies, dynamite, and 17 weapons, including six rifles, a submachine gun, a pistol, an air gun, a military sword, a hiking knife, and an electric cattle prod.
With these tools and weapons, they trained by hiking and camping on Jirisan, one of South Korea’s tallest mountains. They worked on executing kidnappings, and were taught how to handle dynamite.
Kim Gi-hwan, itching to carry out his group’s sick activities, wanted to make sure they were ready, and chose a bank teller as his first victim.
On July 18 1993, Song Bong-woo, Kang Dong-eun, and Baek Byeong-ok loitered by a bus stop in the south-eastern city of Nonsan, where they spotted Choi Mi-ja, a 23-year-old bank teller walking alone after work.
Having practiced for this, they quickly grabbed her and dragged her away to rape her.
But the group weren’t done with her. Kim Ki-hwan thought that since the bank teller had seen their faces, she had to die.
After throwing her in a getaway car along with a shovel, they took her to a hill in the city, where Kim Ki-hwan raped her.
He also ordered Kim Hyun-yang to rape her as well, before throttling her to death while proclaiming to the others: ‘I will show you a demonstration of killing people.’
Kim Ki-hwan then ordered the other members to take turns digging the tragic bank teller’s grave, before burying her that night.
This brutal murder was the first time faith in the group began to waver.
Unable to stomach what he had participated in, Song Bong-woo, the youngest member of the group, ran away after taking 3million won in cash from the group’s funds.
Fearing that Song Bong-woo would tell the police about what they had done, the group pursued him, finding him at a relative’s house.
There, they convinced him they would forgive him, and would even share a meal together, made of a dog.
‘Let’s have a unity rally and go eat dogs’, they told him as he cautiously agreed to go with them.
But after taking him to a remote mountainside, Song Bong-woo was made to beg for Kim Ki-hwan’s forgiveness, before he was beaten over his head with a brick.
Encouraged by their leader’s violence, the rest of the group worked themselves into a frenzy and beat their former co-conspirator to death with other blunt objects, including a pickaxe, in an attempt to impress Kim Ki-hwan with their obscene violence.
Long after Song Bong-woo died, they group ended up barbequing the dog they brought with them.
After he was caught, Kim Ki-hwan calmly told the court ‘I only killed two dogs in one day,’ causing a ruckus.
Though they managed to evade detection after killing Song Bong-woo, the group had to step back and reassess how they went about their kidnappings.
They ended up moving into Kim Ki-hwan’s mother’s house in Bulgap-myeon, in the southeast of the nation, planning on using it as their base.
They used their collective construction skills, as well as the money they had raised, to build an extension to her home.
This extension would include a small incineration facility and three prison cells that the group planned to use for kidnappings.
But to the outside world, Kim Ki-hwan presented himself and the group as dutiful members of society, telling neighbours and his family that he was building a new house for his mother to ‘pay filial piety.’
The leader was far from pious, however, and was arrested by cops who found out he had raped his friend’s niece in June 1993, a month before the group’s first killing.
In the power vacuum, Kang Dong-eun stepped up and decided to make the group go though ‘hell training’ – making them spend a week on a mountainside with nothing but a knife and a bottle of water.
During this trip, he spotted a member lagging behind and threateningly asked: ‘Do you want to cover yourself with a grass blanker like Bong-woo?’
The threats appeared to have worked, as by the end of July 1994, their murder house was completed.
Named ‘Abanggung’, an ironic name for an extravagant palace, the outside was painted bright pink, while the inside was a mint green, to abate any suspicions neighbours may have had.
Now they had their base, the gang was restlessly awaiting their next task.
Almost immediately, they bought illegal weapons from a broker, and sourced a list of VIP customers of the exclusive Hyundai department from a disgruntled worker.
More than 1,200 of the store’s highest-paying customers were listed, primed for targeting at the hands of the Chijon family.
They went after Koreans who owned Hyundai Grandeurs, a type of car which in the 1990s was seen as a status symbol.
On the night of September 7 1994, the gang targeted one of these luxurious cars in Seoul, South Korea’s capital.
There, they set a trap and waited for a Grandeur to pass them by, pouncing on the first one that drove past them.
Using their own car, they blocked their victims, Lee Jeong-su, a 27-year-old café worker, and her boyfriend, 34-year-old musician Lee Jong-won, off.
They used a gas gun to stun the boyfriend and threatened them both with knives, before blindfolding them and binding their feet and hands and loading them into their own car.
Their plan to extort the young couple’s family for money had a fatal flaw – neither of them were rich.
As a starving musician and a cafe worker, the couple couldn’t afford a new motor, and instead had bought the Grandeur second-hand for 7million won, the equivalent of around £9,000 today.
Still, the Chijon family weren’t going to let their quarry go.
They raped Lee Jeong-su repeatedly in their base, but Kim Hyun-yang persuaded the group to let her live.
This would later become their downfall.
But before that, the family began hatching a plan to figure out how to make her boyfriend’s death look like an accident.
They forcefed him booze, then tightly wrapped a plastic bag over his head, suffocating him. Then, taking his Grandeur, they drove to a nearby cliff, left some skid marks nearby and placed him in the driver’s seat, before pushing the vehicle off the cliff.
Their sick plan worked – After he was reported missing, and a construction worker found his body, investigators chalked the incident up to an accident caused by drunk driving, owing to the high blood-alcohol level in his body.
Emboldened by their crime, they set about kidnapping another Grandeur owner around a week later on September 13 1994.
They spotted a couple, So Yun-oh, 43, and Park Mi-ja, 35, paying their respects at a family member’s grave and kidnapped them.
Over the next day, the Chijon family threatened and tortured the couple, and confirmed that they were in fact wealthy – So Yun-oh had recently bought a factory.
The couple were forced to lie over the phone and request 100million won (around £130,000) from his new factory, which they successfully got.
But the couple’s ordeal was far from over.
They forced Lee Jeong-su, who had been their prisoner for over a week at this point, to shoot the middle-aged couple in the head with an air gun so she was complicit in their crime.
The cafe worker was then forced to eat the livers of the couple
Kim Hyeon-yang reportedly joked while handing pieces of the couple’s flesh to her: ‘Is this the first time you’ve seen human meat? It’s delicious!’
The gang then had another problem to deal with – disposal.
Though they had built an incinerator in their hideout, they knew that sending plumes of smoke through a chimney in early autumn would arouse suspicions.
On top of this, they were worried that the stench of cooked human flesh would be notices.
To mask this, they invited their neighbours round to eat barbecued pork with them in an attempt to mask the scent of the incinerator.
So as their neighbours happily chowed down on roasted pork, admiring the recently renovated home with its bright pink walls populated by a kindly, if a little mishmashed, family on that sunny afternoon, they were left in the dark over what was going on beneath them.
The bodies of So Yun-oh and Park Mi-ja were being turned to ash just feet away from them.
Somehow, they got away with their deceit.
Once again emboldened by their twisted success, they used the ransom money to buy guns and several vehicles to carry out more attacks.
But their downfall was soon to come.
In a failed training session, Hyeon-yang Kim’s hands were injured as he handled sticks of dynamite incorrectly.
Needing immediate hospital treatment, he asked Lee Jeong-su to take him to the hospital, assuming that since she had killed the grieving couple and eaten their flesh, she wouldn’t be able to go to the police without implicating herself.
He left her in the waiting room with 500,000 won in cash and Kang Dong-un’s cell phone, even going as far as to goadingly as her: ‘Do you want to run away? Do you want to escape? If you want to run away, then go ahead.’
Though she was initially unsure as to whether she was being tested, her resolve strengthened as soon as he was taken away by a nurse.
She took a taxi to a nearby vineyard, where she hid as she called for a rental car.
The terrified nurse used this vehicle to drive to Daejeon, where she abandoned the vehicle and took another taxi to Seoul, checking herself into a motel in the heart of the sprawling metropolis.
There, she called a male friend and asked him to report it to the police, too terrified to do so herself.
Initially, cops thought her story was too far-fetched to believe, and checked her for track-marks on her arm, believing her to be under the influence of drugs/
After telling her story to the station’s chief criminal investigator, Go Byung-cheon, they realised that many of her story’s details, particularly the disappearance of the missing married couple, weren’t yet available to the public.
They started by tracking So Yun-oh’s phone, finding it in the area he went missing in.
They then went to the area that Lee Jong-won’s car had been thrown off a cliff, confirming that Lee Jeong-su’s story was real.
They conducted a sting operation, arresting Kang Dong-un at a flat he lived in.
They then called the rest of the gang, pretending to be doctors and telling them that he had been in a serious accident and needed to attend hospital as soon as possible.
There, they were arrested.
Even after their arrest, they were utterly remorseless and even played up their twisted actions for the camera.
‘I’m not human’, screamed Kim Hyun-yang.
‘The world is too cruel for me to go out. I just want to die. I wish I could die, even now’, wailed Kang Dong-eun.
Just one month after their arrest, each member of the cult were found guilty of robbery and murder, abandonment of a corpse, and corpse abandonment, and were given the death penalty.
Two days after their sentencing, they were executed.
Though they had been killed for their horrific crimes, their legacy lived on.
For years after, residents of Yeonggwang, the city where the murders took place, were said to have been borderline fearful of telling people where they lived, terrified of being even remotely associated with the Chijon family.
The pink home in the neighbourhood of Bulgap-myeon was also quickly demolished, but the story of what happened in that place was carried on for decades.
As for Lee Jeong-su, she disappeared for a number of years, but popped back up in South Korea’s cultural memory in 2011, when she spoke to the Hankyoreh newspaper to tell her side of the story.
She admitted to suffering from severe PTSD, and criticised the country for not doing enough to support victims of crime in the long-run.