by Martin Limon
“And you came over here?”
“Yes. Myong-song was a quiet child. I’d never heard her scream before. I found her in the kitchen. Apparently her mother had taken a pot of warm water off the charcoal brazier, but she must’ve been interrupted because she left the flame exposed. Myong-song reached in and burnt her hand.”
“And her mother?”
“In the back room.” The old woman shook her head. “Don’t ask me more. That young policeman knows everything.”
I thanked the old woman, slipped off my shoes, and stepped into the silent home.
The front room was wallpapered but barely furnished. Only a small wooden chest with brass fittings and a stack of sleeping mats and folded blankets sat neatly against the wall. The floor beneath my feet was still warm. Apparently, the old neighbor woman had been good enough to change the charcoal for the heating flues that ran beneath the stone foundation. The late Mrs. Yi must’ve been a good housekeeper. The floor’s vinyl covering was scrubbed immaculately clean.
We entered the kitchen. Pots and pans hung from the wooden rafters. No sign of struggle. Only an open charcoal brazier that had now died out. The metal lid had not been replaced. Surely the old woman was right. When Mrs. Yi Won-suk pulled the pan of hot water off the open charcoal flame, someone must’ve jumped her from behind. Someone huge. Overpowering. She wouldn’t have had a chance to struggle. Yet someone who was stealthy enough to tiptoe past the sliding door and across the vinyl-floored front room without being heard. Or if she had heard him, maybe Mrs. Yi thought it was her husband returning early from the fields.
We entered the back room, where Mrs. Yi had been taken. Again, no sign of struggle. A small table in the corner with a mirror, bottles and jars of ointments and lotions, all undisturbed. Maybe the man had threatened Mrs. Yi with a knife. Or worse, threatened to hurt her daughter.
Lieutenant Rhee pointed to the center of the floor.
“The body was found here,” he said in Korean. I translated for Ernie.
Then he told us that her skirt had been pulled up, her long underpants and leggings ripped off, and that the doctor who examined her corpse found enough tearing in her small body to conclude that she’d been violated forcibly by a powerful man.
Lieutenant Rhee pointed to his own neck. Bruises, he told us, had formed a line beneath the curve of Mrs. Yi’s delicate jaw.
For the next two days, our work at Camp Henry was routine. After a while Ernie and I started to feel like a couple of personnel clerks. The officer corps was under orders to account for the whereabouts of every soldier in every unit under their command on the afternoon of the murder. Hundreds of soldiers were eliminated almost immediately because if there’s one thing the army’s good at it’s keeping track of GIs. Support activities are what soldiers do on Camp Henry, so Ernie and I spent a lot of time making phone calls to ensure a truck convoy had actually reached its destination or that a piece of communications equipment had actually been repaired on the day in question.
Our progress was rapid. We were scratching off whole blocks of names and narrowing down our suspects to a short list. We didn’t stop with the enlisted men, we also checked on the officers and even the three or four dozen US civilians employed on the base. The entire process became more and more exciting as each and every alibi was checked and the list grew smaller and smaller. Finally, at the end of the second day, Ernie and I compared notes. To our horror, we obtained the one result that neither of us had expected.
Everybody had an alibi.
We sat in stunned silence for a while, drinking the dregs of the overcooked coffee in the pot in the small office we’d been assigned.
Finally, Ernie spoke. “How the hell are we going to break this to Eighth Army?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “The Korean newspapers have been all over it.”
The original thought that only the Korean tabloids would carry the story of the sordid murder of Mrs. Yi Won-suk had long since gone by the boards. Koreans have an affinity for the simple country life. Even though nowadays they work in high-rise office buildings or fly back and forth to Saudi Arabian oilfields or cut deals with Swiss bankers, they still think of themselves as the pure and virtuous agrarian people that their ancestors had once been. Mrs. Yi was so attractive, her surviving daughter Myong-song so charming, and her husband so stalwart and brave that the heart of the country had been drawn to their little family. The biggest newspapers in the country had run her photograph on the front page. Television reporters had produced specials on her, showing the craggy peaks and streams near her home. Some of them had even tried to talk to Ernie and me, but so far we’d managed to avoid them.
Finally, Ernie and I decided to do what we always do when we don’t have a plan. We locked up the office, strode outside the gate of Camp Henry, and headed toward neon.
When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was.
What I did know was that my stomach was churning and my head ached and my bladder was so full that I was afraid to move. Finally I did move. I threw a silk-lined comforter off my body, rolled over onto a warm ondol floor, and slowly rose to my feet. I was in a rectangular room not much bigger than a closet. I found my clothes and threw them on and pulled back the sliding door, stepped out onto a narrow wooden porch, and squatted down and put on my shoes. The courtyard wasn’t much bigger than the room I’d been sleeping in. The sky was overcast and a light sheen of drizzle filled the sky. Quickly, I stepped across moist brick to the byonso on the other side of the tiny courtyard.
After I relieved myself, a woman with a pocked face, hair in mad disarray and a cotton robe wrapped tightly about her slim body, stood in the center of the courtyard waiting for me. I had no idea who she was.
She told me. I gave her the money that I had apparently promised her the night before, and I left.
Back at the temporary billets at Camp Henry, I showered, shaved, and changed into clean clothes. Still Ernie hadn’t arrived. He was probably passed out somewhere in a hooch behind the bar district. I didn’t have time to wait for him.
The night before, somewhere in our mad swirl from bar to bar, an idea had come to me. There was something I’d missed back at the murder site. I wasn’t sure what it was but I had convinced myself that there had to be something.
Without bothering with breakfast, I strode over to the Camp Henry main gate, and once outside, I waved down a kimchee cab.
Three miles outside of Taegu, I told the driver to slow down. A few homes lined the right side of the road. Behind them were steeply sloping hills, spattered on the lower elevations with a few clumps of pear trees. On the other side of the road stretched many acres of rice and bean fields. Already, men wearing straw hats and with their pants rolled up to their knees were out there working, even in this foreboding overcast.
I saw the home of Mrs. Yi Won-suk and told the driver to slow down. We cruised past. I studied the home. Quiet. Next door, smoke rose from the narrow chimney of the old woman who had been the first to arrive on the murder scene.
I thought about what it would be like for an American in this area.
If he took a cab like I was doing now, he could cruise past the homes along the street and not be observed. Lieutenant Rhee and the Korean National Police had interviewed every cab driver in Taegu—Korean cabbies are used to providing information to the police—but no one had come forward and admitted to hauling a foreigner to this area on the afternoon of the murder. It was possible that someone was lying or had forgotten, but I doubted it. Koreans in general were upset about this case and wanted to solve it. That would include cab drivers.
The other possibility was that the foreigner had come here on foot. Or on bicycle. But either way he would’ve been noticed. Foreigners stay near the compound or in downtown Taegu. They have no reason to come out here to this agrarian suburb. And the road leading from town is lined with car washes, auto repair shops, noodle restaurants, and any number of curious proprietors who would’ve noticed a big-nosed foreigner walk
ing or peddling by. The KNPs had interviewed them all and come up with nothing.
So how did a foreigner arrive in this neighborhood unobserved? And how had he managed to case the home which held Mrs. Yi Won-suk and her daughter? How had he known that she was alone? Surmise? Maybe. He would’ve guessed that her husband would be at work in the fields. Maybe taking that chance was part of the thrill.
That still didn’t tell me how he’d arrived unobserved.
And then it hit me. The obvious: by POV.
POV. One of those cherished military acronyms. This one means Privately Owned Vehicle. Not a military vehicle. Most GIs aren’t allowed to own a POV. You have to leave your car in the States when you’re transferred to Korea. But some high-ranking NCOs and officers, mostly in Seoul, are authorized to have POVs. So are civilians.
But the whereabouts of the NCOs and officers and civilians at Camp Henry had already been accounted for. Of course there could be holes in those alibis. Someone might be lying or someone might be covering up for a buddy. To expose that would take more digging. A lot more digging.
By now we’d traveled about a half mile beyond Mrs. Yi’s home. The cab driver asked me where I wanted to go. I told him to turn around and drive slowly back toward town.
Were there possible suspects other than the foreigners stationed at Camp Henry? Could someone have been driving out here in a POV and just by chance have spotted the attractive Mrs. Yi entering her home? After all, this road leads from Taegu up north to Taejon, the home of another US military base, Camp Ames.
But how would that work? Okay, so the guy’s cruising along, he spots Mrs. Yi, maybe he slows down to follow her. He even turns around, and then he spots her entering her home, pushing her cart through the gate with her daughter, Myong-song, inside. Nobody opening the gate for her. Nobody greeting her.
She’s home alone.
But then what does he do? If he parks the car along this road he’d have been spotted. Somebody would’ve remembered him. Foreigners are a rarity in this area. Who knows? Somebody might’ve even gone outside and waited for him by his car so they could practice their conversational English. Koreans do that all the time. It’s considered a friendly gesture. But nothing like that had happened. Lieutenant Rhee and his men had checked. Everyone along this road from here to Taegu had been interviewed.
They’d seen nothing.
So what had the guy done?
I told the cabbie to stop. Up above Mrs. Yi’s home loomed a cliff covered with shrubs and tufts of long grass. I pointed and asked the cabbie if there was a way up there.
We’d have to follow the road we were on back into town, he told me, and then another road that led back to the top of that hill.
“Is it a seldom-used road?” I asked him. “One that’s hard to find?”
He shrugged. “Anyone who drives around here knows about it.”
I told him to show me.
Ten minutes later the cab pulled into an open area atop a hill. The space was used, he said, for parking on weekends when filial descendents paid homage to their dearly departed.
I paid him and climbed out of the taxi. More gently rolling hills spread behind me and away from the city of Taegu. Each was dotted with tombstones and small mounds.
A graveyard. Koreans bury their dead sitting upright, so they can maintain a view of the world around them. On weekends families come up here with picnic lunches, sit near the mounds, eat, talk, laugh, and try to make the dead person feel that the family hasn’t forgotten them.
The cabbie asked me if I wanted him to wait. I told him no thanks. As he sped off I glanced down the hill in the direction of the city. Below spread a perfect view of the road we had been on and the home of Mrs. Yi Won-suk.
First I examined the parking lot. Nothing. Then I walked down the hill. It was an easy walk because a pathway had been cut by ten thousand footsteps. Soon I was behind the other homes in the area and no curious eyes peeked out to spy on me. A minute later, I stood in front of the open gate of the home of Mrs. Yi Won-suk.
That’s how it must’ve happened. He’d cruised by on the main road, seen Mrs. Yi entering the gate that led to her courtyard, driven up to park atop the hill, and then walked down here.
But who had the time during the middle of a workday? And who had a vehicle dispatched for his personal use? Not any GI at Camp Henry. The murderer had to be someone who owned a POV. Maybe he wasn’t from Camp Henry at all. Maybe he’d been traveling. An inspection team from 8th Army? Not likely. They travel in groups.
Someone with his own POV, traveling the back roads of Korea. A happy wanderer.
That’s when it hit me. A salesman. Insurance. That was it. They wandered from one military installation to another selling their wares. Like camp followers.
I walked back to the road in a state of excitement, dying to tell Ernie what I’d come up with. I had to wait twenty minutes until another cab cruised by.
You’d think that an unmarried GI with one hundred percent health insurance and free dental and a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cheap Serviceman’s Group Life wouldn’t need another insurance policy. And they don’t. But life insurance salesmen somehow managed, every day, to convince young American GIs that they do. It’s a legitimate product. In fact, before an insurance salesman is allowed access to one of 8th Army’s compounds, he and his company have to be vetted by the Judge Advocate General’s Office. Any policy they sell to a GI must contain a clause that his life insurance is still valid if he’s unexpectedly shipped out to a combat zone. Most of the big companies have no problem with this. GIs are young and healthy and the odds are that not many of them are going to die soon.
So it’s a profitable market.
Once Ernie and I returned to Seoul, I checked with JAG and was surprised to discover that there were over thirty certified life insurance agents operating amongst the fifty US military compounds in the Republic of Korea. Every one of them owned a POV.
Once we had a list, it was a matter of straight police work eliminating those with alibis. We didn’t approach them directly but rather pretended to be potential customers and asked for the agents who served the Taegu area. Most of them didn’t. Seoul and the area north to the Demilitarized Zone are where most young GIs can be found. Down south there are relatively slim pickings. None of the agents actually kept a home base there. But we found of the seven US insurance companies operating in-country, six of them had agents who traveled to Taegu periodically. We were able to establish that four of the agents had been in Seoul at the time of the murder of Mrs. Yi Won-suk. The other two had been traveling in the southern area of the country, covering the bases in Taejon, Waegwan, Taegu, and Pusan. Of those two, one insurance agent was a black man. The other was a Caucasian male with light brown hair and blood type O positive.
We had our man.
The bust was made with the assistance of the Korean National Police. Lieutenant Rhee from Taegu traveled all the way up here to Seoul for the honor of arresting the man who had caused such an uproar in the Korean media.
His name was Fred Ammerman. He lived in the outskirts of Seoul in a cement-block apartment complex in Bampo, just south of the Han River. His wife, a Korean national, was absolutely flabbergasted by the proceedings, but she knew enough not to interfere with the Korean National Police. Ammerman was a man of average height and average weight, except for the potbelly that protruded over the waistline of his tailored slacks. He remained calm while the Korean police handcuffed him and while Lieutenant Rhee told him in broken English that they were taking him in for questioning.
Ammerman did glance at us hopefully and say, “What about Eighth Army?”
“We have no jurisdiction over you, Ammerman,” Ernie said. “This is between you and the ROKs.”
As a civilian in country on a work visa, military law couldn’t touch him.
After the KNPs took Ammerman away, I spoke to his wife for a few moments. She was a husky Korean woman, taller and stronger than Mrs. Yi Won-suk had b
een, but with attractive facial features that softened the pronounced bone structure beneath the flesh. She stared into the distance as she spoke.
“My children are both at school,” she said. “For that I am happy.”
“Did you know what he was doing on those trips?” I asked her.
“I knew he had women. That I know long time. But take woman like that. Punch her. Kill her. That I don’t know.”
But there seemed little doubt in Mrs. Ammerman’s mind that the charges were true.
Already a crowd of neighbors was beginning to gather outside on the sidewalk. Mrs. Ammerman glanced toward them and, with a worried look, started clawing at her lower lip. After they’d arrested her foreign husband, the Korean cops had shown no concern about Mrs. Ammerman at all. They didn’t question her because a wife is not expected to offer any evidence that might hurt her husband. And they certainly weren’t concerned about her mental state. By now, Ernie was outside, leaning against his jeep, waiting for me, chewing gum.
“Is there anyone I can call?” I asked. “A friend or relative who can be with you?”
She glanced at me as if awakening from a dream. “Don’t worry. Pretty soon they come. Everybody come. I no can stop them.”
I left her and walked out to the jeep.
Once Ammerman was in custody, the evidence against him piled up fast. They tested his blood just to make sure that the medical records Ernie and I had checked earlier were correct. He was in fact O positive. And they matched his body hair by microscopic analysis with the pubic hairs found at the murder site of Mrs. Yi Won-suk. A perfect match. Also, Ammerman had no convincing alibi for his whereabouts on the day of the murder, but he took a hard line and chose not to speak to the Korean National Police. This was tough to do since they have their way of convincing you that it would be in your interest to answer their questions. But Ammerman gutted it out and kept mum.
His insurance company dropped him like a bad habit. But Ammerman did have savings and the word we received from the KNPs was that Ammerman was hiring some American lawyer from Honolulu who’d worked on foreign cases before. Not smart. The Koreans considered this move to be an insult to Korean lawyers and the Korean judicial system in general. The better move would’ve been to plead guilty and express great remorse and ask the court for leniency.
