Death of a Family : It’s a saga of sexual abuse, clashing cultures, untold riches and multiple suicides. But even after the latest trial is over, probably no one is ever really going to know what went on behind closed doors in the Cho household.

The two-hour home video could have been a chronicle of any happy suburban family over a 10-year period, a house full of proud parents and growing children on a number of joyous occasions.

They celebrate birthdays. They take family trips to American landmarks. In one culturally distinctive ceremony for this affluent Korean-American family, the children come forward one by one and bow to their father, touching their foreheads to the floor in a gesture of obeisance and respect.

There is no hint of what was to ensue.

The father, Kyung Mook (Edward) Cho, 54, a multimillionaire Orange County real estate developer, was accused of molesting four of his children. His oldest daughter and her boyfriend committed suicide soon afterward, another daughter denounced him in court as “possessed by Satan,” and a year ago this month he was convicted of 25 counts of sexual abuse and child molestation.

Cho’s 84-year prison sentence on Dec. 17, followed by his shocking Christmas Day suicide in the Orange County Jail, made headlines throughout Southern California. But it was in the Korean-American community--where Cho was already controversial--that the tragic saga provoked the most soul-searching and continues to puzzle many.

While the judge called Cho’s behavior despicable and his children were devastated, Cho continued to assert his innocence in the days after his conviction.

“People are confused because Mr. Cho killed himself,” said Dr. Injong Hong, executive director of the L.A. Korean Family Counseling and Legal Advice Center. “Some people believe he killed himself to prove he was innocent.”

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To this day, many in the Korean-American community believe that Edward Cho was the victim of vindictive children who rebelled against his strict, traditional parenting by inventing unthinkable accusations, believed by the jurors.

“Culture killed him,” said Chris Nam, vice president of the Korean Assn. of Orange County, who emigrated from the same Korean village as his friend Cho.

Cho strongly asserted the same point. In a letter to his minister--written from jail and later published in two Korean-language newspapers--Cho contended that “Orange County’s all-white jurors’ biases and their inability to understand other cultures brought about” his conviction.

During a custody case and a criminal trial, and in documents filed for a civil lawsuit over Cho’s estate, Cho’s children argued that his behavior grew from his feudal notion that they were his property.

Cho’s son claimed at the criminal trial that his father sexually abused him because Cho appeared to believe that “he owned me or something.”

“Sometimes Korean fathers exert unreasonable discipline or exercise an authoritarian way of rearing children, which creates tremendous emotional turmoil in their children,” agreed Moon Ju Kim, education minister at Bethel Korean Church in Irvine.

The revelations that have poured out in the three court proceedings stand in stark contrast to the idyllic image the Cho family offered to the world.

After immigrating in 1971, Cho prospered in Orange County, concentrating his real estate business in Garden Grove and amassing holdings that at one time were estimated at nearly $3.5 million. He lived in a large home in Fountain Valley and worked his way to prominence in the Korean-American business community.

But even before allegations of sexual abuse were made against him in 1992, Edward Cho was a controversial figure.

“Some people in the Korean community didn’t like him because they thought he was like Scrooge,” said Myong Hwan (David) Son, one of Cho’s best friends. Cho was well-known for his reluctance to pick up a meal check, and he argued over bets at weekly penny-ante poker games, he said.

At the same time, Cho made large donations to civic and cultural organizations, said Son, a frequent visitor to Cho’s home.

All who knew Cho--family members, business associates, attorneys and even his minister--agreed that he was a strict disciplinarian, an authoritarian father who inflicted corporal punishment at times. He tried to exert almost total control over his children’s lives, dictating everything from whom they could befriend to what colleges they would attend and what professions they would pursue, friends and family said.

“In the Korean household, the father is the dominant figure,” said Erica Kim, Cho’s civil attorney. “Everyone obeys everything that Dad says. Mr. Cho was an extreme example of that. He was extremely stingy, very shrewd, very bright, very aggressive.”

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The fourth of eight children born to poor, uneducated parents in a rural Korean village, Edward Cho worked his way through a church college in Seoul. Upon his arrival in the United States, he worked as a Seventh-Day Adventist minister for eight years in the Northern California community of San Lorenzo. After a short marriage that produced two children, Cho remarried and had two more children.

Cho had increasing success as a restaurateur and developer. But his life as a conventional family man was interrupted in 1983, when he moved to L.A. and sent to South Korea for his two daughters from a previous relationship, Young Sun Cho and her younger sister.

What happened between 1983 and 1992, in various residences in Los Angeles and Orange counties, is documented in police reports, in testimony at Cho’s eight-day criminal trial and in documents filed in connection with the civil suit brought by four of Edward Cho’s children. Despite Cho’s death, that suit will be tried against Cho’s estate and his widow.

Further documentation comes from a juvenile custody hearing during which the two youngest Cho children were removed from the home.

Shortly after her father brought her from South Korea, Young Sun Cho told authorities, he began forcing her to have sex with him. She was 14.

“He just comes in, and I will be laying there,” she testified, “and he . . . will just have sex with me.”

By acquiescing, Young Sun Cho testified, “I always thought I was protecting my sister . . . from him having sex with her.”

But, the younger sister testified, Edward Cho also began to abuse her sexually at the age of 9 and continued for nine years. Both daughters said they were unaware that the other was being victimized.

The children testified that their father also regularly kicked and beat them and his wife, sometimes with a stick and a tennis racquet. He threw bowls and furniture at them, they said. Cho’s widow acknowledged that her husband physically disciplined the children but denied that he was brutal.

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In early 1992, Young Sun Cho, then 23, moved out. Several months later, on April 23, she contacted the Orange County Department of Social Services Child Abuse Registry, records show.

On May 6, Young Sun Cho and her younger sister repeated their charges to Fountain Valley police. On May 11, the Department of Social Services removed the two younger children from the home. The younger children also testified later about inappropriate touching by their father. Edward Cho was arrested several days later.

Five months after bringing the sex abuse charges, Young Sun Cho and her boyfriend, who had encouraged her to come forward, killed themselves in their Los Angeles apartment.

“There is no doubt in my mind that Young Sun killed herself due to the abuse,” Detective Kim Brown of the Fountain Valley Police Department wrote in a report. “In talking with her, she was very disturbed about the sexual abuse and the methods of fear used by their father to make her submit. The torment he caused fueled her decision to take her own life.”

During the custody proceedings, Edward Cho vigorously denied the abuse charges. On the witness stand, he called the charges unthinkable, the accusations “gross, heinous things.”

Edward Cho’s attorney, John Barnett, invoked the Salem witch trials, telling the jury at Cho’s criminal trial that Cho’s older daughters were “sophisticated, and they (were) cunning, and they knew what they wanted. And what they wanted was not vindication . . . what they wanted was money. . . . There was not any sex . . . that didn’t happen.”

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On May 5, 1993, a jury found Cho guilty of 25 counts of sexual abuse against three of his children. He was acquitted of molesting his son.

The civil lawsuit was filed on behalf of four of Cho’s six children: the two minors, now in foster care; a daughter who is in college, and Young Sun Cho, who committed suicide.

The lawsuit asks for $13 million or whatever remains of Edward Cho’s holdings. The children also sued Cho’s wife for allegedly allowing the molestation to occur. Depositions are being taken.

Attorneys for the Cho estate and his widow have responded by blaming his two older daughters for a plot to acquire his wealth--a charge they deny.

But money--even a great deal of money--would not have been enough temptation for the Cho children to expose themselves to the shame experienced by victims of incest and sexual abuse, experts say.

“Dragging your family in, bringing such a suit is a big disgrace,” said Dr. Eun Mee Kim, associate professor of sociology at USC. “No amount of money can restore their name.”

Yet, to the day he was found hanging in his jail cell from a noose of bedsheets, Cho maintained that what happened to him could happen to any stern Korean parent.

“If I were to go to jail as a criminal,” he wrote in a letter to the Orange County United Korea Student Assn., “then our 30 million Koreans should all go to prison.”