Identical Stories

Through the windshield of the rented getaway car, Jeen Han watches the front door of the corner apartment. She sees the two boys she met only a few days earlier approach the place where her identical twin, Sunny Han, lives. She sees the older boy, the one holding the gun out of sight, knock. The door opens, and the boys, pretending to sell magazines, talk politely with a young woman. Then they push their way inside. * The next thing Jeen, better known as Gina, will see from her parking spot in the sprawling peach-stucco complex is the younger boy hurrying down the sidewalk toward the car. But for what seems like forever she is shut out of the scene that she choreographed the day the lid blew off her rage.

She has no clue yet that things are not going according to the script. That Sunny, hearing her roommate’s shrieks, has called 911 on her cell phone from a back bathroom. That as 16-year-old Archie Bryant corners Sunny, throws her to the carpet, points the derringer at her back and barks, “I’ll kill you. I’ll shoot you,” the Irvine police are already on their way.

Within minutes, they surround the apartment and yell, “Police!”

Posing as innocent bystanders, Gina and 15-year-old Jonathan Sayarath sit tight in the Mustang convertible.

Inside, Bryant panics. He frantically undoes his and Sayarath’s handiwork, untying the women’s wrists and tearing duct tape from their mouths. “Just tell the cops it was a big joke, like we were playing a game,” he begs.

As the uniforms move in, a now-frantic Gina suddenly bails out of the car, confronts an officer and demands to know what’s going on. Oblivious of her role in the crime, he shoos her away. By the time Bryant emerges from the apartment in handcuffs, followed by his stunned and disoriented victims, tape still clinging to their hair, Gina and Jonathan are high-tailing back to San Diego.

Police greet the pair at the Alamo car-rental facility near Lindbergh Field. Bryant had blabbed to investigators, of course, told them all about the “bad blood” between the sisters. At the Irvine station, Gina gets tagged with a nickname: evil twin.

*

By default, Sunny got to be the good twin.

As the international media swooped in and ran wild with the bizarre story of a 22-year-old woman accused of hiring a pair of teenagers to kill her identical twin, she hooked up with a media agent and made the rounds. In the months after Gina’s arrest in November 1996, Sunny quietly told Leeza and Geraldo and the nice folks at “Hard Copy,” who paid her $10,000, that the sister with whom she had shared a womb, a horrible childhood and co-valedictorian honors in high school could not do such a thing. Yes, their relationship had deteriorated in recent years as both girls stumbled toward adulthood. True, Gina had betrayed her before, many times, particularly after she took up gambling. And, according to several witnesses, Gina had even talked about her plan to have Sunny murdered. But Sunny chose to believe her sister’s story, that she had merely wanted to scare Sunny into returning some of her belongings--a driver’s license, clothes, a backpack and a tax-refund check.

Tales about rival twins date back to Romulus and Remus, the brothers from Roman mythology who grew into bitter enemies; Remus died at the hands of either Romulus or one of his followers, and Romulus became ruler of Rome. In the film era, they have made for juicy movie plots. Bette Davis twice portrayed both the good twin and the evil twin, in the 1946 film “A Stolen Life” and 18 years later in “Dead Ringer.”

But what captivates many of us are the amazing true stories about the sometimes surreal primordial connection between identical twins, like the inseparable pair who married another inseparable pair and lived happily ever after in a duplex in Idaho. Or the brothers, separated at birth, who as adults discovered many inexplicable similarities, from their taste in TV sitcoms right on down to their cigarette brand. Though not all experts buy into the phenomenon known as “utero-bonding,” it explains the media gluttony in the Han case.

“The idea of an identical twin killing another is so fantastic that we can’t imagine,” observes Nancy L. Segal, a Cal State Fullerton psychology professor and leading expert on twins. “If this had been ordinary siblings or cousins or friends, it wouldn’t have captured anyone’s imagination,” she says. “We tend to think of twins as being so close and compatible, which in most cases they are.”

So what went wrong here?

*

In Korean culture, the firstborn is given special status, even if the child holds an edge of only a few minutes, as Sunny did on April 30, 1974. Perhaps that tradition made it easier for a single mother without the means to care for twins to decide which baby to keep. Soon after giving birth, 26-year-old Boo Kim separated her daughters, sending Gina to live with her maternal grandfather.

Despite their three-year separation, Kim recalls, the girls developed an intense bond, emotionally and physically. “They are twins, all the time. Even when very young, when Sunny is sick, the same problem with Gina. Even living in different houses, all the time we go meet in hospital. Even now when Sunny feels bad she says, ‘Mommy, Gina has problem now. She’s feeling something now.’ Sunny and Gina is not two people, there’s only one.”

After being reunited, Sunny and Gina clung to each other during an erratic upbringing marked by frequent moves and the bad habits of a single parent. Any stability they may have had during their early childhood in Korea disappeared once their mother divorced the man whom the twins until recently had believed to be their biological father.

Kim moved the girls from Inchon to the United States in 1986 but left the daunting work of nurturing 12-year-olds through language and cultural adjustments to relatives in Seattle. After a year, she brought them to join her in Orange County. Kim’s wages as a cocktail waitress didn’t stretch far, Sunny recalls, and the family often ran short on food and money. The threat of eviction loomed. And Kim would disappear for days at a time, off on gambling binges, according to both twins and family friends. One time, when she finally surfaced, she had to retrieve her seventh-graders from the children’s home where they had been placed.

Desperate to escape the tumult of life with their mother, the twins crafted a plan to move in with distant relatives in Campo, a town about 50 miles east of San Diego. For the next few years, while staying with Sonya and Jim Norris and their two children and attending Mount Empire Junior-Senior High School, they thrived--academically at least. Teacher Shirley Langford remembers the Han twins lugging around a large Korean-English dictionary with a pale red binding and thin, dogeared pages. As seniors, the girls earned straight A’s, ranking among the top five of the class of ’93. “I think it was pretty phenomenal that a couple of foreign students could reach those academic goals,” Langford says. “They really wanted to succeed. There was very little support and encouragement from home for them to do that.”

Once her daughters moved away, Kim rarely reached out to them. Their first face-to-face contact in five years was her visit to Gina in the Orange County jail shortly after her arrest. “We both started crying,” Kim recalls. “We couldn’t talk. Gina was mad at me because I didn’t take care of my daughters. She said I threw her away.”

During her senior year, Sunny had left the Norris home to live with her boyfriend’s family--a move triggered by Sonya’s discovery of a venomous letter about her that Sunny had intended to send to her mother. In the fallout over the letter, the Norrises also forbade Sunny and Gina to see each other outside of school. Still, Gina would sneak Korean food over to her sister.

Acts of kindness became scarce, however, as the twins’ sisterly sniping grew more fierce and physical as they grew older. “We would fight all the time, find the right words to hurt each other, even try to choke each other, throw things, ruin each other’s stuff, cut our clothes,” Gina told a psychologist shortly after her arrest.

For all their book smarts, neither twin had developed a knack for dealing with everyday life. “They seemed to lack plain practical sense,” observes Charlene Mitchell, a Campo neighbor who took Gina under her wing. “They didn’t seem to know how to cope with things.”

Jean Buchman, with whom Sunny lived in her senior year, puts it this way: “They didn’t know the difference between wants and needs, because half the time, they didn’t have what they needed. So, their wants got out of control.”

Sunny agrees with her friends, who remain supportive of both twins.

“It’s really sad,” she says. “It’s almost like we weren’t ready to be adults.”

when identical female twins become adults, they often live nearby, sometimes within a few doors of each other, experts say. Sunny and Gina went their separate ways after high school, and on the few occasions they did see each other, it usually meant trouble.

Sunny, who had won a scholarship to LaVerne University in Pomona, began to flail academically. With “boyfriend problems” rattling her concentration, she says, she lasted three semesters before losing her scholarship and dropping out. Over the next four years, she bounced from one low-paying no-brainer job to the next. At one point, she resumed her studies at Cypress College but soon abandoned them.

After graduation, Gina worked as a waitress while completing requirements for U.S. citizenship, then enlisted in the Air Force, reporting to basic training at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, in May, 1994. Less than a month later, she wanted out. She told her superiors that her father was seriously ill, then concocted another lie about being a lesbian. Charlene Mitchell remembers Gina crying into the phone: “ ‘They’re going to put me in jail.’ I talked to her commander and he said, ‘We’re not going to put her in jail. We’re trying to calm this girl down.’ ” Gina got her discharge.

Back in the San Diego area, she found an apartment, waited on tables and eventually enrolled in classes to become a blackjack dealer. Hiring on at the Barona Casino in Lakeside, she quickly picked up the habit that would color everything she did from that point on. Gina was a gambler now, sinking to new lows under a weight of debt. By her own account in a psychological evaluation, she “lost everything” playing blackjack and tried to wipe away her mess of a life by chasing sleeping pills with liquor in a January 1996 suicide attempt. Four months later, shortly after quitting the Barona, she was arrested and sentenced to 10 days in jail and three years’ probation for stealing money from Jim Norris and Charlene Mitchell.

Gina had also admitted taking $300 from Sunny a few months earlier during one of their rare visits, triggering a nasty argument. Still, Sunny invited her sister to stay at her Placentia apartment after she got out of jail. Living under the same roof for the first time in four years, the sisters fell into an old pattern. Skirmishes escalated into battles, the worst after Gina disappeared for two days with Sunny’s leased 1995 BMW. Police arriving to break up a noisy brawl found Gina with a bloody nose. “At some point, in the kitchen, I don’t know if I hit her with the phone or punched her in the face, but I did hit her,” Sunny testified in court.

As the officers investigated the fight, they turned up an outstanding warrant--not for the likely suspect, Gina, but for Sunny. Apparently unsatisfied with the buying power of her receptionist’s salary, she had used a friend’s credit card to pay for new clothes; the friend was “rich,” so Sunny didn’t think she’d mind. Returning home from a brief stay in jail, Sunny discovered two things missing: her BMW and her wallet. She told police whom to look for. This time, having violated probation, Gina would spend the summer and fall in jail. In October, while out on a day pass from a work furlough program, she called Sunny and asked her to come pick her up.

“She sounded so nice, so friendly,” Sunny recalled. “She said, ‘How’s your car?’ ”

But Sunny was unswayed. Fearful of having Gina show up on her doorstep, she had moved to a quiet neighborhood near UC Irvine. She didn’t want her sister to know where she lived. She didn’t want to help her. And she told her so.

Furious, Gina began openly discussing plans to have her sister killed and asked several people if they would help. Through friends, she finally found willing accomplices in Sayarath and Bryant, who were promised $100 each for their participation.

Gina later admitted to the psychologist, “I got ballistic.”

*

Almost a year to the day after the attack, on Nov. 4, 1997, Sunny arrives in a Santa Ana courtroom, flanked by security escorts from the D.A.’s office, for her second day of emotionally painful testimony. Wearing a summery snakeskin-print tank dress and a dazed expression, she all but wobbles up to the witness stand, sinks into the chair and mumbles so only the judge can hear that she took a bunch of sleeping pills.

The sensational footage of the aborted proceedings is aired at 6 and 11, and repeatedly on Court TV, as Sunny recovers in the hospital, recalling nothing about court that day. When she resumes her testimony a week later, she explains to the jury that she had been “emotionally extremely depressed.”

Only another twin can relate to the depth of that depression, says Dr. Raymond Brandt, founder and director of Twinless Twins, a support group for people who have been separated from a twin by death or other circumstances. He worried that Sunny might attempt suicide. They had met as guests on “Geraldo” a few months before the trial and afterward talked over dinner at a Manhattan seafood restaurant. A fragile-looking Sunny barely touched her food, he recalls.

“I just wanted to be her dad and take as much pain away from her as I could. She felt very betrayed. I sensed that immediately. She felt disillusioned about the twinship.”

When the time comes, Sunny watches the reading of the verdict live on Court TV in her apartment, having been scared into seclusion by a rabid Korean press. She sees Gina’s face as the jury convicts her and the two teens of two counts of both conspiracy to commit murder and false imprisonment by violence, among a handful of other charges.

“My emotions filled up,” Sunny says later. “I saw the look on her face and I felt something. I was so upset to see her. I could see how confident she had been [of a not guilty verdict]. I totally cried.”

Six months later, Gina is the one in tears, upset about having to wear the drab-blue jail jumpsuit to court instead of her own clothes. It’s a bad beginning to the worst day of her life as her attorney, Deputy Public Defender Roger Alexander, calls witnesses in a last-ditch effort to win a new trial, or at least a lenient sentence.

As the May sentencing date drew near, a desperate Boo Kim had showed up at the Garden Grove offices of the Korean-American Federation of Orange County to beg for help. The group’s president, Koo Oh, agreed to try. He and others visited Gina in jail and began a letter-writing campaign and petition drive in hopes of persuading the judge not to impose the maximum penalty of 25 years to life on the conspiracy charge.

“Most of the Korean people think that is too much for her, too stiff,” Oh said before the sentencing. “What she did is wrong and she should get some punishment for telling the youngsters to go inside the apartment and threaten her sister and the other girl. But there are culture differences. In Korea, our cultures, our customs, you can fight with your brothers and sisters. Sometimes small matters and sometimes big. Whenever they fight in Korea, they say, ‘I’ll kill you.’ But it doesn’t mean they are really going to kill them.”

Kim stands up for Gina again in court, explaining that her daughter is a good girl. Other pro-Gina witnesses testify, and then, just before Judge Eileen C. Moore sentences her to 26 years to life for all the counts (Bryant gets 18 to life and Sayarath eight years), Gina herself speaks for the first time in court: “[I had] “absolutely no intent to kill my twin sister . . . I want my sister to know that I love her very much.”

*

Sunny all but sleeps away the months leading up to the sentencing. After the lucrative offers to tell her story run dry, she relies on her boyfriend for financial support and hardly leaves the apartment, except to visit the psychiatrist for help in dealing with depression. Adding to her emotional upheaval is the devastating news, first reported in a Korean newspaper and later confirmed by her mother, that the man she thought was her biological father isn’t. “[The twins] don’t know the face of their father,” Boo Kim admits.

Then, a few days before Gina’s sentencing, a healthy-looking Sunny makes her second appearance on “Leeza”; the segment is titled “In the Name of Love.” Sitting alongside a Santa Ana attorney whose firm is now negotiating possible film deals for her, she tells an incredulous Leeza Gibbons and a disbelieving studio audience that her sister didn’t want her to die: “She is my blood and it’s hard to believe that your blood would want to do something horrible.” The crowd, hearing that a loaded gun was involved, shakes its head in collective dismay, but Sunny remains adamant in her public defense of Gina.

Privately, though, it’s clear she has begun to wonder. In a long, late-night phone interview in March, Sunny acknowledges that no one will really ever know what was going through her sister’s mind. The sisters have never discussed the case, she says, not even when she visited Gina in jail in the summer of 1997. She says she’s not ready to face her twin again, but knows that she will someday.

“I really love her as a sister, but I feel she is a different person,” Sunny says. “I wish she would come to my face and tell me what’s inside--tell me the truth.”