Murder, and then stares, in L.A.’s Koreatown

The screams shattered the late-afternoon calm of the apartment building.

A middle-aged woman stumbled out of a fourth-floor unit, terrified by her discovery. Neighbors who heard her cries frantically dialed 911. Within minutes, the idyllic block in the Miracle Mile area, lined with jacaranda trees, was swarming with police. A helicopter thundered overhead.

Apartment 402 was a sparsely furnished two-bedroom, with large French windows that let in plenty of afternoon sunlight. The woman led officers through a bedroom into a small bathroom.

There, her 30-year-old daughter, Chi Hyon Song, sat lifeless against a wall. Her mouth was gagged, wrists bound with packaging tape, arms folded in front of her as if in prayer. Gunshots had pierced her head and arm. A middle-aged nanny lay inside the bathtub on her side, shot in the head and chest. Nestled behind her was Chi Hyon’s 2-year-old son. A bullet had entered at his shoulder and severed his spine.

As police canvassed the scene, Chi Hyon’s husband arrived downstairs, holding the hand of the couple’s 4-year-old son, Jin Woo.

Byung Chul Song seemed puzzled by the commotion. An officer whisked away the boy, handcuffed Song and took him to the local police station.

To reporters, police said only that the man was a person of interest. They tested his hands for gunpowder, then questioned him into the night. Finding no evidence to hold him, they released him close to dawn.

But investigators were suspicious. What seemed to them the most probable explanation, the case they would try to prove for years to come, was also the most profoundly disturbing: The woman’s husband, the young child’s father, had somehow been involved in their deaths.

Word of the May 5, 2003, slayings stunned Los Angeles’ Korean community.

Song and his family had lived in the heart of that community. The broad-shouldered former Korean Marine was a respected presence in the Korean-dominated downtown garment district, known as the “jobber market.” Song worked his way up from a box boy to running his own factory and wholesale business. He and his wife attended a Koreatown Baptist church, where she played the flute and Jin Woo attended preschool.

Koreatown’s two highly competitive dailies dubbed the incident the “Miracle Mile murders” and dispatched reporters to find out everything about the Songs. They trailed after investigators, camped out at Song’s business and spoke to church acquaintances.

Soon, amid a flurry of speculation offered by one anonymous acquaintance after another, a picture emerged of a less-than-happy family. Reports of fights and troubles made the papers daily.

“Among people at church, she never talked about her husband, so I thought she lived alone,” an unnamed acquaintance told the Korea Times. “I got the impression that Chi Hyon and her husband weren’t on good terms,” another reportedly said.

Suspicion of Song peaked a month later, when police served a search warrant on his business. Images of officers carting away computers and documents as a flustered Song looked on were splashed across front pages.

The next day, he broke his silence, telling reporters he was “100% innocent.”

“If people understood, even a little, what it’s like to have lost a wife and child at once, they couldn’t cast me as a suspect like this,” he told the Korea Daily. “There are countless rumors, that my deceased wife was my second, that my business is not doing well.”

“I’m also a victim,” he pleaded in an interview with the Korea Times.

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Meanwhile, the police investigation was coming up short.

Officers went door to door in the 168-unit building, questioning everyone they could find. No one heard the gunshots. No one remembered seeing any suspicious persons. Surveillance cameras showed Chi Hyon going upstairs to the apartment alone. Her purse, which was lost the previous day at church, later turned up but provided no leads.

Nor did the two slain women have any relationships that could have led to so brutal an outcome. Chi Hyon had been a housewife until a few months earlier, when she started helping out at her husband’s business. The nanny, 56-year-old Eun Sik Min, was a born-again Christian whose life revolved around her church in Glendale.

With no other obvious leads, the police inquiry continued to focus on Song. Investigators began tapping his phones and tracking his movements.

For Brian McCartin, the LAPD’s lead detective on the case, their scrutiny of Song was a matter of following a basic tenet based on his two decades of investigations: You start with those closest to the victims.

McCartin also found himself thinking back to Song’s interview on the night of the murders.

They questioned him for hours without telling him what they found, trying to see what he knew. He stuck to his story: that he last saw his wife when she left the office in the morning to file a police report about her missing purse.

Toward the end of the interview, they told him his wife and child were dead. Then they watched for his reaction.

“He was too stoic,” McCartin recalled. “There was really no reaction whatsoever. A while later, he broke down and started crying on the floor, but when he found out, nothing.”

There was one piece of evidence that could ensnare the killer. On the packaging tape around Chi Hyon’s mouth were what appeared to be broken-off pieces of a latex glove. Two sets of DNA were on the pieces. One was Chi Hyon’s. The other came up as unknown.

They ran a comparison with Song’s DNA. No match. They compared it with that of his relatives and friends. People close to the nanny’s daughter. A janitor who worked in the building.

There were no matches.

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After a couple months, the Korean media’s fervor waned as quickly as it had flared. Other crimes involving Koreans took over the front pages.

But there were occasional reminders. The case made the Korea Times’ list of top 10 news items of 2003. The papers ran articles marking 100 days since the slayings, the one-year anniversary, then the second.

Song seemed to disappear in the Korean community. He stopped attending church and mostly kept to himself with his surviving son, Jin Woo. A few years later, he quietly remarried.

The police investigation slipped into dormancy.

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In the fall of 2008, a one-page letter landed on McCartin’s desk.

The unknown DNA from the crime scene was identified, the letter said. It belonged to someone named Robin Kyu Cho.

McCartin flipped through his case files. Cho. Cho.

The name was on a list of tenants of the apartment building.

At the time of the killings, detectives had briefly interviewed Cho, who lived on the first floor and parked in a spot adjacent to the Songs’. They asked him if he knew anything. He said no, and they had left it at that.

The 50-year-old father of two boys was an immigrant who helped out at his brother’s dental office and worked odd jobs. In June of 2008, Cho had pleaded guilty to a $2-million Ponzi scheme and received five years’ probation. As a part of his conviction, he was required to submit a DNA sample.

The case took on a new vigor as detectives began surveillance on Cho.

Eventually, detectives picked up the short, round-faced man and questioned him. When he walked out of the station, a team of 15 detectives was on his tail.

Detectives followed Cho to a clothing store parking lot. He parked, then walked across the lot. He stopped at a trash can, took out a crumpled-up newspaper and threw it away.

After Cho drove off, a detective went to the receptacle and dug up the newspaper. He unfolded the ball.

Inside were five unused .38-caliber bullets — the kind used in the murders.

Cho was arrested that evening and charged with triple homicide.

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Leading up to Cho’s arrest, as police built their case, detectives began tapping Song’s phone lines to see if the two would contact each other. They didn’t.

Police asked Song to come to LAPD headquarters. He told them Cho’s face looked remotely familiar but that he didn’t know the man. Neither he nor his wife had been involved in Cho’s fraud case.

Detectives told him that Cho had confessed and said he was paid by the husband to kill his wife and child. It was a ploy to see if Song would break and admit involvement. He didn’t.

Authorities ruled out Song as a suspect. It had been nearly six years since the deaths of his wife and child.

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One morning in the summer of 2009, Song awoke early and donned a crisply pressed black suit.

Jin Woo, now 10, wandered into the room and stared. He was used to seeing his father rush off to work in a T-shirt and jeans.

“Where are you going?” the boy asked.

“Court,” Song replied.

“Why?” Jin Woo asked.

Song still couldn’t bring himself to talk about the tragedy with his son.

The slayings had left a gaping hole in Song’s life. Jin Woo had been the only thing that kept him going. Amid the rumors, suspicious glances and offhand remarks, he had contemplated taking his own life. The pain was sharpest when he sat alone in his car, reminiscing about taking the toddler, Hyun Woo, on errands.

For six years, Song never once talked to Jin Woo about what happened. Jin Woo never asked. Therapists told Song the boy was harboring anxiety he kept hidden. It showed in the red colors he used in his drawings, they said.

That day, at Cho’s preliminary hearing, Song stared intently at the back of the man accused of killing his wife and child.

McCartin, the detective, took the stand and said he suspected money was the motive, but he had no evidence to prove it. Cho’s defense attorneys again pointed to Song, saying police were grasping at straws because they were unable to prove their case against the husband.

“The person who did this case appears, to us, to be the husband,” attorney Theodore Flier told the judge in a bid to have the case against Cho dismissed. “Was there financial gain for husband? …. The husband might have a girlfriend out there who might want to get rid of them.”

The judge ordered Cho to stand trial for triple homicide — likely to take place later this year.

The Korean reporters who had doggedly pursued the case were nowhere in the courtroom. Chi Hyon’s mother, who stopped speaking to Song after he remarried, hurriedly left. In the hallway, a brief, uncomfortable silence hung between Song and the detectives who had long suspected him, before each of them went his way.

victoria.kim@latimes.com