Did She Really Murder the Husband? : A Reconstruction of the Story of a ‘Killer Wife’

This study is part of a series on the nature of murder cases of ‘wife murdering the husband’ during the japanese colonial period. The study focuses on rediscovering the facts of such a case in 1924 through historical and medical evidence. The crime of ‘wife murdering the husband’ was defined as a particular type of crime in colonial Joseon. It was thought to be rooted in the local practice of early marriage and condemned as evidence demonstrating the backwardness of the Joseon society. Numerous cases were reported in the papers and were punished under criminal charges. However, this study raises the question of whether the many reported cases were, in fact, truly a wife’s attempts to kill her husband. The study looks into the case of one woman who pleaded not guilty. The study reconstructs in detail her marriage process, her life with the in-laws and the process of her arrest and court trials from her life history and micorhistory perspectives. We zoom in on the loopholes found in the criminal trial process and forensics at the time. The woman was raped by a relative when she was younger, and was later married off against her will to another man who had STD. And when the husband died, the wife was accussed of being the murderer. She managed to get help from a Korean lawyer at the very final stage of the trial, but only barely escaped a death sentence. She was framed as a murderer because the husband’s family bore hatred against the daughter-in-law who was considered and ‘outsider’ and because the society denounced a woman who had been raped. This hatred and denouncement did not necessarily come from personal character of the husband’s family members, but rather rooted in the modern family power dynamics during the colonial period.