SEOUL– The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down an eight-year prison term for a woman charged in the mysterious disappearance and deaths of two 3-year-old girls, citing the lack of concrete evidence proving her culpability.
The top court sent the case back to the Daegu District Court for a retrial on the grounds that more court hearings are necessary to illuminate the motive and methodology of her alleged crime amid the lack of evidence.
The 49-year-old woman, surnamed Seok, was charged with attempting to dispose of the body of her 3-year-old daughter last year and abducting her granddaughter of the same age years ago in the city of Gumi, about 200 kilometers southeast of Seoul.
The case dates back to February last year when the mummified body of a 3-year-old girl was discovered at the former home of Seok’s 23-year-old daughter, surnamed Kim, six months after Kim moved out alone to remarry.
As investigations proceeded into Kim over lethal child abuse charges and Seok for alleged attempted corpse abandonment, the case took a bizarre twist.
Several DNA tests pinpointed Seok as the biological mother of the dead girl, while Kim was found to have raised her, believing the girl was her own daughter.
Based on the DNA test results, prosecutors and police added child abduction charges against Seok, suspecting she and her adult daughter gave birth to girls around the same time shortly before Seok switched the babies so that her baby daughter could be raised by her grown-up daughter.
The case made headlines for months last year for its mysterious and astonishing nature as investigators failed to come up with damning evidence to connect the dots in the case, including the whereabouts of Kim’s missing daughter and whether she is alive or dead, in the face of stubborn denials by Seok.
In the previous rulings, the district and appeals courts had acknowledged the biological mother-and-daughter relationship between Seok and the dead girl, convicting her of switching the babies.
The courts at that time cited a series of circumstantial facts as the basis for the conviction, including that she watched childbirth-related videos and stopped buying feminine hygiene products during her suspected pregnancy.
Reversing the lower courts’ rulings, however, the Supreme Court said the DNA test results are no more than proof of the biological mother-and-daughter relationship and that they cannot stand as evidence for Seok’s alleged switching of the babies.
The top court said more court hearings are needed to find the motive and the methodology behind the alleged crime, as well as the whereabouts of the missing child, to determine whether Seok is guilty of abduction by switching the babies.
The court also challenged the lower courts’ conclusions that Seok and Kim gave birth at around the same time and that Seok switched the babies, on the grounds that there is no damning evidence, such as CCTV footage or witness accounts.
That Seok committed the crime merely to cover up bearing a child cannot be accepted as a sufficient motive for the crime, the court also said, adding lingering questions about the “indirect” evidence presented in the case should be answered.
Source: Yonhap News Agency