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About this project
Chapter One:
The Dead American
Chapter Two:
Bootprints and the Blue House
Chapter Three:
A Problem of Motive
Chapter Four:
Confession
Chapter Five:
The First Prime Suspect
Chapter Six:
Tofu at the Prison Gate
<p><strong>MURDER IN ROOM 103</strong></p> <p><strong>Chapter one: The Dead American <br> By Harriet Ryan</strong></p> <span class="bigletter">S</span>EOUL – “There’s a dead body in my room!” </p> <p>The cry pierced the Sunday morning silence of the run-down motel, rousing the backpackers and the Nigerian peddlers and the American GIs and the prostitutes. </p> <p>A woman was shouting in English in the narrow first-floor hallway and banging her fists against the plywood-thin doors of the shabby rooms. </p> <p>“There’s a dead body in my room, and I can’t find Jamie,” she screamed. </p> <p>Behind her, just inside the doorway of Room 103, lay the naked body of a young woman. A black cloth covered her face, blood trickled from her head, and dark bruises marred her chest. </p> <p>The police who rushed to the motel in Seoul’s seedy Itaewon neighborhood on March 18, 2001, soon identified the woman as Jamie Penich. She was a 21-year-old American exchange student on a weekend trip. She had been beaten and stomped so savagely that her roommate had not initially recognized her. </p> <p>The cry in the hall triggered an international investigation that led from a tiny street-corner police station to the Korean president’s mansion and to the halls of the U.S. Congress. But four years later, the University of Pittsburgh junior’s grisly murder remains a mystery. Despite a strong pool of suspects, a detailed confession and an arrest, no one knows for sure what happened inside Room 103. </p> <p>Korean police initially believed Jamie’s killer was an American serviceman and brought in a team of U.S. Army and FBI investigators, who agreed that the evidence overwhelmingly pointed to a GI. </p> <p>Months of targeting military suspects, however, yielded no arrests, and Jamie Penich’s murder seemed destined for the cold case file. But then, a powerful U.S. senator began pressuring the Army and Korean authorities to solve the killing. The Army assigned a new investigator. Within months, he reached a shocking conclusion: The killer was not a soldier, but another female exchange student. </p> <p>That woman, a 19-year-old from West Virginia named Kenzi Snider, ultimately confessed to U.S. authorities that she had killed Jamie during a lesbian encounter. </p> <p>Snider was shipped back to Seoul, the first American ever extradited to South Korea, to face murder charges and a possible sentence of hanging. But before she left U.S. soil, she recanted her confession, saying overzealous American detectives had coerced the statements. She had nothing to do with Jamie’s murder, she said, and wasn’t even a lesbian. </p> <p>Two trial courts in Korea heard the evidence and agreed. The judges ruled her confession inadmissible and said all the other evidence suggested a male assailant. </p> <p>If the nation’s highest court, the Supreme Court of Korea, upholds those rulings, as they are expected to do this year, Snider will be officially cleared in Jamie’s murder. It is possible that no one will ever be held accountable for killing the beautiful, accomplished student. </p> <p>For Jamie’s parents, who have worked tirelessly on her case from their home in a small town in western Pennsylvania, the lack of resolution keeps their grief raw. </p> <p>“It doesn’t really get better,” Patricia Penich, Jamie’s mother, says. “There’s just no justice. There’s just … nothing.” </p> <p>Jamie Penich arrived in Korea two weeks before she was killed. A double major in religion and anthropology, she was also working toward certificates in religion and Korean East Asian Studies, and planned to spend her spring semester studying at Keimyung University in Daegu, a city of 2.5 million that is a three-hour train ride south of Seoul. </p> <p>The university was vast and intimidating to outsiders. Of the 27,000 students enrolled there, only 19 were foreigners and they clung together. </p> <p>“We lived in the same dorm. We took the same classes. From the second we woke up in the morning to the minute we went to bed, we were together,” recalled a University of Nebraska student who befriended Jamie that spring. </p> <p>Kenzi Snider, an elementary education major from Marshall University in Huntington, W. Va., arrived the same week as Jamie and immediately noticed the exchange program’s insular dynamic. </p> <p> “If they spoke English, they were your friends,” she recalled. </p> <p>On March 16, two weeks after the Americans arrived, a group of exchange students embarked on a weekend jaunt to Seoul (<a href="javascript:NewWindow('/room_103/multimedia/map.html','main','600','440','no')">MAP</a>). Six of them – Jamie, Snider, a Finnish couple and two Dutch students – left straight from class Friday afternoon. A seventh, a Russian student, was to meet up with them Saturday. </p> <p>Jamie phoned her parents shortly before she left. She was excited about the trip and relieved that her $1,000 Pitt stipend had finally arrived, her mother recalled. </p> <p>“I told her, ‘Don’t stay in some fleabag motel. Stay in the Holiday Inn,’” Patricia Penich said. </p> <p>Jamie promised her mother she would. But when the students arrived at Seoul's train station and asked for a hotel recommendation at the tourist booth, an employee looked at their jeans, flannel shirts and backpacks, and recommended they go to Itaewon. </p> <p>The neighborhood is a seamy strip of bars, Western restaurants and nightclubs catering to foreigners, especially the 37,000 U.S. military personnel stationed in South Korea. </p> <p>The tourist-booth employee called ahead to the Kum Sung Motel in Itaewon and asked the manager to hold a few rooms. When the students arrived, they were surprised to find the Kum Sung more flophouse than motel. </p> <p>The rooms, 17 of them, were crammed into a narrow three-story building down the street from a Burger King. They were barely large enough for a double bed and nightstand, and they were frequently rented by the hour. </p> <p>The students giggled over the condom machines bolted to the walls and the red lights illuminating the rooms. But the married couple who ran the place quoted them an attractive rate – about $15 each for the night. </p> <p>They rented three rooms on the first floor. The Finnish couple, Kati Peltomaa, 21, and Tuomas Heikkinen, 22, shared Room 102. Jamie and Dutch student Anneloes Beverwijk, 23, took Room 103. And Snider and JK, 22, a male student from Holland, took Room 104. </p> <p>That Friday night they explored Itaewon. They ate enchiladas at an American-style restaurant and visited a few bars crowded with GIs. They bought beer and stayed up late playing cards in the motel. </p> <p>They woke early the next day, toured the sprawling Namdaemun market, and then met their Russian classmate, Elvira Mahmutova, 25, at the train station. They spent the afternoon taking in tourist attractions, including the Seoul Tower and a traditional folk village. </p> <p>After a brief stop at the motel, where Mahmutova rented Room 101, the students walked to an Indian restaurant for dinner. Afterward, Peltomaa said she wasn’t feeling well, and she and her boyfriend, Heikkinen, returned to the motel. </p> <p>It was St. Patrick’s Day, and Snider suggested they look for a bar serving green beer. </p> <p>Later the students would tell police there were no problems within the group. They had only known each other two weeks, but their friendships were growing fast. Everyone was upbeat, especially Jamie. As they walked past a notorious area known as Hooker Hill, Jamie took on an Elmer Fudd voice and said, “We must be very quiet. We are hunting hookers,” Snider recalled. </p> <p>At about 10 p.m., the group spotted a sign for green beer at Nickelby’s English Pub. </p> <p>Like most bars in Itaewon on a Saturday night, Nickelby’s was crowded with servicemen. Many of the GIs there that night were members of a military running group known as a hash club and were celebrating that day’s run with pitcher after pitcher of beer. </p> <p>The runners were friendly and talkative and kept the students’ glasses filled with beer. Soon, Jamie, Snider and Beverwijk were dancing with the runners. </p> <p>As the evening grew late, Beverwijk began to feel ill and the other two, Mahmutova and Kuilman, became tired. At about 2 a.m., by Beverwijk’s account, the three Europeans decided to return to the motel. The two American women, however, were still on the dance floor. </p> <p>“We both agreed that we would stay, so we were like, ‘OK, we’ll just see you back [at the motel],’” Snider recalled. The other students reminded them to be up by 8:30 the next morning to leave for a tour of the Korean War Memorial. </p> <p>It was the last conversation the other exchange students would ever have with Jamie.</p> <p align="center">* * * </p> <p>Patty Penich knew it was bad news. No one ever called their house in the middle of the night. She rolled over in bed and lifted the receiver. </p> <p>“Hello?” </p> <p>There was the echo of an international connection, and then a woman with an accent said, “May I speak to Mr. Penich?” </p> <p>The words were a blow. She screamed for her husband. Before he picked up the extension and before the woman said another word, Patty knew the call was about Jamie, and she knew the news was terrible. </p> <p>Three years later, talking about that night still levels the Penichs. In the living room of their meticulously kept home in Derry, Pa., Patty Penich set her jaw and looked away from a graduation photograph of Jamie on the dining room sideboard. Brian Penich stared at the coffee table as his eyes welled. </p> <p>“She said, ‘Jamie’s dead. Jamie’s murdered. Jamie’s been strangled,’” he said. </p> <p>He and Patty, his high-school sweetheart, raised three daughters in Derry, a tiny community nestled in the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania. Jamie was the middle child, and from a young age, she was different. </p> <p>“She had a wanderlust. She didn’t want to be just here. She wanted to see what was out there too,” said her mother. Jamie leafed through National Geographic magazines before she even started school. She watched travel shows like other kids watched “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” </p> <p>“This is a girl who walked into kindergarten the first day and said, ‘Go home, Mom,’” Patty said. </p> <p>For Brian, a maintenance worker at a factory that makes tank parts, and Patty, a homemaker, their daughter’s ambition was astonishing. They had lived their entire lives in Derry, a place where diversity meant some people were Catholic and others Presbyterians, and where a long trip was the hour-and-a-half drive to Pittsburgh. But Jamie talked about traveling around the world. </p> <p>In high school, she spent a year as an exchange student in Belgium and traveled throughout Europe. </p> <p>With sparkling eyes and a quick sense of humor, she made friends easily. Although just 5 feet tall and 110 pounds, her confidence made her seem larger. </p> <p>“She wasn’t scared of anything,” Patty said. She once terrified her parents with an account of being lost in Venice during high school. “She just laughed and said it was an adventure. Everything was an adventure.” </p> <p>After graduation, Jamie enrolled at Pitt and took a heavy course load to fulfill the requirements for her two majors and certificates. She told her parents she wanted to be a professor and was prepared for the years of schooling it would take. </p> <p>In 1999, she became engaged to a musician named Jeff Gretz. She remained eager to live abroad, and spent much of 2000 juggling jobs to save money. She worked at a day-care center and at a brewpub, and by the spring of 2001, she had enough money for a semester in Korea. She and Gretz agreed to a break in their relationship. </p> <p>Her parents drove her to the airport. She could scarcely wait to get on the plane. </p> <p>“It was, ‘Bye, I’m getting on the plane, see you later,’” Patty recalled. “She wasn’t worried, and so we weren’t worried.” </p> <p align="center">* * * </p> <p>The husband and wife who ran the Kum Sung Motel had no illusions about their clientele. Mostly foreigners, the guests were often seeking a cheap place for prostitution, drug use or other illicit activities. In fact, when the panicked exchange students dragged the motel manager to Room 103 the morning of March 18, 2001, he glanced in at the dead body, shrugged and said one of the few words he knew in English, “hooker.” </p> <p>Officers from the neighborhood police station arrived at the motel just after 8 a.m., took in the gory scene and herded the half dozen students into Room 102. The young foreigners, some in tears, told the officers that they were not certain the dead woman was Jamie. A black jacket was thrown across the woman’s face and her body was swollen and crusted in blood. They told the officers to see if the woman had a tattoo of the United States on her back. If she did, it was Jamie. </p> <p>A few minutes later, an officer emerged from the room. </p> <p>“Yeah, it’s your friend Jamie,” he said. They stared at each other in shock. Snider called the U.S. Embassy. “I said something along the lines of, ‘We’re Americans. There’s just been a murder. Can you come and help us?’” she recalled. </p> <p>Jamie was found on her back about 4 feet inside Room 103 (<a href="javascript:NewWindow('/room_103/multimedia/crimeScene.html','main','600','440','no')">DIAGRAM</a>). She was lying parallel to the bed, with her head, arms and torso in the main part of the room and her legs stretching onto the linoleum outside the bathroom. Some of her clothes were in the bathroom; others were scattered on the floor. There were bloody footprints around her body, a bloody rag nearby and a distinctive red mark low on the bedroom wall. </p> <p>Jamie’s injuries indicated that someone had stomped on her head and neck repeatedly. Deep cuts and abrasions left her face covered in blood. Her jaw was fractured in two places. Some of her teeth were broken. Two were knocked out of her mouth. The bones and cartilage in her neck were crushed and her right ear was nearly severed. </p> <p>An autopsy (<a href="javascript:NewWindow('/room_103/multimedia/chapterOne_doc3.html','main','600','440','yes')">DIAGRAMS</a>) later determined that she had died from suffocation. Either someone had strangled her or, more likely, she had choked to death because of the injuries to her neck and mouth, the medical examiner concluded. </p> <p>Although she was completely nude, there was no sign of sexual assault, according to the autopsy. </p> <p>Of critical importance to the police were large, footprint-shaped bruises on Jamie’s chest and right cheek. They bore the distinct pattern of military boots, the police thought. </p> <p>Detectives also noted a smear of blood on the inside handle of the motel’s front door. It appeared that someone with bloody hands had left the building. </p> <p>Despite the obvious brutality of the attack, Jamie’s roommate said she knew nothing about the murder. Beverwijk had gone to bed while Jamie was still at the bar, and when she woke up at 8, she said, Jamie was dead in their room. </p> <p>The detectives were skeptical. How could anyone sleep 3 or 4 feet from such a brutal assault and hear nothing? Beverwijk assured them she was a heavy sleeper, especially after drinking. </p> <p>The investigators turned to Snider, the last person known to see Jamie alive. She told them that she and Jamie had remained at the bar dancing, drinking and, in some instances, flirting with the military men. One GI kissed and propositioned her, she said, and Jamie kissed another soldier and gave him her phone number in Daegu. But when the GIs moved on to a nightclub, she and Jamie decided to call it a night. Snider told investigators that she wasn’t wearing a watch, but thought they had left the bar between 2 and 3:30 a.m. </p> <p>Jamie was drunk enough to need help walking, and when they finally reached the motel she wanted to take a shower to sober up before bed, Snider said. Snider helped Jamie into her room and steadied her while she turned on the shower and began to undress. Snider said she then retired to her own room, but returned to check on Jamie once more. Finding her OK, she turned in. </p> <p>Of the other students, only Peltomaa said she thought she had heard the attack (<a href="javascript:NewWindow('/room_103/multimedia/chapterOne_doc1.html','main','600','440','yes')">STATEMENT</a>). </p> <p>As she lay in bed next door in Room 102, the Finnish woman said, she was awakened at about 4 a.m. by a man speaking in “an angry American accent.” </p> <p>She remembered his words exactly: “But you are here now.” </p> <p>Peltomaa then heard a low groan or soft scream – “almost like when an individual is getting hurt by somebody else.” That, she said, was followed by a stomping, which continued on and off for three to five minutes. </p> <p>She then heard a male voice say, “Let’s go,” followed by at least two sets of footsteps in the hall. Moments later, she heard a woman moaning weakly, accompanied by five to 10 taps on the wall. </p> <p>“I would hear a tap and then a moan,” she told the police. She said she was so scared that she woke up her boyfriend, Heikkinen, but he urged her to go back to sleep. </p> <p>“I didn’t know it was Jamie at that time and I was afraid, so I didn’t go out,” Peltomaa told the investigators. </p> <p>The motel manager, Chae Kwang Sin, said he was watching TV at the front desk at 3 or 3:30 a.m. when a Caucasian man walked through the lobby and out the door. The man, who came from the direction of Jamie’s room, had blood on his beige pants, Sin said. </p> <p>It was clear to Korean investigators that it was time to get the Americans involved. </p> <p>Under an agreement between the two countries, U.S. Army authorities can assist local Korean police in off-base felony investigations if American service personnel are suspected. </p> <p align="center">* * * </p> <p>Kenzi Snider later said she was relieved when American investigators arrived. The interpreters at the police station seemed to have only an elementary grasp of English. The students, who knew little Korean, caught them in mistranslations and noticed that the statements they typed up were awkwardly worded and rife with grammatical mistakes. </p> <p>“I was under the intuition that some female was strike by a male” was how one interpreter rendered Peltomaa’s sense that she heard a woman being assaulted by a man. </p> <p>With the investigators from the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division Command (CID), there was no need for translators. Technically, the CID agents were only assisting the Korean police in the investigation, but they quickly took the lead. </p> <p>They escorted Beverwijk and Snider that afternoon to their headquarters at the sprawling Yongsan Garrison, a 630-acre base in the center of the city, for additional questioning. As she told the Korean detectives, Beverwijk said she had slept through the assault. But Snider proved a goldmine. The CID agents were looking for Army suspects, and she had a detailed memory of the soldiers she and Jamie met at Nickelby’s bar (<a href="javascript:openThat('http://release.theplatform.com/content.select?pid=VJApw131wcWFH0cZ7QryIDkIpGByyNYm&UserName=Unknown');">VIDEO</a>). </p> <p>She remembered three GIs in particular — Josh, Nick and Vince. Josh and Nick were members of the running club. Jamie had danced with Josh, a slightly built, blond soldier about 5-foot-8, and eventually the two started kissing on the dance floor. Jamie later pulled her aside and told her that she’d given Josh her number at the university. Was it possible she told him where she was staying in Seoul? the investigators asked. </p> <p>“I don’t know,” Snider told them. “It wasn’t something that she would do.” </p> <p>Snider danced with Nick, who was a little taller, stockier and had a Latino or Hawaiian complexion. </p> <p>Nick was manning the beer pitcher and refilled her glass when it got low. While dancing with Nick, Snider bumped into Vince, who was muscular and about 6-foot-1, and struck up a conversation. The two went to a booth away from the dance floor and started talking. She mentioned she wanted to visit Jeju Island, a tropical resort off Korea’s southern coast. He said he too was planning a trip there. “If you come home with me tonight,” she quoted him, “I’ll cover all your expenses.” </p> <p>He “tried to kiss me. I told him no, but he was insistent,” Snider told detectives. She finally broke away from Vince and returned to the dance floor. Later, when Nick and some of the other runners invited them to go to Stompers, a nearby nightclub, she and Jamie declined. Tired at last, they decided to return to the motel. </p> <p>Initially, Snider said they had left between 2 and 3:30 a.m., but after more reflection, settled on 3:15. </p> <p>The pair had trouble finding their way back. Snider realized they had taken a wrong turn, and guided Jamie, who was more intoxicated, up a side street and down an alley to get back to the Kum Sung (<a href="javascript:NewWindow('/room_103/multimedia/map.html','main','600','440','no')">MAP</a>). In the alley, she said, they briefly encountered Vince and another soldier. </p> <p>She and Vince acknowledged each other with a wave, she said, and then the women headed for the hotel. </p> <p>“I didn’t look back to see if anyone was following us,” Snider said, “but I didn’t hear anything.” </p>
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