Kids heard ‘banging’ coming from room as taekwondo master Kwang Kyung Yoo began his triple-murder spree

WARNING: Distressing content A group of kids waited patiently for their taekwondo instructor, whom they called “Master Lion”, to lead their class on a summer’s evening. While stretching on the mats, some of the children heard “banging” coming from the storeroom. Unbeknown to them, their teacher was murdering a woman just metres away in the closed-off room. Kwang Kyung Yoo strangled Min Cho to death before dragging her lifeless body into the office of his North Parramatta taekwondo studio. The taekwondo master emerged to greet his students out on the mats soon afterwards before returning to the office where Ms Cho lay dead. Yoo continued to walk in and out of the office several times over the next half an hour or so while teaching his class, at one point taking Ms Cho’s watch and trying to unlock her phone using her face and physically assaulting her body at other times. He called his wife about an hour after he killed Ms Cho to say “the car has arrived”, which referred to lies he told her about soon being given a work car. In reality, he stole Ms Cho’s car after killing her. “The call was brief, but his wife thought that the offender sounded happy,” court documents state. Shortly after, the seven-year-old boy was the only person who remained at the studio along with the instructor. Yoo strangled him to death in the studio’s storeroom. Boy’s murder an ‘egregious breach of trust’ Just hours before, Yoo had presented the boy with a new taekwondo belt in front of a class at Yoo’s Lion’s Taekwondo and Martial Arts Academy He also gave the boy, and other students, Zooper Dooper ice blocks in the lead-up to the murders. “The killing of (the boy) involved an egregious breach of trust. He was a pupil in Mr Yoo’s martial arts academy and presumably looked to him for guidance as ‘Master Lion’,” Justice Ian Harrison said while sentencing Yoo in December. Distressing CCTV footage showed the taekwondo teacher moving around his studio with ease on the evening of the murders, engaging with students and parents normally even after he killed Ms Cho. Justice Harrison noted the “stark” contrast between Yoo’s interactions with Ms Cho and the boy and the murders that followed: His victims had no way of foreseeing their terrible fates. “The contrast between the incredible ordinariness of the events there that preceded those murders and the deaths that were caused is stark,” Justice Harrison said. “Neither Ms Cho nor (the boy) had, or could possibly have had, any conceivable notion of the terrible fate that awaited them. “They were each obviously deceived in the most cynical fashion by Mr Yoo’s mundane attention to the conduct of his business and lulled in those circumstances into what was clearly a sense that there was nothing about which they should have been concerned.” Murders were ‘senselessly cruel’ After carrying out the murders at his taekwondo studio, Yoo drove to Ms Cho’s Baulkham Hills home where he then stabbed her husband, Steven Cho, to death. Mr Cho was “unsuspecting and defenceless”, Justice Harrison said, though he did manage to stab Yoo in self-defence.Yoo claimed he gave his victim a knife. Mr Cho died before he was able to inflict any serious harm on his killer. “Whether considered individually or together, these killings were horrific and violent acts, senselessly cruel and cynical, perpetrated without a trace of human compassion or consideration for the dignity of the (victims),” Justice Harrison said. Yoo will spend the rest of his life behind bars after he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He clutched a bible and kept his head down as he was sentenced in December, while the Chos’ loved ones broke down in tears. Killer’s bizarre motive Yoo was motivated to carry out the horrific crimes to secure the Chos’ money and BMW, Justice Harrison found. He was a month behind on his rent payment for his martial arts studio at the time of the murders, with he and his wife’s total debt about $10,000 across several bank accounts and credit cards. Yoo began thinking of killing the Chos about two weeks before the murders “to get their money”, he allegedly said while in custody. The judge found that Yoo hatched the plan at least by the afternoon of the crimes, as he had told his wife his new car would be arriving that day. “It may seem on one view to be beyond the comprehension and understanding of ordinary people that such terrible and violent conduct could have been generated by Mr Yoo’s apparently entrenched envy of the success achieved by others of which (the Chos’) success was tragically and innocently representative,” Justice Harrison said. “As bizarre as it may appear to be, there is no other suggested or posited reason given for what Mr Yoo did.” However, the killer “couldn’t explain how he was going to get their money afterwards”, Justice Health reports read to the court stated. “Mr Yoo’s hoped-for gains were never going to materialise,” Justice Harrison said. “The murders … erupted from nothing that could ever have been predicted.” Details of Yoo’s “grandiose” fantasies, some of which led him to lie about having meetings with Gina Rinehart and about having competed in the Olympics, were earlier revealed in court. He would also often inspect expensive properties and cars to fuel his “self-important” fantasy that he was more successful than he was. Yoo “felt burdened” by educational and cultural expectations that he would achieve “unrealistic levels” of success; however, Justice Harrison noted that Yoo’s experience of this burden was commonplace in Australian society and in many other countries. This did not, Justice Harrison said, diminish Yoo’s moral culpability. During heart-wrenching victim impact statements read out to the court in November, Ms Cho’s family said they “feel as if we were dead” in the wake of the murders. Laughter has been replaced with “excruciating pain and endless despair” in the lives of her grieving family. “(We) will spend the rest of our lives in tears and pain waiting for death,” the moving statement read. Yoo refused to look up from the floor and meet the gaze of the Chos’ loved ones, whose lives he tore apart, during both a hearing in November and his sentencing the following month.