The Case of The Missing Frog Boys

hey guys it's bella and welcome back to my channel i hope you're all having an incredible day today in today's video we're gonna be covering another mystery monday case we're gonna be covering the case of the frog boy so i'm just gonna go ahead and get into it the 26th of march in 1991 was a public holiday in south korea because the local democratic elections were being held for the first time in 30 years so it was a pretty big deal pretty big day hence the public holiday before the day could really begin we're chol kim jong-sik and kim tae rong who were all between the ages of 9 and 13 years old decided to go and play together it was a public holiday like i said to the boys who all attended seong so elementary school together had the day off and they were like pretty inseparable they and their families all lived really close together in delcio which is a district of daegu in south korea and they were like neighbors their houses kind of like formed a circle if that makes sense so it's like house house house house you go to me they spent a lot of time together they were pretty much inseparable and they were like brothers so that morning they were all playing together outside of ho young's house when a neighbour complained that they were being too loud so they decided to go elsewhere to play tabrion stayed back because he missed breakfast that morning but was going to catch up with them a little later on so the rest of the boys decided to head on without him and then we're going to go looking for salamander eggs at the nearby mount world they made their way up the mountain slowly picking up tin cans and sticks which they pretended to use as like walking sticks on their way and they bumped into her young's brother muyon while they were on their way up he was on a bike ride and they had a quick chat the boys told him of their plans and then they parted ways and kept heading up towards the mountain taeyong met up with them at some point on their way to the mountain but ended up leaving again once he learned that they were planning to hike up the mountain because his mum had been pretty strict about him not going too far so he headed back home just after 1pm that afternoon wu chol wan's father wujong roo got a call from the taekwondo academy saying that his son hadn't shown up so john woo walked around the houses in the village asking whether or not the other boys had turned up at the academy which is when they discovered that none of the five boys had shown up all of the five boys fathers immediately went down to the village to look for them they spoke to mu yong who told them that he'd seen them and that he told them that they were going to find salamander eggs so the parents obviously concluded that they were going up the mountain because that's where you would find salamander eggs now of this mountain on one side of the mountain that was a pond and then behind that pond was a military base and a military shooting base and on the other side was a farm which had a bunch of animals dogs and the fathers started to get worried that maybe one of the animals or the dogs had gotten loose maybe harmed one of their sons so they all went up the mountain searching for their children they looked for hours and hours and hours and found nothing so once it started to get dark they decided it was time to call the police and the police i mean as you would probably guess like i feel like we see this a lot in missing children's cases the police just said you know they've probably run away they'll probably show up and they didn't really give it too much thought which i feel like it's just the worst like it's such a common thing that i see when i research these cases police saying about missing children like they've probably run away they'll probably show up it's like if a parent is telling you something is wrong something's wrong like look into it they had children you're missing out on the most vital time of a missing person's case which is the first 24 to 48 hours by saying that they'll probably come back like so much time is being wasted three days later on the 29th of march jung six family get a phone call this call came from an anonymous person they said that they had the five boys and they weren't doing well and that two in particular were very unwell this person asked for the parents to bring money to this like random street and in the daegu train station and that they would meet them there with the boys i suppose so the parents all five of the parents went there with the police and money and they waited they waited and waited and waited they waited for like over an hour and nobody ever showed up so in the first like four or five days of the case the media really just didn't they weren't interested because i guess they were pretty preoccupied by the local elections going on so they just didn't really care it wasn't until the fourth or fifth day after the boys had gone missing that the local media started to pick the case up the first headline that came out in the local news was five boys missing after trying to find frog eggs which is why the case is called or known as the frog boys because i don't think salamanders were like a very common thing so the media just referred to them as frogs instead of salamanders so the case just became known as the frog boys on the fourth of may the parents of the five boys appeared on a tv program called the square of public opinion and this show was like one of those shows where they have people taking calls on the background i don't even know what they're called to be honest like they get people on the show to talk about something and then like people can call in and there's like people in the background like answering the calls of the people calling in does that make sense so anyway the parents of the five boys went on this tv show um to just try and get the word out more about their missing children because they were feeling really let down by police they just really weren't happy with the investigation the police weren't taking it seriously they were hardly investigating it at all and they were still treating the boys like runaways and the parents had like printed out and handed out all of these flies over the few days after the boys had gone missing about their missing children and then the police had reprinted these and changed the word missing to runaway which the police i mean the parents were so unhappy about they spoke about the fact that they felt like the police were just trying to close the case wrap it up really quickly which is why they were trying to promote this idea that the boys had just run away and they were hoping that this tv appearance would gain some attraction for the case that it would have people watching you know journalists news reporters police people of the public would get involved and you know call in let them know if they had any sort of leads and kind of pressure the police into actually doing something while filming the tv program got a call from seongseo elementary school the school that the boys attended and this caller was claiming to be zhong sik and they were sobbing they were just asking for his mother hung doosan and then the call got cut off before his mother could get to the phone so they were like you know trying to frantically be able to call this person back all of the people watching the show the people in the audience were like kind of hyped that they felt like the children were still alive like this was some sort of hope and then they ended up getting this caller back finding out that it was all some sort of sick prank and it wasn't junk sick at all it was just some random and that's pretty much everything that happened from the tv program so the only really good thing that they got out of it is that people started to care at this point this is when the story blew up countrywide in the media and people really started to get invested in the case and of course because it was so widespread in the media heaps of theories and rumors started to emerge there was one that this like kidnapping ring in south korea took them and they were like getting them to like beg on the streets some people thought that north korean spies were involved some people thought that it was an alien abduction and there was also another theory that it was like a murderer with leprosy because there was this myth at the time that eating a child's liver could help cure leprosy anyway with all the attention that this case was getting the police actually started to begin investigating finally even president rota wu made a statement asking police to look into the case further and there was a massive search which mobilized 300 000 police military troops and volunteers the mountain was searched over 500 times using line searches and they even had these like sticks where they were prod at the ground as they moved forward to check all of the area of the mountain they had helicopters searching as well the undergrowth on the mountain was really short at the time so the conditions to search for the boys were pretty much ideal even from a helicopter up in the air you could see pretty much everything unfortunately though there was little to no evidence in the case there was no trace of the boys nothing left behind not a piece of clothing not a shoe no indications as to where they may have gone but there were a few witnesses that came forward saying they'd seen the boys in the time leading up to their disappearance there was one woman who was living near mount waryong and on her way home she said at around 9 00 am she passed a group of five boys and overheard them talking about the fact that they were going to return home after two hours one of the boy's classmates theon hoonham came forward and saying while he didn't actually see the boys he was pretty sure that he had heard them he lived at the foothills of the mountains and he said that him and his brother and his dad were actually also searching for salamander eggs and then at around 11 30 a.m he said that he heard two screams 10 seconds apart and that he was certain that it was from one of the five boys however two of the boys other classmates had a statement that contradicted this because they said that they passed them on a hiking trail on the mountain just after 12 am and they were fine these two other classmates stopped they had a chat and the five frog boys said that they were gonna go up the mountain looking for bullet casings because as i said the military base was there and the military had a shooting base on the mountain i mean this is the issue with witness statements though because one i mean i don't necessarily think the two statements contradict each other because the string screen may not have been sinister like it could have been two kids like playing you know how kids sometimes run away from each other and like scream as they do or maybe they slipped maybe they found like a gross animal and screamed you know there's so many reasons somebody could have been screaming that aren't sinister so it's not necessarily contradicting each other but at the same time like when a case or when a person or a group of people get a lot of media coverage there's always going to be those sort of people that kind of jim in just to like be involved even if they're lying like there's a lot of like clout chases out there even if it's a bad reason like even if you're lying about somebody being missing or possibly murdered like people will still want to jim in on it it's horrible but it's true there was also one last witness who testified to seeing five boys on a hiking trail on the mountain at 2pm now because there wasn't a lot of evidence police again weren't really paying much attention the parents of the boys and the public in general like the police received a lot of criticism for the way that they handled this case because a lot of people just felt like the searches and whatever else was actually just for show they weren't like really looking for the boys they didn't really care about the boys it was just so people thought they were doing something so the fathers of the five boys felt like they had to take matters into their own hands all five of them quit their jobs and rented a small truck to search for their boys and they searched for three years they coded the truck with huge images of their children and the words please help find our missing children they handed pamphlets out in any public places they went to they brought a megaphone around with them so that they could call out to the public as they drove through they did interviews during this time to try and keep their boys names alive in the media a man named nae jubong the chairman of the national organization of missing children was there to help them he attended interviews with them and during these interviews they noticed like these people would turn up to a lot of interviews trying to pass as reporters ju bong actually asked one of the men for their business cards and it was like really sketchy he he wasn't a reporter and his business card had nothing on it other than his name and his contact number and jubong later found out that this man actually worked for an intelligence agency and wasn't a news reporter at all now these men from the intelligence agency would literally follow jubong and all the five fathers around everywhere like one would follow one father one would follow another father and so on and so forth they would record the details of their schedules like everything they did where they were who interviewed them what they did they would follow them like everywhere like to their houses and with they would report all of this stuff back to their bosses it was like super sketchy and the parents just did not understand these like intelligency agencies men whatever acted like they were protecting them but the parents felt like they were being treated like suspects which they were so unhappy about because they were like why are you treating us like suspects instead of actually going out and doing anything no one's doing anything to look for our children and now you're treating us like suspects the whole case just really took a toll on the boy's parents because not only did they lose their sons but you know they also had these men following them the police weren't really helping them some of the fathers turned to alcohol some turned to sleeping pills they were all mentally and physically exhausted they were in huge amounts of debt because they were paying for all of these like searches themselves like the truck them searching for three years they had no funding at all they had to pay for it all out of their own pockets in april of 1994 the boys fathers finally returned home they wanted to get their jobs back like they still wanted to search for their sons and do everything they could but they felt like it was time to get home get their jobs back like i said they're in huge amounts of debt and they wanted to try and get some sort of normalcy back in their lives or as a normality unfortunately though not only because of the media and interviews there was also like a movie that came out in 1992 which was called comeback frog boys which unfortunately wasn't very successful as emotional movies weren't really as popular in south korea at the time there was a song released by a singer called park song me in 1993 called frogboy and there was also a book which was released which was also unsuccessful and like all of these people the singer the book publishing company they got the parents to donate money saying you know we'll get the word out about your boys we'll reimburse you and give you some of the money we make from this song book whatever but they were all unsuccessful so the fathers sought no return whether it be in monetary conversation or even in just like spreading the word or getting you know the story out there but because of all of these things being released the father's faces were pretty well known they were constantly recognized they felt like they couldn't move on with their lives because every move they made was being scrutinized you know if they tried to get back some normality in their lives they felt like they would be scrutinized because they're not looking for their sons anymore or they're not upset that their sons are missing anymore they were just being harassed by the media there was fake stories made up about them like it was horrible after these first few years of the case the media hype really started to die down they weren't getting any coverage anymore and the boys parents were trying to get some media companies to publish articles about their boys to keep the word alive um but they were all refusing to do so eventually this is the most bizarre part of the entire case to me the parents were contacted by the military and something that i forgot to mention is that the parents of the boys and also the public like the most widely believed theory amongst the public was that the military had something to do with the disappearance because the military shooting base was on the mountain where the boys went missing some of their guns can shoot you know up to one to two kilometers away so people didn't know you know if it was on purpose if maybe one of their bullets accidentally hit one of the children and killed them whatever the case may be it was one of the most widely believed theories that the military had something to do with it and what was really sketchy about the whole thing is that the police absolutely refused to look into the military the parents were contacted by the military they asked them to come to their military base on the mountain like in the middle of the night almost like it was completely pitch black so they went a commissioned officer led them into the military base and into a room where they were greeted by you know soldiers and military officials and get this they told the parents that they were going to give one of them superpowers which would help find their children i'll let you soak that in for a second and then after this after they told them this they like put their hands on the sides of their heads and then one of the mothers like began acting really weird like different like she was in a trance sort of and the military people were like you know it happened to her like follow her she knows where the boys are and so they did the parents all followed her military officials were there following them it was dark it was raining it was muddy and she was just like running up the mountain and then she just like stopped and screamed out our children are here and then they weren't and the whole thing turned out to be would you believe it fake i don't know this part of the case seems so incredibly bizarre to me like so incredibly strange to me that the military would call these grieving parents out there once all of the hype started to die down and then like play this like what practical joke on them like why would the military do that supernatural powers like what even so anyway the case was pretty much dead in the media still they didn't get any new leads until the 12th of january in 1996. so on this day rujong wu was visited by a man named kim gawan who claimed to be a professor of psychology that had studied in the us and he was like really interested in the case and this guy came in guns blazing saying he'd analyzed all of the evidence from the crime and he was convinced that john six dada had murdered the children and buried them in his house he said jong-sik's father wasn't able to account for three hours of his day on the day the boys went missing and he started to make a pretty big fuss of this even though three hours like i don't know it seems like a pretty short time span for him to like go into the mountains murder all five of these children without any of them like running away while he was murdering the other ones and then to bring them back in broad daylight and to bury them in his house i don't know three hours doesn't seem like enough time for that and in the middle of the day or like at the start of the day but i digress so this guy had the media reporting on it he had the police investigating it and he had the public believing it a pretty big crowd gathered around the house as the police begin to search kim cho u's house police said they didn't really believe the claims but they searched anyway just to be safe and during their search they found some children's shoes which made them think that this was a real possibility that john sick's father had murdered the boys and buried them in the house which like i don't know i found it weird that they like took this as a sign because he did have a child so i feel like it's not that bizarre for him to have a child's shoes in his house but anyway because they found these shoes police began to dig up the house with a literal excavator and then they found nothing and then when they found nothing kim gowan the psychologist literally started running away like through the crowds from the house started literally running away and the crowds were like screaming like catch him catch him and then police eventually caught him and took him like to the police station for his own safety but i just can't i don't know the whole situation honestly broke my heart for troll you because he was accused of murdering his own son while also still grieving for the loss of his son everyone's believing it his house was excavated because of it on public tv like the media were all reporting it and filming it unfortunately just a few years later he died of liver cancer and some believe that the reason he got sick is because of the extreme stress that was placed on his body like he was so exhausted mentally and physically from everything that he had gone through and he was still in his 40s when he passed away and just one year after his death on september 26th of 2002 the remains of the five boys were found they were found on mount waryong tangled together just 3.5 kilometers away from where they initially went missing when two locals were hiking up the mountain trail collecting acorns they came across them old clothes and upon closer expection found some bones sticking out of the ground the remains were just that bones clothes shoes and one of the boy's remains was found still with his braces on the clothing matched what the boys had been wearing when they had disappeared and the way in which they were found was a little weird their clothes had been tied up like the sleeves of their shirts were tied together and when the clothes were untied unused bullets and empty cartridges were found in the clothes now the issue with this cram scene is that police massively botched it like massively they didn't know what they were doing and they started digging the bones out anyway letting the parents touch them inspect them like that's how they found the bullets one of the parents untied the sleeves of one of the t-shirts and that's when they found the bullets and for hours it was just police digging before they decided to bring in forensic experts and while the police were digging they were like doing it all wrong not only were they doing the digging and the excavating wrong but the way that they were placing the bones was incorrect they were grouping them like grouping the skulls together and grouping the long bones together when it shouldn't have been grouped like that it should have been grouped body by body separately eventually chase jungmin was called in he was a forensic expert at a local university and this is hours after the police had been completely watching the scene they finally called him in to do the rest of it he was completely appalled by the situation when he arrived at the scene so he did what he could to excavate the rest of the remains so that he could try to probably properly examine them and then to make matters worse the very next day after the remains were found and this is while the but the remains were still being excavated because it took a whole two days to excavate the remains the police chief comes out and he does like this press conference and he basically says that the cause of death was hypothermia that it was about three degrees celsius the night the boys disappeared and that there was rain possibly and a wind chill factor that could have made it much colder and yeah that they died from hypothermia after hearing of this choi won seok and his rescue team from the korea alpine federation decided to check this out for themselves they were convinced that this was a murder the bodies were found not even 100 meters from the streets and only like 300 to 500 meters from their homes so like if they were cold or it started raining or whatever they easily could have just gone home it wasn't like rugged terrain they weren't stupid there's no way they would have just stayed there and frozen to death when they were so close to their homes and it was also extremely unlikely that they would have frozen to death it was about three to five degrees celsius that night and it's just unlikely they would have frozen to death in that kind of weather on top of this the remains were buried so why would the remains be buried if the children had simply just sat there and died like wouldn't the bones be on top of the mountain and if it were the case that they had died of natural causes and they were on top of the dirt animals would have come and plucked one leg here plucked one arm there and the bones would have been scattered all over the place rather than being all together in this one spot something else juan seok noticed is the positioning of the bodies or how close the bodies were in comparison to the military range they were found literally like 100 to 200 meters away from the military shooting range and like i mentioned some of their guns can literally shoot one to two kilometers away so it was a very real possibility that they had been shot whether accidentally or on purpose they were found so close and they were found with bullets empty and full bullets all around them the news obviously reported on this fact and it became pretty or like it kind of fueled the theory that the military had something to do with this division 50 of the military which is the division the bodies were found near held a press conference and basically said yeah those are our bullets but no we did not have anything to do with this they said it was a public holiday so everyone had the day off there were no drills that day nobody would be going in however something to note is that even on public holidays commissioned officers are allowed to go in to the military shooting range they are allowed to shoot and it was also reported that there was one military commissioned officer who that day had fired his rifle to get rid of like leftover bullets that he had in the gun although you know i don't know i couldn't really find much else on that his name or identity were never revealed and the police never looked into the military like to this day never looked in the into the military which is pretty sketchy anyway the next day so two days after the remains have been found the remains were finally finished having been excavated and they were taken back to the university to examine while there were two holes in one of the boys skulls jungmin the forensic expert said that these weren't it wasn't a bullet wound because a bullet wound there would be fractures in the skull and there wasn't he also found that there were small sharp cuts on the surface of some of the other bones now police assumed that this damage to the bones was post-mortem however jungmin was not convinced he also wasn't an expert in this field though so he sent off all of the information photos whatever to an anthropologist in the u.s and received the results back that the anthropologists had said that these were man-made and that they had happened before death it was determined that the boys had died of blunt force trauma to the head now due to the decomposition of the bodies and the way the police handled the case this was pretty much all that could be determined nothing else the murder weapon who may have done this how they may have died was all just speculation forensic experts did however believe that the bodies had been there the entire time because jongmin said that when a body is moved like if someone were to move the bones it would be pretty much impossible to keep the bodies in their anatomical position if that makes sense like keeping every single one of the bones in its exact anatomical position would be almost impossible surely if the bodies had been moved to that location before they decomposed then somebody would have found them and if they didn't like decomposition happens pretty fast like within like a month the body starts to liquefy so i just think logistically with how all of the searches were happening and everything that it wouldn't have been possible on top of this jungmin also said that when the body starts to decay and decompose and liquefy it releases this like chemical which would seep into the soil and surroundings around it and based on the soil and the surroundings where the remains were found he thinks that the bodies had always been there the entire time which also begs the question of how well did the police search like if they had been there all along how did the police not find them i have a lot of thoughts on this case because i feel like it's just all over the place and there's so much evidence and so many conflicting like pieces of evidence but that's pretty much like all of the evidence for the case police continued to look into it a little bit never found anything never looked into the military this case to me like is honestly like a lot to digest i feel like a lot of the evidence points to the military whether it was like one murderous dude or whether it was like somebody accidentally shot the one of the boys and then had to shoot like the rest of the boys to cover it up but the military has an incinerator in this base so like if they did that why wouldn't they just like take them into the incinerator kill them there cover it up i mean maybe if it was like one murderous dude he didn't want the rest of the military to find out or somebody to find out and get in trouble so maybe he wouldn't take them into the incinerator or maybe whoever did it if they were from the military like decided to bury them there so they could be like well why on earth would we bury them so close to our military base couldn't have been us we wouldn't be that stupid but on top of that there were also seemingly no bullet wounds on the children but there were empty casings around them and full bullets but at the same time they did or there was a witness that said that they were going up there to look for bullet casings so also very very sketchy how the police just like outright refused to ever investigate the military not even once but again i don't really know the situation over there at the time i did read that they were all under like president reiter wu's like military regime so nobody really would have had the authority to look into the military but the fact that the military did this is one of the most widely believed theories but i guess at the same time that's because it is kind of the only theory like there are no other suspects there's no evidence to point to anyone else specifically like who would have done this and hypothermia just straight up doesn't make sense for so many reasons because like i said like they were so close to their houses it wasn't like it was brutal terrain there was people hiking up there all the time these boys weren't stupid they could have just gone home and it wasn't cold enough for them to die of hypothermia they knew the area they knew the terrain they knew where they were it's not like it was their first time going out there so if they were uncomfortable if something happened like and there was five of them if one of them got injured one of the other boys could have gone back and told somebody you know they wouldn't have just stayed there and just died with him so i definitely think they were murdered i don't know by who i do think it looks like the military but at the same time there is no bullet wounds or i don't know maybe there was bullet wounds maybe something happened to the bones over time maybe maybe the crime scene was so botched that they couldn't tell but a forensic expert literally said that he didn't think that there were any bullet wounds and that they died from blunt force trauma so i don't know let me know your thoughts on the case let me know what you think i would love to hear in the comments down below and thanks for watching hopefully i will see you guys in the next video bye guys

Channel: Bella Fiori

Views: 1,072,986

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Id: QdFd9Jned54

Length: 32min 33sec (1953 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2020