Reality mirrors movie

“I am hiring a hit man even if I have to pay! Should I fail, would she be pissed off to death?” Promotional materials for the 1994 Korean film “How to Top Your Wife” starring Park Joong-hoon and Choi Jin-sil were funny and explicit. In the movie, a man`s wife who earns a lot of money takes over command of the relationship in work and family affairs. After learning that she cheated on him, he hires an assassin to kill her. The hit man`s efforts to make money in an awkward way made audiences laugh.

The poster of the comedic movie provided laughter by introducing innovative ideas to remove a wife, such as “The couple goes to North Korea and the husband gets spy training there. Then he returns to South Korea and confesses everything,” “They travel to Africa and the wife is left in a forest,” and “Give a very, very, very expensive diamond ring as a present to surprise her to death.” The movie has a happy ending after the man who tried to kill his wife learns the importance of his family. Had such an incident happened in the real world, however, there would have been no happy ending.

Seoul police arrested a 40-year-old man on the charge of hiring a hit man in the former`s bid to take away his wife’s company. She had taken over a rental car company from her husband that earned monthly revenue of 200 million won (181,320 U.S. dollars). When his wife wanted to divorce him, he hired a contract killer to get the company back for 190 million won (172,200 dollars). After the job was done, the husband sent text messages to the killer via mobile phone and used his late wife`s credit card. Reality proved to be far stranger than the movie.

Korea has had quite a few contract killing cases in which men hire assassins in a bid to get their wives’ insurance benefits. In August, a man in his 50s bought three life insurance policies and hired a killer to off his 20-something wife after preparing his plan for seven months. A few years ago, a man in his 30s tried to kill his wife four times with his mistress to get 100 million won (90,660 dollars) in insurance benefits. If a wife or a husband who is insured gets lost or killed, the top suspect in the police investigation should be the surviving spouse who stands to receive insurance benefits. Money can make people blind.

Editorial Writer Koh Mi-seok (mskoh119@donga.com)