Justine Guichard - "A Korean Murder Case at the Intersection of Migration and Crime in Late 1950s Philadelphia"

Justine Guichard, Moon Family Postdoctoral Fellow, James Joo-Jin Kim Program in Korean Studies at the University of Pennsylvania

The April 25, 1958 murder of In-Ho Oh, a twenty-six-year-old South Korean graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, was swiftly solved by the Philadelphia Police Department. Within forty-eight hours after the victim’s beaten body was discovered lying in the vicinity of 36th and Hamilton streets, eleven African American youths between fifteen and nineteen years of age were arrested. The suspects’ admission that they wanted but could not gain access to a nearby dance and the recovery of the deceased’s wallet in the possession of one of them led to two conclusions: that the killing had been motivated by a robbery and that anyone could have been its target. As a matter of fact, the victimization of virtually anyone but a foreigner from South Korea was highly more probable on that Friday night. To a Koreanist accidentally coming across In-Ho Oh’s death almost six decades later, this crime continues to raise questions that call for a different type of investigation.