The Trap Closes
“Who brought the pen?”
“No one brought one.”
“Then how did he sign? Did the defendant go buy a pen at a nearby convenience store?”
“No. Grandma, earlier, Oh Yoon-ja, who had just taken the witness oath, asked whether anyone had a ballpoint pen. So I handed over the only one I had, and wherever she pointed with her finger, Oh Yoon-sik signed.”
“And you didn’t actually explain anything?”
“I just said, ‘Sign here,’ and passed him the paper.”
“That is all.”
Seated in the gallery, Oh Yoon-tek’s face darkened at once.
The judge asked the defendant whether she intended to cross-examine the witness.
The senior attorney—who wasn’t on good terms with the defendant, but still did his job properly—rose from his seat.
“Mr. Gyeong Su-won, the alleyway restaurant is rather large, as I understand it.”
“That’s right.”
“Then how were you able to remember every part of the conversation you just described? You were working at the time, and with so many customers, it must have been noisy. Were you able to stand in one place the whole time?”
Even I had wondered about that when I hadn’t yet seen the CCTV footage.
Was this person lying just to make himself look good to me?
But no, that wasn’t it.
“At Alleyway Grill, each part-timer has assigned tables, and there’s a waiting area.”
Which meant it was near Oh Yoon-sik’s table.
“We don’t blast music, either. Even if the place is noisy because there are a lot of customers, I had a suspicious feeling about the situation, so I watched them the entire time I was working.”
“So you’re saying you didn’t keep watching continuously?”
“Whenever I had a moment, I watched as much as I could.”
“Answer with either yes or no.”
“……”
“Your Honor, Mr. Gyeong Su-won has strung together what he saw and made a unilateral judgment, then used it to shift blame onto the defendant.”
Before I could even step in, the judge turned on the microphone.
“Witness Gyeong Su-won, no matter how suspicious it seemed, was there a reason you watched that one table for so long?”
“...I’m hoping to become a police officer, and I’ve always had a habit of watching things that seem off.”
“Have there been similar incidents recently? It may help us understand you better, Mr. Gyeong.”
Gyeong Su-won hesitated for a moment.
“Two years ago, I stopped a car that hadn’t been properly parked and was rolling downhill, and I saved the lives of a single-parent family. For that, I received the Good Citizen Award from Welji.”
That was new to me.
Come to think of it, the way he told me what had happened that day when he saw my lawyer badge, and the way he noticed enough to bring a shopping bag after seeing the soap flowers... he really was no ordinary person.
The senior attorney, knocked flat by the Good Citizen Award from Welji, shouted, “That is all!”
“I will conclude the questioning of witness Gyeong Su-won here. Thank you for your testimony. You may go.”
* * *
Next up was Yoo Gwan-u, the security guard from Jamwon HANA Apartment.
He had just come off a night shift, and his face was worn with exhaustion.
“Mr. Yoo Gwan-u, when did you start working at Jamwon HANA Apartment?”
“I retired after serving out my time as an elementary school teacher, so I’ve been working as a security guard for about ten years.”
“Did you often see Oh Yoon-sik during that time?”
“I think I saw him once during weekday mornings or evening shifts.”
“More often than I expected. Did Oh Yoon-sik come by the security office often?”
“He called the security office to ask questions more often than he came by in person. Even when I answered him, if he still felt unsatisfied, I’d go to his home and explain it there.”
Lee Kkot-soon’s face reddened as she rubbed at it.
“What kind of thing?”
“His daughter had sent him a KaTalk message, and he asked me whether that was a new abbreviation young people use.”
“That’s not really the job of a security guard. You must have been annoyed.”
“At first, I thought, if he wanted to know, why was he looking for me? Why didn’t he just search it himself? But then I realized that the KaTalk he asked about wasn’t an abbreviation, so his behavior made sense.”
“What was in the KaTalk message?”
“Things like, ‘Mom, I’m coming home today—should I bring Dad his favorite snacks?’ or ‘I had a stressful day at work, but seeing the flower photo you sent made me feel better.’ Just ordinary, everyday messages like that.”
“So it wasn’t internet slang or shorthand?”
“No.”
“And yet Oh Yoon-sik asked you about it. What did you think when that happened?”
“...At first I wondered whether his eyesight was bad, but after repeated calls, I began to think he might be illiterate.”
“Did he ask you even recently?”
Yoo Gwan-u laughed.
“Yes. Oh Yoon-sik showed me his driver’s license and asked whether his name was written correctly.”
“That is all.”
Before the judge could even ask whether the senior attorney wished to cross-examine the witness—
“No, wait. If he’s showing you a driver’s license and asking whether the name is written right, that means you know each other! How is that a neutral witness?!”
“Defendant Oh Yoon-ja.”
“Your Honor, if you lived in an apartment and saw the neighbor next door even once, wouldn’t you root for them? You wouldn’t cheer for some stranger. That person is absolutely not neutral. He shouldn’t have been accepted as a witness in the first place.”
The senior attorney looked at Oh Yoon-ja in astonishment at her forceful outburst, and the judge let out a dry laugh at the brazen claim.
He raised his hand, signaling that he intended to object to that statement.
The judge granted permission.
“Your Honor, the plaintiff and witness had only an indirect business relationship, and I ask that you keep the witness’s occupation in mind.”
The two had only spoken because Oh Yoon-sik initiated the exchanges, and Yoo Gwan-u never once questioned him back or steered the conversation elsewhere.
In the first place, a security guard answering a resident’s question can’t really be called a private conversation.
After announcing that he would conclude the defendant’s questioning, the judge immediately ordered Oh Yoon-ja to take the witness stand.
“Why me?”
“At the plaintiff’s request, the defendant Oh Yoon-ja has been additionally designated as a witness. You already took an oath earlier, didn’t you?”
“Did I do that because I wanted to? You all ganged up on me!”
At the judge’s sharp rebuke, Oh Yoon-ja flew into a rage, yelling about how absurd the law was before finally sitting down in the witness chair.
“Witness Oh Yoon-ja, you said you learned about Oh Yoon-sik’s land compensation from the GTX news, correct?”
“Yeah, so what?”
“Then how did you know the land parcels in Bubal-eup, numbers 52, 61, and 62 were involved? They weren’t even announced in the broadcast.”
“......!”
After a long stretch of mental gymnastics, Oh Yoon-ja tried to explain that she had once heard Oh Yoon-sik mention land in Bubal-eup.
“But Mr. Oh Yoon-sik didn’t know the parcel numbers, did he?”
“How am I supposed to know whether Yoon-sik knew the numbers or not?”
She quickly pulled back, as though realizing that admitting he knew the numbers would amount to admitting he was illiterate.
“That sounds a little different from the recording where you talked about family loyalty and said you’d even handle the mail for him, doesn’t it?”
She had no idea she was tightening the noose around her own neck.
“Did the defendant write in the written pledge that the compensation was inherited property?”
“Right. Well, no? I didn’t write ‘inheritance.’”
“When you spoke with Mr. Oh Yoon-sik on the morning of November 29, you said Bubal-eup wasn’t listed in the inheritance division agreement either. If something isn’t listed, most people would assume it isn’t inherited property.”
“So we checked whether it was there or not, didn’t we?”
“Did you really check?”
“If it might become my property, of course I checked!”
“Then you confirmed that the owner of the real estate in Bubal-eup, parcels 61 and 62, is the plaintiff, Lee Kkot-soon, sitting here, correct?”
“......!”
“Was the phrase ‘by mistake’ written into the written pledge by the defendant? Treating parcels 61 and 62 as part of Oh Yoon-sik’s ‘inherited’ property?”
Article 109, Paragraph 1 of the Civil Act provided that a declaration of intent could be rescinded if there was a mistake concerning an essential part of the legal act.
In other words, if the terms of an agreement between parties conflicted with the facts, the contract could be undone.
If Oh Yoon-ja claimed she had mistaken Oh Yoon-sik’s property for his, then the agreement could be canceled.
Of course, in practice, courts were reluctant to recognize rescission based on mistake too readily, mainly to protect transactional security.
But in a case like this—where no actual transaction had taken place, and the contract itself was illegal and unlawful—there was no reason for the court not to accept it.
The problem lay with the defendant who had drafted the pledge.
From the gallery came a ripple of whispers—“What does that mean?”—and Oh Yoon-tek lowered his head, chewing at his lip.
Then, with her face going ghost-white, Oh Yoon-ja rattled off a denial like a turbo engine had been installed in her mouth.
“N-no, how are we supposed to know that? Yoon-sik said there was inherited property, so we just assumed it was his.”
“Then it’s fair to say the plaintiff Lee Kkot-soon’s Bubal-eup land can be rescinded, because the defendant was at fault.”
If not that—
“Can the defendant who committed perjury with the inheritance division agreement and the edited phone recording really claim she did not target Lee Kkot-soon’s land in Bubal-eup?”
The senior attorney raised his hand.
“Your Honor, the plaintiff is making claims that have not been verified.”
“Your Honor, part of this case cannot be treated as a gift of land compensation arising from ‘inheritance,’ and since it infringes upon the plaintiff Lee Kkot-soon’s property, it is only appropriate to verify it.”
The judge closed his mouth for a moment, then raised our side’s hand.
“Defendant, answer the question.”
“I only wrote what Yoon-sik told me to write. I didn’t know parcels 61 and 62 were Lee Kkot-soon’s land.”
“On the phone, Mr. Oh Yoon-sik said he didn’t know either—so what exactly are you saying you told him? If you learned the truth at the restaurant, the pledge should have been corrected. Not signed by a drunk man!”
From the start, Oh Yoon-ja had been the type who knew the law well enough to call this a written pledge.
When land received through inheritance is divided and the compensation is then shared out, that is usually called a gift.
But she had managed to dodge that issue entirely.
She called it land compensation, and she even included Lee Kkot-soon’s land in the mix.
She had played a double game.
To Oh Yoon-sik, it looked like an inheritance.
The written pledge looked like a gift.
But at its core, it was fraud.
“Hah, you seem to have made a serious mistake. The people who know the law are people like you or the judges and prosecutors—not ordinary people like me!”
Sometimes, con artists knew better than anyone.
No wonder prosecutors sometimes call prisoners in the penitentiary.
“If I go by what the defendant says, then the legal scrivener who drafted the written pledge must be someone who knows the law well?”
“Of course he would! I paid him to write it!”
“And yet it was a fake notarization, wasn’t it? And he wasn’t even a legal scrivener.”
“......?!”
She turned her head toward the gallery.
“Ah, there’s the fake legal scrivener sitting right there—the defendant Oh Yoon-tek, hiding behind the face of legal scrivener Geum Yoon-ho.”
“......!”
“Attorney Cha Do-hyuk, what exactly do you mean by that?”
The judge’s bewilderment was plain in his voice.
“The legal scrivener Geum Yoon-ho, who notarized the written pledge, passed away two years ago.”
“......!”
I showed the judge the clipping.
There, in the obituary section of the legal news, was Geum Yoon-ho.
And beneath it, in a photo from “Geum Yoon-ho’s Legal Office,” Oh Yoon-tek was smiling at the left side of the deceased.
“The defendant Oh Yoon-tek was studying law at Success University when, while helping Oh Yoon-ja, he committed a crime and was expelled. After that, he worked for Legal Scrivener Geum Yoon-ho, but never obtained a legal scrivener’s license.”
Every person in the gallery fixed their eyes on the head-bowed Oh Yoon-tek with silent reproach.
“Since I submitted this as documentary evidence today, I will resubmit it in writing together with the evidence list after the trial.”
“Exhibit No. 8 for the plaintiff is admitted into evidence.”
I watched Oh Yoon-ja, now drenched in cold sweat.
“Defendant Oh Yoon-ja, the questioning isn’t over yet.”
“On May 20, 2014, you deceived the plaintiff Oh Yoon-sik, stole Lee Kkot-soon’s identification card and seal, and took out a 30 million won loan from Saemaeul Nohyeop, correct? And the person who helped prepare the paperwork then was Oh Yoon-tek, wasn’t he?”
The fraud—the entire paradigm of this lawsuit—had now been laid bare.
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