Once we had a list, it was a matter of straight police work eliminating those with alibis. We didn’t approach them directly but rather pretended to be potential customers and asked for the agents who served the Taegu area. Most of them didn’t. Seoul and the area north to the Demilitarized Zone are where most young GIs can be found. Down south there are relatively slim pickings. None of the agents actually kept a home base there. But we found of the seven US insurance companies operating in-country, six of them had agents who traveled to Taegu periodically. We were able to establish that four of the agents had been in Seoul at the time of the murder of Mrs. Yi Won-suk. The other two had been traveling in the southern area of the country, covering the bases in Taejon, Waegwan, Taegu, and Pusan. Of those two, one insurance agent was a black man. The other was a Caucasian male with light brown hair and blood type O positive.
We had our man.
The bust was made with the assistance of the Korean National Police. Lieutenant Rhee from Taegu traveled all the way up here to Seoul for the honor of arresting the man who had caused such an uproar in the Korean media.
His name was Fred Ammerman. He lived in the outskirts of Seoul in a cement-block apartment complex in Bampo, just south of the Han River. His wife, a Korean national, was absolutely flabbergasted by the proceedings, but she knew enough not to interfere with the Korean National Police. Ammerman was a man of average height and average weight, except for the potbelly that protruded over the waistline of his tailored slacks. He remained calm while the Korean police handcuffed him and while Lieutenant Rhee told him in broken English that they were taking him in for questioning.
Ammerman did glance at us hopefully and say, “What about Eighth Army?”
“We have no jurisdiction over you, Ammerman,” Ernie said. “This is between you and the ROKs.”
As a civilian in country on a work visa, military law couldn’t touch him.
After the KNPs took Ammerman away, I spoke to his wife for a few moments. She was a husky Korean woman, taller and stronger than Mrs. Yi Won-suk had been, but with attractive facial features that softened the pronounced bone structure beneath the flesh. She stared into the distance as she spoke.
“My children are both at school,” she said. “For that I am happy.”
“Did you know what he was doing on those trips?” I asked her.
“I knew he had women. That I know long time. But take woman like that. Punch her. Kill her. That I don’t know.”
But there seemed little doubt in Mrs. Ammerman’s mind that the charges were true.
Already a crowd of neighbors was beginning to gather outside on the sidewalk. Mrs. Ammerman glanced toward them and, with a worried look, started clawing at her lower lip. After they’d arrested her foreign husband, the Korean cops had shown no concern about Mrs. Ammerman at all. They didn’t question her because a wife is not expected to offer any evidence that might hurt her husband. And they certainly weren’t concerned about her mental state. By now, Ernie was outside, leaning against his jeep, waiting for me, chewing gum.
“Is there anyone I can call?” I asked. “A friend or relative who can be with you?”
She glanced at me as if awakening from a dream. “Don’t worry. Pretty soon they come. Everybody come. I no can stop them.”
I left her and walked out to the jeep.
Once Ammerman was in custody, the evidence against him piled up fast. They tested his blood just to make sure that the medical records Ernie and I had checked earlier were correct. He was in fact O positive. And they matched his body hair by microscopic analysis with the pubic hairs found at the murder site of Mrs. Yi Won-suk. A perfect match. Also, Ammerman had no convincing alibi for his whereabouts on the day of the murder, but he took a hard line and chose not to speak to the Korean National Police. This was tough to do since they have their way of convincing you that it would be in your interest to answer their questions. But Ammerman gutted it out and kept mum.
His insurance company dropped him like a bad habit. But Ammerman did have savings and the word we received from the KNPs was that Ammerman was hiring some American lawyer from Honolulu who’d worked on foreign cases before. Not smart. The Koreans considered this move to be an insult to Korean lawyers and the Korean judicial system in general. The better move would’ve been to plead guilty and express great remorse and ask the court for leniency.
In fact, the Korean government would’ve been glad to give it. After a few months, a few years at the most, in a Korean jail, they would’ve shuffled him quietly out of the country. A face-saving gesture to assuage Korean public opinion. But if Ammerman fought them, they’d have to fight back to save face for the Korean judicial system and Korean pride and then they’d have to lay a sentence on him more commensurate with the enormity of his crime. Which was murder, after all, of an innocent woman. The Korean government didn’t want to do this. They didn’t want any publicity in the American press that would be adverse toward Korea and that might, in the long run, drive a wedge between the United States and Korea and jeopardize the longstanding security arrangements that held those seven hundred thousand Communist North Korean soldiers at bay. And even more importantly, the Korean government didn’t dare damage the steady stream of American dollars that flowed from the US Treasury to the Korean government in the form of both economic and military assistance.
But not realizing this, Ammerman was taking a tough stance. He was refusing to cooperate with the Korean National Police, refusing to admit his guilt, and just in general pissing everybody off.
All of this would’ve been his problem if it hadn’t been for the woman who appeared in the provost marshal’s office two days before the scheduled start date of Ammerman’s trial.
The woman was his wife, Mrs. Mi-hwa Ammerman.
Colonel Harkins, the current provost marshal of the 8th United States Army, didn’t want to talk to her. However, he could recognize potential trouble when he saw it, so he let her into his office. Her English wasn’t the greatest so I was called in for two reasons: I could speak enough Korean to translate and I was familiar with the case.
When I sat down, Mrs. Ammerman started in on me in rapid-fire Korean. I interrupted her and slowed her down several times and, as best I could, I translated for the colonel. The gist of her complaint was, the Korean National Police wouldn’t allow her to talk to her husband.
Did her husband want to talk to her?
No. He had flatly refused and the KNPs wouldn’t force him.
What she hoped to do was to convince her husband to plead guilty. Since the case had hit the newspapers and the television, everyone in the country had turned against her. That wasn’t so bad, for herself she didn’t care. But her children had been teased unmercifully at school and her oldest son, age twelve, had actually been beaten by a pack of older boys. So much disruption had been caused that the authorities at Seoul International School had asked Mrs. Ammerman to withdraw her children from the student body. With no money coming in, she would have to send her children to the Korean public schools. That would be a disaster. Not only were her children half-American, which was usually enough reason for harassment, but their father was a rapist and a murderer.
“I can’t get a visa to go to the States,” Mrs. Ammerman told me. “I am a Korean citizen, so are my children. My husband never had any interest in applying for US citizenship for us.”
She leaned toward Colonel Harkins, still speaking Korean to him, with me translating.
“Even my older brother has had trouble. Everyone shuns him because of me, and now he’s been fired from his job. No Korean company wants anyone whose sister was foolish enough to marry an American. Especially an American killer.”