The Mug Book

After a gang leader was murdered in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the only witnesses who would talk with the police were tourists. They looked through so-called “mug books” filled with photographs of Asian men - and pointed out a man named Chol Soo Lee. Years later, a journalist decided to investigate his case, and described it as an “unreal, Alice-in-Chinatown murder case." Today’s episode comes from the Smithsonian’s Sidedoor podcast. Julie Ha's documentary is Free Chol Soo Lee. Join our newsletter by 2/28/26 to be entered to win a free year of Criminal Plus: ⁠⁠thisiscriminal.com/newsletter⁠⁠. (Additional rules apply.) Say hello on ⁠Facebook⁠, ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠TikTok⁠. Follow the show and review us on ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠. ⁠Sign up for Criminal Plus⁠ to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make ⁠This is Love⁠ and ⁠Phoebe Reads a Mystery⁠. Artwork by ⁠Julienne Alexander⁠. Check out ⁠our online shop⁠. Episode transcripts are posted on ⁠our website⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:47Speaker 01

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• 1:24Speaker 02

  On June 3rd, 1973, a gang leader named Yip Yip Chak was gunned down at a very busy intersection in Chinatown.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  Julie Ha is a journalist and a filmmaker.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  This murder was actually witnessed by probably dozens and dozens of people.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  When police arrived, they found a .38 caliber revolver, but they couldn't find any witnesses. Julie Ha says the locals in San Francisco's Chinatown were too afraid of gang retaliation to speak with the police. There were more than a dozen unsolved murders in Chinatown attributed to gang warfare.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  It started to become actually quite a serious problem for the city of San Francisco because tourism in Chinatown was really like a main lifeblood of San Francisco's revenue.

• 2:19Speaker 03

  The police interviewed the only people willing to talk.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  The police were only able to get these white tourists who saw the killer for mere seconds from quite a distance away to come down to the station and look through mug books.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  Mug books, full of photographs of Asian men. The white tourists were asked to point out anyone who looked like the shooter. A couple of people stopped on the same photo of a young Korean man. His name was Cho Su Lee.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Cho Su Lee was involved in a gun accident at his place the day before the murder.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  According to the police, Cho Su Lee had accidentally fired a gun in his apartment, and they questioned him about it. When police looked at the type of gun, it was a .38 caliber revolver. They did a ballistics test on the bullet from his apartment.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  When their ballistics expert did a test, they said it was a match, that the bullet that Cho Su Lee fired from his gun came from the murder weapon.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  Cho Su Lee was charged with first-degree murder. An all-white jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to life in prison. When the verdict was read, a reporter from the Sacramento Union wrote that Cho Su Lee, quote, "spat at the prosecutor and lunged toward him as jurors were filing out of the courtroom."

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Later, after he was restrained and put in a holding cell, that same newspaper reporter described Cho Su Lee as having tears welling in his eyes.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Cho Su Lee insisted he was innocent, but no one believed him for years, until a journalist heard about his story and wrote an article that would change both of their lives. This story comes from our friends at Side Door, a history podcast from The Smithsonian. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Here's Side Door's host, Lizzie Peabody.

• 4:28Speaker 04

  It was a lazy summer afternoon in 1973 when Rongko Yamada was killing time at her friend's apartment. She was lying on the floor, flipping through the San Francisco Chronicle, when she saw an article that snapped her out of her summer haze.

• 4:42Speaker 05

  There was an article about all the killings in Chinatown, all the people arrested. And this person named Cho Su Lee had been arrested for murder.

• 4:53Speaker 04

  Rongko knew Cho Su Lee as the Korean kid hanging around her sister's jewelry shop in San Francisco's Japantown. He was sweet, and they were friends. But she knew him as Charles Lee.

• 5:05Speaker 05

  And I thought, this, this is sounds like a Korean name. Is this the Charles that I know?

• 5:14Speaker 04

  So she made a few calls and confirmed that, yes, Charles Lee was in fact Cho Su Lee. And he was being charged with murder.

• 5:22Speaker 05

  I really didn't think that he had done this. But I wasn't 100%. I didn't know.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  Rongko did know one thing for sure, though. Cho Su could not afford a defense attorney. Rongko was a college student, so she couldn't afford one either. But she figured she could at least support her friend during his trial. So she drove to the courthouse in Sacramento. And while she was sitting there, in the courtroom, a young Chinese man approached her.

• 5:53Speaker 05

  And he was from Chinatown, San Francisco. And he said, you know, Cho Su didn't do that. And he knew who had killed Yip Yi Talk. He said, we all know that Cho Su didn't do that murder. That was the first time that someone told me that he was actually innocent.

• 6:22Speaker 04

  Three years later, in 1977, a journalist named K.W. Lee caught wind of Cho Su's story. He was talking to a social worker in Chinatown named Tom Kim when Tom happened to mention--

• 6:36Speaker 06

  He was really saddened by the fact that there was this young Korean immigrant who was in prison for a crime that he didn't commit.

• 6:46Speaker 04

  So Jin Kim is a curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folk Life and Cultural Heritage.

• 6:51Speaker 06

  This social worker felt like he hadn't had the means to be able to do anything to help or support him.

• 6:57Speaker 04

  K.W. was working as an investigative reporter for the Sacramento Union, the largest paper in California's capital. And he could tell right away that something smelled fishy.

• 7:08Speaker 07

  And I followed this smell, and things shouted at me.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  K.W. said that the first thing that failed his sniff test was the court record. The arresting officer, while he was on the stand, kept referring to Cho Su Lee as "Chinese."

• 7:25Speaker 07

  Calling a Korean a Chinese, anybody who has a smattering, of understanding of Asian culture would find it very unreal.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  Cho Su Lee's story resonated with K.W. Lee, who both have the same last name because they both immigrated from Korea. K.W. was a generation older, though. And before we go any further, there's something you need to know about K.W.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  He's a character.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  He cursed every other word. I was like, wow, I didn't realize you could use the F-word in so many different parts of speech.

• 8:03Speaker 04

  K.W. is one of those people you remember meeting.

• 8:07Speaker 06

  The first time I saw him in person was at a community forum that was held in the L.A. Times building in downtown Los Angeles.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  So Jin is one of K.W.'s unofficial biographers.

• 8:18Speaker 06

  And K.W. got up there and foaming at the mouth and yelling. And I was at the back of the room, and I could see the saliva gathering at the sides of his mouth as he yelled into the mic.

• 8:30Speaker 04

  K.W. had a reputation for absolutely hating corruption and wrongdoing. For him, it was personal.

• 8:39Speaker 04

  See, K.W. Lee had left Korea for the United States in 1950.

• 8:44Speaker 06

  His full name is actually Kyung Hwan Lee, and he was born in 1928. And he first, he comes to the United States as a student to study after World War II and right on, literally, the eve of the Korean conflict.

• 8:59Speaker 04

  K.W. despised the political corruption that had taken hold in his native South Korea. His plan was to get a degree in the United States and then return to Korea to speak out against authoritarianism. But he soon found himself in Tennessee, writing about lunch counter sit-ins in protest of racial segregation. Then he moved to West Virginia, the heart of coal country.

• 9:20Speaker 06

  Where he sees a corrupt political system, and it really angered him because he thought, in this country, you know, I'm seeing this thing that, you know, I wanted to go back to Korea and fight against through, you know, an independent press. And so I think he dives into that here in his new home.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  Whether it was coal miners struggling to put food on the table, politicians personally profiting from their office, or entire systems that seemed to favor the powerful over the vulnerable.

• 9:48Speaker 06

  He really was like a champion or an advocate for the underdog.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  And if he sniffed out injustice, he was going to write about it. He was going to expose it.

• 9:55Speaker 04

  In 1970, K.W. left Appalachia and headed to California to work for the Sacramento Union.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  That would be when, for the first time, he said, he would get to write about a fellow Korean immigrant like himself in the story of Cho Su Lee.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  It was 1977 when K.W. Lee heard of Cho Su Lee, and his interest was piqued. What if this young Korean-American was innocent? But K.W. was a Sacramento reporter. The murder of Yip Yee-tak had happened in San Francisco.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  His city editor's like, you're my chief investigative reporter. You're supposed to be working on, like, Capitol exposes. And so K.W. had to sort of make a deal with his city editor. You know, he said, OK, let me work on this on my own time at first. Let me see if I can uncover enough evidence to show that this guy may be innocent.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  So, off the clock, K.W. got to work.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  K W actually was quietly investigating this without even contacting Cho Su Lee at first. He said because he didn't want to get this guy's hopes up. Because if, in fact, he uncovered evidence to show that this guy was guilty of this murder, he was just going to drop it and like quietly walk away. Instead, he was uncovering evidence, you know, that was quite alarming to him and that was proving that this guy was likely innocent.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  But this evidence wasn't the only thing that was alarming. During his investigation, a news report flashed on K W's TV screen. Inmate Cho Su Lee is charged with murder in the stabbing death of a fellow prisoner.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Cho Su Lee said that he killed this man who was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang in self-defense, but authorities charged him with murder. Because this was his second murder charge, this would become a death penalty case.

• 11:51Speaker 04

  The guy K W suspected to be falsely accused of murder had just appeared to commit another murder while in prison. But K W did not stop his investigation. Instead, he wrote a letter to Cho Su in prison.

• 12:06Speaker 08

  Dear Cho Su Lee, my name is Kyung Won Lee, and I am a Korean who came to America in 1950 at the age of 20 to study. I attended universities and have been working as a newspaperman since 1957. I have been a reporter with the Sacramento Union since 1970. A few months ago, I met Tom Kim of San Francisco's Korean Community Service Center. He said his gut feeling was that you got a raw deal in a San Francisco shooting case and that you couldn't have done it. Tom Kim feels, and I feel the same way, that nobody has given a damn about troubled Korean boys trying to make a go in their adopted country. Also, recently I was shocked to learn that you were being charged with slaying an inmate

• 12:51Speaker 08

  at Tracy. It may be late, but never too late. I can do one thing at least. I want to write about the problems you have run into as a bewildered and helpless Korean boy in America. And maybe society will listen. Sincerely, Kyung Won Lee.

• 13:15Speaker 04

  When Cho Su Lee got the letter, he wrote to his friend, Ronko Yamada.

• 13:20Speaker 09

  Dear Ronko, what I'd like to know right now is as much as I can about Kim Won Lee. Because I want to be sure to know if he is for me or against me. Mr. Lee told me he's known Tom Kim for some time. And I would like for you to talk with Tom Kim and let me know his views on Mr. Lee. And is Mr. Lee sincere in wanting to be an aide to me? Love, Cho Su.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  Ever since she'd sat in that courtroom at his trial, Ronko hadn't stopped working to free her friend, Cho Su. She even started going to law school to learn every legal option available. She became Cho Su's person on the outside. So after he wrote that letter to Ronko, he fired off another one to KW, saying,

• 14:02Speaker 05

  You should get to know this woman, Ronko Yamada, who's my friend and who has been helping me. And so finally, KW and I were able to get together. That's how we met.

• 14:16Speaker 04

  It was a dark and stormy night in Sacramento when Ronko met KW. Really? She said the rain was blowing sideways as she looked out the window of the coffee shop and told him everything she knew about Cho Su Lee. After the meeting, KW would spend the next few months interviewing Cho Su in prison, going to Chinatown to talk to sources, and diving deep into court documents. And on January 29, 1978, people in Sacramento opened their Sunday edition of The Union to see the headline, "The Americanization of Cho Su Lee, Part 1: Lost in a Strange Culture", by KW Lee.

• 14:58Speaker 08

  Deepened volatile Tracy prison for young convicts, a 25-year-old Korean man waits in a maximum-security cell facing a possible death penalty. Convicted killer Cho Su Lee stands accused of fatally stabbing a fellow inmate last October 8, a first-degree murder offense with special circumstances calling for capital punishment. At the time of the prison slaying, Lee was serving a life term for the 1973 street corner killing of a reputed gang leader as a hired gun in San Francisco's Chinatown.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  This was the first in a two-part series. You might expect that this story would go into detail about the killing in Chinatown, but that's not what K W did.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  The first story actually just delves deeply into Cho Su Lee's background, his personal story, his biography.

• 15:52Speaker 04

  Cho Su Lee was born in South Korea. He never knew his father and spent most of his childhood with his aunt and uncle in Seoul. When he was 12 years old, he moved to San Francisco to join his mother there. He said that he thought she must be rich because she had hot water and a gas stove. But really, she was living in poverty, working two jobs. And while she struggled to pay the bills, Cho Su struggled at school. He didn't speak English, so the school placed him in a bilingual class for Chinese students. He did not speak Chinese either, and they didn't differentiate between a Korean kid and a Chinese one. The article goes on.

• 16:32Speaker 08

  In classrooms, he found himself in regular lessons in a sink or swim situation, in school yards or on hallways. He was constantly picked on because he was very short for his age, and he didn't know English except how to say his name and age.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  At school, he's bullied because he doesn't know the language. He doesn't know how to speak English. Cho Su actually fights back against the bullies and is often disciplined.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  In one of these cases of bullying, a vice principal accused Cho Su of being the aggressor. This made him so angry, he kicked the vice principal. Instead of getting help, he was arrested, convicted of battery, and sent to juvenile hall. Later, he was sent to a mental institution.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  The doctors diagnosed him with schizophrenia. And then later, a Korean-speaking nurse talks to him, and they realize that he just can't speak English.

• 17:32Speaker 05

  It must have been just such a nightmare for him. Quite alone.

• 17:38Speaker 08

  Thus began the Americanization of Cho Su Lee, with good intentions and benign ignorance, paving the road to a private hell for the bewildered boy from Seoul, Korea.

• 17:54Speaker 06

  I feel like, in retrospect, and KW would probably be like, it sounds like psychological babble. But it's also about him. It's also about KW.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  KW later said he saw himself in Cho Su Lee. He told journalist Sandra Jin in the 1994 interview.

• 18:11Speaker 08

  It was just by the grace of God I have eluded the fate that fell on him. Because there is a very thin line between him and me. I was lucky. He was not lucky.

• 18:25Speaker 04

  Part two of KW's story on Cho Su Lee came out the next day. This one was a deep dive into the case against Cho Su.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  We'll be right back.

• 18:54Speaker 03

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• 21:00Speaker 04

  In a Sunday edition of the Sacramento Union in 1978, journalist K.W. Lee had introduced the people of Sacramento, California to Cho Seo Lee, a young Korean immigrant facing a death sentence. The next day, K.W. ran the second part of his two-part story, posing a question to his readers.

• 21:21Speaker 08

  Did Cho Seo Lee assassinate Yip Yee Tuk in 1973 on a contract from the Wacheng gang amid a rash of gangland murders in San Francisco?

• 21:33Speaker 04

  This is an excerpt from that article, which he titled "Alice in Chinatown Murder Case."

• 21:40Speaker 08

  The Sacramento jury believed that Lee was the hired gun who cold-bloodedly pumped three bullets into the 32-year-old Tuk at the intersection swarming with Sunday tourists and inhabitants.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  K.W. in his investigation, he went into Chinatown in San Francisco many times just to do the legwork, to talk to people in the community. And they said it defied common sense for this Chinatown gang to hire Cho Seo Lee, a Korean, to kill this very high-profile Chinatown gang leader.

• 22:17Speaker 08

  The prosecution's thrust, based on intelligence reports that the Korean acted as a trusted Chinatown gang enforcer for money, defies the common sense and experiences of the Asian community.

• 22:29Speaker 04

  KW's article lays out a detailed outline for why Cho Su Lee was unlikely to have committed the Chinatown murder. And he found that the biggest flaws in the city's case against Cho Su boiled down to two things: the murder weapon and the witnesses. To refresh, the police uncovered a 38 caliber gun near the crime scene, and they had matched it with the bullet Cho Su Lee had accidentally fired into his own wall the day before the murder.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Before the murder trial took place, though, this was challenged by Cho Su's then defense attorney. They challenged that ballistics test, and they discovered that it was not a match and that this was a mistake. The police department actually admitted it was a mistake before the murder trial. But still, the police and the DA, they still went ahead with the prosecution of Cho Su Lee.

• 23:27Speaker 04

  The gun wasn't actually a match, and the police knew it. But they thought they still had a case against Cho Su Lee because of the witnesses. But remember, nobody who lived in Chinatown came forward as a witness. They were too afraid of the gangs. So the only eyewitnesses were out-of-towners. And the IDs made by these witnesses were not as rock-solid as jurors were made to believe. Ronco says after the shooting, six witnesses had been brought to the police station. There, officers handed them a photo book full of Asian men's faces—or mugs—and they were told.

• 24:08Speaker 05

  Oh, just pick anything that's similar. Pick any similarities with the person that you saw.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  Some of the witnesses picked Cho Su because his hair looked similar to the killer—or maybe his eyes. But they told the police they weren't actually identifying the person in the photo as the suspect. They were pointing out similar facial features.

• 24:30Speaker 05

  And some people even said, "I'm picking this because something looks similar, but I know for a fact it wasn't him. This is not the person I saw."

• 24:42Speaker 08

  They chose a total of five mug photographs having characteristics similar to the man they saw shoot the victim. They made no identification of the suspect.

• 24:53Speaker 04

  What's more, the witnesses noticed that the person who shot Yip Yi Tak was about the same height. So when they described the killer, they said,

• 25:01Speaker 02

  "It was a person who was between 5'6" and 5'10."

• 25:07Speaker 04

  Chol Su was actually quite short.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  People often describe him as around 5'2". At most, he was 5'4". By no stretch of the imagination would you imagine him being between 5'6" or 5'10".

• 25:20Speaker 04

  The witnesses also described the shooter as being clean-shaven, and Chol Su had a mustache at the time of the murder. But even though Chol Su Lee didn't fit the description, he was the only person from the mug book that police brought to the station for a physical lineup. Chol Su was marched into a room, stood shoulder to shoulder with a handful of random men, and the witnesses were asked to make an ID of the shooter.

• 25:43Speaker 05

  And they choose Chol Su Lee, but it's not even that this is the person that they saw in Chinatown kill Yip Yi Tak. This is the person that they remember, really, from the mug book.

• 26:00Speaker 04

  Ronco and KW argued that police had been pushing the witnesses toward Chol Su Lee the entire time.

• 26:06Speaker 05

  You almost can't fault the witnesses.

• 26:10Speaker 05

  The police slowly, over time, persuade them to believe that

• 26:17Speaker 05

  the person they have chosen is, in fact, the one.

• 26:21Speaker 04

  But even if the police hadn't steered the witnesses toward Chol Su Lee, there was another problem with their IDs, one that's explained in this TV news investigation of the case.

• 26:30Speaker 11

  Now, what would be the problem, say, with the witnesses who were standing over on that corner? Why couldn't they make a positive identification?

• 26:37Speaker 12

  Well, if you take a... If you look over there, there's an Asian couple standing over there. Now, look away, because you only had no more than three or four seconds. Suppose that you're looking at a book with hundreds of Asian faces in it, and asked to pick out a few faces a few hours later. See how difficult it is? Cross-racial ID. It's an enormous problem.

• 26:59Speaker 11

  If you're not Asian, you're not likely to identify someone who is Asian as easily.

• 27:03Speaker 04

  Research has shown that, quote, "An eyewitness trying to identify a stranger is over 50% more likely to make a misidentification when the stranger and eyewitness are of different races." And not a single one of the witnesses identifying Chol Su Lee was Asian. KW's articles about Chol Su Lee hit the mainstream, and the majority of people read them and moved on with their lives, but not everyone. Some Korean-Americans who read the stories were shaken enough to take action.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  There was a small group of Korean-Americans living in the Davis-Sacramento, California area, and they decided that they were going to form a defense committee to help Chol Su Lee, whom they believed was innocent after reading KW Lee's newspaper articles.

• 27:58Speaker 04

  There were maybe 10 Koreans in this group, but Ranko Yamada had already begun to rally college students and youth activists in the Bay Area. The Koreans in the valley were welcome allies in their fight to free Chol Su Lee, which KW had helped them take public.

• 28:14Speaker 05

  If Chol Su was going to be convicted in the courtroom, at least we could have him tried in the public.

• 28:25Speaker 04

  KW's articles became the opening argument in a trial of public opinion. Activists and concerned Korean-Americans took the article, ran to the nearest photocopier, and started shoving copies into the hands of anyone who would take it.

• 28:39Speaker 06

  So it might be something that would show up at a university or in a meeting of students, but it became something really tangible that people could then use, in a sense, as evidence and support for mobilizing.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  And just word of mouth, little by little, as news spread that there was this Korean immigrant man who was likely railroaded for a murder he did not commit in San Francisco, people just started joining the movement, and they wanted to do something to help this man, even though he was a stranger.

• 29:12Speaker 05

  So it was KW who had spelled it out. A very clear outline, and we followed it. And this movement was created.

• 29:28Speaker 04

  The article had given voice to a broad swath of Americans who felt voiceless and unseen.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  We're coming on the heels of the civil rights movement, on the heels of ethnic studies movement, on the heels of the anti-war movement because of the Vietnam War. And you had a really, like, this whole generation of young Asian-Americans who were feeling quite empowered to try to work for themselves to be seen and heard in a society that they felt was not seeing them and also discriminating against them.

• 30:02Speaker 05

  Everybody had an incident, either through themselves, or their relatives, or their friends, when they had been treated quite unfairly, or gone through, you know, a terrible, terrible process, due to no fault of their own, but because they were Asian.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Something in Cho Su Lee's story resonated with each of them, and really touched them deeply.

• 30:31Speaker 04

  KW had hoped to rally Korean-Americans to Cho Su's side.

• 30:35Speaker 06

  The irony of it, though, is that what he helps to mobilize is a pan-Asian-American movement.

• 30:42Speaker 04

  Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and many more joined the fight. College students sold hot links and held car washes to raise money for the Cho Su Lee Defense Fund. Older Asian-Americans spoke at churches and asked for donations. Some supporters even wrote a song.

• 31:24Speaker 04

  Proceeds from all these efforts went to the defense fund. And eventually, they had raised enough money to reinvestigate Chol Su Lee's case. The Free Chol Su Lee Defense Fund hired new lawyers for Chol Su Lee. Leonard Weinglass, who defended the Chicago Seven, took the lead. And he hired a private investigator named Josiah Tink Thompson. Tink soon discovered another witness that Chol Su Lee's original defense attorney never knew about. And that's because the police never told them. A man named Stephen Morris.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  He is a man who actually witnessed the murder from a closer distance than any of the witnesses who testify at Chol Su's first murder trial. And actually, he called the police station after the murder and said, "I witnessed this." The police apparently talked to Stephen Morris briefly, but then never called upon him again as they investigated the case.

• 32:25Speaker 04

  Stephen Morris had been ready to testify on behalf of Chol Su Lee, but he never heard from the police again. And nobody who was defending Chol Su Lee was made aware of his existence.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  He said the killer was taller. Also, you know, when he looked at Chol Su Lee at the courthouse one day, because the defense's private investigator brought him in to just take a look at Chol Su Lee and ask him, "Is that the killer you saw that day?" You know, Stephen Morris said, "No, that's not him. Chol Su Lee is very handsome. He's beautiful." You know? He's like, "Actually, the killer was kind of ugly." And so, he was able to say that definitively, this was not the killer that he saw.

• 33:08Speaker 04

  A judge ruled that since the police suppressed the existence of the witness Stephen Morris, Chol Su Lee's murder conviction had to be thrown out and a new trial had to be held.

• 33:34Speaker 03

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• 35:39Speaker 04

  It was 1979 when Cho Su was granted a retrial for the killing of Yip Yip Tak nearly six years earlier. With additional evidence and a crack legal team by his side, there was hope. But there was also dread because in the meantime, Cho Su Lee had to be tried for the prison yard stabbing. The jury in that case had no idea that Cho Su's earlier murder conviction had been overturned, and they found him guilty. Because it was his second murder charge, he was sentenced to death and transferred to San Quentin's death row. Cho Su Lee sat on death row in San Quentin for the next three years, awaiting his retrial.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  And during that time, K.W. upended his life to stay on the case.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  He took a leave of absence from his newspaper, the Sacramento Union, because his editors finally said, "We can't have you, our chief investigative reporter, still working on the same case."

• 36:40Speaker 04

  So K.W. said, "Look, I'm sorry, but I have got to see this through to the end."

• 36:45Speaker 02

  And so he takes a leave of absence and he starts a Korean-American newspaper in Los Angeles.

• 36:51Speaker 06

  He starts the Koreatown Weekly, which is a weekly newspaper.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  And one of the key stories that they follow in that newspaper is the Cho Su Lee case.

• 37:01Speaker 04

  K.W. rearranged his entire career to stay on top of Cho Su's case, running himself ragged to get this new paper off the ground. And at the end of each day, he stayed up late to write to Cho Su at San Quentin.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Because he knew Cho Su was probably waiting for that kind of human contact from him, from that letter of encouragement. And so he just couldn't let him down. I mean, the letters between those two are so beautiful, really encouraging each other in the darkest moments.

• 37:34Speaker 06

  K W really wanted to keep his morale up. He wanted to give him a sense of what the possibilities were. He wanted him to feel proud of who he was and what he had endured.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  Even Chol Su, after being placed on death row, and you can imagine what he was going through at that time. But he writes such a comforting letter to K W after that.

• 38:01Speaker 06

  You see Chol Su encouraging him, like, "It's great. I saw the issue. Great job. It must be really hard, but it's great. I'm glad you're doing this."

• 38:10Speaker 02

  I remember K W saying, "Oh, my gosh. Hear you on death row, and you're comforting me."

• 38:19Speaker 02

  Chol Su never knew his own father. And so I think, in many ways, K W sort of filled that role in his life.

• 38:32Speaker 04

  August 11, 1982. Nine years after Yip Yi Toc was killed in Chinatown, Chol Su Lee's retrial began.

• 38:41Speaker 05

  Not so much was different in the second trial.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  It was like night and day, those two murder trials.

• 38:50Speaker 04

  This time, Chol Su Lee had a community of supporters behind him.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  You had not only these young, college-age activists there. You had these church-going grandmothers, Korean immigrant grandmothers, some of them wearing their traditional Korean silk dresses, showing up in the courthouse, smiling at and waving at Chol Su Lee at the defendant's table.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  And while this community support didn't have any legal power, Julie says it had an impact on the trial.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  I think it was Rangko who said, "The community's support and presence helped give the jury and the judge a conscience. It helped keep everybody honest."

• 39:31Speaker 04

  Community support and a top-notch defense was good and all, but Chol Su's fate would ultimately come down to the evidence and testimony that was presented to the jury. Remember, there was no evidence tying Chol Su Lee to the murder of Yip Yi Tak. The ballistics didn't match, so his conviction rested purely on eyewitnesses, the very same witnesses who testified in 1974. But this time, the result was different.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  Chol Su's attorneys were able to actually show how outrageous it was that they could be describing a killer who looked nothing like Chol Su Lee, and it still led to his conviction. This is what happens when you actually have competent defense attorneys who believe in their client's innocence.

• 40:17Speaker 04

  After nearly a month-long trial, the prosecution and defense rested their cases. The jury began to deliberate. Ronco, KW, and Chol Su's supporters were hopeful all their work would free Chol Su.

• 40:31Speaker 05

  But you still, you never know. You never know until the verdict comes out.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  Deliberations lasted one day. At 8:00 PM, the jury announced that they had reached a verdict. Everyone filed into the courtroom to hear their decision.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  The verdict is read, and it's not guilty. The courtroom just erupts into screams and shouts of elation.

• 41:04Speaker 05

  People went crazy. People just jumped up and started yelling in the courtroom.

• 41:12Speaker 04

  One of the members of the defense committee, Jay Yu, had told activists in the courtroom to stay quiet after the verdict, "Don't make a scene."

• 41:19Speaker 02

  But as soon as he heard the not guilty verdict, he screamed. He screamed he couldn't control himself.

• 41:26Speaker 04

  This is how the verdict was covered in KW Lee's Koreatown newspaper.

• 41:32Speaker 13

  With tears brimming in his eyes after the nine-man, three-woman jury read the not guilty verdict, Chol Su Lee faced his supporters through bulletproof glass partitions of the maximum-security facility and told them that his victory was, in fact, theirs.

• 41:48Speaker 09

  It's a verdict, not only for myself. It has been your support, your faith, that has made this possible. God bless you.

• 41:59Speaker 13

  The audience wept. Even some sheriff's bailiffs showed red-rimmed eyes.

• 42:07Speaker 04

  This Pan-Asian movement of old and young, Japanese-Americans, Korean-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and many others, had come together and they had freed a young Korean immigrant from death row. But Cho Su Lee was still a convicted murderer for the prison stabbing in 1977. His lawyers, though, were able to strike a plea deal.

• 42:28Speaker 05

  So he settled with the conditions that there'd be no other association with the courts. When he walks out, he walks out for good. He said, "Okay."

• 42:41Speaker 04

  In March of 1983, he walked out of prison, a free man.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  Cho Su Lee had spent nearly 10 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. And during that entire time, Ranko Yamada never lost focus on getting him back home.

• 43:01Speaker 05

  It was the issue that really did change me and created me, just made me who I am.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  It inspired her to go to law school and become a champion for the underdog. But it wasn't just her life that was changed.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  Working on the Cho Su Lee case really changed K.W.'s life.

• 43:24Speaker 06

  I think that he would probably say it was probably one of the most important relationships and experiences that he had.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  After meeting Cho Su Lee, he said it sort of awakened his latent Korean-American identity.

• 43:39Speaker 04

  K.W. Lee left mainstream English-language newspapers and dedicated himself to journalism about Korean-Americans and for Korean-Americans. He was also working hard to train a whole new generation of journalists.

• 43:54Speaker 05

  He was mentoring all these Korean students and all these young people in journalism and how to be an excellent journalist.

• 44:05Speaker 04

  That's how Julie met K.W. Lee in 1990.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  I was 18 years old, had just graduated from high school, and he just started a Korean-American newspaper called The Kree Times English Edition. He was espousing this principle of how all people, all communities, including Korean-Americans, deserved to be known. Seen and heard in our full human context, warts and all. And that was sort of a signature phrase of his.

• 44:34Speaker 04

  K W. Stayed friends with Chol Su Lee for the rest of his life. He was his mentor, a guiding hand that helped Chol Su when he struggled to adapt to life outside prison. K W. Was like a father figure to him, which made it even harder when Chol Su died unexpectedly in 2014.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  And he was in such anguish when Chol Su died at age 62.

• 44:58Speaker 04

  But K W. Was also angry.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  At the funeral, he stood up and he was clutching this Buddhist monk's walking stick that Chol Su had carved for him out of a tree. And he was a little bit angry and he said, why is the story of Chol Su Lee like underground after all these years? You know, why don't people know about it?

• 45:21Speaker 04

  That speech inspired Julie to make the documentary Free Chol Su Lee. And K W. Was at the film's premiere in 2022. Three years later, in the spring of 2025, he died at the age of 96.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  When he passed, I described it as like the brightest flame going out. You know, that's what it felt like because his, his force and his spirit felt that big. And so when he passed, it did feel like the brightest flame just blew out.

• 46:02Speaker 04

  K W. Lee has become known as the godfather of Asian American journalism. Armed with a typewriter, he spent his life bringing people together to build a community. And he challenged people to find the strength to protect that community.

• 46:16Speaker 05

  I've known many, many brilliant people, people I would consider genius. And K W. Was one of them.

• 46:30Speaker 05

  Smart is just smart.

• 46:35Speaker 05

  But when you couple that with the compassion that he had and his integrity and his feeling for humanity as a whole, that's singular. That's the difference. He was a great, great person.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  So Jin Kim says KW can be summed up in a letter she once saw sitting on his desk. It was from a former colleague of his at the Charleston Gazette in West Virginia. This was years after they had worked together, reporting on coal miners. He wrote,

• 47:14Speaker 06

  What struck me at the time was how much you really cared about these people. And he said, except back then, I wouldn't have said it that way. Back then, I would have said that KW, he gives a shit. And I think that's how I think of him. Yeah, he really, he really gave a shit.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  Thanks to Lizzie Peabody and the podcast Side Door from the Smithsonian. We've got a link to the Side Door podcast in our show notes. It's great, and we hope you'll follow them. We've also got a link there to Julie Ha's documentary, Free Chol Suli.

• 48:04Speaker 03

  Special thanks to Ranko Yamada, Julie Ha, So Jin Kim, Rick Lee, Sebastian Yun, and Matsuko Adachi. Side Door is produced by James Morrison, Lizzie Peabody, and Anne Conanan. Fact checking by Natalie Boyd and mixing by Tarek Fuda.

• 48:24Speaker 03

  Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susannah Robertson, Jackie Sugeko, Lilly Clark, Lena Silson, and Megan Kinnane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. Recently, we put one out about a mystery. Someone was stealing manuscripts, but no one could figure out why. To listen and learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com/plus. We're on Facebook at This is Criminal and Instagram and TikTok at Criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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