Seoul, March 08: In South Korea, where people often remove their shoes before entering homes, restaurants or funeral parlours, it is a nagging problem: people walking off with others’ shoes, either by mistake or, sometimes, intentionally.
Still, Detective Kim Jeong-gu’s jaw dropped recently when he opened the warehouse of an ex-convict in Seoul and found 170 apple boxes packed with 1,700 pairs of expensive designer shoes, sorted by size and brand, and all believed to have been stolen.
“Shoe theft is not unusual here,” Detective Kim, 28, said. “But we gasped at this one.”
The 59-year-old suspect, a former convict identified only by his last name, Park, was a one time used-shoe vendor who had been convicted twice in the past five years of pilfering shoes and operated around funeral homes, police said.
Such facilities have 20 to 40 rooms where grieving families receive guests who bow on the floor in a show of respect for the deceased. They usually arrive in their best shoes and invariably leave them outside.
For Park, the police said, stealing shoes was a case of if the shoe fits, take it.
Last month, Park, disguised as a mourner dressed in black, strolled into a funeral parlour in Seoul, took off his cheap footwear, paid his respects and then slipped on an expensive pair and left.
He hid the shoes behind a tree and returned in sandals. He repeated this twice before he was caught by Detective Kim, alerted by images from security cameras. “He admitted stealing three pairs that day,” Detective Kim said. “We believe he stole them all.” Park is now behind bars.
The police faced a new problem: how to find the owners of the recovered shoes. Few people take the trouble to report stolen shoes.
Finally, the police came up with what they called the “Cinderella solution”. For four days last month, they spread out Park’s footwear on an outdoor basketball court and let anyone who claimed to have lost shoes drop by and try them on — all 1,700 pairs.
But before doing that, a claimant was required to write down his or her shoe size, design, colour and brand to limit the chances of a person’s taking someone else’s pair.
About 400 people showed up, but only 95 found their shoes.