Children (2011) is a mystery thriller Korean movie which circles around a television producer, a psychology professor and a police detective who are investigating the mysterious disappearance of five boys.
In the movie, five years after the boys’ disappearance, Ji-seung (Park Yong-woo), a young ambitious producer at a Seoul television broadcaster, is sent to Daegu after he is caught fabricating parts of a documentary.
In Daegu, he is determined to get a scoop on the mystery case so that he can proudly return to Seoul.
There, he meets a psychology professor, Woo-hyuk (Ryu Seung-ryong), who, using his psychology theory, points to the parents of one of the missing boys as main suspects.
Ji-seung and Woo-hyuk work together to try to prove that Jong-ho’s father and mother killed the children.
But their attempt clashes with Kyung-shik (Sung Dong-il), a veteran detective from a local police station who is the lead investigator of the case.
Kyung-shik believes that a stranger who is familiar with the village committed the crime, not the parents.
Nonetheless, Ji-seung and Woo-hyuk ransack Jong-ho’s house, digging out the stone floor and emptying the toilet, hoping to find the buried bodies of the children, with scores of village residents, reporters and police officers watching.
But the search ends in vain, and the two are slammed for insulting the parents.
The movie then flashes forward to 2002 when the bones of the five children are found at a hill near the village.
About the Frog Boys incident, the truth behind Children (2011)
The film unfortunately is based on a true story.
On March 26, 1991, a group of five boys disappeared while searching for salamander eggs in the outskirts of Daegu, South Korea.
Aged between 9 and 13 years old, the boys were Woo Cheol-won (13), Jo Ho-yeon (12), Kim Yeong-gyu (11) , Park Chan-in (10) and Kim Jong-sik (9).
They were later known as the Frog Boys.
Since the disappearance took place on a public holiday for local elections, the media went crazy over the case.
The then President Rae Tae-woo even ordered a massive manhunt to find the frog boys.
Despite all the media attention and 300,000 force dispatched to look for the boys, they remained missing until 10 years later.
On Sept 26, 2002, a man discovered their bodies on Mount Waryong while searching for acorns.
At first the police believed that they died of hypothermia. There were, however, a number of flaws in that theory.
First of all, the site where they were found was not even 100 meters from the streets. Theoretically, even if it was raining and cold that day, it would have taken them five minutes to run home.
Additionally, if they had died due to natural causes, the bones would have been found on top of the dirt, not buried underneath.
Foul play was immediately suspected after a post mortem showed they had signs of blunt-force trauma.
Meanwhile, the parents of the Frog Boys went through tremendous ordeal since the incident.
Here are five sad truths about the Frog Boys and the parents that they left behind:
1.Many of the parents of the frog boys quit their jobs to look for their sons.
Before the bodies were found, according to Channel News Asia (CNA), the five fathers quit their jobs, rented a small lorry and kept searching across South Korea.
The lorry had photos of the children pasted on the sides and coated to withstand rain. Written below were the word “please help find our missing children”.
2.There were many false leads about the case.
Reportedly, there were over 500 leads about the case. Unfortunately for now, all of them led to nowhere.
There were basically too many theories and conspiracies on what happened to the children.
On top of that, there were many prank calls which only made things worse. Some fake calls even claimed that it was from a kidnapper.
The worst lead perhaps came from Kim Ga-won, a criminal psychologist who had studied in the United States.
Kim claimed that the children were buried in Jong-sik’s house because his father Kim Cheol-gyu couldn’t remember the first three hours on the day the children went missing.
Since there were not many criminal psychologists in those days, many believed Kim, including the police force. The police even brought in an excavator to dig Jong-sik’s house.
The whole fiasco was filmed by the media as many other public members stood there watching.
Even after the house has ruined, nothing had been found.
This resulted in a group of unhappy people who directed their anger toward Kim. The police had to take him away for his own safety.
3.One of the fathers died before ever finding the truth about his son.
Speaking of Jong-sik’s father, Kim Cheol-gyu passed away due to liver cancer a year before the boys’ remains were found.
Many believed that it was caused by the stress he suffered after his son has disappeared.
CNA also reported that some of the fathers had fallen into addictions such into sleeping pills and alcohol while dealing with their losses.
4.The heartbreaking moment when the parents were asked to identify their sons
According to a news report, the first group of police who arrived at the scene were beyond horrible in their jobs.
They just dug out whatever they could find, organising the long bones and the skulls together instead of separating them as one complete body.
One of the parents told in an interview, “How dare they treat the bones like this by arranging them in piles, then call us to look at them and ask them whether this is our child or not. We couldn’t do anything, so we became angry.”
The police did called for forensic scientist Professor Chae Jong-min from Kyungbook University to the crime scene. Even he was baffled with the crime scene that he arrived to with all the bones piled up together.
5.The parents filed a lawsuit against the police for their failures but the result turned out to be heartbreaking.
Obviously lacking common of sense, it was no surprise why the Korean police was served a lawsuit by the parents.
They were sued for having ‘not done their jobs properly’ such as botching evidence at the crime scene.
Unfortunately, the parents lost not in one but three trials against the police.
In 2021, a memorial stone has been erected at Seonwan Park near Mount Waryong in conjunction with the 30th anniversary of the unfortunate incident.
The monument which was named the ‘Frog Boy Commemoration and Child Safety Prayer Monument’, was installed to commemorate all the missing children and to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents.
