And, last fall, Cho was formally sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.Īnd in court, Cho had to face the victims' families one last time. In June 2012, nine years after the murders, the jury returned a guilty verdict. Cho didn't want any witnesses, so he shot her, the nanny and her son. Charis Song, with her keys still in her hand, walked in and surprised him. Without any other clear motive, Santoro told the jury his theory: Cho went into Song's apartment looking for money.

'What causes a thief to turn to murder – no one will ever know but when you're talking about panic and being exposed and one thing leads to another and maybe you go into a home to commit a burglary and a robbery, the next thing you know, you're killing people,' Santoro said. 'Then how did we get all this evidence?' the detective asks him.īut it's a big leap between Ponzi scheme to triple homicide. 'I had nothing, nothing, nothing to do with that case,' Cho is seen saying in the interrogation. Later that same day, Cho is brought back, and this time he is interrogated. 38-caliber bullets were the same type used to murder the victims. 38-caliber rounds,' Deputy District Attorney Frank Santoro said. And the cops go and recover one of the packages and in it are five live. And he dumps packages in several different trash cans at several different locations. 'He drives all over Los Angeles doing really strange things.

They knew he was a Ponzi suspect, but was he a murderer, too? In 2009, detectives started following Cho. He did not contact anybody, did not call anybody, so at that point, our belief was that absolutely, he had nothing to do with the case, nothing to do with the murder of his family,' McCartin said. 'After our interview, he went back to work. With the exception of their parking spaces and few mutual friends, there was no connection. Investigators wanted to see if there was any connection between the men. He knew they owned a business in L.A.'s Garment District, and they appeared to be successful.īut Cho didn't offer investigators new information in his interview, and he was released.īyung Song was also brought in and interviewed separately. He noticed the Songs drove expensive cars. Investigators told Cho they were re-interviewing all former neighbors to see if they could find new leads.Ĭho and his family had a parking spot next to the Song family when they lived in the building. He had just pleaded guilty for that crime and was serving a five years of probation. He was a former neighbor of the Songs and he ran a Ponzi scheme in the Korean community. McCartin said he learned that Byung Song and his wife were having marital and financial problems – but murder? Nothing could ever be proven, and the case went cold for nearly six years.īut then a man named Robin Kyu Cho was brought in for questioning. 'While the suspect was taping her face with plastic gloves, he stuck his hand to her face, pulled his hand to get his hand out and the fingertip stuck,' McCartin said. Her mouth was gagged with tape wrapped around her head. Her hands were bound with packaging tape. The toddler's mother, Charis Song, 30, was found slumped against the bathroom wall and floor. Nanny Eun Sik Min, 56, and Nathan Song, 2, were found in the tub in the master bathroom. 'And that was our job to find out, investigate what actually occurred.' 'A brutal crime scene, had no idea how or why it occurred,' said Brian McCartin, lead investigator on the case for the Los Angeles Police Department.

It was May 5, 2003, and the slaying of a mother, her toddler son and their nanny in their apartment shocked residents in the Miracle Mile area of Los Angeles. LOS ANGELES () - Two women and a 2-year-old boy were shot to death in a Miracle Mile-area apartment complex in 2003 in a case that was cold until the work of dogged investigators paid off years later.

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