Her badly decomposed body was found in a rundown Seoul apartment about a year after she died, discovered only after government housing officials sought to evict her for failing to pay the rent.
The woman, 49, had been well known in the community of North Korean defectors. After fleeing the reclusive nation in the early 2000s, she soon became a success story for South Korea’s resettlement program — even counseling other defectors on how to transition to life in a modern nation.
So it came as a shock among defectors that it took so long for anyone to find the woman, whose name and cause of death haven’t been publicly released after her body was discovered in October.
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