Suspect in thefts was at WSU

Several unsolved thefts of women’s underwear occurred in Pullman between 1999 and 2001 while an Oregon man – now a suspect in similar crimes – attended Washington State University, authorities confirmed Thursday.

Sung Koo Kim, who graduated from WSU in 2001, is charged in four Oregon counties with multiple felonies – crimes associated with a collection of 3,400 bras and panties found in a Tigard, Ore., home, where he lived with his parents.

Some of that underwear was stolen from laundry rooms at a half-dozen Oregon universities, colleges and apartment complexes after Kim left the Pullman campus, court records say.

Investigators say some of the panties and bras may have been taken from the Palouse in the late 1990s.

Oregon detectives who found the collection last year also seized the 30-year-old suspect’s computer, containing 40,000 images of women being raped, tortured, eviscerated and mutilated, along with graphic Web sites, court documents say. He also is charged in Oregon with possessing child pornography.

Until last week, the 30-year-old also was considered a leading suspect in the unsolved disappearance of Brooke Wilburger, who vanished from a Corvallis apartment where panties were stolen.

Kim is no longer a leading suspect in the Wilburger disappearance because he has an alibi for his whereabouts when the 19-year-old Brigham Young University student vanished, Corvallis Police Lt. Ron Noble said Thursday.

Now, prosecutors in Multnomah, Washington, Benton and Yamhill counties in Oregon are focusing on burglary and theft charges associated with the underwear collection. They know about Kim’s time in Pullman.

“We do have some unsolved, fairly large thefts of women’s underwear in that time period,” Pullman Police Commander Chris Tennant said Thursday when asked about such thefts between 1998 and 2001.

The thefts occurred from clothes washers and dryers in laundry rooms used by residents of privately owned apartment complexes located near the WSU campus. The clothing belonged to women who were 18 to 22 years old, Tennant said.

Listed items stolen from the Pullman apartments included satin “thong” briefs and Victoria’s Secret underwear, similar to those found when Oregon police served search warrants at Kim’s home where he lives with his parents, who are South Korean immigrants.

The thefts in Pullman remain unsolved, without a description of a suspect, and Kim is not specifically linked to any of those thefts, Tennant said.

Oregon investigators have been in contact with investigators in the Palouse, the Pullman police commander said.

“You’ve got to remember that this probably is an underreported crime,” Tennant said. “I don’t think all women who have their underwear stolen are going to report it.”

But within a three-month period in 2001, approximately three dozen bras and panties were reported stolen from laundry rooms at three off-campus apartment complexes, not far from where Kim lived, Tennant said after reviewing reports.

Kim received two traffic tickets, one from WSU police and a second from Whitman County deputies, within a two-week period in 2000, Tennant said.

Former Whitman County Sheriff Steve Tomson, who now works for the Justice Department, recalled several underwear thefts in the months before he left the sheriff’s office in 2002.

“I remember that they had a rash of panty thefts,” Tomson said.

The former sheriff said he wasn’t specifically familiar with Kim’s name. “But you’ve got to think if that guy was in Pullman, he’s got to be good for that kind of thing. It’s not a very common crime.”

WSU spokeswoman Charleen Taylor said privacy laws prohibit her from confirming that Kim even attended the Pullman university.

WSU Police Chief Steve Hansen said he couldn’t find specific reports of underwear thefts from WSU dormitories.

But information obtained by The Spokesman-Review shows he lived in Room 334 in Rogers Hall in 1999 and 2000 and later lived in an off-campus apartment complex at 1405 NE Merman Drive in Pullman.

Kim graduated from WSU in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in genetics and cellular biology, the Oregonian reported last year.

While attending WSU, Kim bought an AR-15 assault rifle and frequently went shooting at a Whitman County rock quarry with friends, the Portland newspaper reported.

Kim told his WSU friends that the Columbine High School shooting was justified and later boasted that “he could kill at will and not face sanctions because he was an angel of Christ,” the newspaper reported in its coverage of the suspect.

Eight miles from Pullman, Moscow Police Chief Dan Weaver couldn’t find any reports about underwear thefts at the University of Idaho between 1998 and 2001, but said many times such crimes aren’t reported or are filed as “miscellaneous thefts” by police departments.

“It doesn’t appear that he was over here,” the Moscow chief said, “but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t. Obviously, with 3,400 pair of panties and bras, that’s pretty phenomenal.”