The late Moon Ja Kim still a mystery
By Mike Gordon
Advertiser Staff Writer
The dead woman stared out from the California driver's license, a smile on her face. Happier times, no doubt, for Moon Ja Kim.
Susan Siu stared back, brow furrowed with frustration. She has looked at this photo many times, knows the face and its contours.
Moon Ja Kim's remains were found in March 2000 near Ka'ena Point.
As chief investigator for the Honolulu medical examiner, Siu has become the last best friend Kim will ever have. Closing the case has become an obsession.
And it seems so simple: All she needs is a relative to claim the remains.
But no one mourns for Moon Ja Kim.
"How did you get here?" Siu asked the photograph. "How?"
Kim has been dead for nearly seven years. A hostess at Club Tuberose, Kim left a suicide note, written in Korean, on the kitchen table and $5,000 in cash under the mattress of her Kane'ohe home. She was 40.
On Nov. 2, 1994, four days after she vanished, police found her car at the end of the road near Ka'ena Point.
They didn't find her body.
"Every year we have many unsolved cases. So many, it's hard to say," said Joe Self, an officer with the Honolulu Police Department's missing persons unit. "A friend said she was kind of upset. She took off in her car and drove off, and that was it."
Hikers find skeleton
In March of last year, two hikers found a skeleton near the trail that hugs the rugged Ka'ena Point coastline. They also found a Le Pierre purse, a wallet and a California driver's license. That was enough evidence for police.
"We closed our end as a missing persons case because we found the remains," Self said. "We believe that is her."
Moon Ja Kim, lost and found.
Everything was turned over to the Honolulu medical examiner's office, which ordered a forensic study of the remains. Physically, they matched Kim, who was 5 feet 2 and 110 pounds.
Although the cause of death could not be determined, there was no evidence that this was a murder.
But there was no next-of-kin to contact, so no one could claim the remains. And without medical or dental records, no way to positively identify them. The file was placed with other similar cases, the bones carefully packed away.
Lost and found and lost again.
This past spring, a few weeks after she took over as the new chief investigator, Siu chanced upon the case.
She found Kim's purse, its leather dried by the sun, inside a brown paper bag, held for safekeeping in a storage room.
Inside the purse, Siu found an empty bottle of Crown Royal whiskey, two packs of cigarettes (Salem Lights), car keys, Crest toothpaste, a stack of business cards and what appeared to be family photographs.
She also found an address book, written in Korean. For a while, Siu was sure this would close the case.
"I've gone through it," she said. "I had the Korean Consulate go through it. I had a Korean church lady go through it. Nothing."
She called the U.S. Department of Justice, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the California Department of Justice's Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit, the Social Security Administration, the U.S. Air Force, the people named on the business cards, the numbers listed in the address book.
"All nothing," Siu said. "All negative."
When Kim vanished, police interviewed a man who said he was her boyfriend and a woman she wrote to in her suicide note.
"He went with her for about a year," Siu said of the boyfriend. "She was very private, he said. He didn't know much of anything."
It took weeks to track down the woman in the note. Siu found her last week.
"This was her best friend," Siu said. "Her only known friend."
Epitaph troubling
For a while, Siu thought this would answer all her questions.
Kim had asked the woman to send the money from her mattress and personal belongings to her parents in Korea, but the woman told Siu that she never knew how to find them.
The friend also said Kim had once been married to an Air Force man. But military authorities had already told Siu that they had no record of Kim.
"I'm so close," Siu said. "It's terribly frustrating. It's like you can't get all the pieces of the puzzle. I am so sure it's her."
There is little left that Siu can do. It is likely that the medical examiner will post a "presumptive identification" and declare the remains "unclaimed."
Then they will go to a local mortuary for cremation and burial in an O'ahu cemetery.
That epitaph troubles Siu.
"This is somebody's child," Siu said. "Her life should have had more impact on those around her than it did. How could she drop off the face of the earth and nobody care?"
