Eurasian boy and Korean woman, found murdered in US in 1998, are identified as Bobby Whitt and mother Cho Myoung Hwa. Relatives thought they were living in South Korea
- Bobby Whitt’s American father has reportedly confessed to killing both his son and his Korean wife, Cho Myoung Hwa
- Their bodies were found 350km apart and were not linked as mother and son until a DNA breakthrough last year
More than 20 years after the unidentified bodies of a boy and a Korean woman were found 350km (218 miles) apart in separate states beside a US highway, investigators now say they were a mother and son – and the boy’s American father has confessed to killing them.
Orange County Sheriff Charles Blackwood told news outlets Tuesday that the body of the boy found under a billboard in North Carolina was 10-year-old Robert “Bobby” Adam Whitt, who was born in Michigan and raised in Ohio.
His body was found under an Interstate 85-40 billboard in September 1998.
Last year, the consultant who helped solve the Golden State Killer case, Barbara Rae-Venter, used DNA to determine the child was Eurasian, half-Asian and half-white. Online DNA ancestry services identified a possible relative.
That relative disclosed Bobby’s name, saying family assumed his mother, Cho Myoung Hwa, had taken him to South Korea. Based on that, police determined that the body of an unidentified woman whose remains were found by the same highway in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, around the same time, was Bobby’s mother.
