Indeed. Most of Lynda's independent work was on feminist law. Yet when she went to Roh's house for a barbecue, she raced into the kitchen to help his wife prepare the food -- while the other Korean women milled around outside. "On the one hand, Lynda could play the part of the traditional Korean wife," says Neffinger. "On the other hand, she could be the most strong-willed, powerful, energetic woman you'd ever want to meet -- or not want to meet, depending on your point of view."

Professor Roh approaches the lectern. One afternoon, he says, he was holding a seminar and the discussion somehow drifted away from the law and onto the subject of his tattered black overcoat. The students were teasing him about it; Lynda, instead of joining in, leaned over, reached right inside her professor's jacket, and examined the label. "You people," she declared, "have no idea what style is."

While Lynda was gearing up for finals, having marathon dinners with friends, and combing the racks for work-appropriate suits, Edmund was struggling to adjust to life after college and disengaging from those who could have helped him do it. He probably appeared to be thriving: living in the Atrium Palace Condominiums, a luxury high-rise in Fort Lee with views of the Manhattan skyline; tooling around in a new BMW (a graduation present -- he'd worn out his Lexus); sailing through the Macy's executive-training program.

But Edmund was also dating women who would have mortified his parents, had they known, and he was spending his free time in ways destined to estrange him from his peers. He had become a regular at area "room salons," the rose-hued, Mylar-ceilinged establishments that serve fancy fruit platters, galactically priced drinks, and the company of doting young women. He and a new friend, a Cornell graduate named Jaeyoung Shin, would often go to Jang Mi in Koreatown or the Safari Club in Fort Lee, where an evening for two seldom comes to less than $400 and the customers are seldom younger than 40. His other friends -- the more sedate ones, the ones he'd known longer, the ones on smaller budgets -- would refuse to go.

And to the alarm of those same friends, Edmund had begun to fall for the "hostesses" of these establishments, whose professional duties included pouring drinks, cooing, and making themselves available for the occasional wandering hand. A petite, fine-boned Rutgers student named Diane Kim particularly captured Edmund's fancy, and the two dated for several months, in spite of the yawning class differences between them. As the relationship was coming to an end, Diane, according to Edmund's friends, threatened to commit suicide by jumping off the seventh-floor balcony of Edmund's apartment -- a balcony located on the inside of the building, Marriott-style -- so that all the world could see as she tumbled into the fountain and potted palms below. She did it in high theatrical fashion, too, hurling her purse, her shoes, and her cell phone over the rail before the police arrived.

Not long after, Edmund began to date Claudia Seong, a 31-year-old single mother and close friend of Jaeyoung Shin's. The choice may have been as dubious as getting involved with a hostess from a room salon. "No parent would approve of their son dating a woman who was eight years older with a 6-year-old daughter," Edmund's father, Eun Bong Ko, told the Korea Times. Yongil Shin, the reporter who interviewed him, elaborates. "You must understand," he says, "that in the minds of many Koreans, this relationship is abnormal."

This wasn't a casual relationship, either. Edmund moved into Claudia's apartment, where the living room was a bright colored shipwreck of children's toys and contained no furniture, save for a jumbo-screen television. Yet Edmund's friends still say they have no sense of his girlfriend's history. "It was too awkward to ask her about it," says Jay Im, Edmund's friend. "It would have been disrespectful." The police don't know much about her past either. And neither does the Korean press.

What is known about Claudia is this: She grew up in Korea in a wealthy family. She is small, prefers pageboy haircuts, and has wide, protuberant eyes. Last year, she completed a two-year program at Parsons School of Design, where she specialized in children's wear and puzzled her peers by rarely speaking. (A teacher there described the child, who often accompanied Claudia to class, as silent, polite, and "glum.")

One aspect of Claudia's character has emerged in searing detail: She is passionately, perhaps even pathologically, jealous. While dating Edmund, Claudia never allowed any other woman into her home except her sister and Edmund's, says Irving Anolik, Edmund's lawyer. Jaeyoung told the authorities she once made an ex-boyfriend ceremonially dispose of all gifts his previous girlfriends had given him -- a cell phone, a beeper, some jewelry -- while she watched. A female friend of Edmund's remembers seeing him nervously eyeing the elevator as they chatted at a third-floor café; he was waiting for Claudia to arrive. "I guess he was paranoid," she recalls. "He was so scared of her."

On November 21, 1997, Edmund, Claudia, and Claudia's sister, Young Joo, were arrested for the attempted murder of Diane Kim. Edmund's friends couldn't believe it. "We all knew he'd changed -- that he'd become more reclusive," says Thomas Lee, a childhood friend who kept up with Edmund briefly after college. "But no one actually believed he was capable of doing that. We were all looking for other explanations."

Edgewater authorities aren't. They allege the trio carried out a gruesome, carefully orchestrated scheme: Edmund tried calling Diane every fifteen minutes or so from a pay phone. He reached her around two in the morning and insisted they meet. Within minutes, Edmund, Claudia, and Young Joo pulled up in a car outside Diane's home. They drove her to a barricaded street in Edgewater. Then Edmund and Young Joo pinned her down while Claudia, knife in hand, slashed her repeatedly, slicing open her left cheek, her nose, her legs, her chest, her scalp. Then she stumbled the half-mile back to her apartment, where the doorman called an ambulance. Her skull was exposed.

Edmund and the Seong sisters were shortly let out on bail, at $25,000 each. Their families put up the money. Edmund, speaking through his lawyer, says the charges -- later reduced to second-degree assault -- are false, and he will plead not guilty at his arraignment May 26. "Ms. Kim had a meeting with Mr. Ko to end their relationship," Anolik says. "Ms. Seong and her sister drove him to that meeting because his car was being serviced. There was a bit of an argument, Ms. Kim got out of the car, and she was on a public road. Whatever injuries were inflicted were not inflicted by them."

Yet when asked about Lynda's murder, Anolik says simply, and a touch mysteriously, "Cherchez la femme." Then he adds: "From what we've observed, she's quite capable of having done it. A leopard is much smaller than a lion, and yet a leopard can inflict plenty of damage."

She can also roar. Just after after Lynda's murder, Claudia, according to the police, told the authorities that Edmund confessed to the murder. On March 27, a grand jury indicted Edmund for second-degree murder; Claudia has not been charged. On June 2, Anolik and two New York prosecutors will meet with the judge appointed to this case for the first time.

Anolik will have a lot of physical evidence to explain. On March 20, the night the police found Lynda's body, they found a white plastic bag sitting in the center of Lynda's room. Inside was a bloody sweatshirt and a pair of sweatpants. Inside the sweatpants were two strands of hair -- one long and fine, the other short and coarse. The blood and head hair came from Lynda. The pubic hair came from Edmund. Some gifts that Edmund had given Lynda, including a teddy bear and some Beanie Babies, were missing.

Kenji Iida is standing at the mike, recalling the early, chaotic days when he and Lynda took the reins of the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association. Lynda, he says, was determined to get as many students involved in the campus organization as possible. "You recruit all the women," she told him, "and I'll recruit all of the men." Kenji smiles. "Lynda upheld her end of the bargain."

Lynda was born in Seoul on February 6, 1972. She spent her early childhood hopscotching among various schools in Korea and California before her father finally settled the family in Short Hills, New Jersey. Even in high school, Lynda was confident and attractive; she wore bright-red lipstick, and her yearbook appointed her class flirt.

In college, she was known for her charisma; she defrosted even the coldest people with her charm. She lent her roommates clothes as if they were ballpoint pens and let them snack on whatever food she had in her fridge, which was usually Korean dumplings she'd brought from home. Rana Shanawani, then only an acquaintance from Millburn High School, remembers running into Lynda her sophomore year and mentioning that she was having trouble with housing for the fall. Lynda responded by insisting she come live with her.

Lynda also had her detractors -- as extroverts, particularly women, often do. She struck some people as manipulative or fickle, say friends, perhaps because she had such a hypnotic effect on men. "There were always a lot of guys around," says Kathleen Szegda, another Cornell roommate. "Those who fell for her fell for her hard."

Occasionally, her confidence made the shy and more traditional ones nervous. An old law-school friend remembers how Lynda once phoned to laughingly relay how she'd spent an evening with some Korean friends, drinking at a bar and flirting with a boy across the table. By the end of the night, she had plopped herself in his lap and demanded, in front of everyone, to know when he was going to ask her out. He balked. So she called him the next day and offered an apology. He accepted -- six months later. They ran into each other on the street, and he asked her out.

Nearly everyone describes Lynda as an intensely loyal friend, and she kept up with people -- former boyfriends, roommates, friends from high school. Her loyalty ran so deep one could almost say it reached the point of foolhardiness: She once let a close friend into her Columbia apartment after he spent hours outside her door, drunkenly begging her to let him in. (Campus security, in fact, had at first chased him away.) He claimed he loved her so much he was going to commit suicide.

Lynda started dating Edmund her last semester at Cornell. He was handsome and reserved; he showered her with expensive gifts. When Lynda first started law school, Edmund, still an undergraduate, would drive down from Cornell to see her almost every weekend. When they began splitting up, toward the end of her first year at Columbia, he would sometimes show up at her apartment midweek, unannounced, hoping to give it another go. Their friends agree that when it was all over, Lynda probably occupied a more privileged place in Edmund's memory than he did in hers. Lynda was his first girlfriend. Her college roommates say they can barely recall his face.