Feature

Woman, Interrupted

Yung Lee, Lynda's best friend and a lawyer at Debevoise & Plimpton, is standing at the lectern now. Lynda had astonishing confidence, she says. The kind of confidence a reserved, less assertive best friend could learn from. "When you were little," she remembers Lynda once asking her, "did you ever think you'd grow up to be great?" Young Lee says she shrugged. "I did," said Lynda. "I thought I was going to be great."

Childhood friends remember Edmund as a funny, occasionally fresh, and occasionally loud kid, but one who was almost never poorly behaved. On the contrary: "He was clean-cut and smart," recalls Tom Lee. "And his parents were very strict. He couldn't listen to rock music. He wasn't allowed to go to R-rated movies. He wasn't allowed to watch cable."

Edmund grew up in a well-appointed home, spacious by Wyckoff standards, that was stocked with mountains of video games. If he had a simmering temper back then, no one remembers it. "He could be pretty sarcastic," recalls Jay Im, "but he never hit anybody or anything like that."

Like a lot of other overprotected kids, Edmund changed while he was at college. He started smoking, and he was drinking, sometimes recklessly. Twice, according to several classmates, he got into car accidents with his Lexus, and at least one of those times, he had been drinking. Jay Im would know; he had no other way home that night, and he was in the car. "But you could tell that his heart was pure, and that people could walk all over him," says Jay, an observation echoed often by Edmund's friends. "He was still the most generous, giving guy."

Edmund also still seemed mindful of his filial obligations. He shuttled back and forth to Seoul during school vacations; he majored in economics to better understand the Esquire Company, his family's business. After growing up in an all-American suburb, Edmund had also finally discovered a substantial community of Koreans at Cornell. His senior year, he and his friends joined "the Zu," a kind of Asian-American alternative to a frat house.

Edmund started to date Lynda the spring of his sophomore year. She was three years older than he, a fact his friends say displeased his parents, but he persisted, exulting in the raw force of her personality; he was much more reserved in public than she was, and he lived a much more insular life. "Speaking to Lynda made you feel really comfortable," says Jay. "She could bolster you like no one else could. I think Edmund was attracted to that."

After Edmund graduated, he moved to Fort Lee, which has a large Korean population. At first, he spent his free time kicking around in billiard halls and Koreatown. But gradually, he lost touch with many of his old friends, choosing instead the company of women he met in room salons, and later, Claudia Seong. Before he disappeared entirely, many of them noticed he became surly and belligerent when drunk, prone to cursing fits; one even remembers him provoking Jaeyoung outside a club, and that the altercation ended in a fistfight, with Edmund on the ground.

Then came the November slashing of Diane Kim. When Lynda first heard that Edmund had been arrested, she asked a friend of his -- coincidentally, a paralegal at Cravath -- to ask around and see whether it was true. The woman couldn't confirm it, but eventually, Lynda did. She was stunned. She knew Edmund was foundering, because she had heard from him periodically over the summer, according to friends. Sometimes, he would ask her to take him back. But she didn't think he'd drifted so far off course he'd be implicated in a crime. "When she found out," says a friend, "she was really worried about him. But she took the attitude of a parole officer. She said he'd really screwed up this time."

Meanwhile, Edmund's family bailed him out of jail and flew back to the United States to try to quash his relationship with Claudia. "I felt she wasn't a good influence on him," his father told the Korea Times. "But I wasn't successful in splitting them up. Edmund said he trusted her more than anyone in this world besides his parents and family."

Yet something was eating away at Edmund -- literally. He lost a lot of weight after that first arrest -- by some estimates as much as 40 pounds -- and disappeared from public view. He was also fired from his job at Macy's. Then, about a month before Lynda was murdered, some of Edmund's female friends got strange phone calls from Jaeyoung. He delivered peculiar instructions: They were to ignore Edmund if they saw him walking down the street. "It was bizarre," says Ashley Kim, a 26-year-old Cornell graduate who received one such call. "When I asked why," says another, "Jaeyoung just said, 'Oh, it's too long of a story to get into.' "

Another young woman Jaeyoung contacted was struck by the urgency of his request. "He made it sound like a really big favor," she says. "He told me he felt like he really owed this to Edmund, because he had made him do so many things he didn't want to do." She didn't understand why she'd be doing a service to Edmund by ignoring him, or what it was Jaeyoung regretted -- though she speculated it may have been insisting Edmund join him on excursions to the room salons. Jaeyoung later told the police he had phoned these women at Claudia's request.

Lynda received one of Jaeyoung's phone calls, too. About a week later, say the police, on the evening of March 18, her call waiting beeped while she was on the phone. "That's Edmund," Lynda told her friend. "He's coming over. He's had a fight with his girlfriend and he has nowhere to stay."

Her friends are still talking, though the chapel is chilly and everyone's clothes are damp: That she wore high-heel boots. That she preferred Armani. That she liked to watercolor. That she liked to water-ski. That she could make almost anyone laugh. That she would link arms with her companions as they strolled, side by side, down the street.